When you think of the phrase “top 10 ways,” you probably picture a light‑hearted list of travel hacks or cooking tricks. In this case, however, the list reads more like a script for a dystopian TV show. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been steadily tightening its grip on everyday life, turning ordinary activities into high‑tech, high‑surveillance experiences that would make even the creators of Black Mirror raise an eyebrow.

10 Facial Recognition for Toilet Paper

China is currently undergoing a “Toilet Revolution,” a campaign launched by President Xi Jinping in 2015 to upgrade restroom facilities across the nation’s most visited tourist spots. The push came after countless complaints about grimy pit toilets and sub‑standard amenities. Billions of yuan have since been funneled into building luxurious public bathrooms equipped with Wi‑Fi, vending machines, televisions, and even charging stations for electric scooters and cars.

But some local authorities have taken the upgrade a step further. In many of these high‑tech lavatories, users must stand on a marked spot while a facial‑recognition scanner snaps a picture of their face and then dispenses a 28‑inch strip of toilet paper (roughly six to seven sheets). If you need more, you’re forced to wait nine minutes for the next batch. Certain “smart” stalls even feature alarms that alert restroom staff when a patron has lingered too long – the alarm sounds after fifteen minutes, prompting a supervisor to check on the situation.

9 Public Humiliation for Jay Walking

Road traffic accidents claim around 260,000 lives each year on mainland China’s highways, with pedestrians and cyclists accounting for a staggering 60 % of the fatalities. Disturbingly, evidence suggests some drivers deliberately run down pedestrians to dodge the hefty medical bills that would follow a collision – a practice locally dubbed the “hit‑to‑kill” rule. The expense of ongoing treatment often outweighs a one‑time compensation payout, incentivising this grim calculus.

To curb jaywalking and the resulting tragedies, the government has deployed a suite of facial‑recognition tools that capture the faces of offenders and plaster them on electronic billboards and online portals. The intention is clear: shame citizens into compliance. Once identified, the offender receives a modest fine that is automatically deducted from their Weibo or WeChat accounts. Repeat violators are blacklisted on the social‑credit system, stripping them of access to various public services.

In 2018, Ningbo officials inadvertently embarrassed a prominent businesswoman after their system misidentified an advertisement on a moving bus as a jaywalker. The face captured belonged to Dong Mingzhu, a respected executive whose image was being used in an air‑conditioning commercial, not a pedestrian breaking the law.

8 Fitting Workforces with Brain‑Reading Headsets

Back in 2018, a wave of revelations exposed a growing trend among Chinese corporations: the use of sophisticated head‑gear to monitor workers’ brainwave activity. From power plants in Hangzhou to state‑run hospitals, these devices are touted as tools for boosting efficiency and safety. Hangzhou’s state‑owned power company claims the technology has sharpened workflow and profit margins, while Changhai Hospital employs the headbands, paired with pressure sensors and cameras, to anticipate violent outbursts among patients. Even state schools are experimenting with the gear to gauge student concentration levels.

The headsets work by detecting a range of brainwave signals, flagging overly emotional or anxious states that are deemed detrimental to productivity. When a warning is issued, managers may grant a day off or reassign the employee to a less demanding role. As neuroscience professor Jin Jia explains, “Some jobs demand unwavering focus; there’s no room for error.”

7 Robo‑Dove Spy Drones

Dozens of Chinese agencies have deployed robotic birds—dubbed “Robo‑Dove”—to eavesdrop on unsuspecting citizens. These tiny surveillance drones, weighing just 200 grams, feature a suite of GPS antennas, sensors, and cameras. Their semi‑deformable wings generate both lift and thrust, allowing them to mimic the flight patterns of real birds so convincingly that flocks often follow them, helping the drones blend seamlessly into the sky.

The government touts these near‑silent machines as perfect for covert monitoring. They have already seen action in five provinces, including the Muslim‑majority region of Xinjiang, where Beijing is keen to suppress Turkic separatist sentiment through pervasive surveillance, DNA tracking, and “re‑education” camps. Clocking speeds of 25 mph, the drones remain invisible to all but the most sensitive radar. The military is also evaluating them for border patrol, environmental protection, and land‑planning missions.

6 Artificial News Anchors

At the 2018 World Internet Conference, Xinhua News Agency unveiled what it called the world’s first artificial news presenters. Developed by search‑engine giant Sogou, these virtual anchors boast lifelike hand gestures and facial expressions. The English‑speaking anchor, modeled after Xinhua’s own Zhang Zhao, delivered a segment on Panama’s strategic importance to China’s Latin American outreach, concluding with the line, “That’s all for today’s English news program. As an AI news anchor under development, I know there is a lot to improve.”

