The Chinese Coronavirus Story Is Too Big for China to Spin

Maybe what goes up online must come down, but what comes down will go up again.
By Kiki Zhao

A vigil in Hong Kong on Feb. 7, the day that Li Wenliang, a doctor who was reprimanded for warning about the coronavirus, died after being infected with it.

Reactions to Li Wenliang’s death last Friday filled the timelines of my social media accounts almost immediately. 

Post after post on my WeChat. 

Grief, frustration, anger.
A week later, the groundswell of emotions seems unabated.
Dr. Li, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, was one of the first doctors to try to warn about the disease, and then to die from it.
The story of how the authorities muzzled Dr. Li became an instant parable for their trampling on the Chinese public’s right to know. 

The authorities’ effort to now muzzle the public’s outrage is a parable of government unaccountability.On Dec. 30, Dr. Li told former classmates from medical school in a WeChat group that several patients displaying SARS-like symptoms were being quarantined. 

He was quickly summoned for questioning by the police.
On Jan. 3, Dr. Li was made to sign a statement declaring that his warning had been incorrect and was “illegal,” and that it had “disturbed social order.” 

Under a typed admonishment that said, “If you continue this illegal activity, you will be dealt with by the law! Do you understand?” he wrote by hand, “I understand.” 

Would he now cooperate with the police? 

“I can.”
In an interview later with Caixin, one of China’s leading investigative news outlets, Dr. Li said, “There shouldn’t be only one voice in a healthy society.” 

After news broke last week that he had died, a picture with his quote ignited the Chinese internet.
Fang Fang, a fiction writer based in Wuhan, has been documenting daily life in the city. 

“Dear internet censors, you should let Wuhan people speak,” she wrote recently. 

“We’ve been locked down here for more than ten days; we’ve seen too many extreme tragedies. If you don’t allow us to express our anguish or complaints or reflections, do you really want us to go mad?”
Allowed or not, the people are expressing their anguish, complaints and reflections.
A post on WeChat with photos of young people wearing surgical masks inscribed with “I cannot” and “I do not understand” quickly spread online. 

So did a letter signed by 10 professors in Wuhan demanding an apology from the officials who silenced Dr. Li and other whistle-blower doctors. 

Both posts were promptly taken down.
On Feb. 11, a group of middle-school teachers in Chengdu, about 700 miles west of Wuhan, posted online an open letter to their students about the outbreak. 

“In ‘The Plague,’ Albert Camus wrote that the only way to fight with the plague is honesty,” the text went. 

“We cannot turn a funeral into a wedding. We cannot use songs of praise to replace questioning.”
The article, which was hugely popular online, was taken down just hours after it was posted.

A news website run by the city authorities of Dongying, in the eastern province of Shandong, published an article late last month praising the online censor Guo Qiqi: She sleeps just four hours a day, and monitors the internet for 20. 

The article included photos of a policewoman whose job was to monitor Twitter and Facebook, which are blocked inside China.
The piece swept Weibo like a storm — but not as the authorities had intended. 

“Trying hard to build a Brave New World,” said one comment.
The article and the comments have since been deleted.
The censors can’t keep up, though: Maybe what goes up online must come down, but what comes down will go up again.
Which might explain why, in addition to trying to prevent people from openly discussing Dr. Li’s death, the information blackout in the early stages of the outbreak and the government’s handling of the crisis overall, the authorities are also trying to peddle an alternative narrative — and one that co-opts Dr. Li’s story.
As ever, the central government in Beijing is scrambling to project the image that it has everything under control. 

Instead of admitting to any large-scale inefficiencies or errors, it has sent a team to Wuhan to investigate Dr. Li’s death. 

Two senior provincial party officials were sacked on Thursday.
The government is also trying to cast Dr. Li’s death as the nation’s sacrifice — meaning, the Chinese Communist Party’s own.
The veteran epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan, who is credited with identifying the coronavirus that causes SARS and is widely revered, wept as he spoke about Dr. Li in an interview with Reuters this week. 

“The majority of people think he’s a hero of China,” Dr. Zhong said, in English, tears welling. 

“I’m so proud of him. He told people the truth at the end of December.” 

Many people share that view.
Only, they don’t want the Chinese Communist Party telling them who is a hero or what heroism is.
Xinhua, the party’s official news agency, has called for the population to “turn grief into strength” — and follow Dr. Li’s example to “complete his unfinished undertaking.”
That’s a dangerous invitation. 

The people can see through the government’s ploy, and they are fuming.
On Sunday, I read an article online about Yan Cheng, a teenager with severe cerebral palsy who died on Jan. 29, a week after his father was taken into quarantine. 

The teenager was unable to look after himself and yet he was left on his own. 

I pored over a photo of him smiling, taken not long before he died. 

I thought of how cold and hungry and lonely he must have felt that last night, and I wailed.
The next day I got a notice from Weibo: The platform was banning me from publishing or reposting anything for 30 days. 

But new posts and articles have kept appearing on my timeline, and I keep on upvoting them.

Chinese Peril

How China Will Take Over The World.
By Tatiana Koffman

There is a new cold war on the horizon. 

But instead of oil, the space race, or nuclear weapons, this one is being fought through the penetration of currencies, specifically the US Dollar against the Renminbi, also frequently referred to as the Chinese Yuan. 

Since Facebook announced its new stablecoin project Libra, in June of 2019, Mark Zuckerberg has been tried in the court of public opinion. 

Both Congressional and House Financial Services Committee hearings have essentially made a mockery of our government and showed just how technologically outmoded many of our politicians are.
But while Congressional Representative Katie Porter was commenting on Zuckerberg’s haircut and Congressman Warren Davidson was asking about “shitcoins,” China has been enjoying the spectacle from afar and making its own move. 

Namely, The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is only a few months away from launching the digital version of the Chinese Yuan, making China the first country in the world to have a digital central bank currency. 

This historical move has been 80 years in the making, and is the ultimate checkmate in the game of economic expansion.

Post-War Economics
The single most transformational economic event over the last century was World War II (1939-1945). 

As governments overprinted and overspent money on defense, many European nations were faced with financial bankruptcy and saw their currencies significantly devalued. 

And when the war was finally over, their balance sheets were far too weak to rebuild infrastructure or meaningfully participate in international trade.
In 1944, in an effort to stabilize the global economy, many of the world's leaders came together at a gathering in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to introduce the Gold Standard. 

It was decided that most of the world’s currencies would become tied to the US Dollar at a fixed exchange rate, which in turn would be backed by gold held in vaults. 

A new entity, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was created to police these exchange rates, while all participating countries would ship their gold to the U.S.
The IMF then created the Special Drawing Right (SDR) which, rather than representing a currency per se, was designed to represent a unit of account or exchange. 

For example, at the time of writing, 1 SDR = 1.38 USD. 

