8-14-2018 China spent roughly 1.24 trillion yuan on domestic security in 2017, accounting for 6.1 per cent of total government spending and more than was spent on the military. Budgets for internal security, of which surveillance technology is a part, have doubled in regions including Xinjiang and Beijing.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/from-laboratory-in-far-west-china-s-surveillance-state-spreads-10616264....................................................................................................
7-26-18 Google and other U.S. companies are providing services in China that will be used to enhance the Communist Party’s surveillance infrastructure, according to Sen. Marco Rubio.
“It’s an outrage,” the Florida Republican said during a hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. “It’s an embarrassment . . . and it’s hypocritical.”
Rubio trained his fire on American companies during a hearing on China’s repression of Muslim ethnic minorities in the historically-autonomous region of Xinjiang. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “efforts to build the world’s most advanced police state” have been facilities by American companies “who have reportedly supplied surveillance and biometric technology,” as the commission noted. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/marco-rubio-google-other-us-companies-are-aiding-chinese-surveillance
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4-18-2018 U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia said in January more than 120,000 people were being held in re-education facilities in the southern Xinjiang city of Kashgar alone. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-xinjiang-usa/tens-of-thousands-detained-in-chinas-xinjiang-u-s-diplomat-says-idUSKBN1HP17N
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“So many people, mostly the men, were imprisoned for so-called ‘913’ crimes: having forbidden digital content on their phones,” says Ms Alfiya, a Kashgar housewife.
Chinese media have in part masked the sudden disappearance of such a large part of Xinjiang’s population by absorbing it into more innocuous initiatives.
For instance, according to the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist party, a national poverty alleviation programme relocated 461,000 rural Xinjiang residents in the first three months of 2018. Calls to Xinjiang’s provincial government and public security arm went unanswered.
Those who have travelled internationally or have family members abroad, particularly in Muslim majority countries, are also targets.
But as the crackdown has intensified even Uighurs who travel within China have been arrested.
Mr Adil, a businessman who asked not to reveal his family name and now lives in Turkey, says two of his brothers disappeared in 2016. Later, his family were told the pair had been brought back to Xinjiang and detained for travelling to the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
“We do not know the exact charges. We were told that they were questioned about why they had gone inland (out of Xinjiang) and sentenced in secret,” says Mr Adil, who has been unable to contact his brothers since.
The escalation in detentions is ripping families apart.
“The last time I talked to my son, he said, ‘Why do you not come back when I miss you so much?’’’ says Ms Dilnur Ana, a Uighur living in Istanbul. She left to study in 2016, leaving a five-year-old son and a seven-year-old daughter in Kashgar.
Harassed by local authorities, her family members cut off communication in April.
“You cannot know the pain that I feel as a mother at not being able to see my children. I have not heard their voices in more than a year,” she says, her voice cracking.
Empty streets in Urumqi and Kashgar are an eerie testament to how the security campaign is fraying Xinjiang’s economic and social fabric.
“The economic problems here are huge,” says a Han businessman surnamed Dong, who moved back to Urumqi from the northern province of Liaoning to be closer to his family.
“There are not enough people to fill all the open jobs, and there is no one left to buy your goods. Imagine what happens when you remove that many people.”
For the hundreds of thousands of detainees there is no clear process for exiting the detention centres — many have been in extralegal limbo for more than a year. Public security officials must personally vouch for an individual detainee to secure their release, but such cases are rare.
“You can never ‘learn’ that stuff well enough to get out,” Mr Kuerban, an Urumqi trader, says wryly, using a euphemistic term for the daily propaganda classes detainees take.
His nephew was held in March after receiving a phone call from police in his hometown of Kashgar ordering him to return from Urumqi.
A huge security presence has smothered dissent but many quietly seethe at the daily indignities. “Why is it that I have to stop at checkpoints but Han Chinese do not? Why is it that I cannot have a passport but other people can?” says Mr Yasinjiang, a Kashgar driver. “Why is it only Uighurs who must be subject to these security practices?”
The impact is beginning to be felt outside the region.
Once thriving trade with China’s neighbours in central Asia and Pakistan has dried up, with foreign traders unable to receive their usual one-month visas due to heightened security screening.
Inventory depots, where traders gather to make deals, offload goods and exchange currency, have seen traffic plummet. During a June afternoon, one such Urumqi depot frequented by central Asian traders sat largely empty, its storefronts locked up.
Among those caught in the middle are China’s ethnic Kazakhs, who for decades crossed the border between China and Kazakhstan freely. The security clampdown has made that much more difficult — a fact exposed at the trial of a Chinese-Kazakh woman, forced to work at a Xinjiang internment centre before fleeing to Kazakhstan.
Chinese authorities pushed to extradite Sayragul Sauytbay but her family insisted the request was politically motivated because she possessed sensitive information about the detention centres. Last Wednesday a Kazakh court turned down the extradition request.
What that legal decision means for relations between Kazakhstan and its powerful neighbour and trading partner remains unclear.
The foreign ministry in Astana says Kazakh diplomats have repeatedly raised the issue of its citizens being detained in Xinjiang. A visit by a deputy foreign minister in April to Urumqi secured the release of Kazakh citizens but diplomats have avoided speaking out for fear of a backlash.
“Kazakhstan is relatively small and dependent on China (so it) has to play the game,” says one prominent Kazakh lawyer who has worked on Chinese infrastructure projects in the country.
“We don’t diss the Chinese dragon or the Russian bear or we could end up like Crimea and Georgia.”
Internationally, diplomatic efforts have come to a standstill because Chinese officials categorically deny anything is wrong in Xinjiang, describing internment centres as “vocational training”, say western diplomats. https://www.todayonline.com/world/crackdown-xinjiang-where-have-all-people-gone
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10-9-2017 Authorities in a county of northwest China’s Xinjiang region that is largely populated by Muslim ethnic Uyghurs have been ordered to send almost half of area residents to re-education camps, according to officials, who say they are struggling to meet the number. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/camps-10092017164000.html
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8-11-2015 HIV/AIDS has been on the increase among young Uyghur men in the southern part of northwest China’s Xinjiang region due to an influx of infected prostitutes who have been transmitting the deadly disease since 2009, according to a Uyghur former health official and a professor with knowledge of the situation.
“Now HIV/AIDS is a most dangerous disease in the Uyghur autonomous region, especially among local Uyghurs,” said Feruk Pidakar (not his real name), a former senior government official at the Office for AIDS Control and Prevention under the Health Department of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the area’s formal name. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/aids-hiv-spreads-among-uyghurs-in-chinas-xinjiang-08112015103610.html
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At the far north tip of Xinjiang is a mountain area where green ray Elohim have their retreat.
-Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang province
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8-14-2018 FOR THE past 18 months, China has conducted a massive campaign against Muslim-minority communities in its vast western Xinjiang region, including confining up to 1 million people in concentration camps. It has managed to do this in virtual secrecy, with little attention, few complaints and less pressure from the outside world. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/we-cant-ignore-this-brutal-cleansing-in-china/2018/08/14/e0b7b0f0-9f19-11e8-83d2-70203b8d7b44_story.html?utm_term=.e8ef8962001b
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