Not exactly a technical answer...

does the Chinese government really care? I ask because this is the type of thing that only enters a conversation when 'effectiveness'/'accuracy' becomes a discussion down the line. I doubt that China gives a s* frankly, which makes this even scarier...the data used to show it works will like be bad by design.

It's a quantum leap in surveillance tech -- the latency for nation-wide tracking of individuals will be phenomenally reduced. HUMINT resources can be more effectively allocated and target acquisition times can be reduced.

That said, the false positive rate is guaranteed to be high at first but the tech will be improved, furthermore the data will be correlated with other's rather than sole-sourced.

Sure they won't mind if there's collateral damage, but it's useless if it wastes time and effort by leading to the wrong person too often.

The Chinese state can throw basically unlimited resources at dealing with false positives. Doesn't seem like a problem for them.

Any place that uses the death penalty as quickly and frequently as China isn't too concerned about false positives.

Really important question, but unfortunately the article doesn't mentions it. What do mention is that for a successful identification only the three-quarter of the face is needed.