Today, the SDR is based on a basket of currencies which includes the US Dollar, the Euro, Japanese Yen, the Pound Sterling, and most recently, the Chinese Yuan.
After the Gold Standard was introduced, the post-war period between 1945 and 1970 was perhaps the greatest period of economic stability and prosperity of the last century. 

Countries were investing heavily in infrastructure and manufacturing, which provided well-paying jobs, giving rise to the middle class popularized by suburban America. 

It was during this time that the U.S. assumed its world dominance in the political sphere, largely due to the lingering weakness of recovering European economies and their lack of infrastructure and manufacturing capacity.
In 1971, Nixon abolished the Gold Standard to continue funding war efforts in Vietnam, and the world has not been the same since. 

The US Dollar remained widely regarded as the global reserve currency. 

But beginning in 1995, many European countries started using the Euro instead, which was meant to unify the European region through trade.
China started working on its own currency ascension plan to stimulate its trade and economic growth between 1994 and 2005, when it pegged the Yuan to the US Dollar. 

China embraced widespread centralized economic reforms, averaging a GDP growth of 10% annually and lifting half of its 1.3 billion people out of poverty. 

China is projected to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy in the next decade. 

In 2016, the Chinese Yuan was the first emerging market currency to be allowed into the IMF SDR basket and by 2019 became the 8th most traded currency in the world.

The New Cold War
The growing might of China has put Western powers on high alert. 

But, the next cold war will not be fought by exerting dominance in the physical world, but rather in the digital one. 

Data has become more valuable than oil. 

Modern societies are now powered using oceans of data, with Facebook and Google at the forefront, and companies like Palantir in the background. 

These companies have more knowledge and power than governments have ever had, but lack the same level of responsibility to its ‘citizens’. 

They are our new multinational multilaterals.
In the physical world, the U.S. is known for weaponizing its currency, using sanctions (12 countries today and counting) to alter global behavior. 

But in the digital world, it simultaneously wages war on its own tech companies with regulations, effectively and unwittingly disabling the very tools that could help it achieve lasting global dominance. 

One such effort is the proposed Democrat house bill “Keep Big Tech out of Finance Act.” 

This bill directly targets companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google to prevent them from creating their own ‘corpo-currencies’. 

A similar effort to fight U.S. big tech was undertaken in Europe with the GDPR.
While our governments increasingly make attempts to regulate data, they haven’t quite figured out how to regulate money that isn’t tied to borders. 

Governments can forbid the usage of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as Russia and China recently did, but since the transactions are designed to disintermediate central authority, the ban has only made its citizens more drawn to it.
China’s answer was not just to ban bitcoin, but to give its people an alternative -- the DCEP (Digital Currency Electronic Payment). 

China becoming the first country to create a central bank backed digital currency shouldn’t come as a surprise. 

After all, this is a country that has a wider penetration of digital payments than any other region in the world.
WeChat, a popular Chinese chat and peer-to-peer payment app, has surpassed 1 billion users and accounts for 34% of total mobile traffic in China. 

The app appears to be popular among non-Chinese users as well, particularly in Asia and Africa. Consumers can pay for their every day expenses and make peer-to-peer payments with WeChat. 

As one of the 5 entities committed to using the DCEP, it is already accepted by most merchants, with paper bills rarely used. 

Even the homeless proudly display their QR codes in the streets.

China has already penetrated the global market by manufacturing the majority of the world’s consumer products. 

What happens when it creates the most efficient (and legal) payment system in the world and forces us to use it when buying its goods?
And just like that, the U.S. faces a real threat of no longer being the global reserve currency.
Digital Payments in Emerging MarketsEnter Facebook, a company with 2.4 billion users and a reputation for misusing user data. 

The giant also owns a popular messaging app, WhatsApp, with 1.5 billion users. 

The company has proposed its own solution to unite the world -- a digital stablecoin which, upon closer inspection, seems to be modelled after the SDR. 

Libra’s basket is based on 50% USD, and the rest in Euro, Japanese Yen, Pound Sterling, and the Singapore Dollar, as well as other stable non-currency assets. 

Facebook has made a point of excluding the Chinese Yuan, drawing a noticeable line in the sand. 
Zuckerberg has acknowledged that Facebook may not have been the best candidate to bring forth a new international currency given its recent issues with privacy and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. 

But the necessity of such a currency still remains if we hope to slow down the Chinese global footprint.
As far as the U.S. is concerned, the DCEP will be a much greater threat to the ‘western hegemony’ than a Libra coin. 

A western-led digital currency like Libra would have kept the majority of the planet that lives outside of China’s firewall aligned. 

But Zuckerberg’s team made two crucial mistakes. 

First, it did not fully align with the U.S. government before launch, the way WeChat is aligned with the Communist Party of China, and second, perhaps more crucially, it did not take full advantage of Libra’s impact story in emerging markets. 
One had to delve into the Libra white paper to discover the problem Libra was actually trying to solve --  “1.7 billion adults globally remain outside of the financial system with no access to a traditional bank, even though one billion have a mobile phone and nearly half a billion have internet access.” 

This is a valuable statistic, but it is missing a much more important point. 

Many people who do have access to a traditional bank account, don’t want to use it. 

Workers in the developing world routinely line up at bank terminals to cash their paycheck the day it arrives, either because they do not trust their institutions or they find that their banks have predatory fees. 

Many rural communities are still cash-based, with ATMs located hours away. 

Libra would have allowed for liquidity in these communities, in a stable method of exchange, increasing the overall velocity of capital. 
Libra could have solved these issues and more. 

For example, many U.S. immigrants run businesses back in their home countries using WhatsApp. Libra would have allowed workers, suppliers, and managers to receive payments straight to their mobile phone and then spend it within their communities using the same app.
Libra could have made global financing accessible for small businesses and farmers in the developing world. 

One area of impact is Nigeria, which has the highest concentration of arable land in Africa and remains underdeveloped because of struggles with financing. 

For example, a young woman needs a small loan to launch her chicken farming business to support her family. 

There are several government programs in place, but they cannot effectively and securely deploy the capital to reach her. 

She has family in the U.S. and the U.K., but they cannot efficiently send her capital. 

Non-profit grants exist but they also cannot effectively reach her. 

And so, her capital options are limited, and are likely to result in letting go of her dream towards self-reliance.
Ignoring impact stories such as these was a crucial oversight by Facebook. 

And if we are unable to rally behind Libra, capital and liquidity issues in emerging markets will be solved through WeChat, extending the economic influence of the Chinese Yuan. 

Emerging markets will likely become the battleground for the next cold war. 

And as such, the U.S. government will need to ask itself what it fears more, a home-grown technology giant or a world led by China.

Taiwan Gets Tough On Chinese Disinformation Ahead Of Elections

By EMILY FENG

Demonstrators protest against what they called "red media" influence in Taiwan during a rally against pro-China media in front of the president's office building in Taipei on June 23. With a presidential election in January, Taiwan is bracing for a new deluge of disinformation, much of it aimed at boosting Beijing's preferred politicians.

