China is treating Islam like a mental illness

Uighurs Can’t Escape Chinese Repression, Even in Europe
By ELLEN HALLIDAY
Uighur demonstrators in Turkey wave East Turkestan flags in a protest against China.

BRUSSELS—In the comfortable living room of a family home near Antwerp, photographs from not so long ago recall the faces of the missing.

A business man sits proudly behind the desk of the company he owns. 

A party of women smile and laugh as they share a cup of tea. 

Four brothers in sharp suits, with their arms spread across one another’s shoulders, grin at the camera.
One of them is Ibrahim Ismael. 

He and his family fled their home in Hotan, East Turkestan, in 2011. 

They are ethnic Uighurs, a minority in China but the biggest group in East Turkestan, China’s largest and westernmost colony, which borders eight countries. 

They cannot go home, where at least 1 million Uighurs are detained in camps that Beijing says are for “reeducation” (human-rights groups label them “concentration camps”). 

Nor can they freely campaign for Uighur rights in Europe. 

Conversations with Uighurs in Belgium, Finland, and the Netherlands reveal a systematic effort by China to silence Uighurs overseas with brazen tactics of surveillance, blackmail, and intimidation. 

Many of the Uighurs I spoke with did so on condition of anonymity out of concern for their families in China.
Beijing claims that East Turkestan has always been part of China. 

Some of the province’s main cities—Ürümqi, Hotan, and Kashgar—have been strategically important posts on the Silk Road, the legendary trade route that connected China, the Middle East, and Europe for centuries. 

But the region’s history is more complicated. 

In 1949, Uighurs declared independence for East Turkestan. 

Although it didn’t last long—China took control shortly after the establishment of the communist state in Beijing that same year—the memory of self-governance and invasion lives on.
Most Uighurs, though not all, are Muslim, and speak a Turkic language rather than Chinese. 

In the 1990s, a major separatist insurrection in the province and the recent collapse of the Soviet Union encouraged China to increase its control in the region. 

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Beijing stopped talking about the Uighurs as separatists and started referring to its opponents in the region as "terrorists"; this discourse, linked to the Islamic faith of most Uighurs, helped China gain international support for its actions. 

When violence broke out in Ürümqi shortly after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the government cracked down harder than ever before. 

The state now monitors the individual trustworthiness of each person. 

Points are lost for owning a Koran, so-called extremist behavior such as fasting during Ramadan, simply being Uighur, or having a family member living in a foreign country. 

Those who lose too many points are sent to a camp, often for an indeterminate length of time.
The Uighur diaspora in Europe is relatively small—just a few thousand refugees, in addition to several thousand more in Turkey. 

Some came on student visas, to France, Hungary, and the Nordic countries, and then stayed. 

Others, knowing it was a one-way trip, put their safety in the hands of smugglers. 

Ibrahim and his family paid $40,000 for a journey through Guangzhou, Malaysia, Thailand, and Turkey, before they could start a new life in Belgium. 

‘I arrived with only $100 left in my pocket,’ he told me.
At first, many Uighurs in Europe were reluctant to speak out. 

Although Ibrahim and his friends live in European democracies where freedom of speech is promised, they feared that their advocacy would lead to retribution for their families.
One activist told me that when in the past he risked a snatched conversation on WeChat, the widely used Chinese social-media app, the state was listening. 

“You can hear that there is someone else there,” he said . 

“If we greet our families with Salaam Alaikum, they flinch and tell us to be quiet.” 

The Uighurs I met told me that as surveillance and arrests in East Turkestan increased since 2017, the calls from relatives stopped altogether. 

“I didn’t want to be an activist,” says Halmurat Harri, a Uighur campaigner and Finnish citizen, whose parents were detained in East Turkestan in April 2017. 

“I’m just a son, who wants to speak to his mother.” 

As the silence settled in, many in Europe began to feel they had no other choice but to go public.
Halmurat was one of the first to challenge the Chinese demand for silence. 

In August 2018, he set off on a “Freedom Tour” of Europe to raise awareness of the detention of Uighurs, including his parents.
Halmurat argued extensively and publicly that his parents’ case did not fit with any official Chinese-government excuses for detaining Uighurs. 

They are retirees, so they don’t need vocational training. 

They are secular, so can’t be called religious extremists. 

His father even speaks fluent Chinese. 

Halmurat used social media effectively—and in December 2018, his parents were removed from the camp and put under house arrest. 

He thinks it is “highly possible” that his activism pressured the government to let them go—though they were released just weeks before the Finnish president visited China.
His story has inspired others to follow suit. 

Activists are now more numerous, more organised, and more energized than ever before. 

They run workshops, public meetings, and social-media campaigns to hone their strategies and win the attention of politicians. 

They are eager to share their stories and their grief. 

But their efforts have not gone unnoticed by Beijing.
China wants to silence its critics, and so it confronts Uighur activists who live beyond its borders.
The EU’s border provides little extra protection: Uighurs in Germany, Finland, and Belgium also report being contacted by Chinese authorities. 

They say they are asked to spy or to reveal sensitive personal details including their home address, workplace, and national ID numbers. 

The offers, even if refused, breed distrust. 

Their friends, they are told, have accepted.
Other forms of intimidation are more public. 

One Uighur man I spoke with reported that he took part in a protest march in Belgium that was followed by a Chinese consular car with blacked-out windows. 

Halmurat reports that demonstrators in Helsinki have been photographed. 

According to the World Uyghur Congress, an advocacy group that represents Uighur interests from Munich, Beijing uses such photographs to punish the families of the protesters who remain in China.
Beijing has also sought to silence a network of scholars in Europe, who are working with Uighur activists to help tell their story. 

Vanessa Frangville, a French scholar at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, has found her work targeted by Chinese authorities. 

