Die Endlösung der Uigurischfrage

Uyghurs face an Orwellian future
By Connor Dilleen

China’s treatment of its Uyghur minority in occupied East Turkestan has garnered increased attention in recent months, due to Beijing’s policy of mass arbitrary detention of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in ‘political re-education centres’. 

In April, the chairs of the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China called the detention program the ‘largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today’, and raised the prospect of sanctions against those responsible for the policies.
The Chinese government has long had a fractious relationship with its Uyghur minority, elements of which have demonstrated separatist tendencies and agitation in the face of pervasive religious and cultural discrimination and repression by Han Chinese in the Uyghurs’ historical homeland of  East Turkestan. 

Since 11 September 2001, when China recast its ongoing campaign against separatism in  East Turkestan as part of the global ‘war on terror’, the Chinese security apparatus has proven remarkably effective in suppressing Uyghur militants. 

That’s partly because Uyghur violence in China is generally low-tech, using knives and basic homemade explosives.
Over the past two years, China has dramatically intensified its targeting of Uyghurs and other Muslim Turkic groups in an apparent strategy of using terrorist threats as a pretext to culturally cleanse its western provinces. 

The campaign has been driven by Chen Quanguo, who was appointed East Turkestan party secretary in August 2016 after ‘pacifying’ Tibet through a combination of intense securitisation and penetrating social control mechanisms. 

Under Chen’s stewardship, security spending in East Turkestan rose 50% between 2016 and 2017 to US$6.8 billion, with nearly 100,000 new security positions advertised in the 12 months to September 2017.
Beijing’s policy towards it Muslim Turkic minority populations has two distinct elements: the implementation of oppressive and pervasive surveillance infrastructure, and the institutionalisation of a comprehensive social re-engineering and indoctrination program.
China’s rollout of biometrically enabled mass surveillance infrastructure, coupled with artificial intelligence designed to predict behaviour, has attracted significant attention from Western media in recent months. 

What is being implemented in East Turkestan, however, is even more invasive and comprehensive than in other parts of China. 

The ‘integrated joint operations platform’ collates data from biometrically enabled CCTV camera networks, WiFi sniffers targeting networked devices, security checkpoints collecting citizen ID card numbers, and biometric visitor management systems in access-controlled communities.
East Turkestan residents are required to install government spyware on their mobile phones, enforced by police spot checks that can result in up to 10 days in detention for those who haven’t complied. 

Residents are also required to fit their vehicles with a satellite navigation system that allows government tracking.
China’s electronic surveillance is complemented by a program called fanghuiju (‘Visit the People, Benefit the People and Get together the Hearts of the People’) in which officials visit homes in Uyghur communities to collect data on family composition and ideology that is then used to inform assessments on trustworthiness.
Regional authorities have also initiated a program to collect DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans and blood types from all East Turkestan residents between the ages of 12 and 65. 

The data is stored centrally and linked to an individual’s national identification number.
The second element of Beijing’s policy involves the internment of ethnic Muslim minorities—including Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz—in re-education camps. 

Internees can be held indefinitely and without recourse to a court. 

Local authorities maintain that the camps are schools for eradicating extremism within the Muslim population. 

Residents are assigned a label of either ‘safe’, ‘normal’ or ‘unsafe’, which is based on metrics such as age, faith, religious practices, foreign contacts, experiences abroad and behavioural insights gleaned from data collected through physical and electronic surveillance.
Citizens identified as ‘unsafe’ and requiring re-education are then assigned an additional designation that determines the program to which they are subjected. 

Those assessed as the most recalcitrant are assigned to the most severe category of ‘strike hard detainees’. 

The two categories below that are ‘stubborn of thinking’ and ‘unstable thinking’. 

Re-education programs typically involve intensive study of communist ideology and propaganda and of the dangers of illegal religious practices and separatism.
A document reportedly leaked from the region’s public security agencies outlined figures for the number of detainees in ‘re-education’ centres in 69 of East Turkestan’s counties, which placed the number at 892,000. 

Extrapolated for all of East Turkestan, that number suggests that around 11% of the entire Uyghur and Kazakh population of East Turkestan is, or has been, interned in re-education centres. 

