What does it take to intern half a million members of one ethnic group in just a year? Enormous resources and elaborate organization, but the Chinese authorities aren’t stingy. Vast swathes of the Uighur population in China’s western region of Xinjiang — as well as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic minorities — are being detained to undergo what the state calls “transformation through education.” Many tens of thousands of them have been locked up in new thought-control camps with barbed wire, bombproof surfaces, reinforced doors and guard rooms.
The Chinese authorities are cagey and evasive, if not downright dismissive, about reports concerning such camps. But now they will have to explain away their own eloquent trail of evidence: an online public bidding system set up by the government inviting tenders from contractors to help build and run the camps. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opinion/china-re-education-camps.html
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8-13-18
Chinese government officials say they are fighting a rise in Islamic extremism as well as a separatist movement that calls for an independent Uyghur nation.
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“He had big dreams,” said the friend who is now hiding in Turkey to avoid being sent to China. “He wanted to be a religious scholar, which he knew was impossible in China, but he also wanted to stay close to his mother in Korla.”
He was fluent in Arabic and but also in Chinese. When they huddled around a smartphone to watch a Taiwanese tear-jerker about a boy separated from his mother, he would be the one weeping first.
When homesickness got to him, he would tell his friends about how his mother doted on him, and about Korla and the big house he grew up in. And when he gets married, God willing, he would say, he’d start a family in that house, too.
“If my wife doesn’t agree, then we don’t marry,” he declared.
He returned to China when he was called back in 2016 and taken away in February, according to three students and a teacher from Cairo. They say they heard from reliable sources in China — but cannot prove — that he died in detention.
Southern Xinjiang, the vast desert basin from where many of the students came, is one of the most heavily policed places on earth.
Deep in the desert’s southern rim, the oasis town of Hotan is a microcosm of how Chen, the Xinjiang party boss, has combined fearsome optics with invisible policing.
He has ordered police depots with flashing lights and foot patrols be built every 500 meters (yards)— a total of 1,130, according to the Hotan government. The AP saw cavalcades of more than 40 armored vehicles including full personnel carriers rumble down city boulevards. Police checkpoints on every other block stop cars to check identification and smartphones for religious content.
Shopkeepers in the thronging bazaar don mandatory armored vests and helmets to sell hand-pulled noodles, tailored suits and baby clothes.
Xinjiang’s published budget data from January to August shows public security spending this year is on track to increase 50 percent from 2016 to roughly 45 billion yuan ($6.8 billion) after rising 40 percent a year ago. It’s quadrupled since 2009, a watershed year when a Uighur riot broke out in Xinjiang, leaving nearly 200 members of China’s Han ethnic majority dead, and security began to ratchet up.
Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology who tracks Chinese public security staffing levels based on its recruiting ads, says Xinjiang is now hiring 40 times more police per capita than populous Guangdong Province.
“Xinjiang has very likely exceeded the level of police density seen in East Germany just before its collapse,” Zenz said. “What we’ve seen in the last 12 to 14 months is unprecedented.”
But much of the policing goes unseen.
To enter the Hotan bazaar, shoppers first pass through metal detectors and then place their national identification cards on a reader while having their face scanned.
The facial scanner is made by China Electronics Technology Group (CETC), a state-owned defense contractor that has spearheaded China’s fast-growing field of predictive policing with Xinjiang as its test bed. The AP found 27 CETC bids for Xinjiang government contracts, including one soliciting a facial recognition system for facilities and centers in Hotan Prefecture.
Hours after visiting the Hotan bazaar, AP reporters were stopped outside a hotel by a police officer who said the public security bureau had been remotely tracking the reporters’ movements.
“There are tens of thousands of cameras here,” said the officer, who gave his name as Tushan. “The moment you took your first step in this city, we knew.”
The government’s tracking efforts have extended to vehicles, genes, and even voices. In February, authorities in Xinjiang’s Bayingol prefecture, which includes Korla, required every car to install GPS trackers for real-time monitoring. And since late last year, Xinjiang authorities have required health checks to collect the population’s DNA samples. In May, a regional police official told the AP that Xinjiang had purchased $8.7 million in DNA scanners — enough to analyze several million samples a year.
In one year, Kashgar Prefecture, which has a population of 4 million, has carried out mandatory checks for practically its entire population, said Yang Yanfeng, deputy director of Kashgar’s propaganda department. She characterized the checkups as a public health success story, not a security measure.
“We take comprehensive blood tests for the good of the people, not just record somebody’s height and weight,” Yang said. “We find out health issues in citizens even they didn’t know about.”
A biometric data collection program appears to have been formalized last year under “Document No. 44,” a regional public security directive to “comprehensively collect three-dimensional portraits, voiceprints, DNA and fingerprints.” The document’s full text remains secret, but the AP found at least three contracts referring to the 2016 directive in recent purchase orders for equipment such as microphones and voice analyzers.
Meiya Pico, a security and surveillance company, has won 11 bids in the last six months alone from local Xinjiang jurisdictions. It won a joint bid with a DNA analysis company for 4 million yuan ($600,000) in Kargilik and has sold software that automatically scans smartphones for “terror-related pictures and videos” to Yarkent.
Meiya and CETC declined comment.
To monitor Xinjiang’s population, China has also turned to a familiar low-tech tactic: recruiting the masses.
