China update

   If you plan for a year, plant a seed.  If for ten years, plant a tree; if for a hundred years, teach the people.  When you sow a seed once you will reap a single harvest.  When you teach the people you will reap a hundred harvests.  -Kuan Chung (taoist, died 645 B.C.) 

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9-18-19    The Uighur majority areas on the border of Central Asia only became a fully integrated part of China in the 2000s. They were effectively colonized when millions of non-Muslim Han settlers moved into their community in the 1990s and 2000s to extract natural resources such as oil and natural gas….

This November 2017 photo shows residents walking through a security checkpoint into the Hotan Bazaar. AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

   In response to this Chinese authorities declared what they called a “People’s War On Terror.” They began to use techniques of counterinsurgency, a mode of military engagement that stresses mass intelligence gathering, to assess the Uighur population.

  As part of this process, in 2016, they began to collect biometric data, such as DNA, high-fidelity voice recordings and face scans, from the entire population of the region in order to track the activities of people on WeChat and in their daily lives using their voice signature and faceprint.

In a September 2018 photo, Uighur drivers have their vehicles checked at a police check point in Hotan, in China’s Xinjiang region. AP Photo/Andy Wong

  They also began a process of interviewing millions of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities to determine who could be categorized as trustworthy or “normal” as stated on official population assessment forms. In order to determine this, state authorities mapped out the person’s social network and history of Islamic practice, both in their local community and online.

  Since the total Muslim population of the region, including other Muslim groups such as the Kazakhs, Hui, Kyrgyz, Tajiks and others is around 15 million, these assessments and activity checkpoints required the deployment of more than 90,000 police officers and more than 1.1 million civil servants.

  The majority of the security forces are of Han ethnicity. Han people are settlers in the Uighur region. They are not Muslim, they do not speak Uighur, and many of my Han interviewees described the Uighur culture as “backward,” “primitive” or even “dangerous.”

  In order to aid in this assessment process state authorities also contracted with Chinese private technology firms to develop software programs and hardware that could comb through the images, videos and speech recordings in the WeChat histories of a targeted person in a matter of seconds.   https://theconversation.com/i-researched-uighur-society-in-china-for-8-years-and-watched-how-technology-opened-new-opportunities-then-became-a-trap-119615

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HONG KONG, Aug. 6 — Pro-Beijing lawmakers approved legislation here today giving broad authority to the police to conduct covert surveillance, including wiretapping phones, bugging homes and offices and monitoring e-mail.

  The bill passed the 60-member Legislative Council on a vote of 32 to 0 soon after pro-democracy lawmakers walked out of the chamber in protest early this morning.would make it too easy for the government to monitor political opponents.

http://www.nytimes. com/2006/ 08/06/world/ asia/06cnd- hong.html? ex=1312516800&en=7dfae1a64376a9f1&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

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