Anecdotal accounts from ex-detainees paint a picture of a brutal life in the centres. 

Detainees are subjected to extended interrogation, torture and political indoctrination, and some serve sentences of up to seven years.
Reporting on the extent of the East Turkestan crackdown, which has been largely anecdotal, is now being confirmed by leaked reports from regional administrations and analysis of publicly available information on procurements and government recruitment. 

There is now no doubt about the scale and ambition of what Beijing is pursuing in East Turkestan, which is the most intensive campaign of coercive social re-engineering since the end of the Cultural Revolution.
China is pursuing a national program of mass surveillance of its citizens, and Uyghurs are facing a more extreme version than that endured by most Chinese. 

In East Turkestan, the government’s program of mass surveillance is also linked to a system of coercive indoctrination centres that are structured to deprive Uyghurs of their liberty and cultural, linguistic and religious identity, and aimed at making the Orwellian concept of Groupthink a reality.

China's Final Solution to the Muslim Question

China is secretly imprisoning over one million Muslims — but they've left 2 big pieces of evidence behind

• More than one million Muslims have been caught up in China's "re-education camps" over the last year.
• The camps, which operate outside the courts, are designed to indoctrinate ethnic minority Uighurs and force them to reject their religious beliefs.
• Bids for constructing or renovating these centers, as well as staff job ads, provide clear evidence of the purpose and scale of these re-education programs.
• Uighurs face constant surveillance in East Turkestan, which experts consider a testing ground for the a wider surveillance state.

By Tara Francis Chan
Uighur security personnel patrol near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar in western China's Xinjiang region.

In East Turkestan, many locals read endlessly, write often, and sing loudly.
But not by choice.
In extrajudicial indoctrination camps around Xinjiang, ethnic Uighur men and women are forced to study Chinese history, write personal reflections, and sing songs like "Without the Communist Party, there is no New China." 

Many are beaten, tortured, and are unable to go home.
China considers this process "re-education." 

It runs outside the court system with people dragged away for infringements like talking to a loved one overseas or having a beard, and there is no course for appeal.
A recent estimate put the number of people who have been, or are currently, interned since April 2017 just over one million.
Though the exact total is unknown, Adrian Zenz, a social researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology, pored over local job ads and government bids to find new evidence of the system's existence and scale.
Old town of Kashgar, in East Turkestan

Since 2016, there were government bids to construct or upgrade 73 facilities in East Turkestan that, despite various names, appeared as though they will operate, wholly or at least in part, as re-education centers.
Re-education centers are often disguised as vocational training hubs, as many were in these bids, but the details betray their hidden purpose.
Together, the facilities required guard rooms, video surveillance, security fences, police equipment, police living quarters, handheld security inspection devices, steel-reinforced concrete walls, and even iron chains.
"Many of these facilities are heavily secured, to an extent that they do not just aim to keep potential intruders out, but to keep those inside under tight surveillance." Zenz told Business Insider.
Twenty bids listed new or upgraded monitoring or video surveillance. 

One bid from January wanted 122 cameras to cover the whole facility without leaving any "dead angles."
One center required security nets, the renovation of a guard room, and "four watchtowers." 

Another, submitted on 25 April, requested an 86,000 square-foot "underground facility."
These security features, according to Zenz, confirm reports that vocation centers frequently function as internment camps, though many facilities likely sit on a continuum.
"All we know is that a substantial number of facilities, likely capable of holding at least several hundred thousand, are geared more towards the re-education side. Some are explicitly and directly marked as re-education facilities. More than likely, facilities with a stronger vocational training focus can likewise hold several hundred thousands," said Zenz.

"Some even specifically state that they are designed to perform 're-education.' 

An official government notice from April 2017 pertaining to these facilities in a particular prefecture mandated that training topics include military drill, Chinese language, legal knowledge, ethnic unity, religious knowledge and patriotic education."

A policeman holding shield and baton guards a security post leading into a center believed to be used for re-education in Korla in East Turkestan on Nov. 2, 2017.