When a Uighur businessman from Kashgar completed a six-month journey to flee China and landed in the United States with his family in January, he was initially ecstatic. He tried calling home, something he hadn’t done in months to spare his family unwanted police questioning.
His mother told him his four brothers and his father were in prison because he fled China. She was spared only because she was frail.
Since 2016, local authorities had assigned ten families including theirs to spy on one another in a new system of collective monitoring, and those families had also been punished because he escaped. Members from each were sent to re-education centers for three months, he told the AP.
“It’s worse than prison,” he said. “At least in prison you know what’s happening to you. But there you never know when you get accused. It could be anytime.”
A document obtained by U.S.-based activists and reviewed by the AP show Uighur residents in the Hebei Road West neighborhood in Urumqi, the regional capital, being graded on a 100-point scale. Those of Uighur ethnicity are automatically docked 10 points. Being aged between 15 and 55, praying daily, or having a religious education, all result in 10 point deductions.
In the final columns, each Uighur resident’s score is tabulated and checked “trusted,” “ordinary,” or “not trusted.” Activists say they anecdotally hear about Uighurs with low scores being sent to indoctrination.
At the neighborhood police office, a woman who gave her surname as Tao confirmed that every community committee in Urumqi, not just Hebei Road West, needed to conduct similar assessments. She said there were no statistics on how many residents had been deemed “not trusted,” nor were there official procedures to deal with them.
“What is happening is every single Uighur is being considered a suspect of not just terrorism but also political disloyalty,” said Maya Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who is studying how Chinese police are using technology to track political dissidents as well as Uighurs.
This month, Xinjiang announced it would require every government employee in the region to move into a Uighur home for a week to teach families about ideology and avoiding extremism.
What pains most, Uighurs abroad say, is the self-imposed barrier of silence that separates them from loved ones, making efforts to say happy birthday or find out whether a relative is detained risky.
When Salih Hudayar, an American Uighur graduate student, last called his 70-something grandfather this summer, he spoke in cryptic but reassuring tones.
“Our phones will not work anymore,” his grandfather said. “So, don’t try calling and don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine as long as you’re all fine.”
He later heard from a cousin in Kyrgyzstan that his grandfather had been sent to re-education.
A Uighur student who moved to Washington following the crackdown this summer said that after his move, his wife, a government worker still in Urumqi, messaged to say the police would show up at her home in 20 minutes. She had to say goodbye: after that she would delete him permanently from her contacts list.
A month later he received calls on WhatsApp from a man who introduced himself as Ekber, a Uighur official from the international cooperation office of the Xinjiang regional public security bureau, who wanted him to work for them in the U.S. — and warned him against saying no.
“If you’re not working for us then you’re working for someone else. That’s not a road you want to take,” he snapped.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/12/17/surveillance-cams-face-scans-help-china-make-thousands-vanish/959047001/
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5-17-18 ALMATY, Kazakhstan (AP) — Hour upon hour, day upon day,
When Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused to follow orders each day, he was forced to stand at a wall for five hours at a time. A week later, he was sent to solitary confinement, where he was deprived of food for 24 hours. After 20 days in the heavily guarded camp, he wanted to kill himself.
"The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticize yourself, denounce your thinking — your own ethnic group," said Bekali, who broke down in tears as he described the camp. "I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I can't sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time."
Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese — and even foreign citizens — in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a U.S. commission on China last month said is "the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.” https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-life-like-in-xinjiang-reeducation-camps-china-2018-5
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There is no argument that can prove or disprove the Truth. Not argument but the experience of Truth, the being of Be-ness if you will is the only proof that God can be and is where you are and where I AM....
The Christ mind is the real mind of every disciple of God. This one universal mind to which all may gain access through an obedient humility is not programmed, nor indeed can be, by the fallen ones who would impose their belief systems upon the children of God.
Their success in manipulation comes about because the children of God have placed their trust in the outer mind; and it is this outer mind that is subject to all of the influences that surround the evolutions of earth--hereditary, environmental and including the auric impressions of every lifestream upon every other lifestream amplified by mass communication, satellite and the psychic levels of human experience....
It was the susceptibility of a prior brainwashing that entered through the Protestant revolt. For with Luther and his ninety-five theses came the damnable doctrine of the removal of the Person of Christ from the sons and daughters of God and the removal of the Lord God as the inhabiter of the temple of the soul and the body! The denial of the proper role of the Virgin Mary and of the hierarchy of the hosts of the Lord, as well as of the communion of saints in heaven with the saints on earth, has deprived the children of God of the understanding of the great mystery of the Word incarnate both in the ascended masters and in the unascended devotees of God.
Remove God from the temple, the consciousness of your children, ye parents and teachers well-meaning or otherwise, and your children will then be inhabited by the anti-God manifestations of a materialistic philosophy based on the pride of the personal self rather than the glory of the Person of God....
The climate of no religion that has produced the vacuum of God consciousness which marks this age is as bad as false religion where the false gods of those who profess to pursue the fundamental teachings of Christ and of his word have become, O vanity of vanities!, a religion of Bible-quoting, demon-possessed, so-called Christians who think they have salvation in a dead letter and an untempered zeal. ...
Let programming, deprogramming, mass indoctrination and the brainwashing of children and youth and of the susceptible of every generation be counteracted by the universal knowledge of the Word incarnate and the Truth that is the rock of every man’s being.
-Gabriel with Mohammed, in Prayer and Meditation, 1978
-Archangel Gabriel: Pearls of Wisdom 21:53
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