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Police State
For those not placed in internment camps, they have faced the Chinese crackdown on Uyghurs in various other ways. In order to suppress the masses, the Chinese government has implemented an Orwellian system of mass surveillance, specifically targeting Uyghurs in Xinjiang and keeping personal files on each family as well as facial recognition cameras and implementation of a “pre-crime” algorithm for identifying potential targets.
To bring about a show of force and impose an auora of intimidation via watchfulness, the CCP has dramatically increased spending on and the number of security forces, including military and police units in Xinjiang. An estimated 10,000 police units were hired in February of 2019 alone.
This increase in police units has led to an increase in harassment, discrimination, and difficulty in life in Xinjiang. Numerous checkpoints have been set up where belongings, people, and sometimes phones are searched for potential "extremism" against China. Frequent patrols by the People's Armed Police (Chinese paramilitary) are sent out to suppress ideas of independence and protest.
To make matters more dystopian, the CCP has implemented force individuals to install surveillance software on their devices, primarily phones. This includes GPS trackers and software that reads messages and monitors the search history of Uyghurs. In addition, they have installed "Wi-Fi sniffers" that collect information from phones and computers.
On the physical approach of China's harassment of Uyghurs, they have forcefully and secretly obtained voice samples of individuals speaking on tapped phone calls as well as fingerprints, eye scans, and DNA samples for data collection and analyzation.
Electronically, the CCP continues to degrade the idea of privacy and massively enhance surveillance. An estimated 40,000 facial recognition cameras line the Xinjiang region, monitoring the Uyghurs' every move. Several of these cameras are placed outside of Mosques to identify potential extremists.
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To put this mass surveillance and data collection to use, the CCP employed an algorithm run on AI and machine learning that analyzes large amounts of collected data including surveilled and personal data that is able to identify possible individuals that may potentially take part in any anti-Chinese activity. This ranges from actually radical militants to simply those displeased with the government. The implementation of this system has led to the disappearance of neighbors, propelling the Uyghurs in Xinjiang to live in a state of fear.
It's estimated almost a million Uyghurs have disappeared from their homes with a message in the form a piece of paper on the wall of a chained door simply saying the disappeared are being looked after.
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