Job ads are also a huge giveaway
As easy as it may be to silently whisk away thousands of people to new re-education centers, skyrocketing prisoner would also require a huge recruitment drive.
According to Zenz, from May 2017, counties with large ethnic minority populations "initiated a wave of recruitments" for so-called education and training centers.
But ads for such staff were often listed in the same ads as open police positions, and some ads even preferred recruitees with a military or police background.
Other job ads conflated the two roles, hiring "training center policing assistants." 

If the staff were being hired to work at a regular vocation center the high number of security personnel would be "difficult to explain," said Zenz.
Ads also frequently lacked required skills or qualifications that would normally be crucial to providing vocational training. 

Many required only a middle-school education whereas other provinces, where few Uighur would live, usually require at least a bachelor degree.
In one East Turkestan county, where Uighurs make up 95% of the population, 320 jobs available at a "training center" had three criteria: have a middle-school education, be loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, and be part of the ethnic majority Han.
An Uighur woman protests in front of policemen on July 7, 2009 in Urumqi, the capital East Turkestan

Re-education isn't the only problem Uighurs face
In an attempt to crack down on religion, authorities in East Turkestan have targeted almost any form of religious expression by Uighur Muslims.
Women have been banned from wearing burqas and veils. 

Residents were barred from fasting during Ramadan with restaurants ordered to stay open despite religious obligations. 

And in 2016, millions of East Turkestan residents were ordered to surrender their passports and must seek permission to travel abroad.
Authorities have installed surveillance apps on residents' phones and begun collecting DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and blood types from all East Turkestan residents aged between 12 and 65. 

They have also collected voice samples that may be used to identify who is speaking on tapped phone calls.
There's also 40,000 facial-recognition cameras that are being used to track, and block, the movement of Uighurs in the region.
East Turkestan is considered by experts to be a testing ground for what the US State Department has described as "unprecedented levels of surveillance."
The concern is East Turkestan could also be a testing ground for a nationwide re-education system.

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.

East Turkestan: Digital police state shackles Chinese minority

Thousands disappear as China polices thought

By Gerry Shih

In this Nov. 3, 2017 photo, paramilitary policemen in an armored vehicle are on duty at the airport in Hotan in western China's Xinjiang region. Authorities are using detentions in political indoctrination centers and data-driven surveillance to impose a digital police state in the region of Xinjiang and its Uighurs, a 10-million strong, Turkic-speaking Muslim minority Beijing fears could be influenced by extremism. 

Nobody knows what happened to the Uighur student after he returned to China from Egypt and was taken away by police.
Not his village neighbors in China's far west, who haven't seen him in months. 

Not his former classmates, who fear Chinese authorities beat him to death.
Not his mother, who lives in a two-story house at the far end of a country road, alone behind walls bleached by the desert sun. 

She opened the door one afternoon for an unexpected visit by Associated Press reporters, who showed her a picture of a handsome young man posing in a park, one arm in the wind.
"Yes, that's him," she said as tears began streaming down her face. 

"This is the first time I've heard anything of him in seven months. What happened?"
"Is he dead or alive?"
The student's friends think he joined the thousands — possibly tens of thousands — of people, rights groups and academics estimate, who have been spirited without trial into secretive detention camps for alleged political crimes that range from having "extremist" thoughts to merely traveling or studying abroad. 

The mass disappearances, beginning the past year, are part of a sweeping effort by Chinese authorities to use detentions and data-driven surveillance to impose a digital police state in the region of East Turkestan and over its Uighurs, a 10-million strong, Turkic-speaking Muslim minority that China says has been influenced by Islamic extremism.
Along with the detention camps, unprecedented levels of police blanket East Turkestan's streets. 

Cutting-edge digital surveillance systems track where Uighurs go, what they read, who they talk to and what they say. 

And under an opaque system that treats practically all Uighurs as potential terror suspects, Uighurs who contact family abroad risk questioning or detention.
The campaign has been led by Chen Quanguo, a Chinese Communist Party official, who was promoted in 2016 to head East Turkestan after subduing another restive region — Tibet. 

Chen vowed to hunt down Uighur separatists blamed for attacks that have left hundreds dead, saying authorities would "bury terrorists in the ocean of the people's war and make them tremble."
Through rare interviews with Uighurs who recently left China, a review of government procurement contracts and unreported documents, and a trip through southern East Turkestan, the AP pieced together a picture of Chen's war that's ostensibly rooting out terror — but instead instilling fear.
Most of the more than a dozen Uighurs interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity for fear that Chinese authorities would punish them or their family members. 

