Chinese government utilize some pretty good machine learning to analyze and monitor those cameras. Techniques include: - Vehicle plates recognition. They are automatically captured and mapped. Chinese police can get the complete historical routes of any car around major cities in real time just buy entering the number.

- Activity detection. If something interesting is happening in front of a camera (e.g. two people running in front of a camera middle of the night), AI detects that and pops the view up in front of humans for further action. Because less than 1% of cameras contain any useful info at any moment, they don't need that many humans to watch those cameras live.

- Face recognition. For many cameras, Face capture and recognition is running live and report any criminals or targeted personnel to police.

- Footage markup. If police need to go through the camera footage manually, the recording playback can skip the uninteresting parts to save time.

Combining these with unrestricted real-time integration of other data sources, such as real time GPS from mobile apps, cell tower call history from telecoms, network traffic inspection and remote spying capabilities, Chinese police forces can pretty much find anybody very quickly. They are also known to have state of the art big data platforms developed in house.

One anecdote I read: Somebody killed a person in a small city middle of the night, removed battery of his phone, ran to his car parked on street, drove a couple of hundred miles to another middle sized city, only to be caught in a motel next morning. How? Complete camera footage covering his walking path, vehicle plate tracking all the way to his destination, and motel check-in system that is also integrated with police.

Well if they're using the same 2013-compiled firmware as the millions of IP cameras China dumps on Amazon, eBay, etc, I imagine it'll be hackers monitoring them.

Looks like it's mostly private cameras? Those probably won't be monitored at all, in practice; most private security cameras aren't. Back when they used tapes, a surprising number weren't even actually hooked up to record.

They will usually take 3 years to figure out they can't and then it's time to junk the 625 million cams and upgrade to the next dumb solution. Your basic tech industry employment guarantee scheme.

It'll be combined with recent substantial efforts toward facial and voice recognition systems in China. When a hit occurs, it'll be recorded for time and place etc.