NEWS//Surveillance of Xinjiang Muslims
Axios China reports today (April 5, 2019) on “the massive and growing surveillance-state China has built in to control the Uighur population.” The Uighurs are Muslims who have protested decades of discrimination, police brutality, and the confiscation of their lands by the central government.
The article quotes from a New York Times article entitled, "How China Turned a City Into a Prison." The article states:
Children are interrogated…. [One mother said,] “My daughter had a classmate who said [to interrogators], ‘My mother teaches me the Quaran.’ The next day they were gone.”
The Old City of Kashgar has been razed. “The government said it was safety and santitation. But the rebuilding has also created wider streets than are easier to monitor and control.”
“Visitors are kept far from the indoctrination camps on the edge of town.”
An article by Darren Byler is also quoted by Axios China. Byler writes about “health check” that all adults in Xinjiang must undergo. During this check “several types of biometric data, including DNA, blood type, fingerprints, voice signature and face signature” are collected. In order to facilitate their tracking, every Uighur must carry a smartphone. To protect the information stored on phones, destroying SIM cards is a crime. Souce: Ghost World.
Axios predicts that “as human rights take a higher priority on the agendas of many developed countries, their relations with China are only going to get more contentious.”
Sources: Logic, a magazine about technology, New York Times, Axios 01, Axios 02, Axios 03