Since that debut, the AI news team has expanded to include a digital female presenter, and continuous machine‑learning upgrades have refined their mannerisms, facial animations, and speech patterns. These tireless virtual journalists now deliver thousands of reports across Xinhua’s platforms. While Xinhua serves as the CCP’s official mouthpiece, its internal media—unavailable to the public—feeds party officials with uncensored updates. Meanwhile, Sogou’s parent company Tencent continues to underpin the regime’s vast surveillance architecture.

5 Faking Exercise to Avoid Salary Deductions

With fitness‑tracking apps now woven into daily life, Chinese employers have begun exploiting step counts to enforce productivity. In 2015, Tencent integrated a step‑tracker into its ubiquitous WeChat app, allowing users to monitor their daily walks and “like” friends’ step totals. By 2018, a real‑estate firm in southeast China started using this feature to police its staff, imposing a penalty of one yuan (about 14 cents) for every 100 steps missed below a 180,000‑step monthly target. A human‑resources employee once lost roughly $14 for falling short by 10,000 steps.

Insurance companies have also jumped on the trend, offering discounts to customers who meet step goals. In response, many Chinese have begun cheating the system. Since WeChat’s tracker relies on a phone’s internal accelerometer, users can swing their device in a cradle or attach it to a rotating platform, tricking the sensor into logging steps that never occurred. Some restaurants have even installed these contraptions to keep patrons drinking and dining longer.

4 Study the Great Nation App

China’s Publicity Department has rolled out an app called “Study the Great Nation,” a glossy digital textbook that extols President Xi Jinping’s achievements and the Party’s ideological triumphs. While it masquerades as an educational tool, the app also grants the CCP “super‑user” privileges, effectively allowing the party to monitor a user’s daily activities.

The platform pushes a steady stream of Xi‑centric news, even promoting a television series titled “Xi Time.” Users embark on a curated tour of China’s history, culture, and socialist principles, then must complete a series of quizzes to prove they’ve absorbed the Party’s doctrine. Test results are displayed on leaderboards, sparking competition among citizens. Schools shame students with low scores, employers demand proof of performance, and journalists must complete the course to obtain press cards.

Over 100 million people have downloaded the app, a figure bolstered largely by government coercion. Early reviews were dismal—averaging a mere 2.7 stars on the Apple Store—yet many were quickly deleted, leaving the app’s reputation shrouded in official propaganda.

3 Catching Wanted Criminals with Smart Glasses

Chinese police forces have embraced cutting‑edge tech to track down fugitives, employing smart glasses that integrate facial‑recognition software. In 2015, tech firm LLVision released a Chinese version of Google Glass called GLXSS. The devices have proven effective on bustling railway platforms in Zhengzhou, where during the 2018 Lunar New Year, officers used them to detain human traffickers, hit‑and‑run suspects, and individuals traveling with forged IDs.

In Sichuan, law‑enforcement personnel wear the glasses at highway checkpoints, capturing vehicle license plates and cross‑referencing them against a database of wanted individuals. An 8‑megapixel camera streams HD footage to a tablet, which instantly matches faces to the national criminal registry. LLVision’s CEO Wu Fei defends the technology, insisting it serves “noble” purposes and that “we trust the government.”

2 Taser‑Wielding Police Robots

China has positioned itself as a world leader in both military and civilian robotics, exporting its innovations to emerging markets across the Middle East and Africa. The nation’s tech‑driven arsenal includes attack helicopters, stealth jets, mini‑submarines, and tank destroyers, alongside a suite of police robots that patrol city centers, hospitals, airports, and construction sites.

In 2016, the National Defense University unveiled AnBot, a 78‑kg autonomous security robot reminiscent of Doctor Who’s Daleks. Equipped with surveillance cameras and an extendable electro‑shock arm, AnBot can sprint at 11 mph toward cries for help, offering rapid response to violence or unrest. Today, it patrols Shenzhen Airport’s terminals.

A sister robot, the E‑Patrol Robot Sheriff, debuted at a railway station in Henan province. It monitors humidity and temperature, cross‑checking commuters against criminal databases. On its inaugural day, the robot detected a fire, its air‑monitoring system alerting staff and averting a larger disaster.

1 Execution Vans That Harvest Organs

The CCP has long justified capital punishment as essential for social order, traditionally employing firing squads. Since 2010, lethal injection has become the preferred method, but many rural jurisdictions balk at the expense of transporting prisoners to centralized execution facilities. To solve this, mobile execution vans and buses have emerged.

