China's hi-tech war on its Muslim minority

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

Most Uighurs in the detention centres are on their way to serving long prison sentences, or to indefinite captivity in a growing network of internment camps, which the Chinese state has described as facilities for “transformation through education”. These camps, which function as medium-security prisons and, in some cases, forced-labour factories, attempt to train Uighurs to disavow their Islamic identity and embrace the secular principles of the Chinese state. They forbid the use of the Uighur language and instead offer drills in Mandarin, the language of China’s Han majority. Only a handful of detainees who are not Chinese citizens have been fully released from this “re-education” system.


In her recent study on the rise of “surveillance capitalism”, the Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff notes that consumers are constantly generating valuable data that can be turned into profitable predictions about our preferences and future behaviours. In the Uighur region, this logic has been taken to an extreme. The power – and potential profitability – of the predictive technologies that purport to keep Xinjiang safe derive from their unfettered access to Uighurs’ digital lives and physical movements. From the perspective of China’s security-industrial establishment, the principal purpose of Uighur life is to generate data, which can then be used to further refine these systems of surveillance and control.

To read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/apr/11/china-hi-tech-war-on-muslim-minority-xinjiang-uighurs-surveillance-face-recognition