In November 2018, two Chinese officials delivered a letter from the Chinese ambassador in Belgium to the university two weeks after it published an online statement in support of Uighur academics. “The Embassy hopes that the University will be able to avoid being misled by false information, and withdraw from its website the motion and other unfounded articles on East Turkestan, in the general interest of the Belgian-Chinese friendly cooperation,” the ambassador wrote.
In February 2019, two individuals dressed as students but identified, Frangville says, by police as Chinese consular staff,, disrupted an academic conference in Strasbourg, France, that she organized on the situation in East Turkestan. 

The individuals distributed propaganda and discredited the panel. 

“That was kind of a traumatic incident, because they spread doubt about what we were saying,” she told me. 

There have also been reports of similar disruptive incidents in Ireland and in Canada.
The Uighur activists want Western leaders to pressure China over its human-rights record in East Turkestan, in the hope that Beijing may loosen control. 

The EU has urged Beijing to respect freedom of religious belief, freedom of expression, and the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. 

On May 3, as the U.S.-China trade war escalated, the Trump administration accused China of running “concentration camps” and subsequently called its actions in East Turkestan the “stain of the century.”
But European governments could also do more to safeguard activists living inside their borders. Authorities at times appear ill-prepared to protect Uighur activists. 

Shortly before he set off on his awareness-raising European tour, Halmurat’s car was vandalized. Upon his return, it began to emit white smoke from the engine. 

When he reported the incidents to the local police, he found that they did not take his concerns seriously.
In July, Halmurat traveled to Turkey to meet diplomats and discuss reported deportations of Uighurs to Tajikistan. 

Arriving at the Ankara airport after a flight from Istanbul, he noticed that two, then three, then four men were following him, always on their phones, in and out of the airport. 

They were Uighur, and spoke the Uighur language. 

When he came closer, he says, they switched to Turkish. 

Fearing for his safety, he called the Finnish Foreign Ministry and U.S. Embassy in Turkey. 

While U.S. officials gave information and reassurance, “I do not feel protected by my own country,” Halmurat told me.
While European Foreign Ministries are aware of the ways in which Chinese officials intimidate Uighur activists, they can do little to prevent it. 

In Europe’s open, democratic societies, China can legally pressure critics through academia, political lobbying, and the media. 

The European External Action Service, the EU’s foreign-policy arm, has a well-oiled operation tracking Russian influence in Europe, but has only more recently begun to pay more attention to the ways in which China makes use of these spaces to silence critics.
To some extent, Uighur activists are vulnerable because Western societies are not aware of their situation. 

Many Europeans have never heard the word Uighur, and refugees like Ismael and activists like Halmurat find it hard to generate public support for their cause. 

“We need people to see us as they see Tibet,” Halmurat said.
Only two European countries—Germany and Sweden—guarantee that they will not deport Uighurs claiming asylum. 

Germany only changed its rules after deporting 22-year-old Dilshat Adil in what authorities called an “administrative error.” 

He has not been heard from since. 

Rune Steenberg, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen, says that Adil’s deportation is evidence of systemic apathy. 

“Don’t believe that Western governments are good, fair, or want your best,” he warns Uighur activists. 

“They’re not as bad as others, but they are not as good as you hope.”
For Ibrahim and his family, life in Europe is much better than it was in East Turkestan. 

He is employed as a long-distance truck driver, his three children are in school, and the family can practice their faith at home without retribution. 

But they are torn in two: between the opportunities of their European future and the pain of knowing that their new life may have contributed to the suffering of their family in East Turkestan.
Whether they are active campaigners or not, Uighurs living far from East Turkestan and farther yet from Beijing cannot escape Xi Jinping’s long arm of influence. 

Small gestures reveal the spirit of independence that will not be cowed. 

“The strong bully the weak,” Ibrahim tells me, as he puts on his shoes and heads out for work. 

“What China is doing is a test.” 

On the living-room floor, in the doorway of his home, Ibrahim treads on a barely visible photograph that bears the face of Xi. 

In Belgium, he has merely taken a step. 

In China, he would have committed a crime. 

Xi’s faded features stare blankly upward, his image worn away by the passing feet of those he tries to silence.

Evil Tech

Google's China prototype links searches to phone numbers

By Christopher Carbone

How the Google search retrieves results is a closely guarded trade secret, but a few things are known about the mysterious algorithm.
Google built a prototype of a censored search engine for China that links users’ searches to their personal phone numbers—therefore making it easier for the Chinese government to monitor its citizens’ queries.
The app-based project, codenamed Dragonfly, also would remove content deemed sensitive by China’s authoritarian Communist Party regime, including information about freedom of speech, dissidents, peaceful protest and human rights, The Intercept reported.
Previously unknown details about Dragonfly included a censorship blacklist  compiled by Google that included terms such as “student protest” and “Nobel Prize” in Mandarin.
Human rights organizations have criticized Dragonfly and seven engineers resigned in protest over the lack of accountability and transparency for the controversial project.
“This is very problematic from a privacy point of view, because it would allow far more detailed tracking and profiling of people’s behavior,” Cynthia Wong, a senior internet researcher with Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept. 

“Linking searches to a phone number would make it much harder for people to avoid the kind of overreaching government surveillance that is pervasive in China.”
Fox News reached out to Google for comment and received the following statement from a spokesperson on Sunday:
“We've been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools. But our work on search has been exploratory, and we are not close to launching a search product in China.”
Back in August, more than a dozen human rights groups sent Google CEO Sundar Pichai a letter asking him to explain how Google was safeguarding Chinese users from censorship and surveillance.
The search giant told Fox News at the time that it had been “been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools. But our work on search has been exploratory, and we are not close to launching a search product in China.”

In 2010, Google announced it was leaving China, mentioning the Communist country’s censorship tactics as a reason for its decision.
However, Pichai has said that he wanted the world’s most-used search engine to be in China "serving" its 800 million Internet users.

China's Crimes: Massive Crackdown in Muslim Region

Mass Arbitrary Detention, Religious Repression, Surveillance in East Turkestan

Human Rights Watch

The Chinese government is conducting a mass, systematic campaign of human rights violations against Turkic Muslims in East Turkestan.
The 117-page report, “‘Eradicating Ideological Viruses’: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims,” presents new evidence of the Chinese government’s mass arbitrary detention, torture, and mistreatment, and the increasingly pervasive controls on daily life. 

