“The mark of the beast,” says the Art of Balance blogger, of China's Public Security Bureau's announcement of the completion of a database which contains details on 1.25 billion of China's 1.3 billion citizens.

“Parallel to this,” continues the blogger, “we will be facing the worlds biggest roll-out of RFID (radio frequency identification) by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), which oversees the country’s police force, who plans to issue more than 1.3 billion second-generation resident identification cards based on RFID chips, according to an industry analyst at In-Stat China.”