The AP is withholding the student's name and other personal information to protect people who fear government retribution.
Chen and the East Turkestan regional government did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

But China's government describes its East Turkestan security policy as a "strike hard" campaign that's necessary following a series of attacks in 2013 and 2014, including a mass knifing in a train station that killed 33. 

A Hotan city propaganda official, Bao Changhui, told the AP: "If we don't do this, it will be like several years ago — hundreds will die."
China also says the crackdown is only half the picture. 

It points to decades of heavy economic investment and cultural assimilation programs and measures like preferential college admissions for Uighurs.
Officials say the security is needed now more than ever because Uighur militants have been fighting alongside Islamic extremists in Syria. 

But Uighur activists and international human rights groups argue that repressive measures are playing into the hands of the likes of al-Qaida, which has put out Uighur-language recruiting videos condemning Chinese oppression.
"So much hate and desire for revenge are building up," said Rukiye Turdush, a Uighur activist in Canada. 

"How does terrorism spread? When people have nowhere to run."

In this Nov. 4, 2017, photo, children play in the old city district where Chinese national flags are prominently hung in Kashgar in East Turkestan. 

'Thought police'
The government has referred to its detention program as "vocational training," but its main purpose appears to be indoctrination. 

A memo published online by the East Turkestan human resources office described cities, including Korla, beginning "free, completely closed-off, militarized" training sessions in March that last anywhere from 3 months to 2 years.
Uighurs study "Mandarin, law, ethnic unity, de-radicalization, patriotism" and abide by the "five togethers" — live, do drills, study, eat and sleep together.
In a rare state media report about the centers, a provincial newspaper quoted a farmer who said after weeks of studying inside he could spot the telltale signs of religious extremism by how a person dressed or behaved and also profess the Communist Party's good deeds. 

An instructor touted their "gentle, attentive" teaching methods and likened the centers to a boarding school dorm.
But in Korla, the institutions appeared more daunting, at least from the outside. 

The city had three or four well-known centers with several thousand students combined, said a 48-year-old local resident from the Han ethnic majority. 

One center the AP visited was, in fact, labeled a jail. 

Another was downtown on a street sealed off by rifle-toting police. 

A third center, the local Han resident said, was situated on a nearby military base.
While forced indoctrination has been reported throughout East Turkestan, its reach has been felt far beyond China's borders.
In April, calls began trickling into a Uighur teacher's academy in Egypt, vague but insistent. 

Uighur parents from a few towns were pleading with their sons and daughters to return to China, but they wouldn't say why.
"The parents kept calling, crying on the phone," the teacher said.
Chinese authorities had extended the scope of the program to Uighur students abroad. 

And Egypt, once a sanctuary for Uighurs to study Islam, began deporting scores of Uighurs to China.
Sitting in a restaurant outside Istanbul where many students had fled, four recounted days of panic as they hid from Egyptian and Chinese authorities. 

One jumped out a window running from police. 

Another slept in a car for a week. 

Many hid with Egyptian friends.
"We were mice, and the police were cats," said a student from Urumqi, East Turkestan capital.
All who returned were intensely grilled about what they did in Egypt and viewed as potential terror suspects, the students said. 

Many were believed held in the new indoctrination camps, while some were sentenced to longer prison sentences.
The young man from Korla rarely went out in the two years he spent studying Islam in Egypt. 

He played some soccer — a beloved sport among Uighurs — but wasn't particularly athletic or popular.
Instead, he kept to himself in an apartment that he kept fastidiously clean, steeped in his studies at the revered Al Azhar University, the 1,000-year-old seat of learning in Sunni Islam. 

He freely discussed Quranic verses with his Uighur friends but mostly avoided politics, one friend said. 

He spoke of one day pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative religion.
"He had big dreams," said the friend who is now hiding in Turkey to avoid being sent to China. 

"He wanted to be a religious scholar, which he knew was impossible in China, but he also wanted to stay close to his mother in Korla."
He was fluent in Arabic but also in Chinese. 

