Chinese officials have started to install security cameras right outside people's homes as the country steps up its 'big-brother' state surveillance to prevent a second wave of coronavirus cases.
Expats in home isolation in Beijing said the government had mounted monitors pointed directly at their front doors to ensure they didn't step out.
Security guards, building cleaners and neighbours have allegedly been told to keep close watch of those in quarantine in a dystopian, post-lockdown China.
Though state newspaper stresses that the measures are only for curbing COVID-19, one security expert fears that Beijing could use the pandemic as grounds for strengthening its high-tech mass surveillance.
In one Beijing residential compound, officials told AFP that people under home quarantine must inform community volunteers whenever they open their doors.
Friederike Boege, a German journalist, began her second quarantine in Beijing this year on Sunday after returning from Hubei's capital Wuhan.
Her building's management installed a camera in front of her door to monitor her movements.
'It's quite scary how you get used to such things,' she told AFP.
'Apart from the camera I do believe that the guards and the cleaner on the compound would denunciate me if I were to go out,' Ms Boege said.
During Ms Boege's previous quarantine experience in March after returning from a trip to Thailand, she was reported to building management by a cleaner for going downstairs to take out the trash.
People under home quarantine elsewhere in the city have had silent electronic alarms installed on their doors.
Officials put up a notice on each quarantined household's door asking neighbours to keep an eye on the confined inhabitants.
Another foreign resident of Beijing saw a surveillance camera fitted on the wall opposite his apartment after he and his family returned to the capital city from a trip to southern China.
The 34-year-old Irish expat, named Ian Lahiffe, told CNN that he opened the door when the camera was being installed, without warning.
Such security cameras are set up 'purely for the needs of counter-epidemic works', according to Chinese state newspaper The Global Times.
The Communist tabloid argues that those cameras could help enhance the supervision of infection chains, and officials would remove them when the relevant families complete their quarantine.
China has been building a mass surveillance network, which boasts hundreds of millions of street cameras.
The surveillance network has been billed as the world's most powerful facial-recognition system and aims to identify any of its 1.4 billion citizens within three seconds.
The country's residents are due to be carefully watched by 626 million street monitors, or one camera for nearly every two people, as early as this year, according to a study.
China has five most-monitored cities in the world. Its most-surveilled city, Chongqing, is equipped with more than 2.5 million street cameras, or one for every six people.
Critics, however, have cautioned over the scheme. Many have compared it to a dystopian system run by a fictional state leader, Big Brother, in George Orwell's novel 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.
Security analyst Paul Bischoff, who has penned a report about the world's most-monitored cities, believes that China has taken advantage of the novel coronavirus to speed up the implementation of state surveillance.
Mr Bischoff told MailOnline: 'China was ramping up surveillance long before the coronavirus outbreak.
'The pandemic offered authorities a pretext to accelerate the rollout of more surveillance.'
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