Die Endlösung der Uigurischefrage

China’s Genetic Research on Ethnic Minorities Sets Off Science Backlash
Scientists are raising questions about the ethics of studies backed by Chinese surveillance agencies. Prestigious journals are taking action.
By Sui-Lee Wee and Paul Mozur

Kashgar, a city in East Turkestan, the colony where China has locked up more than one million people from predominantly Muslim minority groups.

BEIJING — China’s efforts to study the DNA of the country’s ethnic minorities have incited a growing backlash from the global scientific community, as scientists warn that Beijing uses its growing knowledge to spy on and oppress its people.
Two publishers of prestigious scientific journals, Springer Nature and Wiley, said this week that they would re-evaluate papers they previously published on Tibetans, Uighurs and other minority groups. The papers were written or co-written by scientists backed by the Chinese government, and the two publishers want to make sure the authors got consent from the people they studied.
Springer Nature, which publishes the influential journal Nature, also said that it was toughening its guidelines to make sure scientists get consent, particularly if those people are members of a vulnerable group.
The statements followed articles by The New York Times that describe how the Chinese authorities are trying to harness bleeding-edge technology and science to track minority groups. 

The issue is particularly stark in East Turkestan, a colony on China’s western frontier, where the authorities have locked up more than one million Uighurs and other members of predominantly Muslim minority groups in concentration camps in the name of quelling "terrorism".
Chinese companies are selling facial recognition systems that they claim can tell when a person is a Uighur. 

Chinese officials have also collected blood samples from Uighurs and others to build new tools for tracking members of minority groups.Western scientists and companies have provided help for those efforts.

That has included publishing papers in high-profile journals, which grants prestige and respectability to the authors that can lead to access to funding, data or new techniques.
When Western journals publish such papers by Chinese scientists affiliated with the country’s surveillance agencies, it amounts to selling a knife to a friend “knowing that your friend would use the knife to kill his wife,” said Yves Moreau, a professor of engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
On Tuesday, Nature published an essay by Dr. Moreau calling for all publications to retract papers written by scientists backed by Chinese security agencies that focus on the DNA of minority ethnic groups.
“If you produce a piece of knowledge and know someone is going to take that and harm someone with it, that’s a huge problem,” said Dr. Moreau.

Yves Moreau, an engineering professor in Belgium, is calling for publications to retract papers written by scientists backed by Chinese security agencies that focus on the DNA of minority ethnic groups.

The scientific reaction is part of a broader backlash to China’s actions in East Turkestan. 

Lawmakers in the United States and elsewhere are taking an increasingly critical stance toward Beijing’s policies. 

On Tuesday, the House voted almost unanimously for a bill condemning China’s treatment of Uighurs and others.

Dr. Moreau and other scientists worry that China’s research into the genes and personal data of ethnic minorities is being used to build databases, facial recognition systems and other methods for monitoring and subjugating China’s ethnic minorities.
They also worry that research into DNA in particular violates widely followed scientific rules involving consent. 

In East Turkestan, where so many people have been confined to concentration camps and a heavy police presence dominates daily life, they say, it is impossible to verify that Uighurs have given their blood samples willingly.
China’s Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Science and Technology did not respond to requests for comment.
In September, Dr. Moreau and three other scientists asked Wiley to retract a paper on the faces of minorities it published last year, citing the potential for abuse and the tone of discussion about race.
“The point of this work was to improve surveillance capabilities on all Tibetans and Uighurs,” said Jack Poulson, a former Google research scientist and founder of the advocacy group Tech Inquiry, and another member of the group that reached out to Wiley. 

Even if the authors obtained consent from those they studied, he added, that would be “insufficient to satisfy their ethical obligations.”

“The point of this work was to improve surveillance capabilities on all Tibetans and Uighurs,” said Jack Poulson, a former Google research scientist.

Wiley initially declined, but said this week that it would reconsider. 

Last week, Curtin University, an Australian institution that employs one of the authors of the study, said it had found “significant concerns” with the paper.
Science journals are now setting different standards.
In February, a journal called Frontiers in Genetics rejected a paper that was based on findings from the DNA of more than 600 Uighurs. 

Some of its editors cited China’s treatment of Uighurs, people familiar with the deliberations said.
The paper was instead accepted by Human Genetics, a journal owned by Springer Nature, and published in April.

Philip Campbell, the editor of Springer Nature, said this week that Human Genetics would add an editorial note to the study saying that concerns had been raised regarding informed consent. 

Springer Nature will also bolster guidelines across its journals and is contacting their editors to “request that they exercise an extra level of scrutiny and care in handling papers where there is a potential that consent was not informed or freely given,” it said in an email.
The paper published in Human Genetics was a subject of a Times article on Tuesday that raised questions about whether the Uighurs had contributed their blood samples willingly. 

Those Uighurs lived in Tumxuk, a city in East Turkestan that is ringed by paramilitary forces and is home to two internment camps.
Scientists like Dr. Moreau are not calling for a blanket ban on Chinese research into the genetics of China’s ethnic minorities. 

He drew a distinction between fields like medicine, where research is aimed at treating people, and forensics, which involves matters of criminal justice.
But Dr. Moreau found that recent genetic forensics research from China focused overwhelmingly on ethnic minorities and was increasingly driven by Chinese security agencies.
Of 529 studies in the field published between 2011 and 2018, he found, about half had a co-author from the police, military or judiciary. 

He also found that Tibetans were over 40 times more frequently studied than China’s ethnic Han majority, and that the Uighur population was 30 times more intensely studied than the Han.
.
A paper from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 looked at “Learning race from a face.”

Over the past eight years, he wrote, three leading forensic genetics journals — one published by Springer Nature and two by Elsevier — have published 40 articles co-authored by members of the Chinese police that describe the DNA profiling of Tibetans and Muslim minorities.
Tom Reller, a spokesman for Elsevier, said the company was in the process of producing more comprehensive guidelines for the publication of genetic data. 

But he added that the journals “are unable to control the potential misuse of population data articles” by third parties.
The principle of informed consent has been a scientific mainstay after forced experiments on inmates in Nazi death camps came to light. 

To verify that those standards are followed, academic journals and other outlets depend heavily on ethical review committees at individual institutions. 

Bioethicists say that arrangement can break down when an authoritarian state is involved. 

Already, Chinese scientists are under scrutiny for publishing papers on organ transplantation without saying whether there was consent.
In its own review of more than 100 papers published by Chinese scientists in international journals on biometrics and computer science, The Times found a number of examples of what appeared to be inadequate consent from study participants or no consent at all. 