Throughout the region, the Turkic Muslim population of 13 million is subjected to forced political indoctrination, collective punishment, restrictions on movement and communications, heightened religious restrictions, and mass surveillance in violation of international human rights law.

Chinazism: Crackdown on Turkic Muslims

“The Chinese government is committing human rights abuses in East Turkestan on a scale unseen in the country in decades,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. 

“The campaign of repression in East Turkestan is key test of whether the United Nations and concerned governments will sanction an increasingly powerful China to end this abuse.”
The report is primarily based on interviews with 58 former residents of East Turkestan, including 5 former detainees and 38 relatives of detainees. 

Nineteen of those interviewed have left East Turkestan within the past year and a half.
The Chinese government’s “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Extremism” began in East Turkestan in 2014. 

The level of repression increased dramatically after Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo relocated from the Tibet Autonomous Region to assume leadership of East Turkestan in late 2016.
Since then, the authorities have stepped up mass arbitrary detention, including in pretrial detention centers and prisons, both of which are formal facilities, and in political education camps, which have no basis under Chinese law. 

Credible estimates indicate that 1 million people are being held in the camps, where Turkic Muslims are being forced to learn Mandarin Chinese, sing praises of the Chinese Communist Party, and memorize rules applicable primarily to Turkic Muslims. 

Those who resist or are deemed to have failed to “learn” are punished.
The detainees in political education camps are held without any due process rights – neither charged nor put on trial – and have no access to lawyers and family. 

They are held for having links with foreign countries, particularly those on an official list of “26 sensitive countries,” and for using foreign communication tools such as WhatsApp, as well as for peacefully expressing their identity and religion, none of which constitute crimes.
A man who spent months in political education camps, told Human Rights Watch: “I asked [the authorities] if I can hire a lawyer and they said, ‘No, you shouldn’t need a lawyer because you’re not convicted. There’s no need to defend you against anything. You’re in a political education camp – all you have to do is just study.’”
Outside these detention facilities, the Chinese authorities in East Turkestan subject Turkic Muslims to such extraordinary restrictions on personal life that, in many ways, their experiences resemble those of the people detained. 

A combination of administrative measures, checkpoints, and passport controls arbitrarily restrict their movements. 

They are subjected to persistent political indoctrination, including compulsory flag-raising ceremonies, political or denunciation meetings, and Mandarin “night schools.” 

With unprecedented levels of control over religious practices, the Chinese authorities have effectively outlawed Islam in the region.
They have also subjected people in East Turkestan to pervasive and constant surveillance. 

The authorities encourage neighbors to spy on each other. 

The authorities employ high-tech mass surveillance systems that make use of QR codes, biometrics, artificial intelligence, phone spyware, and big data. 

And they have mobilized over a million officials and police officers to monitor people, including through intrusive programs in which the monitors are assigned to regularly stay in people’s homes.
The campaign has divided families, with some family members in East Turkestan and others abroad caught unexpectedly by the tightening of passport controls and border crossings. 

Children have at times been trapped in one country without their parents. 

The government has barred Turkic Muslims from contacting people abroad. 

The government has also pressured some ethnic Uyghurs and Kazakhs living outside the country to return to China, while requiring others to provide detailed personal information about their lives abroad.
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) reviewed the situation in China in mid-August and described East Turkestan as a “no rights zone.” 

The Chinese delegation disputed this portrayal of the region, as well as its characterization of political education camps, calling them “vocational education centers.”
It is evident that China does not foresee a significant political cost to its abusive East Turkestan campaign, partly due to its influence within the UN system, Human Rights Watch said. 

In the face of overwhelming evidence of grave abuses in East Turkestan, foreign governments should pursue a range of multilateral and unilateral actions. 

They should also pursue joint actions at the UN Human Rights Council, creating a coalition to gather and assess evidence of abuses in East Turkestan, and imposing targeted sanctions on Party Secretary Chen Quanguo and other senior officials responsible.
“The pain and anguish of families torn apart, with no knowledge of what’s happened to their loved ones stands in stark contrast to Beijing’s claims that Turkic Muslims are ‘happy’ and ‘grateful,’” Richardson said. 

“A failure to urgently press for an end to these abuses will only embolden Beijing.”

Selected accounts
The names and identifying details of people interviewed have been withheld to protect their safety. All names of detainees are pseudonyms.

On political education camps:
Nobody can move because they watch you through the video cameras, and after a while a voice came from the speakers telling you that now you can relax for a few minutes. That voice also tells you off for moving…we were watched, even in the toilet. In political education camp, we were always under stress.              –Rustam, a former detainee who spent months in political education camps, May 2018

I resisted their measures…They put me in a small solitary confinement cell…In a space of about 2x2 meters I was not given any food or drink, my hands were handcuffed in the back, and I had to stand for 24 hours without sleep.             –Nur, a former detainee in a political education camp, March 2018

Everyday controls in East Turkestan:
A total of five officials…took turns to watch over me [at home]. And they had to document that they’d checked on me… The photos show them reading political propaganda together [with me] or show me moving a pillow on a bed to prepare for them to stay overnight; or them lying down on the sofa.                                                        –Aynur, a woman who left East Turkestan in 2017, May 2018

Since early 2017, twice a week, officials came. Some people even stayed for a night. The authorities came in advance and made a list and assigned new “relatives” to you. … [The officially-assigned “relatives”] talked to my son, my grandkids, they took pictures, they sat at the table, they asked, “Where’s your husband, where did he go?” I was really frightened, and I pretended to be busy looking after my grandkids. I was worried that if I spoke I’d let slip that my husband had gone [abroad]. So, I stayed silent.

–Ainagul, 52, who left East Turkestan in 2017 and whose son is in a political education camp, May 2018

International impact of the Strike Hard Campaign:
First, the village police called, and then a higher-level police bureau called. Their numbers were hidden – they didn’t show where they were calling from…. The police told me, “If you don’t come, we’ll come get you.”

