Mass surveillance still continues apace in Xinjiang and is being rolled out incrementally across the rest of China
by Ruth Ingram
China is arguably the most surveilled nation, and the Uyghurs of its furthest northwestern region, the most closely scrutinized people group on earth. At the last count in 2023, there were more than 200 million CCTV cameras throughout the nation, with plans for more in the coming years.
The Chinese state is no stranger to surveillance, starting in the Mao era when people were forbidden to leave their own registered areas. But the 21st century hi-tech revolution has taken surveillance to a higher level and brought with it endless possibilities to keep tabs on the minutiae of people’s lives, not only where they are at any one time, but whom they are seeing, who their friends are, what they are downloading, what they are buying, whether or not they are practicing a faith, how much petrol they are using and how much food they are consuming; the list goes on. China’s ultimate plan to monitor the entire Middle Kingdom is within reach.
Whilst the benefits of new technology cannot be underestimated in its potential to create new platforms for activism, increase access to information and ensure a safer society, freedom and privacy are vulnerable in the wrong hands.
To address the potential of technology to suppress the rights of minority groups, particularly the Uyghurs, a panel was convened recently by the Cambridge University Union, where Uyghur poet and author, Aziz Isa Elkun spoke about recent events in the homeland from which he has been estranged since 1999, and described how the Chinese government’s use of social media and AI technology has been weaponized to suppress any dissident opinion or criticism of the regime. “It has been especially used to crackdown on Uyghurs, erase their culture and their language,” he said.
The CCP selected the Uyghur region in 2016 to be its technology incubator, where the 13 million or so Uyghurs were used as Guinea pigs for data collection on an industrial scale. Every piece of biometric data, from blood and tissue type to iris scans, voice and gait recognition was scooped up from the captive audience on pain of internment in the rapidly growing number of so-called “re-education” camps, if they refused. Soon an immense database was compiled of every citizen—perfect fodder for the data-hungry Chinese hi-tech companies charged with developing a range of intrusive surveillance capabilities.
This experiment in technological control according to the New York-based non-profit, the Human Rights Foundation, transformed the area into an “Orwellian prison state.”
But it was not always like this, according to Elkun.
Uyghurs embraced the early possibilities of the internet creating websites using their own language back in 1995 to express opinions, free, they thought, from government interference. Despite the Uyghur language’s official status, Uyghurs would have to wait until 2004 for the government to create its own official sites.
The Uyghur sites were soon abuzz with forums for discussions on social issues, history and the preservation of Uyghur culture and language. When Uyghur workers at a toy factory in Guangdong province in the East of China were killed by a Han Chinese mob of co-workers on June 26, 2009, the websites mourned the killings. Their pages were flooded with images and clips of the incident, demanding justice and calling for protests.
What began in response as a peaceful protest in Urumqi on July 5th, 2009, soon became an ethnic bloodbath with many on both sides killed in the riots that followed as the army was moved in. Websites and phones were awash with videos. This incident marked a “watershed moment in the troubled history of the region,” said Elkun. “This was a turning point for the escalation of state violence and the wholesale criminalization of Uyghurs in the following decade.”
In response to the outpouring of social media activity, the government closed down the entire internet for one year.
But there were still a few years to go before 2016 when events in the province would take a sinister turn. Until then a new development on the social media horizon took Uyghurs by storm. January 2011 saw the Chinese IT giant Tencent launch the WeChat smartphone app. By 2023 WeChat (Chinese: Weixin) had become one of the largest media choices for over 1.3 billion users worldwide, with more than 800 million users within China. Uyghurs took full advantage of what became the primary one-to-one and group communication tool and between 2013–2015 as Islam flourished in the province, debates about religious practice, faith, and Uyghur identity bloomed.
Looking back at those days when WeChat unleashed unprecedented opportunities for constructive debate, there were frequent challenges to the state’s negative “extremist” narrative, lively engagements with faith, and the expression of a wide range of alternative voices and perspectives. But the moderate voices were also a challenge to the official CCP narrative that increasingly branded Uyghurs who were religious as “unreliable” and “extremist.”