Those concerns have also dogged facial recognition research in the United States.
One 2016 facial recognition paper published by Springer International was based on 137,395 photos of Uighurs, which the scientists said were from identification photos and surveillance cameras at railway stations and shopping malls. 

The paper does not mention consent.
A 2018 study, focused on using traffic cameras to identify drivers by beard, uses surveillance footage without mentioning whether it got permission from the subjects. 

The paper was also published by Springer.
A second 2018 Springer article that analyzes Uighur cranial shape to determine gender was based on “whole skull CT scans” of 267 people, mostly Uighurs. 

While the study said the subjects were “voluntary,” it made no mention of consent forms.
The latter two papers were part of a book published by Springer as part of a biometrics conference in East Turkestan’s capital, Urumqi, in August 2018, months after rights groups had documented the crackdown in the region. 

In a statement, Steven Inchcoombe, chief publishing officer of Springer Nature, said that conference organizers were responsible for editorial oversight of the conference proceedings. 

But he added that the company would in the future strengthen its requirements of conference organizers and ensure that their proceedings also comply with Springer Nature’s editorial policies.

A 2018 study published by Springer, on identifying drivers by beard, used surveillance footage without mentioning whether it got permission.

Two papers assembled databases of facial expressions for different minority groups, including Tibetans, Uighurs and Hui, another Muslim minority. 

The papers were released in journals run by Wiley and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. 

Wiley said the paper “raises a number of questions that are currently being reviewed.” 

It added that the paper was published on behalf of a partner, the International Union of Psychological Science, and referred further questions to it. 

The engineers institute did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
The science world has been responding to the pressure. 

Thermo Fisher, a maker of equipment for studying genetics, said in February that it would suspend sales to East Turkestan, though it will continue to sell to other parts of China. 

Still, Dr. Moreau said, the issue initially received little traction among academia.
“If we don’t react in the community, we are going to get more and more into trouble,” he said. 

“The community has to take a major step and say: ‘This is not us.’”

China’s hi-tech war on its Muslim minority

In East Turkestan, the Han Chinese are using technology to pioneer a new form of terror capitalism
By Darren Byler

A checkpoint in East Turkestan. 

In mid-2017, a Uyghur man in his twenties, whom I will call Alim, went to meet a friend for lunch at a mall in his home city, in the East Turkestan colony in northwest China. 

At a security checkpoint at the entrance, Alim scanned the photo on his government-issued identification card, and presented himself before a security camera equipped with facial recognition software. 

An alarm sounded. 

The security guards let him pass, but within a few minutes he was approached by officers from the local “convenience police station,” one of the thousands of rapid-response police stations that have been built every 200 or 300 meters in the Turkic Muslim areas of the region. 

The officers took him into custody.
Alim’s heart was racing. 

Several weeks earlier, he had returned to China from studying abroad. 

As soon as he landed back in the country, he was pulled off the plane by police officers responding to a nationwide warrant for his arrest. 

He was told his trip abroad meant that he was now under suspicion of being “unsafe.” 

The police then administered what they call a “health check,” which involves collecting several types of biometric data, including DNA, blood type, fingerprints, voice signature and face signature—a process which all adults in East Turkestan are expected to undergo. (According to China's official news agency, Xinhua, nearly 36 million people submitted biometric data through these “health checks,” a number which is higher than the estimated 24.5 million people who have official residency in the region.) 

Then they transported him to one of the hundreds of detention centers that dot northwest China.
Over the past five years, these centers have become an important node in China’s technologically driven “People’s War on Terror.” 

Officially launched by the Xi Jinping administration in 2014, this war supposedly began as a response to Uyghur mass protests—themselves born out of desperation over decades of discrimination, police brutality, and the confiscation of Uyghur lands—and to attacks directed against security forces and civilians who belong to the Han ethnic majority. 

In the intervening period, the Chinese government has come to treat almost all expressions of Uyghur Islamic faith as signs of potential religious extremism and ethnic separatism under vaguely defined anti-terrorism laws; the detention centers are the first stop for those suspected of such crimes. 

Since 2017 alone, more than 1 million Turkic Muslims have moved through these centers.
At the center to which he had been sent, Alim was deprived of sleep and food, and subjected to hours of interrogation and verbal abuse. 

“I was so weakened through this process that at one point during my interrogation I began to laugh hysterically,” he said when we spoke. 

Other detainees report being placed in stress positions, tortured with electric shocks, and submitted to long periods of isolation. 

When he wasn’t being interrogated, Alim was kept in a fourteen-square-meter cell with twenty other Uyghur men, though cells in some detention centers house more than sixty people. 

Former detainees have said they had to sleep in shifts because there was not enough space for everyone to stretch out at once. 

“They never turn out the lights,” Mihrigul Tursun, a Uyghur woman who spent several months in detention, told me.
The religious and political transgressions of these detainees were frequently discovered through social media apps on their smartphones, which Uyghurs are required to produce at thousands of checkpoints around East Turkestan. 

Although there was often no real evidence of a crime according to any legal standard, the digital footprint of unauthorized Islamic practice, or even an association to someone who had committed one of these vague violations, was enough to land Uyghurs in a detention center. 

Maybe their contact number had been in the list of WeChat followers in another detainee’s phone. Maybe they had posted, on their WeChat wall, an image of a Muslim in prayer. 

It could be that in years past they had sent or received audio recordings of Islamic teachings that the Public Security Bureau, which polices social life in China, deems “ideological viruses”: the sermons and lessons of so-called “wild” imams, who have not been authorized by the state. 

Maybe they had a relative who moved to Turkey or another Muslim-majority country and added them to their WeChat account using a foreign number. 

The mere fact of having a family member abroad, or of traveling outside China, as Alim had, often resulted in detention.
Not using social media could also court suspicion. So could attempting to destroy a SIM card, or not carrying a smartphone. 

Unsure how to avoid detention when the crackdown began, some Uyghurs buried old phones in the desert. 

Others hid little baggies of used SIM cards in the branches of trees, or put SD cards containing Islamic texts and teachings in dumplings and froze them, hoping they could eventually be recovered. Others gave up on preserving Islamic knowledge and burned data cards in secret. 

Simply throwing digital devices into the garbage was not an option; Uyghurs feared the devices would be recovered by the police and traced back to the user. 

Even proscribed content that was deleted before 2017 —when the Public Security Bureau operationalized software that uses artificial intelligence to scour millions of social media posts per day for religious imagery—can reportedly be unearthed.
Most Uyghurs in the detention centers are on their way to serving long prison sentences, or to indefinite captivity in a growing network of massive concentration camps which the Chinese state has described as “transformation through education” facilities. 

