{"id":908,"date":"2018-07-20T10:05:56","date_gmt":"2018-07-20T10:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=908"},"modified":"2018-07-20T10:05:56","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T10:05:56","slug":"chinas-uyghurs-face-an-orwellian-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=908","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s Uyghurs face an Orwellian future"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Connor Dilleen<\/p>\n

ASPI<\/p>\n

China\u2019s treatment of its Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang autonomous region has garnered increased attention in recent months, due to Beijing\u2019s policy of mass arbitrary detention of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in \u2018political re-education centres\u2019. In April, the chairs of the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China called the detention program the \u2018largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today<\/a>\u2019, and raised the prospect of sanctions against those responsible for the policies.<\/p>\n

The Chinese government has long had a fractious relationship with its Uyghur minority, elements of which have demonstrated separatist tendencies and agitation in the face of pervasive religious and cultural discrimination and repression by Han Chinese in the Uyghurs\u2019 historical homeland of Xinjiang. Since 11 September 2001, when China\u00a0recast its ongoing campaign against separatism<\/a>\u00a0in Xinjiang as part of the global \u2018war on terror\u2019, the Chinese security apparatus has proven remarkably effective in suppressing Uyghur militants. That\u2019s partly because Uyghur violence in China is generally\u00a0low-tech, using knives and basic homemade explosives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Over the past two years, China has dramatically intensified its targeting of Uyghurs and other Muslim Turkic groups in an apparent strategy of using terrorist threats as a\u00a0pretext to culturally cleanse its western provinces<\/a>. The campaign has been driven by Chen Quanguo, who was appointed Xinjiang party secretary in August 2016 after \u2018pacifying\u2019 Tibet through a combination of\u00a0intense securitisation and penetrating social control mechanisms<\/a>. Under Chen\u2019s stewardship, security spending in Xinjiang rose\u00a050%<\/a>\u00a0between 2016 and 2017 to US$6.8 billion, with nearly\u00a0100,000 new security positions<\/a>\u00a0advertised in the 12 months to September 2017.<\/p>\n

Beijing\u2019s policy towards it Muslim Turkic minority populations has two distinct elements: the implementation of oppressive and pervasive surveillance infrastructure, and the institutionalisation of a comprehensive social re-engineering and indoctrination program.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s rollout of biometrically enabled mass surveillance infrastructure, coupled with artificial intelligence designed to predict behaviour, has attracted\u00a0significant attention from Western media<\/a>\u00a0in recent months. What is being implemented in Xinjiang, however, is even more invasive and comprehensive than in other parts of China. The \u2018integrated joint operations platform<\/a>\u2019 collates data from biometrically enabled CCTV camera networks, WiFi sniffers targeting networked devices, security checkpoints collecting citizen ID card numbers, and biometric visitor management systems in access-controlled communities.<\/p>\n

Xinjiang residents are\u00a0required to install government spyware<\/a>\u00a0on their mobile phones, enforced by police spot checks that can result in up to 10 days in detention for those who haven\u2019t complied. Residents are also required to\u00a0fit their vehicles with a satellite navigation system<\/a>\u00a0that allows government tracking.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s electronic surveillance is\u00a0complemented by a program<\/a>\u00a0called\u00a0fanghuiju<\/em>\u00a0(\u2018Visit the People, Benefit the People and Get together the Hearts of the People\u2019) in which officials visit homes in Uyghur communities to collect data on family composition and ideology that is then used to inform assessments on trustworthiness.<\/p>\n

Regional authorities have also\u00a0initiated a program<\/a>\u00a0to collect DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans and blood types from all Xinjiang residents between the ages of 12 and 65. The data is stored centrally and linked to an individual\u2019s national identification number.<\/p>\n

The second element of Beijing\u2019s policy involves the\u00a0internment of ethnic Muslim minorities<\/a>\u2014including Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz\u2014in re-education camps. Internees can be held indefinitely and without recourse to a court. Local authorities maintain that the camps are schools for eradicating extremism within the Muslim population. Residents are assigned a label of either \u2018safe\u2019, \u2018normal\u2019 or \u2018unsafe\u2019, which is\u00a0based on metrics such as age, faith, religious practices, foreign contacts, experiences abroad<\/a>\u00a0and behavioural insights gleaned from data collected through physical and electronic surveillance.<\/p>\n

Citizens identified as \u2018unsafe\u2019 and requiring re-education are then assigned an\u00a0additional designation<\/a>\u00a0that determines the program to which they are subjected. Those assessed as the most recalcitrant are assigned to the most severe category of \u2018strike hard detainees\u2019. The two categories below that are \u2018stubborn of thinking\u2019 and \u2018unstable thinking\u2019. Re-education programs typically involve intensive study of communist ideology and propaganda and of the dangers of illegal religious practices and separatism.<\/p>\n

A document reportedly leaked from the region\u2019s public security agencies outlined\u00a0figures for the number of detainees in \u2018re-education\u2019 centres<\/a>\u00a0in 69 of Xinjiang\u2019s counties, which placed the number at 892,000. Extrapolated for all of Xinjiang, that number suggests that around 11% of the entire Uyghur and Kazakh population of Xinjiang is, or has been, interned in re-education centres.\u00a0Anecdotal accounts<\/a>\u00a0from ex-detainees paint a picture of a brutal life in the centres. Detainees are subjected to extended interrogation,\u00a0torture<\/a>\u00a0and political indoctrination, and some serve sentences of up to seven years.<\/p>\n

Reporting on the extent of the Xinjiang crackdown, which has been largely anecdotal, is now being confirmed by leaked reports from regional administrations and analysis of publicly available information on procurements and government recruitment. There is now no doubt about the scale and ambition of what Beijing is pursuing in Xinjiang, which is possibly the\u00a0most intensive campaign of coercive social re-engineering<\/a>\u00a0since the end of the Cultural Revolution.<\/p>\n

China is pursuing a national program of mass surveillance of its citizens, and Uyghurs are facing a more extreme version than that endured by most Chinese. In Xinjiang, the government\u2019s program of mass surveillance is also linked to a system of coercive indoctrination centres that are structured to deprive Uyghurs of their liberty and cultural, linguistic and religious identity, and aimed at making the Orwellian concept of\u00a0Groupthink<\/a>a reality.<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.org.au\/chinas-uyghurs-face-an-orwellian-future\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Connor Dilleen ASPI China\u2019s treatment of its Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang autonomous region has garnered increased attention in recent months, due to Beijing\u2019s policy of mass arbitrary detention of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in \u2018political re-education centres\u2019. In April, the chairs of the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China called the detention program the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinas-uyghur-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=908"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":910,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908\/revisions\/910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}