–Dastan, 44, who lives outside China and whose wife is in a political education camp, May 2018

They give a signal, that even if you’re in a foreign country, they can “manage” you. … I’m scared... I didn’t join any terrorist or any organization against China. I didn’t join any demonstrations. I didn’t carry any East Turkestan flag. I have no criminal record in China…why are they doing stuff like that [to me]?

–Murat, a 37-year-old student living outside China and whose sister is in a political education camp, June 2018

Repressive Experiences in China Studies

First-of-its-kind survey of China scholars seeks to quantify just how frequently they encounter repressive actions by the Chinese state intended to stop or circumscribe their research. A majority say self-censorship is a problem.

By Elizabeth Redden

Anecdotes abound of scholars who write on controversial subjects being denied visas to enter China, having difficulty accessing archives on the mainland or being “taken for tea” by Chinese police or security officials during the course of their fieldwork. 

But just how common are these kinds of experiences?
A survey of more than 500 China scholars discussed Saturday at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting in Boston finds that such “repressive research experiences are a rare but real phenomenon” in the China studies field and “collectively present a barrier to the conduct of research in China.” 

Researchers found that about 9 percent of China scholars report having been “taken for tea” by Chinese government authorities within the past 10 years, to be interviewed or warned about their research; 26 percent of scholars who conduct archival research report being denied access; and 5 percent report difficulties obtaining a visa.
A majority of researchers believe their research is either somewhat sensitive (53 percent) or very sensitive (14 percent). 

Sixty-eight percent of scholars say that self-censorship is a problem for the China studies field.
“Our own conclusion is that the risks of research conduct in China are uncertain, highly individualized, and often not easily discernible from public information. The decision about whether or not to pursue a particular potentially sensitive research project is a therefore highly personal one. Scholars encounter real consequences for conducting certain research in China, and these risks are higher for both Chinese researchers, and the Chinese colleagues and interlocutors who interact with foreign scholars,” Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and Rory Truex, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, write in a paper outlining the results of their survey.

Greitens and Truex write that their survey provides “the first systematic data on the frequency with which China scholars encounter repressive actions by the Chinese government.” 

The researchers sent the survey to 1,967 social scientists they identified having expertise in China and received 562 complete responses, for a 28.6 percent response rate. 

Respondents include anthropologists, economists, historians, political scientists and sociologists. 

The researchers limited the sample to scholars working in Australia, Europe, Hong Kong, New Zealand and North America.
The survey focuses specifically on researchers' experiences, but it comes at a time of increasing concern about Chinese influence on Western academe more broadly. 

Reports last fall that academic publishers were censoring journal content in China raised widespread alarm, and Chinese-government funded Confucius Institutes, centers of Chinese language and culture education that are located on U.S. college campuses, are coming under increasing scrutiny.
Greitens and Truex divided the repressive research experiences they documented into three main categories:
Restrictions on access to China. Greitens and Truex found that the Chinese government "does restrict visa access for work that it considers potentially problematic." While there are some high-profile cases of scholars who report being "blacklisted" from China long term, the researchers found that "the most common form of restriction is temporary visa ‘difficulty’ rather than outright denial or long-term blacklisting." Greitens and Truex note that it is not always clear that the reason for difficulties is related to the scholar’s research, but the scholars often believed or received informal indication this was the case.
Restrictions on access to research materials and subject. Restrictions on access to archival research materials are fairly common: 26 percent of all scholars who do archival research report facing restrictions, as do 41 percent of responding historians, whose research depends most heavily on access to archives. Denials of access to particular materials often seemed to be based on the topic of those materials, though, as Greitens and Truex write, “archivists rarely cited sensitivity as the reason for denial, instead citing digitization or other internal processes.”

The survey findings also suggest that access to archival materials has changed over time, and that previously accessible materials are no longer available to foreign researchers.
Of those researchers who use interviews or participant observation in their research, about 17 percent report that they’d had interview subjects “withdraw in a suspicious or unexplained matter, an experience that is most prevalent in political science and anthropology.”
Surveillance and intimidation. Among the 9 percent of respondents who said they’d been interviewed by Chinese authorities (“taken for tea”) within the last 10 years, Greitens and Truex write that there were certain common patterns in their experiences. “A scholar attracts attention in the course of research -- attending a protest, requesting archival access, giving a talk, etc. Agents of the local government in turn respond, gather information on the researcher, and often seek an end to, or place boundaries around, the research activity,” they write.
In addition, about 2 percent of respondents reported having their computer or other materials confiscated during field research. And 2.5 percent -- 14 individual scholars -- reported experiencing temporary detention by police or physical intimidation. Greitens and Truex found that “these higher-impact events occurred disproportionately in places with a heightened security presence, such as Tibet and East Turkestan.”

Impact on a Range of Research Subjects
Over all, Greitens and Truex found that while it does appear that “research topic area plays a role in repressive experiences,” it is “far from deterministic.” 

For example, they found that scholars who studied topics considered sensitive like ethnicity, religion and human rights were disproportionately likely to encounter difficulties getting visas. 

But researchers who studied other topics including the environment, China’s foreign relations and gender had problems, too.
In many cases Greitens and Truex note that “research is not blocked, but allowed to proceed while being monitored along the way.” 

One theme of their findings was what scholars describe in open-ended responses as “fuzzy” or unclear boundaries: “You never know where the border is; you only know when you have crossed it,” one respondent said.

Warnings frequently come through informal channels. 

Twelve percent of all scholars, and 17 percent of those who said they do intensive field research, say that a Chinese colleague or friend had been contacted about their work. 

“We note that this is consistent with a broader pattern... where political sensitivity is communicated through indirect channels and language than directly through formal procedures, where relationships rather than documents and institutions are leveraged for that communication,” Greitens and Truex write.
China scholars reported adjusting their research strategies in various ways to avoid drawing undesired attention from Chinese state authorities. 

Nearly half (48.9 percent) said they have used different language to describe a project while in China. Nearly a quarter (23.7 percent) shifted a project’s focus away from the most sensitive aspects, while 15.5 percent reported having abandoned a project entirely. 