“Police, try not to see veiled women. If you see a veiled woman, try to ignore her. They are not robbers, but defenders of religion. If you are an assistant policeman in the countryside stop torturing people who have no ID cards, because their ancestors have lived here for generations, they are the owners of this land,” went one such comment on a WeChat feed over a photo emblazoned with the words, “Ya Allah.”
These contributors were not to know that in the phone checks that lay ahead in 2017, for simply hosting this kind of content and forwarding it, not only the sender but every recipient would be rounded up for internment.
In charge of the hi-tec roll out in Xinjiang was the new governor of the region, Chen Quanguo who arrived in 2016, fresh from quelling dissent in Tibet, and set about turning the entire province into something akin to an open prison.
America’s declaration of “War on Terror” following the New York Twin Tower attacks in 2001, was the smokescreen Beijing needed to single out the Uyghurs, one of its largest Muslim people groups, and begin to label them as terrorists. Everyday, peaceful activities from their style of clothing, the names they gave their children, the language they spoke and how they decorated their homes came under scrutiny.
Following orders from Xi Jinping himself to “show no mercy” in “rounding up all who should be rounded up,” in a “smashing, obliterating offensive” to “wipe out” the terrorists “completely,” and “destroy them root and branch,” CCTV cameras, facial recognition, and smartphone technology were indispensable tools in herding hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs into mass internment, where they were watched and listened to day and night by a Huawei and Hikvision-made army of surveillance cameras. Huawei was also responsible for the camp smart gates and software for schedule management.
From 2017, the relative freedom of the WeChat platform came to an abrupt end. “More than 4000 private Uyghur language websites were taken offline, and their content was erased from the internet,” said Elkun. “The owners and editors of these websites were subsequently sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.”
Every Uyghur was required to download an app through which when their phone was routinely checked, the police linked up with “The Integrated Joint Operations Platform” (IJOP), the main system that holds all the Uyghur personal data, to discover what kind of person they have apprehended; their criminal record, whether they are “reliable” or “unreliable,” whether they have “unreliable” relatives, how often they fill their car, whether they have travelled overseas or like to pray five times a day, or even whether they like to use the front or back door when leaving their home.
The very tools that had unleashed a semblance of freedom back in 2013, had now become the means by which Uyghurs were being hunted down. The conversations and debates that had raged innocently for a brief moment had now become evidence with which to round them up and lock them away for a very long time.
Hi-tech mass surveillance still continues apace in Xinjiang and is being rolled out incrementally across the rest of China. Human rights abuses and infringements of privacy and free speech continue under the guise of safety and national security and Chinese tech giants continue to be complicit in the atrocities. Huawei and Hikvision having been party to the Uyghur genocide are being feted by western nations in need of facial recognition tech that was first fine-tuned on Uyghurs. Mood detection and predictive behavior-capable software is also in the works.
Elkun, like so many of his countrymen and women in exile, has been on the receiving end of the Chinese Government’s use of social media and technology to manipulate relatives in the homeland. Many are taken hostage and threatened with arrest if they cannot persuade a loved one to return and all are surveilled heavily and their media use censored. “China has effectively cut off communication between Uyghurs at home and the diaspora through these measures,” he said.
He has not been able to speak to his elderly mother for several years. “The government’s actions aim to isolate the Uyghur population and control the narrative surrounding the situation,” he said.
Ironically, having banned the use of major social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp within China, the CCP is happy to wield its influence on those very same sites outside the country by employing the services of hundreds of social media “influencers” to “deny the Uyghur genocide and freely spread their propaganda,” said Elkun. In December 2021 alone, Twitter removed 2,160 fake accounts attributed to China, but the CCP continues to maintain its innocence and dismisses all attempts to slur its name by pleading “hurt feelings” and western “lies of the century.”
Elkun urged the world not to remain silent over the genocide of his people and to take advantage of unfettered social media channels in the West to protest the atrocities. “Diplomatic efforts through the UN to condemn human rights abuses must not stop and individuals and companies complicit in the atrocities must be sanctioned,” he said. “There must be independent investigations, global public awareness campaigns and engagement with civil society and human rights organizations at every level,” he said.
“The goal is to exert diplomatic pressure, ensure transparency, and address the reported human rights violations in a collective and multilateral manner. It’s an absolute moral and principal obligation of the world, including all UN member states, to save innocent people’s lives from genocide.”