The panopticon (with Shanghainese characteristics)

When we posted just a short while ago about Yahoo China's becoming a community portal we didn't really know what this meant ... but now we have a better idea because we were just surfing Mop.com (猫扑), a website which claims to be China's first or number one interactive entertainment portal. In any case, while there we read about how Shanghai's finest plan on creating a system for monitoring migrant populations in Shanghai. Basically, non-Shanghai people (and by this they mostly mean migrant workers) are going to be registered in a new system that will allow them to know how many people are living in an apartment, even how many people are living in each room. (He meant this figuratively, right?)

These new measures are in part due to the fact that the crime rate among migrant populations in Shanghai is on the rise. Even when they don't commit crimes, they sometimes do annoying things like pop out more babies than they're supposed to. The point is that they are too far beyond the reach of the po-lice, which is why they are devising new surveillance and control methods for dealing with the various problems that arise when you've got huge migrant populations: 150 million people, over 10 percent of China's entire population.

The source of information was none other than Wu Zhiming, Shanghai's police chief -- this was all culled from a chat/interview he gave online. We guess this means that he emerged from the graft probe relatively unscathed. He is the police chief as well as the party secretary of the Public Security Department. Furthermore, the rumors are that he is the nephew of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.

Photo from Vidiot's Flickr page.