These camps, which function as medium-security prisons and, in some cases, forced-labor factories, center around training Uyghurs to disavow their Islamic identity and embrace the secular and economic principles of the Chinese state. 

They forbid the use of the Uyghur language and instead offer drilling in Mandarin, the language of China’s Han majority, which is now referred to as “the national language.” 

Only a handful of detainees who are not Chinese citizens have been fully released from this “re-education” system.
Alim was relatively lucky: he had been let out after only two weeks; he later learned that a relative had intervened in his case. 

But what he didn’t know until police arrested him at the mall was that he had been placed on a blacklist maintained by the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP, or 一体化联合作战平台), a regional data system that uses AI to monitor the countless checkpoints in and around East Turkestan’s cities. 

Any attempt to enter public institutions such as hospitals, banks, parks or shopping centers, or to cross beyond the checkpoints of the dozen city blocks that were under the jurisdiction of his local police precinct, would trigger the IJOP to alert police. 

The system had profiled him and predicted that he was a potential terrorist.
Officers told Alim he should “just stay at home” if he wanted to avoid detention again. 

Although he was officially free, his biometrics and his digital history were being used to bind him in place. 

“I’m so angry and afraid at the same time,” he told me. 

He was now haunted by his data.

Unlimited Market Potential
The surveillance and predictive profiling systems that targeted Alim and the many Uyghur Muslims he met in detention are the product of a neo-totalitarian security-industrial complex that has emerged in China over the past decade. 

Dozens of Chinese tech firms are building and marketing tools for a new “global war on terror,” fought in a domestic register and transposed to a technological key. 

In this updated version of the conflict, the war machine is more about facial recognition software and machine learning algorithms than about drones and Navy SEAL teams; the weapons are made in China rather than the United States; and the supposed terrorists are not “barbaric” foreigners but domestic minority populations who appear to threaten the dominance of authoritarian leaders and impede state-directed capitalist expansion.
In the modern history of systems of control deployed against subjugated populations, ranging from North American internment camps to the passbooks of apartheid-era South Africa, new technologies have been crucial. 

In China, that technological armament is now so vast that it has become difficult for observers to fully inventory. 

The web of surveillance in East Turkestan reaches from cameras on the wall, to the chips inside mobile devices, to Uyghurs’ very physiognomy.
Face scanners and biometric checkpoints track their movements. 

Nanny apps record every bit that passes through their smartphones.
Other programs automate the identification of Uyghur voice signatures, transcribe, and translate Uyghur spoken language, and scan digital communications, looking for suspect patterns of social relations, and flagging religious speech or a lack of fervor in using Mandarin. 

Deep-learning systems search in real time through video feeds capturing millions of faces, building an archive which can help identify suspicious behavior in order to predict who will become an “unsafe” actor. 

The predictions generated automatically by these “computer vision” technologies are triggered by dozens of actions, from dressing in an Islamic fashion to failing to attend or fully participate in nationalistic flag raising ceremonies. 

All of these systems are brought together in the IJOP, which is constantly learning from the behaviors of the Uyghurs it watches.
The predictive algorithms that purport to keep East Turkestan safe by identifying terrorist threats feed on the biometric and behavioral data extracted from the bodies of Uyghurs. 

The power—and potential profitability—of these systems as tools of security and control derives from unfettered access to Uyghurs’ digital lives and physical movements. 

The justification of the war on terror thus offers companies a space in which to build, experiment with, and refine these systems. 

In her recent study on the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” the Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff notes that consumers are constantly off-gassing valuable data that can be captured by capital and turned into profitable predictions about our preferences and future behaviors. 

In the Uyghur region, this logic has been taken to an extreme: from the perspective of China’s security-industrial establishment, the principal purpose of Uyghur life is to generate data.
After being rendered compliant by this repressive surveillance, Uyghurs are fed into China’s manufacturing industries as labor. 

Officially, the People’s War on Terror has been framed as a “poverty alleviation” struggle. 

This requires retraining marginalized Muslim communities to make them politically docile yet economically productive. 

China enforces this social order with prisons and camps built to accommodate over ten percent of the country’s Turkic Muslim population. 

The training that happens in the camps leads directly to on-site factories, for textiles and other industries, where detainees are forced to work indefinitely. 

The government frames these low-wage jobs as “internships.”
Controlling the Uyghurs has also become a test case for marketing Chinese technological prowess to authoritarian nations around the world. 

A hundred government agencies and companies, from two dozen countries including the United States, France, Israel, and the Philippines, now participate in the annual China-Eurasia Security Expo in Ürümchi, the capital of the Uyghur region. 

Because Ürümchi is a strategic entrepôt to the Muslim world, the expo has become the most influential security tech convention across East Asia.
The ethos at the expo, and in the Chinese techno-security industry as a whole, is that Muslim populations need to be managed and made productive. 

This, from the perspective of Chinese industry, is one of China’s major contributions to the future of global security. 

As a spokesperson for Leon Technology, one of the major players in the new security industry, put it at the expo in 2017, 60 percent of the world’s Muslim-majority nations are part of China’s premier international development initiative, “One Belt, One Road,” so there is “unlimited market potential” for the type of population-control technology they are developing in East Turkestan.
Over the past five years, the People’s War on Terror has allowed Chinese tech startups such as Leon, Meiya Pico, Hikvision, Face++, Sensetime, and Dahua to achieve unprecedented levels of growth. 

In just the last two years, the state has invested an estimated $7.2 billion on techno-security in East Turkestan. 
Some of the technologies they pioneered in East Turkestan have already found customers in authoritarian states as far away as sub-Saharan Africa. 

In 2018, CloudWalk, a Guangzhou-based tech startup that has received more than $301 million in state funding, finalized a strategic cooperation framework agreement with the Mnangagwa administration in Zimbabwe to build a national “mass facial recognition program” in order to address “social security issues.” (CloudWalk has not revealed how much the agreement is worth.) 

Freedom of movement through airports, railways, and bus stations throughout Zimbabwe will now be managed through a facial database integrated with other kinds of biometric data. 

In effect, the Uyghur homeland has become an incubator for China’s “terror capitalism.”

A Way of Life
The Uyghur internet has not always been a space of exploitation and entrapment. 

When I arrived in Ürümchi in 2011 to conduct my first year of ethnographic fieldwork, the region had just been wired with 3G networks. 

When I returned for a second year, in 2014, it seemed as though nearly all adults in the city had a smartphone; downloads of Uyghur-language apps suggested approximately 45 percent of the Uyghur population of 12 million was using one. 

Many Uyghurs had begun to use WeChat to share recorded messages and video with friends and family in rural villages. 

They also used their phones to buy and sell products, read about what was happening in the world, and network with Uyghurs throughout the country and around the globe. 