Eye Central Television is a popular satirical TV news show in Taiwan, with an active social media presence. 

One day in April, it received a Facebook message from someone using the name Tina Hsu, but this was no ordinary fan.
Hsu's Facebook profile was blank; it had just been created that morning.
And Hsu made a surprising proposition: to buy EyeCTV's Facebook admin rights, taking control of the content shared with its more than 420,000 followers.
At first, the political satire program, reminiscent of The Daily Show, played along. 

"We jokingly asked for 1.4 billion Taiwan dollars [$46 million]," says show writer Sandra Ho — requesting a number that matches the population of China, she notes.
EyeCTV didn't sell out in the end. 

Many in the Taiwanese media suspect the proposition and others like it are part of a Chinese state-backed influence campaign. 

Dozens of Facebook pages in Taiwan have become content mills for Chinese Communist Party propaganda. 

Taiwan is now the liberal democracy that receives the most disinformation spread by a foreign government, according to a May report from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The stakes for curbing the propaganda are especially high right now in Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing says belongs to the People's Republic of China. 

In January, Taiwan will vote for its president and legislators. 

Its current leaders are determined to avoid a repeat of the 2018 local elections, which were marred by Chinese interference.
But to filter false content, Taiwan faces free speech concerns that other countries, such as the United States, also have encountered.

Fact-checking Facebook
One of the latest efforts against disinformation is a unique collaboration between Facebook and the Taiwan FactCheck Center. 

The nonprofit center uses a back-end tool provided by Facebook to track viral, misleading posts and works to fact-check them. 

Once it does, Facebook alerts anyone who shared the post that it was wrong and includes a link to the fact-check article below the false post.
"Journalists focus on the truth, on describing something that happened. But for us, we want to prove that something has not happened. 

That's much harder to do," says Summer Chen, the editor-in-chief of the Taiwan FactCheck Center.
The initiative comes as the government is getting tough on disinformation, including steep fines for those caught spreading it.

Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu speaks during a news conference in Taipei on Nov. 22.

"It's not only a domestic effort or a [Taiwanese] government interagency effort. There's also an international effort" to ward off Beijing's influence campaigns, Joseph Wu, Taiwan's foreign minister, tells NPR. 

"Because of the experiences we have, we have also built up some of the most formidable defense capabilities in the world."
In April, Taiwan's broadcast regulator fined a TV station over $32,000 for not verifying an inaccurate news item before airing it. 

Dozens of individuals have also been fined for sharing harmful, false items on social media.
The crackdown comes amid rising suspicion of mainland Chinese influence in Taiwan's news media.
In June, thousands marched against what protest organizers called the "threats of infiltration" by Chinese Communist "red media" in Taiwan's democracy. 

Later that month, Taiwan refused entry of a TV journalist from the mainland who broadcast misleading reports. 

Regulators are currently discussing blocking video-streaming sites run by Chinese companies Baidu and Tencent from broadcasting in Taiwan.

No name, no location
There's a central challenge for regulators: Most disinformation coming into Taiwan is through anonymous, hard to detect social media accounts.
Last year, when Taiwanese officials were falsely accused of abandoning Taiwanese tourists stranded by Typhoon Jebi in Osaka, Japan, the story was first spread by an anonymous user on PTT, a messaging forum popular in Taiwan. 

Within a day, several Taiwanese evening talk shows had picked up the item. 

Furious residents heaped criticism on the Taiwanese government's representative in Osaka, Su Chii-cheng.
He killed himself soon after, reportedly leaving a note that said he had been troubled by the news.
Researchers say some of the misleading material, including a doctored image, shows signs of being created in mainland China.
Tracing influence campaigns back to Beijing is difficult though, says Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister. 

Social media users and hackers can use software to conceal their location.
One giveaway on Twitter, Tang says, is when users in mainland China are able to access the site, normally blocked by China's Internet firewall, without help from such software.

Using Taiwanese slang
Puma Shen runs DoubleThink Labs, a research outfit monitoring how false information travels from content farms funded by Chinese state or party-run entities to Facebook fan pages to news shows in Taiwan, and broadcast to an unsuspecting public.
Shen says one tactic he sees is an online "subliminal attack" to sway voters. 

Hundreds of hackers search one candidate's name over and over again to slant search engine algorithms toward displaying their results more prominently than other candidates'.
One day, Shen predicts China will surpass Russia in global disinformation operations.
"It's not really hard to do that," Shen says, pointing to Chinese-run apps like short video platform TikTok, now under U.S. investigation for collecting American user data, and messaging app WeChat. 

"[China] has all these marketing groups' online shopping apps which can easily collect private information on citizens in other countries."
China's influence efforts have advanced rapidly since the last Taiwanese municipal elections in 2018. Some messages stood out because they used mainland Chinese text, written in a simplified alphabet, in contrast with the traditional characters used in Taiwan, researchers say. 

Now, disinformation posts written in fluent Taiwanese slang are shared through private social media channels rather than publicly.

Rights concerns
Cédric Alviani, the head of Reporters Without Borders' East Asia bureau in Taipei, warns that coercive measures against media, including fining news outlets, are counterproductive: "By doing this kind of thing, the Taiwanese authorities are actually doing the exact same thing as they criticize," he says. 

He's referring to how Taiwan is using top-down methods to control undesirable speech comparable to what China's Communist Party does.
Alviani advocates for allowing people and outlets to dispute their fines or revoked credentials.
He also says Taiwanese media need more funds to pay for good journalism, rather than rely on social media for news.
"People don't trust so much their media because the line between the media and entertainment is very blurred in Taiwan," Alviani contends. 

"[Outlets] have an undue pressure to generate audience to their articles."
Government officials say they are aware of concerns that the disinformation crackdown could hinder freedom of the press and expression.
"I think when people still remember the martial law like I do, we just don't want to go back there," says Tang, the digital minister.
The former authoritarian government enforced martial law for almost 40 years until 1987. 

Tang says her parents were journalists and had to work under censorship during that period.
As the government passes tougher legislation to protect Taiwan, it risks affecting the civil liberties Taiwanese have enjoyed for three decades.
"Maybe it's impossible to legislate social media," concedes Ketty Chen, vice president of the government think tank Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. 

"As democracies, a challenge we often face is how you can legislate an individual's right to expression and the freedom of media [and] freedom of journalists to report, to investigate."

Chinazism

China Sharpens Hacking to Hound Its Minorities, Far and Wide
By Nicole Perlroth, Kate Conger and Paul Mozur

Uighur teenagers on their phones in Kashgar in China’s East Turkestan colony. Chinese hackers have secretly monitored the cellphones of Uighurs and Tibetans around the globe.

