China is accelerating its push for "Smart Campuses" through the use of artificial intelligence and big data technology to monitor and analyse classroom behaviour and teaching patterns of both students and teachers in real time.
The surveillance systems track everything from school attendance and classroom participation to students' concentration levels and attentiveness during lessons.
According to a report by HKEPC, the smart school initiative began in 2018 under the Chinese Ministry of Education’s “Education Informatisation 2.0” policy. Initially focusing on facial recognition systems for school and dormitory access, the project has since evolved into full-scale AI monitoring within classrooms. HKEPC is a Chinese tech review and hardware information site.
Since October 2025, as many as 469 smart classrooms have been established across the country. School administrators can now closely monitor classroom dynamics, including attendance rates, how often students look up, front-row occupancy, and classroom interaction levels through a backend reporting system known as the "Daily Routine Logging System".
Sixty-eight percent of secondary schools in China have begun installing these smart cameras in classrooms to analyze student behaviour.
The use of AI has also expanded into the national university entrance examination, or gaokao, where intelligent monitoring systems are paired with security scanners and biometric verification gates to detect abnormal behaviour and prevent cheating.
Despite China’s aggressive push for AI in education, certain figures circulating on social media, such as the exact proportion of schools utilising the system and plans to expand AI nationwide across the entire education sector by 2030, have yet to be officially confirmed by government documents. As a result, the initiative continues to spark widespread debate over its actual effectiveness, privacy concerns and the implications of mass student surveillance.
Source: HKEPC, Ministry of Education the people's republic of China, ChinaTalk