When they huddled around a smartphone to watch a Taiwanese tear-jerker about a boy separated from his mother, he would be the one weeping first.
When homesickness got to him, he would tell his friends about how his mother doted on him, and about Korla and the big house he grew up in. 

And when he gets married, God willing, he would say, he'd start a family in that house, too.
"If my wife doesn't agree, then we don't marry," he declared.
He returned to China when he was called back in 2016 and taken away in February, according to three students and a teacher from Cairo. 

They say they heard from reliable sources in China that he died in detention.

In this Nov. 4, 2017, photo, residents walk past a statue showing Mao Zedong near billboards with the words for "Welcome 19th Congress," "Patriotism" and "Democracy" near a square in Kashgar in East Turkestan.

Show of force
Southern East Turkestan, the vast desert basin from where many of the students came, is one of the most heavily policed places on earth.
Deep in the desert's southern rim, the oasis town of Hotan is a microcosm of how Chen, the East Turkestan party boss, has combined fearsome optics with invisible policing.
He has ordered police depots with flashing lights and foot patrols be built every 500 yards— a total of 1,130, according to the Hotan government. 

The AP saw cavalcades of more than 40 armored vehicles including full personnel carriers rumble down city boulevards. 

Police checkpoints on every other block stop cars to check identification and smartphones for religious content.
Shopkeepers in the thronging bazaar don mandatory armored vests and helmets to sell hand-pulled noodles, tailored suits and baby clothes.
East Turkestan's published budget data from January to August shows public security spending this year is on track to increase 50 percent from 2016 to roughly 45 billion yuan ($6.8 billion) after rising 40 percent a year ago. 

It's quadrupled since 2009, a watershed year when a Uighur riot broke out in East Turkestan, leaving nearly 200 members of China's Han ethnic majority dead, and security began to ratchet up.
Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology who tracks Chinese public security staffing levels based on its recruiting ads, says East Turkestan is now hiring 40 times more police per capita than populous Guangdong Province.
"East Turkestan has very likely exceeded the level of police density seen in East Germany just before its collapse," Zenz said. 

"What we've seen in the last 12 to 14 months is unprecedented."
But much of the policing goes unseen.
To enter the Hotan bazaar, shoppers first pass through metal detectors and then place their national identification cards on a reader while having their face scanned.
The facial scanner is made by China Electronics Technology Group (CETC), a state-owned defense contractor that has spearheaded China's fast-growing field of predictive policing with East Turkestan as its test bed. 

The AP found 27 CETC bids for East Turkestan government contracts, including one soliciting a facial recognition system for facilities and centers in Hotan Prefecture.
Hours after visiting the Hotan bazaar, AP reporters were stopped outside a hotel by a police officer who said the public security bureau had been remotely tracking the reporters' movements.
"There are tens of thousands of cameras here," said the officer, who gave his name as Tushan. 

"The moment you took your first step in this city, we knew."
The government's tracking efforts have extended to vehicles, genes, and even voices. 

In February, authorities in East Turkestan's Bayingol prefecture, which includes Korla, required every car to install GPS trackers for real-time monitoring. 

And since late last year, East Turkestan authorities have required health checks to collect the population's DNA samples. 

In May, a regional police official told the AP that East Turkestan had purchased $8.7 million in DNA scanners — enough to analyze several million samples a year.
In one year, Kashgar Prefecture, which has a population of 4 million, has carried out mandatory checks for practically its entire population, said Yang Yanfeng, deputy director of Kashgar's propaganda department. 

She characterized the checkups as a public health success story, not a security measure.
"We take comprehensive blood tests for the 'good' of the people, not just record somebody's height and weight," Yang said. 

"We find out health issues in citizens even they didn't know about."
A biometric data collection program appears to have been formalized last year under "Document No. 44," a regional public security directive to "comprehensively collect three-dimensional portraits, voiceprints, DNA and fingerprints." 

The document's full text remains secret, but the AP found at least three contracts referring to the 2016 directive in recent purchase orders for equipment such as microphones and voice analyzers.
Meiya Pico, a security and surveillance company, has won 11 bids in the last six months alone from local East Turkestan jurisdictions. 