SAN FRANCISCO — China’s state-sponsored hackers have drastically changed how they operate over the last three years, substituting selectivity for what had been a scattershot approach to their targets and showing a new determination by Beijing to push its surveillance state beyond its borders.
The government has poured considerable resources into the change, which is part of a reorganization of the national People’s Liberation Army that Xi Jinping initiated in 2016, security researchers and intelligence officials said.
China’s hackers have since built up a new arsenal of techniques, such as elaborate hacks of iPhone and Android software, pushing them beyond email attacks and the other, more basic tactics that they had previously employed.
The primary targets for these more sophisticated attacks: China’s ethnic minorities and their diaspora in other countries, the researchers said. 

In several instances, hackers targeted the cellphones of a minority known as Uighurs, whose home region, East Turkestan, has been the site of a vast build-out of surveillance tech in recent years.
“The Chinese use their best tools against their own people first because that is who they’re most afraid of,” said James A. Lewis, a former United States government official who writes on cybersecurity and espionage for the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington. 

“Then they turn those tools on foreign targets.”
China’s willingness to extend the reach of its surveillance and censorship was on display after an executive for the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets tweeted support for protesters in Hong Kong this month. 

The response from China was swift, threatening a range of business relationships the N.B.A. had forged in the country.
In August, Facebook and Twitter said they had taken down a large network of Chinese bots that was spreading disinformation around the protests. 

And in recent weeks, a security firm traced a monthslong attack on Hong Kong media companies to Chinese hackers. 

Security experts say Chinese hackers are very likely targeting protesters’ phones, but they have yet to publish any evidence.

A security checkpoint with facial recognition technology in Hotan in East Turkestan.

Security researchers said the improved abilities of the Chinese hackers had put them on a par with elite Russian cyberunits. 

And the attacks on cellphones of Uighurs offered a rare glimpse of how some of China’s most advanced hacking tools are now being used to silence or punish critics.
Google researchers who tracked the attacks against iPhones said details about the software flaws that the hackers had preyed on would have been worth tens of millions of dollars on black market sites where information about software vulnerabilities is sold.
On the streets in East Turkestan, huge numbers of high-end surveillance cameras run facial recognition software to identify and track people. 

Specially designed apps have been used to screen Uighurs’ phones, monitor their communications and register their whereabouts.
Gaining access to the phones of Uighurs who have fled China — a diaspora that has grown as many have been locked away at home — would be a logical extension of those total surveillance efforts. Such communities in other countries have long been a concern to Beijing, and many in East Turkestan have been sent to camps because relatives traveled or live abroad.
The Chinese police have also made less sophisticated efforts to control Uighurs who have fled, using the chat app WeChat to entice them to return home or to threaten their families.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment. 

Security researchers recently discovered that the Chinese used National Security Agency hacking tools after apparently discovering an N.S.A. cyberattack on their own systems. 

And several weeks ago, a Chinese security firm, Qianxin, published an analysis tying the Central Intelligence Agency to a hack of China’s aviation industry.

Xi Jinping visiting President Barack Obama in 2015. Their agreement to halt certain cyberoperations gave China time to hone its abilities.

Breaking into iPhones has long been considered the Holy Grail of cyberespionage. 

“If you can get inside an iPhone, you have yourself a spy phone,” said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye, a cybersecurity firm.
The F.B.I. couldn’t do it without help during a showdown with Apple in 2016. 

The bureau paid more than $1 million to an anonymous third party to hack an iPhone used by a gunman involved in the killing of 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif.
Google researchers said they had discovered that iPhone vulnerabilities were being exploited to infect visitors to a set of websites. 

Although Google did not release the names of the targets, Apple said they had been found on about a dozen websites focused on Uighurs.
“You can hit a high school student from Japan who is visiting the site to write a research report, but you are also going to hit Uighurs who have family members back in China and are supporting the cause,” said Steven Adair, the president and founder of the security firm Volexity in Virginia.
The technology news site TechCrunch first reported the Uighur connection. 

A software update from Apple fixed the flaw.
In recent weeks, security researchers at Volexity uncovered Chinese hacking campaigns that exploited vulnerabilities in Google’s Android software as well. 

Volexity found that several websites that focused on Uighur issues had been infected with Android malware. 

It traced the attacks to two Chinese hacking groups.
Because the hacks targeted Android and iPhone users — even though Uighurs in East Turkestan don’t commonly use iPhones — Mr. Adair said he believed that they had been aimed in part at Uighurs living abroad.

An analyst at FireEye. “If you can get inside an iPhone, you have yourself a spy phone,” said John Hultquist, the company’s director of intelligence analysis.

“China is expanding their digital surveillance outside their borders,” he said. 

“It seems like it really is going after the diaspora.”
Another group of researchers, at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, recently uncovered an overlapping effort, using some of the same code discovered by Google and Volexity. 

It attacked the iPhones and Android phones of Tibetans until as recently as May.
Using WhatsApp messages, Chinese hackers posing as New York Times reporters and representatives of Amnesty International and other organizations targeted the private office of the Dalai Lama, members of the Tibetan Parliament and Tibetan nongovernmental organizations, among others.
Lobsang Gyatso, the secretary of TibCERT, an organization that works with Tibetan organizations on cybersecurity threats, said in an interview that the recent attacks were a notable escalation from previous Chinese surveillance attempts.
For a decade, Chinese hackers blasted Tibetans with emails containing malicious attachments, Mr. Lobsang said. 

If they hacked one person’s computer, they hit everyone in the victim’s address books, casting as wide a net as possible. 

But in the last three years, Mr. Lobsang said, there has been a big shift.
“The recent targeting was something we haven’t seen in the community before,” he said. 

“It was a huge shift in resources. They were targeting mobile phones, and there was a lot more reconnaissance involved. They had private phone numbers of individuals, even those that were not online. They knew who they were, where their offices were located, what they did.”
Adam Meyers, the vice president of intelligence at CrowdStrike, said these operations were notably more sophisticated than five years ago, when security firms discovered that Chinese hackers were targeting the phones of Hong Kong protesters in the so-called Umbrella Revolution.

The attacks on iPhones, which Uighurs in East Turkestan don’t typically use, suggested that Uighurs abroad were among the targets, said Steven Adair, president of Volexity.

At the time, Chinese hackers could break only into phones that had been “jailbroken,” or altered in some way to allow the installation of apps not vetted by Apple’s official store. 

The recent attacks against the Uighurs broke into up-to-date iPhones without tipping off the owner.
“In terms of how the Chinese rank threats, the highest threats are domestic,” Mr. Lewis said. 

“The No. 1 threat, as the Chinese see it, is the loss of information control on their own population. But the United States is firmly No. 2.”
Chinese hackers have also used their improved skills to attack the computer networks of foreign governments and companies. 

They have targeted internet and telecommunications companies and have broken into the computer networks of foreign tech, chemical, manufacturing and mining companies. 