Young Uyghur filmmakers could now share short films and music videos instantly with hundreds of thousands of followers. 

Overnight, Uyghur English teachers such as Kasim Abdurehim and pop stars such as Ablajan—cultural figures that the government subsequently labeled “unsafe”—developed followings that numbered in the millions.
Most unsettling, from the perspective of the state, unsanctioned Uyghur religious teachers based in China and Turkey developed a deep influence. 

Since the 1950s, when the newly founded People’s Republic of China began sending millions of Han settlers to the region, Islamic faith, Turkic identity, and the Uyghur language have been sources of resistance to Han cultural norms and Chinese secularism. 

Sunni Islam and Turkic identity formed the basis for the independent East Turkistan republics that predated the decades of settler colonization. 

Together with deep-seated attachments to the built environment of Uyghur civilization—courtyard houses, mosque communities, and Sufi shrines—they helped most Uyghurs feel distinct from their colonizers even in the teeth of Maoist campaigns to force them to assimilate.
The government has always pushed to efface these differences. 

Beginning with Mao’s Religious Reform Movement of 1958, the state limited Uyghurs’ access to mosques, Islamic funerary practices, religious knowledge, and other Muslim communities. 

There were virtually no Islamic schools outside of state control, no imams who were not approved by the state. 

Children under the age of eighteen were forbidden to enter mosques. 

As social media spread through the Uyghur homeland over the course of the last decade, it opened up a virtual space to explore what it meant to be Muslim. 

It reinforced a sense that the first sources of Uyghur identity were their faith and language, their claim to a native way of life, and their membership in a Turkic Muslim community stretching from Ürümchi to Istanbul.
Because of the internet, millions of Uyghurs felt called to think in new ways about the piety of their Islamic practice, while simultaneously learning about self-help strategies and entrepreneurship. 

They began to imagine escaping an oppressive state which curtailed many of their basic freedoms by such means as restricting access to passports, systematic job discrimination, and permitting the seizure of Uyghur land. 

They also began to appreciate alternative modernities to the one the Chinese state was forcing upon them. 

Rather than being seen as perpetually lacking Han appearance and culture, they could find in their renewed Turkic and Islamic values a cosmopolitan and contemporary identity. 

They could embrace the halal standards of the Muslim world, wear the latest styles from Istanbul, and keep Chinese society at arms-length. 

Food, movies, music and clothing, imported from Turkey and Dubai, became markers of distinction. Women began to veil themselves. 

Men began to pray five times a day.
They stopped drinking and smoking. 

Some began to view music, dancing and state television as influences to be avoided.
The Han officials I met during my fieldwork referred to this rise in technologically disseminated religious piety as the “Talibanization” of the Uyghur population. 

Along with Han settlers, they felt increasingly unsafe traveling to the region’s Uyghur-majority areas, and uneasy in the presence of pious Turkic Muslims. 

The officials cited incidents that carried the hallmarks of religiously motivated violence—a knife attack carried out by a group of Uyghurs at a train station in Kunming; trucks driven by Uyghurs through crowds in Beijing and Ürümchi—as a sign that the entire Uyghur population was falling under the sway of terrorist ideologies.
But, as dangerous as the rise of Uyghur social media seemed to Han officials, it also presented them with a new means of control—one they had been working for several years to refine. 

On July 5, 2009, Uyghur high school and college students had used Facebook and Uyghur-language blogs to organize a protest demanding justice for Uyghur workers who were killed by their Han colleagues at a toy factory in eastern China. 

Thousands of Uyghurs took to the streets of Ürümchi, waving Chinese flags and demanding that the government respond to the deaths of their comrades. 

When they were violently confronted by armed police, many of the Uyghurs responded by turning over buses and beating Han bystanders. 

In the end, over 190 people were reported killed, most of them Han. 

Over the weeks that followed, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young Uyghurs were disappeared by the police. 

The internet was shut off in the region for over nine months, and Facebook and Twitter were blocked across the country.
Soon after the internet came back online in 2010—with the notable absence of Facebook, Twitter, and other non-Chinese social media applications—state security, higher education, and private industry began to collaborate on breaking Uyghur internet autonomy. 

Much of the Uyghur-language internet was transformed from a virtual free society into a zone where government technology could learn to predict criminal behavior. 

Broadly defined anti-terrorism laws, introduced in 2014, turned nearly all crimes committed by Uyghurs, from stealing a Han neighbor’s sheep to protesting land seizures, into forms of terrorism. 
Religious piety, which the new laws referred to as “extremism,” was conflated with religious violence. 

The East Turkestan security industry mushroomed from a handful of private firms to approximately 1,400 companies employing tens of thousands of workers, ranging from low-level Uyghur security guards to Han camera and telecommunications technicians to coders and designers. 

The Xi administration declared a state of emergency in the region, the People’s War on Terror began, and Islamophobia was institutionalized. 

 
Smart Terror
In 2017, after three years of operating a “hard strike” policy in East Turkestan—which involved instituting a passbook system that turned the Uyghur homeland into a what many considered an open-air prison, and deploying hundreds of thousands of security forces to monitor the families of those who had been disappeared or killed by the state—the government turned to a fresh strategy. 

A new regional party secretary named Chen Quanguo introduced a policy of “transforming” Uyghurs. 

Using the language of public health, local authorities began to describe the “three evil forces” of “religious extremism, ethnic separatism and violent terrorism” as three interrelated “ideological cancers.”
Because the digital sphere had allowed unauthorized forms of Islam to flourish, officials called for AI-enabled technology to detect and extirpate these evils. 

Already in 2015, Xi Jinping had announced that cybersecurity was a national priority; now Party leadership began to incentivize Chinese tech firms to build and develop technologies that could help the government control and modify Uyghur society. 

Billions of dollars in government contracts were awarded to build “smart” security systems across the Uyghur region.
The turn toward “transformation” coincided with breakthroughs in the AI-assisted computer systems that the Public Security Bureau rolled out in 2017 and brought together in the IJOP. 

The Chinese startup Meiya Pico began to market software to local and regional governments that was developed using state-supported research and could detect Uyghur language text and Islamic symbols embedded in images. 

The company also developed programs to automate the transcription and translation of Uyghur voice messaging.
The company Hikvision advertised tools that could automate the identification of Uyghur faces based on physiological phenotypes. 

High-resolution video cameras capable of operating in low-light conditions were linked to AI-enabled software trained on an extensive image database of racially diverse faces; together, these technologies could determine the ethnicity of a person based on the shape and color of the person’s facial features—all while the person strolled down street. 

