As is well known, China's digital surveillance is unrivaled anywhere in the world in terms of its reach, its rigor, and its technological sophistication. A piece of news from late last year illustrates this perfectly.
On December 24, 2025, a video released by traffic police in Xiangtan, Hunan, showed several men riding electric scooters whose faces were captured by cameras, with their personal information instantly appearing in a green box on screen -- showing their “violation,” the “location of the violation,” their “name,” “school enrollment status,” “student ID number,” and even “dormitory.” The students captured on camera came from a business school, a school of information engineering, a school of mechanical engineering, a school of international education, and other institutions. After the video sparked heated online discussion, Xiangtan traffic police closed the comment section and deleted it.
In fact, on Chinese social media platforms, there is no shortage of videos showing traffic police across the country using “facial recognition” to pull up a traffic violator's ID number, whether they hold a driver's license, and other personal details. One comment from a netizen struck me especially: “Forgot your ID? Traffic police can use 'facial recognition' to find out exactly who you are in seconds.”
This remark brought to mind, almost involuntarily, the mystery of China's massive numbers of missing people.
How Many People Are Actually Missing in China?
According to the “White Paper on China's Missing Population (2020),” once published by Sohu, roughly 1 million people were registered as missing in China in 2020 -- equivalent to several thousand people disappearing every single day. Unofficial data suggest that in 2024, online records showed roughly 3.07 million missing-person reports.
Given that China's digital surveillance supposedly leads the world, and that traffic police can identify a traffic violator's information within minutes, would it really be so hard to figure out where missing people have gone, why they disappeared, and whether crimes were involved? Clearly not. Yet in reality, the vast majority of missing people remain unaccounted for over the long term, and the reasons behind their disappearances remain a total mystery. One netizen sarcastically remarked, “In a country that claims to have a 'Skynet' so vast that nothing can escape it, everything can be found -- except missing people.”
What does this glaring contradiction -- between the police's powerful ability to “find out who you are in seconds” and the sheer number of missing people whose whereabouts remain unknown -- actually tell us? It tells us that the reason so many missing people in China are never accounted for is not because the police lack the capability to investigate, or because they simply cannot find the answers -- it is because they choose not to investigate at all.
Missing persons are a matter of public order and social stability. Searching for missing people, determining the causes of their disappearance, and cracking down on the crimes behind mass disappearances are basic duties of the police. That they can investigate but choose not to suggests something sinister lies behind it. What could that be? With the recent flood of exposures surrounding the CCP's secret of forced organ harvesting, it is not hard to conclude that a large proportion of China's missing people are connected to exactly this -- and that the CCP is the single largest criminal organization engaged in forced organ harvesting.