Airbus recently said China had hacked it through a supplier.
In 2016, Xi Jinping consolidated several army hacking divisions under a new Strategic Support Force, similar to the United States’ Cyber Command, and moved much of the country’s foreign hacking operation from the army to the more advanced Ministry of State Security, China’s main spy agency.
The restructuring coincided with a lull in Chinese cyberattacks after a 2015 agreement between Xi and President Barack Obama to cease cyberespionage operations for commercial gain.
“The deal gave the Chinese the time and space to focus on professionalizing their cyberespionage capabilities,” Mr. Lewis said. 

“We didn’t expect that.”
Chinese officials also cracked down on moonlighting in moneymaking schemes by its state-sponsored hackers — a “corruption” issue that Xi concluded had sometimes compromised the hackers’ identities and tools, according to security researchers.
While China was revamping its operations, security experts said, it was also clamping down on security research in order to keep advanced hacking methods in house. 

The Chinese police recently said they planned to enforce national laws against unauthorized vulnerability disclosure, and Chinese researchers were recently banned from competing in Western hacking conferences.
“They are circling the wagons,” Mr. Hultquist of FireEye said. 

“They’ve recognized that they could use these resources to aid their offensive and defensive cyberoperations.”

WeChat and the Surveillance State

WeChat is the most powerful weapon of social control for the Chinese government.
By Stephen McDonell

China's WeChat is a site for social interaction, a form of currency, a dating app, a tool for sporting teams and deliverer of news: Twitter, Facebook, Googlemaps, Tinder and Apple Pay all rolled into one. 

But it is also an ever more powerful weapon of social control for the Chinese government.
I've just been locked out of WeChat (or Weixin 微信 as it is known in Chinese) and, to get back on, have had to pass through some pretty Orwellian steps -- steps which have led others to question why I went along with it.
One reason is that life in Beijing would be extremely difficult without WeChat. 

The other is that I could not have written this piece without experiencing the stages which have now clearly put my image, and even my voice, on some sort of biometric database of troublemakers.
I was in Hong Kong to cover the enormous candlelight vigil marking 30 years since the People's Liberation Army was ordered to open fire on its own people to remove the mostly student protesters who'd been gathering in and around Tiananmen Square for months in June 1989.
This moment in history has been all but erased from public discourse on mainland China but in Hong Kong, with its special status in the Chinese-speaking world, people turn out every year to remember the bloody crackdown.
This time round the crowd was particularly huge, with estimates ranging up to 180,000.
Naturally I took photos of the sea of people holding candles and singing, and posted some of these on my WeChat "moments".

Tiananmen's tank man: The image that China forgot

The post contained no words -- just photos.
Chinese friends started asking on WeChat what the event was? 

Why were people gathering? 

Where was it?
That such questions were coming from young professionals here shows the extent to which knowledge of Tiananmen 1989 has been made to disappear in China.
I answered a few of them, rather cryptically, then suddenly I was locked out of WeChat.
"Your login has been declined due to account exceptions. Try to log in again and proceed as instructed," came the message on the screen.
Then, when I tried to log back in, a new message appeared: "This WeChat account has been suspected of spreading malicious rumours and has been temporarily blocked…"
It means posting photos of an actual event taking place, without commentary, amounts to "spreading malicious rumours" in China.
I was given time to try and log in again the next day after my penalty had been served.
When I did I had to push "agree and unblock" under the stated reason of "spread malicious rumours".
So this rumour-monger clicked on "agree".
Then came a stage I was not prepared for. 

"Faceprint is required for security purposes," it said.
I was instructed to hold my phone up -- to "face front camera straight on" -- looking directly at the image of a human head. 

Then told to "Read numbers aloud in Mandarin Chinese".
My voice was captured by the App at the same time it scanned my face.
Afterwards a big green tick: "Approved"
Apart from being creepy you can only imagine the potential use of this type of data.
No doubt I have now joined some list of suspicious individuals in the hands of goodness knows which Chinese government agencies.
In China pretty much everyone has WeChat. 

I don't know a single person without it. 

Developed by tech giant Tencent it is an incredible app. 

It's convenient. It works. It's fun. 

It was ahead of the game on the global stage and it has found its way into all corners of people's existence.
It delivers to the Communist Party a life map of pretty much everybody in this country, citizens and foreigners alike.
Capturing the face and voice image of everyone who was suspended for mentioning the Tiananmen crackdown anniversary in recent days would be considered very useful for those who want to monitor anyone who might potentially cause problems.
When I placed details of this entire process on Twitter others were asking: why cave in to such a Big Brother intrusion on your privacy?
They've probably not lived in China.
It is hard to imagine a life here without it.
When you meet somebody in a work context they don't give you a name card any more, they share their WeChat; if you play for a football team training details are on WeChat; children's school arrangements, WeChat; Tinder-style dates, WeChat; movie tickets, WeChat; news stream, WeChat; restaurant locations, WeChat; paying for absolutely everything from a bowl of noodles to clothes to a dining room table… WeChat.
People wouldn't be able to speak to their friends or family without it.
So the censors who can lock you out of Wechat hold real power over you.
The app -- the least secure of its type in the world -- has essentially got you over a barrel.
If you want to have a normal life in China, you had better not say anything controversial about the Communist Party and especially not about its dictator, Xi Jinping.
This is China 2019.

China's crimes against humanity

INSIDE WECHAT MASSIVE SURVEILLANCE OPERATION
By Isobel Cockerell

It was 2011, and she was living in Hotan, an oasis town in East Turkestan, in northwest China. 

The 30-year-old, Nurjamal Atawula, loved to take pictures of her children and exchange strings of emoji with her husband while he was out. 

In 2013, Atawula downloaded WeChat, the Chinese social messaging app. 

Not long after, rumors circulated among her friends: The government could track your location through your phone. 

At first, she didn’t believe them.
In early 2016, police started making routine checks on Atawula’s home. 

Her husband was regularly called to the police station. 

The police informed him they were suspicious of his WeChat activity. 

Atawula’s children began to cower in fear at the sight of a police officer.
The harassment and fear finally reached the point that the family decided to move to Turkey. Atawula’s husband, worried that Atawula would be arrested, sent her ahead while he stayed in East Turkestan and waited for the children’s passports.
“The day I left, my husband was arrested,” Atawula said. 

When she arrived in Turkey in June 2016, her phone stopped working—and by the time she had it repaired, all her friends and relatives had deleted her from their WeChat accounts. 

They feared that the government would punish them for communicating with her.
She was alone in Istanbul and her digital connection with life in East Turkestan was over. 

Apart from a snatched Skype call with her mother for 11 and a half minutes at the end of December 2016, communication with her relatives has been completely cut. 

“Sometimes I feel like the days I was with my family are just my dreams, as if I have been lonely all my life—ever since I was born,” she said.
Atawula now lives alone in Zeytinburnu, a working-class neighborhood in Istanbul. 