A Leon Technology spokesperson told one of the country’s leading technology publications that the cameras were also integrated with an AI system made by Leon that could flag suspicious behavior and individuals under special surveillance “on the scale of seconds.” 

Other programs performed automated searches of Uyghurs’ internet activity and then compared the data it gleaned to school, job, banking, medical, and biometric records, looking for predictors of aberrant behavior.
The rollout of this new technology required a great deal of manpower and technical training. 

Over 100,000 new police officers were hired. 

One of their jobs was to conduct the sort of health check Alim underwent, creating biometric records for almost every human being in the region.
Face signatures were created by scanning individuals from a variety of different angles as they made different facial expressions; the result was a high-definition portfolio of personal emotions. 

All Uyghurs were required to install the Clean Net Guard app, which monitored everything they said, read, and wrote, and everyone they connected with, on their smartphones.
Higher-level officers, most of whom were Han, were given the job of conducting qualitative assessments of the Muslim population as a whole—providing more complex, interview-based survey data for IJOP’s deep-learning system. 

In face-to-face interviews, these neighborhood police officers assessed the more than 14 million Muslim-minority people in the province and determined if they should be given the rating of “safe,” “average,” or “unsafe.” 

They determined this by categorizing the person using ten or more categories: whether or not the person was Uyghur, of military age, or underemployed; whether they prayed regularly, possessed unauthorized religious knowledge, had a passport, had traveled to one of twenty-six Muslim-majority countries, had overstayed their visa, had an immediate relative living abroad, or had taught their children about Islam in their home. 

Those who were determined to be “unsafe” were then sent to the detention centers where they were interrogated and asked to confess their crimes and name others who were also “unsafe.” 

In this manner, the officers determined which individuals should be slotted for the “transformation through education” internment camps.
The assessments were iterative.
Many Muslims who passed their first assessment were subsequently detained because someone else named them as “unsafe.” 

In as many as tens of thousands of cases, years of WeChat history was used as evidence of the need for Uyghur suspects to be “transformed.” 

The state also assigned an additional 1.1 million Han and Uyghur “big brothers and sisters” to conduct week-long assessments on Uyghur families as uninvited guests in Uyghur homes. 

Over the course of these stays, the relatives tested the “safe” qualities of those Uyghurs that remained outside of the camp system by forcing them to participate in activities forbidden by certain forms of Islamic piety such as drinking, smoking, and dancing. 

As a test, they brought their Uyghur hosts food without telling them whether the meat used in the dishes was halal or not. 

These “big sisters and brothers” focused on the families of those who had been shot or taken away by the police over the past decade. 

They looked for any sign of resentment or any lack of enthusiasm in Chinese patriotic activities. 

They gave the children candy so that they would tell them the truth about what their parents thought. All of this information was entered into databases and then fed back into the IJOP.
The IJOP is always running in the background of Uyghur life, always learning. 

The government’s hope is that it will run with ever less human guidance. 

The goal is both to intensify securitization in the region and to free up security labor for the work of “transformation through education.”

Quantified Selves
My first encounter with the face-scanning machines was at a hotel in the Uyghur district of Ürümchi in April 2018. 

Speaking in Uyghur, the man at the front desk told me I did not need to scan my face to register because I had foreign identification. 

But when I left the city on the high-speed train, Han officers instructed me on how to scan my passport picture and stand “just so” to enable the camera to get a good read of my face. 

Exiting the train an hour later in Turpan, my face had to be verified manually at the local police station. 

The officer in charge, a Han woman, told a young Uyghur officer to scan my passport photo with her smartphone and match that image with photos she took of my face. 

When I asked why this was necessary, the officer in charge said, “It is to keep you safe.”
As I moved through Uyghur towns and face-recognition checkpoints, I was surprised not to find handlers following me. 

When the officers at one checkpoint seemed to have anticipated my arrival, I realized the reason: cameras were now capable of tracking me with nearly as much precision as undercover police. 

My movements were being recorded and analyzed by deep learning systems. 

I, too, was training the IJOP.
In order to avoid the cameras, I took unauthorized Uyghur taxis, ducked into Uyghur bookstores, and bummed hand-rolled cigarettes from Uyghur peddlers while I asked questions about the reeducation system. 

I hoped that slipping into the blind spots of the IJOP would help to protect the people I spoke with there. 

A few weeks after my trip, I heard that another American who had lived in the region for an extended period was interrogated by public security officers about my activities.
In the tech community in the United States there is some skepticism regarding the viability of AI-assisted computer vision technology in China. 

Many experts I’ve spoken to from the AI policy world point to an article by the scholar Jathan Sadowski called “Potemkin AI,” which highlights the failures of Chinese security technology to deliver what it promises. 

They frequently bring up the way a system in Shenzhen meant to identify the faces of jaywalkers and flash them on jumbotrons next to busy intersections cannot keep up with the faces of all the jaywalkers; as a result, human workers sometimes have to manually gather the data used for public shaming. 

They point out that Chinese tech firms and government agencies have hired hundreds of thousands of low-paid police officers to monitor internet traffic and watch banks of video monitors. 

As with the theater of airport security rituals in the United States, many of these experts argue that it is the threat of surveillance, rather than the surveillance itself, that causes people to modify their behavior.
Yet while there is a good deal of evidence to support this skepticism, a notable rise in the automated detection of internet-based Islamic activity, which has resulted in the detention of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, also points to the real effects of the implementation of AI-assisted surveillance and policing in East Turkestan. 

Even Western experts at Google and elsewhere admit that Chinese tech companies now lead the world in these computer vision technologies, due to the way the state funds Chinese companies to collect, monitor, utilize, and report on the personal data of hundreds of millions of users across China.
In Kashgar, 1500 kilometers west of Ürümchi, I encountered dozens of Han civil servants who had been told to refer to themselves as “relatives.” 

Several of these “big brothers and sisters” spoke in glowing terms about the level of safety and security they felt in the Uyghur countryside. 

Uyghur communities, it seemed, were now safe for Han people. 

The IJOP tracks movements of Han people as well, but they experience this surveillance as frictionless. 

At railway stations, for example, they move through pre-approved “green lanes.” 

The same technology that restricts the movements of Uyghurs makes the movements of Han residents even freer.
“Anyone who has been to Kashgar will know that the atmosphere there was really thick and imposing,” a Leon Technology spokesperson told reporters at the China-Eurasia Security Expo in 2017. 

He was implying that, in the past, the city felt too Uyghur.
One of the Uyghur-tracking AI projects that Leon developed made that “thick atmosphere” easier for Han settlers and officials to breathe.
“Through the continuous advancement of the project, we have a network of 10,000 video access points in the surrounding rural area, which will generate massive amounts of video,” the spokesperson said. 