It won a joint bid with a DNA analysis company for 4 million yuan ($600,000) in Kargilik and has sold software that automatically scans smartphones for "terror-related pictures and videos" to Yarkent.
Meiya and CETC declined comment.

Prying eyes
To monitor East Turkestan's population, China has also turned to a familiar low-tech tactic: recruiting the masses.
When a Uighur businessman from Kashgar completed a six-month journey to flee China and landed in the United States with his family in January, he was initially ecstatic. 

He tried calling home, something he hadn't done in months to spare his family unwanted police questioning.
His mother told him his four brothers and his father were in prison because he fled China. 

She was spared only because she was frail.
Since 2016, local authorities had assigned ten families including theirs to spy on one another in a new system of collective monitoring, and those families had also been punished because he escaped. Members from each were sent to re-education centers for three months, he told the AP.
"It's worse than prison," he said. 

"At least in prison you know what's happening to you. But there you never know when you get accused. It could be anytime."
A document obtained by U.S.-based activists and reviewed by the AP show Uighur residents in the Hebei Road West neighborhood in Urumqi, the regional capital, being graded on a 100-point scale. Those of Uighur ethnicity are automatically docked 10 points. 

Being aged between 15 and 55, praying daily, or having a religious education, all result in 10 point deductions.
In the final columns, each Uighur resident's score is tabulated and checked "trusted," ''ordinary," or "not trusted." 

Activists say they anecdotally hear about Uighurs with low scores being sent to indoctrination.
At the neighborhood police office, a woman who gave her surname as Tao confirmed that every community committee in Urumqi, not just Hebei Road West, needed to conduct similar assessments. She said there were no statistics on how many residents had been deemed "not trusted," nor were there official procedures to deal with them.
"What is happening is every single Uighur is being considered a suspect of not just terrorism but also political disloyalty," said Maya Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who is studying how Chinese police are using technology to track political dissidents as well as Uighurs.
This month, East Turkestan announced it would require every government employee in the region to move into a Uighur home for a week to teach families about ideology and avoiding extremism.
What pains most, Uighurs abroad say, is the self-imposed barrier of silence that separates them from loved ones, making efforts to say happy birthday or find out whether a relative is detained risky.
When Salih Hudayar, an American Uighur graduate student, last called his 70-something grandfather this summer, he spoke in cryptic but reassuring tones.
"Our phones will not work anymore," his grandfather said. 

"So, don't try calling and don't worry about us. We'll be fine as long as you're all fine."
He later heard from a cousin in Kyrgyzstan that his grandfather had been sent to re-education.
A Uighur student who moved to Washington following the crackdown this summer said that after his move, his wife, a government worker still in Urumqi, messaged to say the police would show up at her home in 20 minutes. 

She had to say goodbye: after that she would delete him permanently from her contacts list.
A month later he received calls on WhatsApp from a man who introduced himself as Ekber, a Uighur official from the international cooperation office of the East Turkestan regional public security bureau, who wanted him to work for them in the U.S. — and warned him against saying no.
"If you're not working for us then you're working for someone else. That's not a road you want to take," he snapped.
A week after that, he couldn't help himself placing one last call home. 

His daughter picked up.
"Mom is sick but she doesn't want me to speak to you. Goodbye," she said.

Unanswered question
For the past year, Chen's war has meant mass detentions, splintered families, lives consumed by uncertainty. 

It has meant that a mother sometimes can't get an answer a simple question about her son: is he dead or alive?
A short drive from Korla, beyond peach plantations that stretch for miles, the al-Azhar student's mother still lives in the big house that he loved. 

When the AP arrived unannounced, she said she had not received any court notices or reasons about why her son and his father were suddenly taken months earlier. 

She declined an interview.
"I want to talk, I want to know," she said through a translator. 

"But I'm too afraid."
AP reporters were later detained by police, interrogated for 11 hours, and accused of "illegal reporting" in the area without seeking prior permission from the Korla government.
"The subjects you're writing about do not promote positive energy," a local propaganda official explained.
Five villagers said they knew authorities had taken away the young student; one said he was definitely alive, the others weren't sure.
When asked, local police denied he existed at all.