It’s home to Turkey’s largest population of Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic minority native to East Turkestan, a vast, resource-rich land of deserts and mountains along China’s ancient Silk Road trade route.
Atawula is one of around 34,000 Uyghurs in Turkey. 

She is unable to contact any of her relatives—via phone, WeChat, or any other app. 

“I feel very sad when I see other people video chatting with their families,” she says. 

“I think, why can’t we even hear the voice of our children?”
For Uyghurs in East Turkestan, any kind of contact from a non-Chinese phone number, though not officially illegal, can result in instant arrest. 

Most Uyghurs in Turkey have been deleted by their families on social media. 

And many wouldn’t dare try to make contact, for fear Chinese authorities would punish their relatives. 

It’s just one of the ways Xi Jinping’s government maintains a tightly controlled net of surveillance over the Uyghurs in China, and it has a ripple effect on Uyghurs living all over the world.
Zeytinburnu, the Istanbul suburb where Atawula lives, lies behind the city’s winding expressways, and is dotted with restaurants and cafés serving Uyghur cuisine: wide, slippery noodles, lamb kebabs, and green tea. 

The Uyghur separatist flag—a light blue version of the Turkish flag—is a common sight. 

It’s a banned image in China, representing free East Turkestan.
East Turkestan was brought under the Communist Party of China’s control in 1949. 

During the latter half of the 20th century, Uyghur independence was a threat that loomed over the party’s agenda. 

The government tried to stamp out separatism and “assimilate” the Uyghurs by encouraging mass migration of Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, to East Turkestan.
During the ’90s, riots erupted between Uyghurs and Chinese police. 

In a white paper published in March, the Chinese government defined the riots as “inhuman, anti-social and barbaric acts” perpetrated by separatist groups. 

Amnesty International, meanwhile, described the 1997 protests in Gulja, East Turkestan, as a peaceful demonstration turned massacre, quoting exiled Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer. 

“I have never seen such viciousness in my life,” she said. 

“Chinese soldiers were bludgeoning the demonstrators.”
After the 9/11 attacks, the Chinese government took a page from George W. Bush’s war on terror and began targeting separatist groups in East Turkestan. 

In 2009, bloody ethnic riots broke out between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi, the East Turkestan capital. 

Police put the city on lockdown, enforcing an internet blackout and cutting cell phone service. 

It was the beginning of a new policy to control the Uyghur population—digitally.

The WeChat Lockdown
In recent years, China has carried out its crackdown on Islamic extremism via smartphone. 

In 2011, Chinese IT giant Tencent holdings launched a new app called WeChat—known as “Undidar” in the Uyghur language. 

It quickly became a vital communication tool across China.
The launch of WeChat was “a moment of huge relief and freedom,” said Aziz Isa, a Uyghur scholar who has studied Uyghur use of WeChat alongside Rachel Harris at London’s SOAS University. “Never before in Uyghur life had we had the opportunity to use social media in this way,” Isa said, describing how Uyghurs across class divides were openly discussing everything from politics to religion to music.
By 2013, around a million Uyghurs were using the app. 

Harris and Isa observed a steady rise in Islamic content, “most of it apolitical but some of it openly radical and oppositional.” 

Isa remembers being worried by some of the more nationalist content he saw, though he believes it accounted for less than 1 percent of all the posts. 

Most Uyghurs didn’t understand the authorities were watching.
This kind of unrestricted communication on WeChat went on for around a year. 

But in May 2014, the Chinese government enlisted a taskforce to stamp out “malpractice” on instant messaging apps, in particular “rumors and information leading to violence, terrorism, and pornography.” 

WeChat was required to let the government monitor the activity of its users.
Miyesser Mijit, 28, whose name has been changed to protect her family, is a Uyghur master’s student in Istanbul who left East Turkestan in 2014, just before the crackdown. 

During her undergraduate studies in mainland China, she and her Uyghur peers had already learned to use their laptops and phones with caution. 

They feared they would be expelled from university if they were caught expressing their religion online.
Mijit’s brother, who was drafted into the East Turkestan police force in the late 2000s, warned her to watch her language while using technology. 

“He always told me not to share anything about my religion and to take care with my words,” Mijit said. 

She did not take part in the widespread WeChat conversations about religion. 

If her friends sent her messages about Islam, she would delete them immediately, and performed a factory reset on her phone before coming home to East Turkestan for the university vacation period. Her precautions turned out to be insufficient.

A Surveillance State Is Born
The monitoring of Uyghurs was not limited to their smartphones. 

Mijit remembers first encountering facial recognition technology in the summer of 2013. 

Her brother came home from the police station carrying a device slightly bigger than a cellphone. 

He scanned her face and entered her age range as roughly between 20 and 30. 

The device promptly brought up all her information, including her home address. 

Her brother warned her this technology would soon be rolled out across East Turkestan. 

“All your life will be in the record,” he told her.
In May 2014, alongside the WeChat crackdown, China announced a wider “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism.” 

It was a response to several high-profile attacks attributed to Uyghur militants, including a suicide car bombing in Tiananmen Square in 2013 and, in the spring of 2014, a train station stabbing in Kunming followed by a market bombing in Urumqi. 

Authorities zeroed in on ethnic Uyghurs, alongside Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic minorities in East Turkestan.
After being subjected to daily police checks on her home in Urumqi, Mijit decided to leave East Turkestan for Turkey. 

When she returned to China for a vacation in 2015, she saw devices like the one her brother had shown her being used at police checkpoints every few hundred feet. 

Her face was scanned by police the moment she arrived at the city gates. 

“I got off the bus and everyone was checked one by one,” she said. 

She was also greeted by devices affixed to the entrance of every supermarket, mall, and hospital.
Amina Abduwayit, 38, a businesswoman from Urumqi who now lives in Zeytinburnu, remembers being summoned to the police station and having her face scanned and inputted into the police database.

“It was like a monkey show,” she said. 

“They would ask you to stare like this and that. They would ask you to laugh, and you laugh, and ask you to glare and you glare.”
Abduwayit was also asked to give DNA and blood samples to the police. 

This was part of a larger, comprehensive campaign by the Chinese government to build a biometric picture of East Turkestan’s Uyghur population and help track those deemed nonconformists. 

“The police station was full of Uyghurs,” Abduwayit says. 

“All of them were there to give blood samples.”
Finally, Abduwayit was made to give a voice sample to the police. 

“They gave me a newspaper to read aloud for one minute. It was a story about a traffic accident, and I had to read it three times. They thought I was faking a low voice.”
The voice-recognition program was powered by Chinese artificial intelligence giant iFlytek, which claims a 70 percent share of China’s speech recognition industry. 

In August 2017, Human Rights Watch found information indicating iFlytek supplied voiceprint technology to police bureaus in East Turkestan province. 

The company opened an office in Silicon Valley in 2017 and remains open about working “under the guidance of the Ministry of Public Security” to provide “a new experience for public safety and forensic identification,” according to the Chinese version of its website. 