“This many images will ‘bind’ many people.”
Like the rest of the IJOP, the Leon project helps the Chinese government to bind Uyghurs in many ways—by limiting their political and cultural expression, by trapping them within checkpoints and labor camps. 

The effect of these restrictions, and of the spectacle of Uyghur oppression, simultaneously amplifies the sense of freedom and authority of Han settlers and state authorities.
The Han officials I spoke with during my fieldwork in East Turkestan often refused to acknowledge the way disappearances, frequent police shootings of young Uyghur men, and state seizures of Uyghur land might have motivated earlier periods of Uyghur resistance. 

They did not see correlations between limits on Uyghur religious education, restrictions on Uyghur travel, and widespread job discrimination on the one hand, and the rise in Uyghur desires for freedom, justice, and religiosity on the other. 

Because of the crackdown, Han officials have seen a profound diminishment of Islamic belief and political resistance in Uyghur social life. 

They’re proud of the fervor with which Uyghurs are learning the “common language” of the country, abandoning Islamic holy days, and embracing Han cultural values. 

From their perspective, the implementation of the new security systems has been a monumental success.
A middle-aged Uyghur businessman from Hotan, whom I will call Dawut, told me that, behind the checkpoints, the new security system has hollowed out Uyghur communities. 

The government officials, civil servants, and tech workers who have come to build, implement, and monitor the system don’t seem to perceive Uyghurs’ humanity. 

The only kind of Uyghur life that can be recognized by the state is the one that the computer sees. This makes Uyghurs like Dawut feel as though their lives only matter as data—code on a screen, numbers in camps. 

They have adapted their behavior, and slowly even their thoughts, to the system.
“Uyghurs are alive, but their entire lives are behind walls,” Dawut said softly. 

“It is like they are ghosts living in another world.”

China’s Brutal ‘Boarding Schools’

Beijing’s concentration camps for Muslim Uighurs are stark violations of human rights.
The New York Times

A sign warning against "uncivilized" behavior in the main bazaar in Urumqi, the capital of China's East Turkestan colony.

The Trump administration may not be the most unimpeachable source when it comes to human rights, but the head of the State Department’s bureau for human rights, Michael Kozak, was dead on when he said China’s mass incarceration of Muslim minorities was “just remarkably awful.”
Mr. Kozak made the comments on Wednesday as the State Department presented its annual report on human rights around the world, an event at which his boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, declared that China was “in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations.”
That’s a tough call in today’s world.
But China’s brutal campaign to strip Uighur and other Turkic minorities in the East Turkestan colony of their culture, religion and identity through a network of secretive concentration camps must rank among the more outrageous continuing violations in the world. 
What makes it all the more galling is the Beijing government’s feigned umbrage whenever the camps are mentioned, and its absurd efforts to depict them as China’s contribution to the war on "terrorism".
After initially denying the existence of the camps, China in October began a campaign to portray them as “campuses,” “vocational training centers” and “boarding schools” intended to bring Uighurs into the modern era.
China has made direct news reporting from East Turkestan all but impossible, giving access only to carefully monitored official tours. 
On one, Reuters reported that camp inmates praised their new life and sang, in English, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”
Reports from survivors, Uighur dissidents, the Uighur diaspora, satellite imagery and other sources depict something far more akin to the gulag than a happy boarding school, with more than a million Uighurs, out of a population of more than 10 million Muslims in East Turkestan, forced to undergo Cultural Revolution-style coercion to adopt state-sanctioned norms of political thought and behavior.
Writing in The Times, Mustafa Akyol, a senior fellow on Islam at the Cato Institute, described camps at which “people are forced to listen to ideological lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write ‘self-criticism’ essays.” 
He said survivors told of sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
Conquered and incorporated into China in the 18th century, East Turkestan has long been a thorn in China’s side.
The Chinese government attributes scores of violent events, including bombings and assassinations, to Uighur separatists.
Violent riots in July 2009 in Urumqi, the East Turkestan capital, escalated into attacks on Han Chinese people and a vicious crackdown and several death sentences.
But trying to extinguish national identity through what amounts to mass brainwashing is an atrocity that smacks of some of the worst experiments of our time — including China’s own Cultural Revolution — with some thoroughly modern twists. 
A key part of China’s campaign to control the Uighurs has been collecting DNA from members of the minority under the guise of a free health check.
Sadly, Muslim nations have been reticent about supporting the Uighurs, because of the economic clout China wields among them and the solidarity these states have with an anti-Western authoritarian regime.
In February, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was quoted on Chinese television after a meeting with Xi Jinping as saying, “China has the right to carry out antiterrorism and de-extremization work for its national security.”
That should not dissuade other governments and organizations from continuing to focus attention on the camps, as the State Department has.
A bipartisan bill introduced in Congress, the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, would require the State Department and intelligence agencies to report on what the Chinese government is doing in East Turkestan.
The bill should be promptly passed.
The United States should also support the request of 15 Western ambassadors to Beijing — America’s was not one of them — to meet with the Communist Party secretary in East Turkestan.
What is happening in East Turkestan must not be ignored.

China has turned East Turkestan into a zone of repression — and a frightening window into the future

The Washington Post

The Chinese database that Victor Gevers, a Dutch cybersecurity researcher, found online has given a rare glimpse into China’s extensive surveillance of East Turkestan, a remote colony home to an ethnic minority population that is largely Muslim. 

AT A minimum, the minority Muslim Uighur population of East Turkestan colony in China is about 11 million people, and probably significantly higher. 

So consider the scope of surveillance over Uighurs in light of a recent database leak that indicated about 2.5 million people in East Turkestan are being tracked by cameras and other devices, generating more than 6.6 million GPS coordinates in one 24-hour period, much of it tagged with locations such as “mosque” and “hotel.”
Victor Gevers, a security researcher for the GDI Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to defend Internet freedom, found the database, belonging to SenseNets, a Chinese company that provides facial recognition and other monitoring systems to the police. 

The company had left the database unguarded but closed it off when Mr. Gevers inquired. 

It included records such as identification numbers, gender, nationality, address, birth dates, photographs, employers and which cameras or trackers they had passed. 

Mr. Gevers suggests that more than a quarter of those in the database appear to be ethnic Uighurs, although it also included Han Chinese and others.
The data provides another glimpse into the darkening world of East Turkestan, which China’s authorities have turned into a zone of repression. 

In addition to ubiquitous electronic and physical surveillance, an estimated 1 million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims have been incarcerated in concentration camps where they are being brainwashed to wipe out their traditional culture and language.
According to Xiao Qiang, director of the Counter-Power Lab at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information, East Turkestan is a window on the future of China, a “frontline” test-bed for data-driven surveillance that could then be spread well beyond. 