In small towns, condemned individuals are strapped to stretchers and loaded into these specialized vehicles. A cocktail of drugs induces unconsciousness, followed by cardiac arrest. A technician, overseen by a third‑party witness, administers the lethal injection while a video feed records the procedure to ensure compliance with state regulations. After death, the victim’s organs are harvested and stored in ice‑boxed containers.

Human‑rights groups allege the vans fuel a lucrative organ‑trade market, especially since a range of offenses—including tax fraud and corruption—still carry the death penalty. In 2019, a London tribunal found China guilty of harvesting organs from political prisoners, particularly targeting Falun Gong adherents. Reports claim surgeons extracted eyes, hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs, and skin, sometimes while the victims remained alive.

Why These Top 10 Ways Matter

Each of these ten examples illustrates how technology, once heralded as a force for progress, can be repurposed into tools of control and coercion. From bathroom stalls that monitor your toilet‑paper usage to robots that wield tasers, the Chinese state’s relentless push for surveillance is reshaping daily life into something eerily reminiscent of a Black Mirror episode. Understanding these mechanisms is the first step toward recognizing the broader implications for privacy, autonomy, and human rights worldwide.

It is just the worst when a show you really love gets canceled too soon, and you are left with no finale, no resolution, and no hope for your beloved characters. Well, look on the bright side: at least you probably were not a fan of one of these shows. Each show on this list was canceled after just one episode—not a common feat, understandably. Some of the shows were pulled for low ratings, others for far more scandalous reasons, but regardless, these shows are considered some of the worst.

10 Dot Comedy

Trying to use internet humor on TV almost never works out. For one, the internet moves fast. TV production usually takes so long that by the time the show airs, the jokes tend to be outdated. On top of that, internet-savvy people know when they are being pandered to, and they will not buy into TV bigwigs shoving “hip” comedy in their faces. Surprisingly, though, the idea of moving internet comedy to TV is not as new as you would think.

Dot Comedy was a show that aired in 2000, far before most other shows tried to cash in on online jokes. The series featured Jason and Randy Solar, Annabelle Gurwitch, and Katie Puckrick, taking on a somewhat similar format to America’s Funniest Home Videos, which is interesting since they ended up being polar opposites. While AFV has been running since the ’80s, Dot Comedy was pulled off the air right after its premiere. Aside from the mediocre reviews it received, the show was only watched by 4.1 million people, less than the show it replaced. As a result, the show was canceled before it could air any more episodes.^[1]

9 You’re in the Picture

This is one of the oldest cases of a series getting canceled after one episode, dating back to 1961. It was a game show starring the legendary Jackie Gleason. Sounds promising enough, right?

The premise was that four celebrities would stick their heads into an image and then ask yes or no questions to try and guess what scene they were a part of. It is a very simple premise that is similar to many games played around the coffee table to this day. Also, you can think about one of the scenarios from Who’s Line Is It Anyway? that uses a green screen and questions and answers to determine what video is playing behind the unsuspecting comedian.

However, the first episode’s panelists (Pat Carroll, Arthur Treacher, Jan Sterling, and Pat Harrington Jr.) on You’re in the Picture were its downfall. Aside from being terrible at the game, they just were not funny enough to carry a game show, even alongside a comedic powerhouse like Gleason. It was no wonder that Time Magazine called the 1960-61 TV season the worst one ever at the time. The next week, Gleason used the time slot to issue a public apology for how awful the show was, and it never aired again.^[2]

8 The Melting Pot

This was another case of a big-name comedian—in this case, Spike Milligan of The Goon Show and Q—having a show that bombed, only this one was outright offensive as opposed to just unfunny. It is one thing to host a game show with confused contestants, but creating a show where you star in brown-face is just awful.

Comedy Playhouse: The Melting Pot aired once in 1975 and never again after that, for a good reason. The show involved Milligan playing a Pakistani immigrant arriving illegally in Britain with his son and living in a racially diverse London home. This was, unsurprisingly, extremely controversial, even at the time. The BBC knew after just one episode that they had made a horrible mistake. The show was pulled, and the remaining episodes were never seen.^[3]

7 Co-Ed Fever

In early 1979, ABC aired Delta House, which was a spinoff of the legendary comedy film Animal House. While the show was not awful, the raunchy content of the film was not allowed on TV. Ultimately, it was canceled after one season. It is still a bit impressive, as TV adaptations of films are extremely difficult to get right. All in all, it was an alright show.