The company says it offers a particular focus to creating antiterrorism technology.
Human Rights Watch believes the company has been piloting a system in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security to monitor telephone conversations. 

“Many party and state leaders including Xi Jinping have inspected and praised the company’s innovative work,” iFlytek’s website reads.
Halmurat Harri, a Finland-based Uyghur activist, visited the city of Turpan in 2016 and was shocked by the psychological impact of near-constant police checks. 

“You feel like you are under water,” he says. 

“You cannot breathe. Every breath you take, you’re careful.”
He remembers driving out to the desert with a friend, who told him he wanted to watch the sunset. They locked their cellphones in the car and walked away. 

“My friend said, ‘Tell me what’s happening outside. Do foreign countries know about the Uyghur oppression?’ We talked for a couple of hours. He wanted to stay there all night.”
To transform East Turkestan into one of the most tightly controlled surveillance states in the world, a vast, gridlike security network had to be created. 

Over 160,000 cameras were installed in the city of Urumqi by 2016, according to China security and surveillance experts Adrian Zenz and James Leibold.
In the year following Chen Quanguo’s 2016 appointment as regional party secretary, more than 100,000 security-related positions were advertised, while security spending leapt by 92 percent—a staggering $8.6 billion increase.

It’s part of a wider story of huge domestic security investment across China, which hit a record $197 billion in 2017. 

Around 173 million cameras now watch China’s citizens. 

In the imminent future, the government has laid out plans to achieve 100 percent video coverage of “key public areas.”
For Uyghurs, “the employment situation in East Turkestan is difficult and limited,” said Zenz. 

A lot of the good jobs require fluency in Chinese—which many Uyghurs don’t have. 

Joining the police force is one of the only viable opportunities open to Uyghurs, who are then tasked with monitoring their own people.

China’s Uyghur Gulags
The government’s efforts to control the people of East Turkestan were not only digital; it also began to imprison them physically. 

In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said one million Uyghurs were being held in what amounts to a “massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy.”
At first, China denied the existence of the camps entirely. 

But then, in October 2018, the government announced it had launched “a vocational education and training program” and passed a law legitimizing what they termed “training centers.”
In a September 2018 report, Human Rights Watch found human rights violations in East Turkestan to be of a scope and scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution and that the creation of the camps reflected Beijing’s commitment to “transforming East Turkestan in its own image.”
Gulbahar Jalilova, 54, a Uyghur clothes retailer from Kazakhstan, spent one year, three months and 10 days in detention centers and camps in Urumqi. 

She now lives in Istanbul. 

According to her arrest warrant in China, issued by the Urumqi Public Security Bureau, she was detained “for her suspicious involvement in terrorist activities in the region.” 

Police accused her of money laundering via one of her employees in Urumqi, who was also arrested. Jalilova denies the charges, saying that they were a mere pretext.
Jalilova was taken to a kanshousuo, one of the many temporary detention centers in the East Turkestan capital. 

Over the next 15 months, she was transferred to three different jails and camps in Urumqi. 

She is precise and exacting in her memory of life in detention: a 10-by-20 foot cell, with up to 50 people sitting in tightly packed rows, their feet tucked beneath them.
Jalilova, who has struggled with her memory since being released in August 2018, keeps a notebook where she has written down all the names of the women who were in the cell with her. 

She also notes the reasons for their arrest, which include downloading WhatsApp—a blocked app in China—storing the numbers of prominent Uyghur scholars, and being caught with religious content on their phones.
She remembers how the cell was fitted with cameras on all four sides, with a television mounted above the door. 

“The leaders in Beijing can see you,” the guards told her. 

Once a month, Jalilova said, the guards would play Xi Jinping’s speeches to inmates and make them write letters of remorse. 

“If you wrote something bad, they would punish you,” Jalilova said. 

“You could only say ‘Thank you to the Party’ and ‘I have cleansed myself of this or that’ and ‘I will be a different person once I am released.’”

She was set free in August 2018 and came to Turkey, no longer feeling safe in Kazakhstan, where the government has been accused of deporting Uyghurs back to East Turkestan.

Escape to Turkey
Though no official statistics for the camps exist, the volunteer-run East Turkestan Victims Database has gathered more than 3,000 Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Muslim minorities’ testimonials for their missing relatives. 

It shows that around 73 percent of those recorded as being in detention are men.
It follows that the majority of people who have escaped East Turkestan for Turkey in recent years are women. 

Local activists estimate 65 percent of the Uyghur population in Turkey is female, many separated from their husbands.
Some Uyghur women made their clandestine escape from East Turkestan by fleeing overland, through China and Thailand to Malaysia, before flying to Turkey. 

In Zeytinburnu, they live in a network of shared apartments, making whatever money they can by doing undocumented work in the local textile industry, as tailors or seamstresses.
The women who arrived without their husbands are known among other Uyghurs as “the widows.” Their husbands are trapped in East Turkestan, and they do not know if they are alive, imprisoned, or dead.
Kalbinur Tursun, 35, left East Turkestan in April 2016 with her youngest son Mohamed, the only one of her children who had a passport at the time. 

She left her other children and husband in East Turkestan. 

She was pregnant with her seventh child, a daughter called Marziya whom she feared she would be forced to abort, having already had many more children than China’s two-child policy allows.
When Tursun first arrived in Turkey, she video-called her husband every day over WeChat. 

Tursun believes Chinese police arrested him on June 13, 2016—as that was the last time she spoke to him. 

She was then told by a friend that her husband had been sentenced to 10 years in jail as a result of her decision to leave. 

“I am so afraid my children hate me,” she said.

Turkey is seen as a safer place to go than other Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, whose leaders have both recently dismissed the Uyghurs’ plight. 

Uyghurs have come to Turkey in waves from China since the 1950s. 

They are not given work permits, and many hope they will eventually find refuge in Europe or the United States.
Though Turkey has traditionally acted as protector for Uyghurs, whom they view as Turkic kin, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been reluctant to speak up for the Uyghurs in recent years as trade relations with China have improved. (By the same token, the Trump administration has declined to press China on human rights issues in East Turkestan as it negotiates a trade deal with Beijing.)
On February 9, 2019, Hami Aksoy, a spokesman for Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, broke the diplomatic hush. 

“It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uyghur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in internment camps and prisons,” Aksoy’s statement read.

Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman from Urumqi, was afraid to speak freely when she arrived in Turkey in 2015. 

For the first two years after she arrived, she did not dare to greet another Uyghur. 

“Even though I was far away from China, I still lived in fear of surveillance,” she said. 

Though she now feels less afraid, she has not opened her WeChat app in a year and a half.
Others tried to use WeChat to contact their families, but the drip-feed of information became steadily slower. 

In 2016, findings by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a research center that monitors methods of information control, showed how the app was censoring its users by tracking their keyword usage. 