Mr. Xiao wrote in the Journal of Democracy last month that China under Xi Jinping is attempting to marshal the powers of artificial intelligence to process all kinds of surveillance data, including facial recognition, and systems that can monitor gender, clothing, gait and height of passersby, as well as voice recognition, and creating a DNA database.
After being asked by the New York Times about the use of its technology to build the DNA database, a Massachusetts company, Thermo Fisher, said it would no longer sell its equipment in East Turkestan. 

Congress is considering important legislation that would help expose and pressure others who enable China’s abuses.
China’s goal is to use these technologies to suppress dissent, and to predict and snuff out any challenge to the ruling Communist Party’s grip on power. 

In East Turkestan, surveillance is part of a policy of cultural genocide. 

In addition to the camps and cameras, Mr. Xiao says the government has issued guidelines to collect DNA samples from all East Turkestan residents between ages 12 and 65.
When George Orwell’s “1984” was published seven decades ago, it seemed a dire warning of a future dystopia ruled by thought police and authoritarian control. 

Today, such a world is becoming a reality in East Turkestan. 

We agree with human rights groups who have urged the United Nations Human Rights Council, when it meets starting Monday, to launch an international fact-finding mission to East Turkestan to expose this unsettling experiment in state control of human behavior.

China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Quislings

The Chinese turned to a Massachusetts company and a prominent Yale researcher as they built an enormous system of surveillance and control.
By Sui-Lee Wee

Tahir Imin, a 38-year-old Uighur, had his blood drawn, his face scanned and his voice recorded by the authorities in China’s East Turkestan colony.

BEIJING — The authorities called it a free health check. Tahir Imin had his doubts.
They drew blood from the 38-year-old Muslim, scanned his face, recorded his voice and took his fingerprints. 

They didn’t bother to check his heart or kidneys, and they rebuffed his request to see the results.
“They said, ‘You don’t have the right to ask about this,’” Mr. Imin said. 

“‘If you want to ask more,’ they said, ‘you can go to the police.’”
Mr. Imin was one of millions of people caught up in a vast Chinese campaign of surveillance and oppression. 

To give it teeth, the Chinese authorities are collecting DNA — and they got unlikely corporate and academic help from the United States to do it.
China wants to make the country’s Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, more subservient to the Communist Party. 

It has detained up to a million people in concentration camps, drawing condemnation and threat of sanctions from the Trump administration.
Collecting genetic material is a key part of China’s campaign.

A comprehensive DNA database could be used to chase down any Uighurs who resist conforming to the campaign.
Police forces in the United States and elsewhere use genetic material from family members to find suspects and solve crimes. 

Chinese officials, who are building a broad nationwide database of DNA samples, have cited the crime-fighting benefits of China’s own genetic studies.
To bolster their DNA capabilities, scientists affiliated with China’s police used equipment made by Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company. 

For comparison with Uighur DNA, they also relied on genetic material from people around the world that was provided by Kenneth Kidd, a Yale University geneticist.

Kenneth Kidd is helping China's Final Solution

On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would no longer sell its equipment in East Turkestan, the colony of China where the campaign to track Uighurs is mostly taking place. 

The company said separately in an earlier statement to The New York Times that it was working with American officials to figure out how its technology was being used.
Kidd said he had been unaware of how his material and know-how were being used. 

He naively "believed" Chinese scientists were acting within scientific norms that require informed consent by DNA donors.
China’s campaign poses a direct challenge to the scientific community and the way it makes cutting-edge knowledge publicly available. 

The Chinese campaign relies on public DNA databases and commercial technology, much of it made or managed in the United States. 

In turn, Chinese scientists have contributed Uighur DNA samples to a global database, violating scientific norms of consent.
Cooperation from the global scientific community “legitimizes this type of Orwellian genetic surveillance,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who has closely tracked the use of American technology in East Turkestan.

China has maintained an iron grip in East Turkestan, where it is trying to make Uighur Muslims more subservient to the Communist Party.

Swabbing Millions
In East Turkestan, in northwestern China, the program was known as “Physicals for All.”
From 2016 to 2017, nearly 36 million people took part in it, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency. 

The Chinese collected DNA samples, images of irises and other personal data.

It is unclear whether some residents participated more than once — East Turkestan has a population of about 24.5 million.
In a statement, the East Turkestan government denied that it collects DNA samples as part of the free medical checkups. 

It said the DNA machines that were bought by the East Turkestan authorities were for “internal use.”
China has for decades maintained an iron grip in East Turkestan. 

In recent years, it has blamed Uighurs for a series of "terrorist" attacks in East Turkestan and elsewhere in China, including a 2013 incident in which a driver struck two people in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
In late 2016, the Communist Party embarked on a campaign to turn the Uighurs and other largely Muslim minority groups into loyal supporters. 

The government locked up hundreds of thousands of them in what it called "job training" camps, touted as a way to escape poverty, backwardness and radical Islam. 

It also began to take DNA samples.
In at least some of the cases, people didn’t give up their genetic material voluntarily. 

To mobilize Uighurs for the free medical checkups, police and local cadres called or sent them text messages, telling them the checkups were required, according to Uighurs interviewed by The Times.
“There was a pretty strong coercive element to it,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies the plight of the Uighurs. 

“They had no choice.”

A market in Kashgar, a city in East Turkestan. China has detained up to a million people in camps in the western region.

Calling Kidd
Kenneth Kidd first visited China in 1981 and remained curious about the country. 

So when he received an invitation in 2010 for an expenses-paid trip to visit Beijing, he said yes.
Kidd is a major figure in the genetics field. 

The 77-year-old Yale professor has helped to make DNA evidence more acceptable in American courts.
His Chinese hosts had their own background in law enforcement. 

They were scientists from the Ministry of Public Security — essentially, China’s police.
During that trip, Kidd met Li Caixia, the chief forensic physician of the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science. 

The relationship deepened. 

In December 2014, Li arrived at Kidd’s lab for an 11-month stint. 

She took some DNA samples back to China.
“I had thought we were sharing samples for collaborative research,” said Kidd.
Kidd is not the only foreign geneticist to have worked with the Chinese authorities. 

Bruce Budowle, a professor at the University of North Texas, says in his online biography that he “has served or is serving” as a member of an academic committee at the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science.
Jeff Carlton, a university spokesman, said in a statement that Budowle’s role with the ministry was “only symbolic in nature” and that he had “done no work on its behalf.”
“Budowle and his team abhor the use of DNA technology to persecute ethnic or religious groups,” Mr. Carlton said in the statement. 