That same year, CBS tried to get in on the action with Co-Ed Fever. The show’s “unique” plot twist was that it was about a women’s college starting to admit men for the first time. Antics ensued, or at least they would have. This show, like Delta House, faced problems with what kind of stories they could air, and on top of that, the ratings were terrible. The remaining episodes never aired in America.^[4]

6 Videos After Dark

America’s Funniest Home Videos is a beloved show that everybody has seen at least once. It has been going for decades with no signs of stopping. That does not mean that every one of its ventures has been a big success, though.

Videos After Dark is a more recent example of a show canceled after one episode. Airing in 2019, the show was meant to be like AFV for an older audience, with edgier videos than the main show. Original AFV host Bob Saget was set to star. The show premiered as planned, and more episodes were promised, but strangely, nothing seems to have materialized. The show’s Twitter stopped posting the next month, and everyone seemed to act like the show never existed at all, despite the show’s webpage still saying “coming soon.”^[5]

5 Emily’s Reasons Why Not

Emily’s Reasons Why Not seemed innocent enough. It aired in 2006 and was just a simple sitcom about a woman named Emily trying to navigate the dating world. She decides that she will break up with a guy if she can think of five reasons to. The show was heavily compared to Sex and the City, and it was advertised like crazy.

Unfortunately, the show itself did not live up to the ads. Everybody in the world seemed to find it extraordinarily dull and not worth the watch. The network got the message, and the remaining episodes have never been seen on American TV, although they did get a DVD release years later.^[6]

4 Who’s Your Daddy?

Reality TV is not exactly known for being high-class. It is often considered trashy, mind-numbing ridiculousness that is only watched as a guilty pleasure. Obviously, not every reality show is that way. Some are actually very well received. Who’s Your Daddy? is not one of them.

From 2002, Who’s Your Daddy? centered around a tough subject: adoption. It puts an adopted woman in a room with several men, and if she picks out which one is her biological father, she wins a cash prize. If she picks the wrong man, that man will get the cash prize. Surely it is easy to understand why this would be considered a bit cringe-worthy. After its first episode, a 90-minute special, hit the airwaves, the response was furious. Adoption organizations and adoptive parents hated this show that added money and cameras into an extremely personal process. The show was canceled immediately in the wake of the backlash.^[7]

3 Heil Honey, I’m Home!

Just from the title, it is probably easy to guess why this was canceled. While many people believe anything can be joked about, some things just should not be a sitcom premise. Alongside The Melting Pot, this 1990 flop is certainly one of the most controversial sitcoms of all time.

The format of the show was akin to sitcoms of the ’50s, only it was about Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun trying to get along with their Jewish neighbors. This obviously drew a huge amount of criticism. The Board of Deputies of British Jews spoke out against it wholeheartedly, while nobody on the planet seemed to find it very funny. Luckily, the BSB got the message. It was swiftly canceled, but out of all the shows on this list, Heil Honey, I’m Home! remains one of the best-remembered.^[8]

2 Turn-On

Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In is a very fondly remembered show. The brightly colored sets, the witty one-liners, the innovative joke wall… what’s not to love? ABC was pretty jealous of all the attention Laugh-In was getting, so they decided to create their own version: Turn-On. Unfortunately, whereas Laugh-In soared, Turn-On was one of TV’s biggest failures.

The show was much different than anything anybody had seen before. It was not just raunchier than Laugh-In; it was also so fast-paced that most people could not keep up. The soundtrack consisted of a Moog synthesizer, which was very new in 1969, and computers played a big role in the premise of the show. Audiences absolutely could not stand this show. The station was flooded with complaints, more so about the sexual content than the strange format. The show was canceled before the first episode even ended. It was never seen again. Who knows—maybe if this show was made today, things would be different.^[9]

1 Australia’s Naughtiest Home Videos

This may be the most famous item on the list. It’s essentially Australia’s answer to Videos After Dark, only this show is from 1992! It is also unique because it only aired half an episode before being canceled.

Like Videos After Dark, the show was meant to be a raunchier version of America’s Funniest Home Videos. While the reception for Videos After Dark was lukewarm, Australia’s Naughtiest Home Videos was just plain disgusting. Clips included a boy eating maggots and a man spinning a basketball on his penis. Seemingly, absolutely nobody wanted to see any of that. After 34 minutes, the show was demanded to be pulled off the air, and it was. A Cheers rerun took its place, and presumably, audiences rejoiced. Eventually, the episode did air in full in 2008, and now it is free to watch online. Beware, though: it is gross and, otherwise, not very funny. Watch if you dare!^[10]