Is the Shenzhen Big Brother project going to work?

In China there is never a shortage of crazy big plans and the intention to use Shenzhen as a guinea pig for a massive monitoring of the population, as here reported by Bloomberg, seems one of them. All its residents get a residence card with chip with all the information you need on it, including for example "one-child conditions" and "personal credit history". Additional 20,000 camera's equipped for facial recognition will come on top of that project.

About $390 million will be invested for the project in Shenzhen. The government plans to first use the technology in Shanghai and Shenzhen, then adopt the identity cards in 660 cities if the pilot program is successful.

While it is a scary enough development to be watched, the chances of this becoming a success in China seems rather slim. A rather small place like Singapore could perhaps be able to do so, but how would that work in a country with 1.3 billion people where 150 million migrants are an important part of the economic system? In a country that is terribly short of government funding for education, health care and policing? It would only work if China would be a police state, and it is not.