“Their work focuses on criminal investigations and combating human trafficking to serve humanity.”
Kidd’s data became part of China’s DNA drive.
In 2014, Chinese ministry researchers published a paper describing a way for scientists to tell one ethnic group from another. 

It cited, as an example, the ability to distinguish Uighurs from Indians. 

The authors said they used 40 DNA samples taken from Uighurs in China and samples from other ethnic groups from Kidd’s Yale lab.
In patent applications filed in China in 2013 and 2017, ministry researchers described ways to sort people by ethnicity by screening their genetic makeup. 

They took genetic material from Uighurs and compared it with DNA from other ethnic groups. 

In the 2017 filing, researchers explained that their system would help in “inferring the geographical origin from the DNA of suspects at crime scenes.”
For outside comparisons, they used DNA samples provided by Kidd’s lab, the 2017 filing said. 

They also used samples from the 1000 Genomes Project, a public catalog of genes from around the world.
Paul Flicek, member of the steering committee of the 1000 Genomes Project, said that its data was unrestricted and that “there is no obvious problem” if it was being used as a way to determine where a DNA sample came from.
The data flow also went the other way.
Chinese government researchers contributed the data of 2,143 Uighurs to the Allele Frequency Database, an online search platform run by Kidd that was partly funded by the United States Department of Justice until last year. 

The database, known as Alfred, contains DNA data from more than 700 populations around the world.
This sharing of data could violate scientific norms of informed consent because it is not clear whether the Uighurs volunteered their DNA samples to the Chinese authorities, said Arthur Caplan, the founding head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s School of Medicine. 

He said that “no one should be in a database without express consent.”
“Honestly, there’s been a kind of naïveté on the part of American scientists presuming that other people will follow the same rules and standards wherever they come from,” Dr. Caplan said.
Kidd said he was “not particularly happy” that the Chinese ministry had cited him in its patents, saying his data shouldn’t be used in ways that could allow people or institutions to potentially profit from it. 

If the Chinese authorities used data they got from their earlier collaborations with him, he added, there is little he can do to stop them.
He said he was unaware of the filings until he was contacted by The Times.
Kidd also said he considered his collaboration with the ministry to be no different from his work with police and forensics labs elsewhere. 

He said governments should have access to data about minorities, not just the dominant ethnic group, in order to have an accurate picture of the whole population.
As for the consent issue, he said the burden of meeting that standard lay with the Chinese researchers, though he said reports about what Uighurs are subjected to in China raised some difficult questions.
“I would assume they had appropriate informed consent on the samples,” he said, “though I must say what I’ve been hearing in the news recently about the treatment of the Uighurs raises concerns.”

Machine Learning
In 2015, Kidd and Budowle spoke at a genomics conference in the Chinese city of Xi’an. 

It was underwritten in part by Thermo Fisher, a company that has come under intense criticism for its equipment sales in China, and Illumina, a San Diego company that makes gene sequencing instruments. 

Illumina did not respond to requests for comment.
China is ramping up spending on health care and research. 

The Chinese market for gene-sequencing equipment and other technologies was worth $1 billion in 2017 and could more than double in five years, according to CCID Consulting, a research firm. 

But the Chinese market is loosely regulated, and it isn’t always clear where the equipment goes or to what uses it is put.
Thermo Fisher sells everything from lab instruments to forensic DNA testing kits to DNA mapping machines, which help scientists decipher a person’s ethnicity and identify diseases to which he or she is particularly vulnerable. 

China accounted for 10 percent of Thermo Fisher’s $20.9 billion in revenue, according to the company’s 2017 annual report, and it employs nearly 5,000 people there.
“Our greatest success story in emerging markets continues to be China,” it said in the report.
China used Thermo Fisher’s equipment to map the genes of its people, according to five Ministry of Public Security patent filings.
The company has also sold equipment directly to the authorities in East Turkestan, where the campaign to control the Uighurs has been most intense. 

At least some of the equipment was intended for use by the police, according to procurement documents. 

The authorities there said in the documents that the machines were important for DNA inspections in criminal cases and had “no substitutes in China.”
In February 2013, six ministry researchers credited Thermo Fisher’s Applied Biosystems brand, as well as other companies, with helping to analyze the DNA samples of Han, Uighur and Tibetan people in China, according to a patent filing. 

The researchers said understanding how to differentiate between such DNA samples was necessary for fighting "terrorism" “because these cases were becoming more difficult to crack.”
The researchers said they had obtained 95 Uighur DNA samples, some of which were given to them by the police. 

Other samples were provided by Uighurs voluntarily, they said.
Thermo Fisher was criticized by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and others who asked the Commerce Department to prohibit American companies from selling technology to China that could be used for purposes of surveillance and tracking.


Marco Rubio
✔@marcorubio
Grotesque to read @thermofisher fawning over #XiJinping in #China’s state media.
A reminder #ThermoFisher is making lots of $ helping #Xinjiang authorities conduct mass detention & brutal suppression of #Uyghur Muslims by selling them DNA sequencers.http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201811/05/WS5bdfe891a310eff3032869d9_12.html …
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On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would stop selling its equipment in East Turkestan, a decision it said was “consistent with Thermo Fisher’s values, ethics code and policies.”
“As the world leader in serving science, we recognize the importance of considering how our products and services are used — or may be used — by our customers,” it said.

Tahir Hamut, a Uighur now living in Virginia whose blood was taken by the police in East Turkestan, said it was “inconceivable” that Uighurs there would have consented to give DNA samples.

Human rights groups praised Thermo Fisher’s move. 

Still, they said, equipment and information flows into China should be better monitored, to make sure the authorities elsewhere don’t send them to East Turkestan.
“It’s an important step, and one hopes that they apply the language in their own statement to commercial activity across China, and that other companies are assessing their sales and operations, especially in East Turkestan,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch.
American lawmakers and officials are taking a hard look at the situation in East Turkestan. 

The Trump administration is considering sanctions against Chinese officials and companies over China’s treatment of the Uighurs.
China’s tracking campaign unnerved people like Tahir Hamut. 

In May 2017, the police in the city of Urumqi in East Turkestan drew the 49-year-old Uighur’s blood, took his fingerprints, recorded his voice and took a scan of his face. 

He was called back a month later for what he was told was a free health check at a local clinic.
Mr. Hamut, a filmmaker who is now living in Virginia, said he saw between 20 to 40 Uighurs in line. He said it was absurd to think that such frightened people had consented to submit their DNA.
“No one in this situation, not under this much pressure and facing such personal danger, would agree to give their blood samples for research,” Mr. Hamut said. 

“It’s just inconceivable.”