Just 1.6 percent reported publishing anonymously.
Though the majority (68 percent) of respondents agree that self-censorship among China scholars is a problem in the field, Greitens and Truex write that their "survey data also challenges the definition of self-censorship and the notion that it occurs primarily because of self-interested careerism. Respondents stressed discretion as a necessary ethical principle for social science research in China, given the potential for a scholar’s Chinese interlocutors to disproportionately bear the negative consequences of sensitive research. They also drew a distinction between censoring the conclusions of academic work and choosing to adopt more publicly critical stances on policy issues, especially those that fell outside their specific research area."
Asked to offer advice on how to manage sensitive research in China, respondents emphasized the importance of listening to Chinese colleagues and protecting research subjects and interlocutors above all else.

Chinese surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

Monitoring tech pioneered in East Turkestan is spreading across China and the world.
By Nithin Coca

Security cameras are seen on a street in Urumqi, East Turkestan.

In July 2009, deadly riots broke out in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan. 

Nearly 200 people died, the majority ethnic Han Chinese, and thousands of Chinese troops were brought in to quell the riots. 

An information battle soon followed, as mobile phone and internet service was cut off in the entire province. 

For the next 10 months, web access would be almost nonexistent in East Turkestan, a vast region larger than Texas with a population of more than 20 million. 

It was one of the most widespread, longest internet shutdowns ever.
That event, which followed similar unrest in neighboring Chinese-ruled Tibet in 2008, was the sign of a new phase in the Chinese state's quest to control its restive outer regions. 

The 2009 shutdown was the first large-scale sign of a shift in tactics: the use of technology to control information.
"East Turkestan has gotten little attention, but this is where we're really seeing the coming together of multiple streams of technology [for surveillance] that just hasn't happened in other contexts before," said Steven Feldstein, fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Nine years later, East Turkestan has seen the widespread implementation of sophisticated high-tech surveillance and monitoring technology, what BuzzFeed called "a 21st century police state." 

But what happens in East Turkestan does not stay in East Turkestan. 

The technologies piloted there are already spreading across all of China, and Chinese companies are beginning to sell some of this technology to other authoritarian-minded countries. 

If this trend continues, the future of technology, particularly for those in the Global South, could more resemble what's happening in East Turkestan than developments in Silicon Valley.
East Turkestan is the home to the Uyghurs, a Turkic people who mostly follow Islam and have a distinct culture and language. 

Not surprisingly, the region has a tenuous relationship with Beijing, which is more than 1,400 miles away. 

Protests, riots and even terrorist attacks have been connected to the Uyghur struggle, which gives cover to Chinese authorities to implement the harshest strategies there.
"Abuses are most apparent in East Turkestan because of the lack of privacy protections but also because the power imbalance between the people there and the police is the greatest in China," said Maya Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch.
That is why security investment in East Turkestan skyrocketed after the riots. 

According to Adrian Zenz, a lecturer at the European School of Culture and Theology who has written extensively about the police presence in East Turkestan and Tibet, the region's security forces doubled between 2009 and 2011 to more than 11,000 people. 

And it kept growing: In 2017, he documented more than 65,000 public job advertisements for security-related positions in East Turkestan, and last year Amnesty International estimated that there were 90,000 security staff in the region, the highest ratio of people to security in any province in China.
Several new tools and tactics accompanied this rise in security personnel, most notably the implementation of "convenience police stations," a dense network of street corner, village or neighborhood police stations designed to keep an eye out everywhere and rapidly respond to any threat, perceived or real. 

But there were also corresponding investments in security technology on a globally unprecedented scale. 

It started with a drive to put up security cameras in the aftermath of the 2009 riots before evolving into something far more sophisticated, as East Turkestan turned into a place for state-connected companies to test all of their surveillance innovations.
"The rule of law doesn't exist," said William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International. "They are able to pioneer new methods of control that, if successful, they could use elsewhere in China."
Today, East Turkestan has both a massive security presence and ubiquitous surveillance technology: facial-recognition cameras; iris and body scanners at checkpoints, gas stations and government facilities; the collection of DNA samples for a massive database; mandatory apps that monitor messages and data flow on Uyghurs' smartphones; drones to monitor the borders. 

While there's some debate over how advanced the system tying these technologies together is, it's clear that China's plan is for a fully integrated system that uses artificial intelligence to rapidly process massive amounts of information for use by the similarly massive numbers of police in convenience stations.
For Uyghurs, it means that wherever they go, whomever they talk to and even whatever they read online are all being monitored by the Chinese government. 

According to The New York Times, "When Uighurs buy a kitchen knife, their ID data is etched on the blade as a QR code." 

BuzzFeed documented stories of family members too scared to speak openly to relatives abroad. 

And the combination of all of these tools through increasingly powerful AI and data processing means absolute control and little freedom.
"It's one thing to have GPS tracking. It's another thing to monitor social media usage of large populations," said Feldstein. 

"But to do that in combination with a large DNA database of up to 40 million people and to integrate those methods with other modes of surveillance and intrusion -- that represents a very new frontier and approach when it comes to online surveillance and oppression."
The result, at least for China, is a massive success. 

Violence in the region has fallen as riots, protests and attacks are now rare in East Turkestan. 

Part of that is due to the presence of the state, but it's also related to a rise in fear, as no one is sure how pervasive the Chinese surveillance apparatus is.
"People can never be sure if they are free from monitoring," said Nicole Morgret, project coordinator at the Uyghur Human Rights Project. 

"The fear is such that even if the surveillance is not complete, people behave as if it is. The technology is being rolled out so quickly."
That is because access to the actual platforms being used by the Chinese authorities is limited, and much of the knowledge about surveillance technology comes from observations by the few journalists who can report from East Turkestan or through looking at public tender and budget documents. 

Or, increasingly, the knowledge comes from observing how other regions in China are being monitored and how Chinese tech companies abroad are deploying or marketing similar tools.

