A pole packed with around 30 charge-coupled device cameras
and spotlights hangs over a street near Hikvision Digital
Technology Co. in Hangzhou, China, in 2014.
In the far western region of Xinjiang, China has created one of the world’s most sophisticated
and intrusive state surveillance systems to target the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic
minority. Part of what Beijing calls its anti-terrorism campaign, the system includes mandatory
facial-recognition scans at gas stations and Wi-Fi sniffers that secretly collect data from
network devices. Over the past two years, the technology has helped authorities round up an
estimated hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other Muslims and lock them up in
clandestine camps that China calls “re-education centers.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/
06/13/in-chinas-far-west-companies-cash-in-on-surveillance-program-that-targets-muslims/
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One woman tells AFR Weekend her brother was detained last April. She says Chinese
authorities are targeting any among the country's 11 million Uighurs, who have lived or
travelled overseas. Her brother had previously worked in Dubai.
"My brother is innocent. He is educated and hardworking. He is the best of us," she says,
clearly upset, in an interview over the phone. "About one hour after he went missing,
another of my brothers rang to tell me to stop ringing. He told me not to ring him, my parents
or anyone in the family again. I have lost all connection. I have no idea whether they are dead
or alive. Ask any Uighur living in Australia or around the world whether they are able to speak with their families in Xinjiang. The answer is no. If we call them, they go to jail."...
Richardson says: "There's no reason that Australia and other governments could come
together to form a friends-of-Xinjiang coalition for those governments to talk to each other to
put some pressure on Beijing to close these camps immediately."
Richardson dismisses an argument often made in diplomatic circles that these
representations are better made behind closed doors. "Australia doesn't have conversations
with China about the South China Sea behind closed doors or about problematic trade
issues only behind closed doors," she says. “ Australia is perfectly capable of being plenty
tough on other issues but not on this one. Why is that?” https://www.afr.com/news/world/
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1-17-2018 School students in Linxia county in Gansu province, home to many
members of the Muslim Hui ethnic minority, are prohibited from entering
religious buildings over their break, a district education bureau said, according to the
notification.
Students must also not read scriptures in classes or in religious buildings, the bureau
said, adding that all students and teachers should heed the notice and work to
strengthen political ideology and propaganda. China is an atheist, communist state. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/01/china-county-bans-muslim-children-
religious-events-180117123448774.html
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7-31-2018 China’s Xinjiang region is home to 1.5% of the country's population, but
accounted for one in five arrests in 2017. This didn't include the hundreds of
thousands of people, possibly as many as 1 million, who are being held in
extrajudicial political "re-education camps" designed to indoctrinate ethnic
minorities and force them to reject their religious beliefs.
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8-18-2018 Formation of Xinjiang (new frontier) in 1884. One consequence now, and
particularly since large-scale Han migration after 1948, is that the major cities of the north,
Urumqi, Karamay and Shihezi are 80-90 per cent Han, while in the south and the Ili valley,
cities such as Kashgar, Hotan and Turpan are similarly overwhelmingly
Uygur or (in the case of Yining) Kazakh.
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7-28-2018 detainees are forced to sing patriotic songs, take part in self-criticism
sessions and sit through lectures on Xi Jinping “thought”, Chinese language, Chinese law and
the dangers of Islam.
The objective is to dilute Uyghur cultural identity and, in Xi’s words: “enhance their sense
of identity with the motherland, the Chinese nation, Chinese culture, the CCP and socialism
with Chinese characteristics.”
These camps are an extreme symptom of Xi’s commitment to return Communist ideology to
centre stage in China. This began shortly after Xi assumed the presidency in 2013 when
he launched the “Seven Perils” campaign to combat so-called subversive ideas. This targeted
things like Western constitutional democracy, universal values of human rights and press
freedom….
For Uyghurs, all of this has resulted in an almost unimaginable expansion of the power of
the state over their lives in pursuit of what can only be called “cultural cleansing”. The
state’s harnessing of 21st-century technology has also enabled it to harass and silence
Uyghurs living abroad and pressure them into collaborating with authorities to monitor family
members in Xinjiang….’In the final analysis, we as a nation should not remain silent
while hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are persecuted for simply being who they are.
-Michael Clarke of Autralian National University https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/07/28/patriotic-songs-self-criticism-china-re-educating-muslims-mass-detention-camps/
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8-17-2018 According to a new report released by Human Rights Watch, China has created
a massive centralized database that tracks troves of private information on Xinjiang’s
citizens, information such as a person’s “health, family planning, banking, and legal records.”
China has also rolled out wi-fi “sniffers” to surreptitiously gather data from people’s
smartphones and computers. Cameras with facial recognition and infrared technology have
been placed throughout Xinjiang, pointed at anything from entertainment venues to
supermarkets and even schools. All of this data can be used to send Uyghurs or others in
Xinjiang to the political re-education camps.
Against this backdrop of increasing state repression, prominent Uyghur cultural leaders and
academics put their liberty at risk simply by being a voice for their culture. One notable case
is Ilham Tohti, winner of PEN America’s 2014 Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write
Award, who is now serving a life sentence for his efforts to foster greater cultural harmony
within the Xinjiang region. Prominent Uyghur scholar Rahile Dawut has also recently
disappeared—her whereabouts currently remain unknown. https://pen.org/xinjiang-free-expression-catastrophe/
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.Earlier this year, the Foreign Ministry declared that concerns about the
mistreatment of the Uighurs were “unjustified” and that criticism amounted to
“interference in China’s internal affairs,” The Guardian reports. “In a memorable statement
last summer, Xinjiang’s deputy foreign publicity director, Ailiti Saliyev, went so far as to suggest
that ‘the happiest Muslims in the world live in Xinjiang’,” the paper adds.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/95773/xinjiang-camps-china-denies-interning-one-million-uighur-muslims
Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images
Chinese paramilitary policemen stand guard on a street in the Uighur district of Urumqi city, in China's Xinjiang
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