Among the search terms that could trigger official suspicion are any words relating to Uyghur issues such as “2009 Urumqi riots,” “2012 Kashgar riots,” and anything to do with Islam.
In Zeytinburnu, seamstress Tursungul Yusuf, 42, remembers how phone calls and messages from relatives in East Turkestan became increasingly terse as 2017 went on. 

“When we spoke, they’d keep it brief. They’d say, ‘We’re OK, safe.’ They’d speak in code—if someone was jailed in the camps, they would say they’d been ‘admitted to hospital.’ I’d say ‘understood.’ We could not talk freely. My older daughter wrote ‘I am helpless’ on her WeChat status. She then sent me one message, ‘Assalam,’ before deleting me.”
A kind of WeChat code had developed through emoji: A half-fallen rose meant someone had been arrested. 

A dark moon, they had gone to the camps. 

A sun emoji—“I am alive.” 

A flower—“I have been released.”
Messages were becoming more enigmatic by the day. 

Sometimes, a frantic series of messages parroting CPC propaganda would be followed by a blackout in communication. 

Washington, DC-based Uyghur activist Aydin Anwar recalls that where Uyghurs used to write “inshallah” on social media, they now write “CPC.”
On the few occasions she was able to speak with relatives, she said “it sounded like their soul had been taken out of them.” 

A string of pomegranate images were a common theme: the Party’s symbol of ethnic cohesion, the idea that all minorities and Han Chinese people should live harmoniously alongside one another, “like the seeds of a pomegranate.” 

By late 2017, most Uyghurs in Turkey had lost contact with their families completely.

Resilience, Resistance, Resolve
In a book-lined apartment in Zeytinburnu, Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist and poet, coaches Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman who fled East Turkestan after police took her DNA. 

They’re filming a video they plan to upload to Facebook. 

Ayup films her on his smartphone, while she sits at a table and recounts how her home city of Urumqi was a “digital prison.”
Abduwayit describes how they were afraid to turn the lights on early in the morning, for fear the police would think they were praying. 

She then lists all the members of her family whom she believes have been transferred to detention centers.
Abuwayit is just one of hundreds of Uyghurs in Turkey—and thousands across the world—who have decided to upload their story to the internet.
Since this time last year, a kind of digital revolution has taken place. 

The Finland-based Uyghur activist Halmurat Harri believes he was the first person to film a testimonial. 

“I want freedom for my parents, freedom for Uyghur,” he said in a cell phone video recorded in his bathroom in Helsinki last April, before shaving off his hair in protest. 

“Then I called people and asked them to make their own testimony videos,” Harri said.
Videos filmed on smartphones from Uyghur kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms began appearing on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. 

Ayup described how at the beginning, people would “cover their faces and were afraid of their voices being recognized,” but as 2018 progressed, people became braver.
Gene Bunin, a scholar based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, manages the volunteer-run East Turkestan Victims Database, and has cataloged and gathered thousands of testimonials from Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Muslim minorities targeted in East Turkestan.
Bunin noticed that unlike private attempts to make contact, public exposure of missing relatives seemed to push the Chinese authorities to respond. 

This is particularly true for cases where victims had links to Kazakhstan, where the government has been exerting pressure on China to release ethnic Kazakhs. 

“There’s evidence the Chinese government is willing to make concessions for those whose relatives give video testimonies,” Bunin said.
He was told of people being released as little as 24 hours after their relatives posted testimonies online. 

“It’s a strong sign the East Turkestan authorities are reacting to these videos,” he said.
China has recently stepped up its defense of practices in East Turkestan, seemingly in response to broader Western attention. 

In March, Reuters reported that China would invite European diplomats to visit the region. 

That followed a statement by East Turkestan governor Shohrat Zakir that the camps were in fact “boarding schools.”
Harri recently started a hashtag, #MeTooUyghur, encouraging Uyghurs around the world to demand evidence that their families were alive.
Large WhatsApp news groups, with members from the international Uyghur diaspora, have also been a vital source of solidarity for a community deprived of information.
On December 24, 2018, Kalbinur Tursun—the woman who left five of her children in East Turkestan—was sitting in the ladies’ clothing shop she manages in Zeytinburnu, scrolling through a Uyghur WhatsApp group. 

She checks it first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and dozens of times throughout the day, as several hundred Uyghur members post near-constant videos and updates on the crisis in East Turkestan.
She tapped on a video of a room full of Uyghur children, playing a game. 

An off-camera voice shouts “Bizi! Bizi! Bizi!”—Chinese for “Nose! Nose! Nose!” and an excited group of children tap their noses. 

Tursun was astonished.
On the left, she recognized her 6-year-old daughter, Aisha. 

“Her emotion, her laugh … it’s her. It’s like a miracle,” she said. 

“I see my child so much in my dreams, I never imagined I would see her in real life.” 

It had been two years since she had last heard her daughter’s voice.
The video appears to come from one of the so-called “Little Angel Schools” in Hotan province, around 300 miles from Tursun’s native Kashgar, where it’s been reported nearly 3,000 Uyghur children are held. 

Tursun wonders whether her four other children may have been taken even further afield. 

Speaking to Radio Free Asia, a Communist Party official for the province said the orphanages were patrolled by police to “provide security.”
Unlike almost everyone in the global Uyghur diaspora, Nurjamal Atawula managed to find a way to contact her family after the WeChat blackout. 

She used one of the oldest means possible: writing a letter. 

In late 2016, she heard of a woman in Zeytinburnu who regularly traveled back and forth between Turkey and her parents’ village in East Turkestan. 

She asked the woman to take a letter to her family. 

The woman agreed. 

Atawula wrote to her brother and was careful not to include anything border inspection or police might be able to use against him.
“When I was writing the letter, I felt I was living in the dark ages,” Atawula said. 

She gave it to the woman, along with small presents for her children and money she had saved for her family.
A month later, she got a reply. 

The Uyghur woman, who she calls sister, smuggled a letter from her brother out of China, hidden in a packet of tissues.
Atawula sent a reply with her go-between—but after the third trip, the woman disappeared. 

Atawula doesn’t know what happened to her. 

She still writes to her family, but her letters are now kept in a diary, in the hope that one day her children will be able to read them.
It has now been more than two years since Atawula received her brother’s letter. 

She keeps it carefully folded, still in the tissue it came in. 

In that time, she has only read the words three times, as if by looking at them too much they will lose their power.
My beautiful sister,
How are you? After you left Urumqi we couldn’t contact you, but when we got your letter we were so pleased. I have so many words for you… maybe after we reunite we will be able to say them to one another. You said you miss your children. May Allah give you patience. Mother, me, and the relatives all miss you very much. We have so many hopes for you. Please be strong and don’t worry about the children.

China’s hi-tech war on its Muslim minority

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

A checkpoint in East Turkestan. 

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

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

An alarm sounded. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was now haunted by his data.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over 100,000 new police officers were hired. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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