While the East Turkestan model may be extreme even for China, it is starting to influence policing across the country. 

The advent of the surveillance state in East Turkestan has come alongside China's increasingly tightening control over national information flows, including the blocking or removal from app stores of many foreign apps, VPNs and platforms, most recently Skype.

"The question a lot of people have [is] ... to what extent is this going to be rolled [out] across the rest of China and packaged and sold to other repressive governments around the world?" said Morgret. "You can definitely see parts of it being implemented in China proper, such as the police database and collecting DNA samples from certain people. I certainly suspect the government has ambitions to create this type of total surveillance across the country."
The government has a powerful tool at its disposal, as last year, a new cybersecurity law went into effect that greatly broadens the power of the state to further control information. 

It requires foreign companies to maintain data centers in China, something Apple, for example, is complying with, leading the nonprofit watchdog group Reporters Without Borders to warn journalists working in China not to use iCloud anymore to store data. 

WeChat, China's do-everything app, is already sharing user data with the state.
There are other signs that East Turkestan's policing innovations are entering the rest of China. 

The country is planning to integrate footage from its estimated 176 million surveillance cameras into a "police cloud" system, linked to national identity cards, making it possible that in the near future, everyone in China could be tracked anywhere. 

A model of this was demonstrated earlier this month when news reports emerged that new facial-recognition glasses are being used by police in train stations and airports across the country, tracking travelers ahead of the Lunar New Year.
Considering all of this, it's no surprise that China is already the world's biggest market for surveillance software and hardware, estimated by industry researcher IHS Markit at $6.4 billion in 2016, a figure expected to triple by 2020. 

China's tech giants Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are also jumping in, investing heavily in surveillance technology to take advantage of this boom.
These companies are starting to sell some of these tools abroad as well. 

In Ecuador, a Chinese ECU911 Integrated Security Service system, the development of which was connected to the state-owned China National Electronics Import and Export Corporation, was deployed in 2016 and credited with a 24 percent drop in crime. 

A more worrisome case was uncovered by Human Rights Watch, which found evidence that the Ethiopian government was using telecom-surveillance technology provided by the Chinese telecom giant ZTE to monitor the political opposition, activists and journalists.
Other companies are following ZTE's path. 

Yitu Technology, an AI facial-recognition company, has already set up offices in several African countries and is looking to expand to Europe, where it sees potential due to recent terrorist attacks -- the same rationale initially used to expand the surveillance state in East Turkestan. 

These examples are few and not yet a sign that the East Turkestan model is having a big global impact, but even if the overseas market for Chinese surveillance technology remains limited for now, many observers think that could quickly change.
"Now that China is delving into this new technology realm and is repressing very successfully and effectively, it is by nature that other dictatorial regimes would try to emulate this," said Feldstein.
"I think we're on the threshold of this exploding," said Zenz. 

"China wants to become a world leader in AI, and that includes a lot of these security applications that are already earmarked for exporting."
While the technology itself is not necessarily harmful, the concern is that in the wrong hands, it could empower repressive governments around the world to further abuse human rights. 

And the number of these regimes is growing, as recently released reports from the Economist Intelligence Unitand Freedom House show that around the world, free speech and democracy are falling and censorship, authoritarianism and autocracy are rising.
"The Chinese government is leading on thinking around mass surveillance, and it has the impact of influencing other countries to think, 'Well, we could have an authoritarian government but look outwardly stable by putting in these systems to make sure that even if people are discontented, we can still keep them down by ensuring that every move is monitored,'" said Wang. 

"As this technology becomes cheaper, that reality might become more possible even for countries without massive resources like the Chinese government."
Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, East Turkestan

In East Turkestan, there are no signs that the massive buildup in both police presence and surveillance technology will recede anytime soon, despite the perceived success in limiting violence and protests thus far. 

If anything, it looks like things will get a lot worse. 

More and more Uyghurs, perhaps as many as 120,000, are being rounded up and sent to reeducation camps for minor offenses. 

Increasingly, any outward expression of religion or cultural expression is being seen as subversive, with even elderly intellectuals facing arrests, like the 82-year-old Islamic scholar Muhammad Salih Hajim, who died earlier this year in a reeducation camp. 

Now Uyghurs are also being forced to hand over DNA samples and put spyware on their phones. 

Meanwhile, spending on both technology and human-security presence is expected to rise even further.
"It is going to crazy heights and there are no sign of it abating ... quite to the contrary, the state officials are really into intelligent, big data processing, networking of information, storing all the information and linking it up, applying AI and predictive policing for it," said Zenz.
At least one facet of the East Turkestan model has gone global. 

Internet shutdowns, like what happened in East Turkestan in 2009, are now common around the world. 

Just this past year, there were widespread internet shutdowns in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the English-speaking region of Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya and more than 30 other countries. 

Often the causes are similar to what took place in East Turkestan -- ethnic tensions, riots or political events such as elections.
"It's an increase around the world," said Melody Patry, a spokesperson with Access Now. "Moreover, the phenomenon of repeat offenders is on the rise. ... When a government issues a first internet shutdown, they are more likely to issue others."
But China has moved on, and internet shutdowns are now rare. 

According to Access Now, there was only one documented shutdown in China in all of 2016. 

While uninformed observers could see this as a sign of progress, in actuality it shows that the next frontier of digital surveillance and state control is not blocking information access but harvesting it with a purpose.
"You don't need these blackout shutdowns anymore when you have much more fine-grained mechanisms of control ... that can very early on detect potential issues and problems, and in turn promote self-policing, self-censorship," said Zenz. 

"Because people know what consequences there are."
The shift in China is that the internet, which was initially seen as a threat due to its ability to allow users to access information, is now being perceived differently. 

What was back in 2009 blamed for the riots is now the source of information empowering the Chinese government to preemptively arrest and detain not only Uyghurs but also, increasingly, Chinese human rights lawyers, feminist activists and journalists around the country before they can post something inflammatory on a website or share sensitive content on WeChat.
"The internet ... has become a great source of information that can be intelligently processed at capacity and speed that was not possible 10 years ago," said Zenz. 

"What we see is a moving from a mere firewall that just blocks or an instant response, like the deletion of messages, to proactive self-censorship."
The global rise in shutdowns, which Access Now notes are getting more sophisticated and fine-tuned, shows that East Turkestan model has a market in an increasingly technological, authoritarian world. How quickly other countries follow China's move toward more total, personalized and data-driven control depends on both the need and the availability of the tools pioneered in East Turkestan on the global marketplace.

Tech Quisling

Reporters in China should close iCloud accounts to avoid surveillance, says press watchdog
By Shannon Liao

In light of Apple’s intentions to outsource Chinese iCloud operations to a firm with ties to the local government at the end of the month, French nonprofit Reporters Without Borders — otherwise known as Reporters Sans Frontières or RSF — is telling journalists to take security precautions.
The nonprofit said in a post on Monday that members of the media who have Apple iCloud accounts in China should either move or close their accounts before the deadline, or face “control of their data [passing] to the Chinese state.” 

iCloud operations in China will be taken over by Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), which is supervised by a board run by government-owned businesses.
However, this is the second time RSF has recently expressed concern over Apple’s compliance with the Chinese government. 

In August, the organization commented on news that VPNs would be withdrawn from Apple’s Chinese App Store since the government considers them illegal. 

RSF has expressed a dark outlook on Apple’s partnership with GCBD, noting how Apple’s lawyers have added a clause in the Chinese terms that both Apple and GCBD may access all user data.

Rogue Nation

Inside China’s Big Tech Conference, New Ways to Track Citizens
By PAUL MOZUR

Xi Jinping shown on a screen during the fourth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen.

WUZHEN, China — An artificial intelligence company touted a robot that could help doctors with diagnoses.
A start-up displayed a drone designed to carry a single passenger 60 miles per hour.
And in a demonstration worthy of both wonder and worry, a Chinese facial recognition company showed how its technology could quickly identify and describe people.
If there were any doubts about China’s technological prowess, the presentations made this week at the country’s largest tech conference should put them to rest.
The event, once a setting for local tech executives and leaders of impoverished states, this year attracted top American executives like Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Google, as well as executives of Chinese giants like Jack Ma of Alibaba and Pony Ma of Tencent.
Yet all the advancements exhibited at the event, the World Internet Conference, in the picturesque eastern Chinese city of Wuzhen, also offered reason for caution.
The technology enabling a full techno-police state was on hand, giving a glimpse into how new advances in things like artificial intelligence and facial recognition can be used to track citizens — and how they have become widely accepted here.

U.S. tech Quisling Tim Cook at the World Internet Conference on Sunday.

The tracking was apparent both in the design of the event, which ended on Tuesday, and in the technology on display.
Tight security checkpoints made use of facial recognition.
Chinese armed police patrolled.
And in the dark corners of the whitewashed walls of the convention hall, the red lights of closed-circuit cameras glowed.
A fast-growing facial recognition company, Face++, turned its technology on conferencegoers.
On a large screen in its booth, the software identified their gender, described their hair length and color and characterized the clothes they wore.
Other Chinese companies showed what could be done with such data.
A state-run telecom company, China Unicom, featured a display with graphics breaking down the huge amounts of data the company has on its subscribers.
One map broke down the population of Beijing based on the changing layout of the city’s population as people commuted to and from work.
Another showed where foreign visitors roamed on its network.

Xiao Qiao robots at the conference.

The people overseeing China Unicom’s booth openly discussed the data, a sign of how widely accepted such surveillance and data collection have become in China.
At Unicom’s two other state-run rivals, a similar penchant for measurements and surveillance was also on display.
China Mobile floated a camera on the prow of one of the many boats that drift through Wuzhen’s canals, sending the images over its latest and faster cellular technology.
China Telecom showed off its ability to measure the amount of trash in several garbage cans and detect malfunctioning fire hydrants.
Investors and analysts say China’s unabashed fervor for collecting such data, combined with its huge population, could eventually give its artificial intelligence companies an edge over American ones.
If Silicon Valley is marked by a libertarian streak, China’s vision offers something of an antithesis, one where tech is meant to reinforce and be guided by the steady hand of the state.
Such developments underscore a nascent back-and-forth between China and the United States that will determine much about technology’s future development and application.

The Ehang 184, an oversized flying drone meant to ferry a single passenger at 60 miles per hour, on display at the conference. 

Speaking at a panel on terrorism, Mei Jianming, described as a chief expert on antiterrorism for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an intergovernmental group that includes China and Russia among other countries, labeled groups that speak out for the human rights of China’s Islamic minority Uighurs as terrorists.
He then said Beijing should do more to use its influence to push Twitter to change its terms of service and push back against such groups.
“We should strengthen the capability of our propaganda,” he said.
“On the Chinese official side, our China Daily and Xinhua News have their own Twitter presence, but the effectiveness of their propaganda is not enough. It’s clearly not enough.”
The contradictions of using sites like Twitter to change opinions abroad, while blocking them domestically, were often evident but almost as often unremarked upon.
During the opening speech made by Wang Huning, a member of China’s leading seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, there were more overtures to openness and cooperation than to the security and censorship that have marked China’s approach to the internet.
One of the most clear discussions of censorship came not from a speaker at the conference, but from an official watching the conference’s entry gate on the first day.
A representative of the Wenzhou city government, he queried journalists about how they got around China’s internet filters.
It was not clear whether he was genuinely curious, or wanted to find out which tools were most effective so they could be later targeted.

Chinese Peril

China May Have Created a New Way to Sink U.S. Aircraft Carriers

By Dave Majumdar

The Pentagon just released its annual report on China’s military power, which once again highlighted Beijing’s efforts to put American aircraft carriers at risk. 

Right on cue, China announced a major milestone for a system that might be a key component of its antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy.

This week, Chinese state media reported that the Caihong-T 4 (CH-T4), China’s massive, solar-powered drone, for the first time flew at an altitude of twenty thousand meters. 

This is important because there are no clouds above twenty thousand meters, which allows solar-powered drones to operate for significantly longer periods of time.
How long? 

Basically, indefinitely. 

According to China Daily, “future improvements will enable it to remain aloft several months or even several years.”
Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer, who write the excellent Eastern Arsenal blog, note that the CH-T4 is an impressive combination of big and light. 

The drone’s wingspan is around 130 feet, which is wider than a Boeing 737. 

At the same time, the CH-T4 only weighs between 880 and 1,100 pounds. 

By way of comparison, Boeing 737’s lowest typical operating empty weight is over seventy thousand pounds, and its maximum gross takeoff weight can reach as high as 170,000 pounds. 

Besides being slender, the CH-T4’s lightness is due to its carbon fiber and plastic components.
The drone can also travel at speeds of 125 miles per hour. 

However, it will also be able to cruise at sixty-five thousand feet, so it will be able to cover a huge swath of land without moving very far. 

Indeed, Lin and Singer point out: “It can utilize its high flight ceiling to maintain line-of-sight contact with over 400,000 square miles of ground and water. That's about the size of Egypt. For both militaries and tech firms, covering so much territory makes it an excellent data relay and communications node.”
What Lin and Singer don’t mention is that these capabilities will make the CH-T4 an excellent asset in China’s quest to hold America’s aircraft carriers at risk in the Western Pacific. 

Much of the attention given to that effort focuses on China’s so-called “carrier-killer” missile, the DF-21D. 

But as I noted last week in relation to North Korea, the missile itself is only one piece of the puzzle. Even more important is the sophisticated “kill chain” of surveillance, radar and communications systems needed to track and provide updated targeting information to the antiship ballistic missile while it is in flight.
Publicly available information indicates that America’s efforts to defeat China’s antiaccess/area-denial strategies focus on disrupting this “kill chain.” 

For example, in 2013, then chief of naval operations Jonathan Greenert and then Air Force chief of staff Gen. Mark Welsh coauthored an essay in Foreign Policy on how Air-Sea Battle intended to overcome A2/AD threats. 

In the article, they wrote that “Air-Sea Battle defeats threats to access by, first, disrupting an adversary’s command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems; second, destroying adversary weapons launchers (including aircraft, ships, and missile sites); and finally, defeating the weapons an adversary launches.”
The logic of this approach, they argued, is that it “exploits the fact that, to attack our forces, an adversary must complete a sequence of actions, commonly referred to as a ‘kill chain.’ 

For example, surveillance systems locate U.S. forces, communications networks relay targeting information to weapons launchers, weapons are launched, and then they must hone in on U.S. forces. 

Each of these steps is vulnerable to interdiction or disruption, and because each step must work, our forces can focus on the weakest links in the chain, not each and every one.”
Once it is operational, the CH-T4 will complicate these efforts by increasing the redundancies in China’s kill chain. 

For instance, if America is able to disrupt or destroy Chinese satellites, Beijing can rely on the drone to provide the information necessary to track American ships. 

The CH-T4 will have other comparable advantages over other surveillance systems. 

On the one hand, they will be cheaper and more flexible than satellites, while at the same time flying higher and farther away from the battlefield than different surveillance aircraft and ships. 

This combination will make it more difficult for Washington to destroy the surveillance step of the kill chain, although it could still focus on other steps such as disrupting the communication networks.
None of this is news to the U.S. military. 

Although the Pentagon’s newest report on China’s military didn’t mention the CH-T4 by name, it did note that “the acquisition and development of longer-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will increase China’s ability to conduct long-range ISR and strike operations.”
Fortunately, the U.S. military will have some time to figure out its response, as China Daily reports that it will “take several years for designers and engineers to improve and test the aircraft before it is delivered to users.” 

If the United States’ own record at developing this type of technology is any guide, Beijing should expect a few more hiccups along the way. 

NASA's Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology (ERAST) began working on the Helios Prototype well over a decade ago. 

In 2001, it completed an important milestone by flying at an altitude of ninety-six thousand feet (29,260 meters). 

Yet a Helios crashed during a flight test just two years later. 

Europe, meanwhile, is also trying to develop so-called pseudo satellites.

U.S. Solidarity for Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act

Congress moves to sanction officials who suppress the city’s rights.
The Wall Street Journal

Hong Kong democracy leader Joshua Wong was in Washington on Wednesday, where he met with Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi and Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, the latter of whom used the occasion to introduce the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. 

The more China violates its promise to respect Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy, the more this bill will gain support in Congress.
The Cotton-Rubio bill would reaffirm the principles of the 1992 United States-Hong Kong Policy Act, including support for democratization and human rights. 

It would also reinstate the requirement that the State Department issue a yearly report on Hong Kong, and that the Secretary of State certify that Hong Kong is sufficiently autonomous from Beijing before pursing new agreements extending preferential treatment to the territory.
Likeliest to earn attention in Hong Kong and Beijing is the provision imposing sanctions on officials who have suppressed basic freedoms in Hong Kong, including those “responsible for the surveillance, abduction, detention, or forced confessions of certain booksellers and journalists.” 

These officials would lose access to U.S. visas and see U.S.-based assets frozen.
Donald Trump hasn’t shown much appreciation for the importance of human rights to U.S. foreign policy. 

He tweeted during Hong Kong’s mass pro-democracy demonstrations of 2014, “President Obama should stay out of the Hong Kong protests, we have enough problems in our own country!”
Mr. Wong, who helped lead those protests at age 18, appealed Wednesday to the President-elect: “Being a businessman I hope Donald Trump could know the dynamics in Hong Kong and know that to maintain the business sector benefits in Hong Kong, it’s necessary to fully support human rights in Hong Kong to maintain the independence and the rule of law.”
No one—perhaps even Mr. Trump—knows how his foreign policy will evolve, but Congress is likely to assert itself more than it has, especially on human rights. 

Mr. Wong’s warm welcome on Capitol Hill is a signal to Beijing that reneging on its promises to Hong Kong won’t be cost-free.