China uses data to tamp down on Uighurs

KORLA, China — Possibly tens of thousands of people have been spirited away without trial into China’s secretive detention camps for alleged crimes that range from having extremist thoughts to merely traveling or studying abroad.

The mass disappearances, beginning the past year, are part of efforts by Chinese authorities to use detentions and data-driven surveillance to impose a police state over the region of Xinjiang and its 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority that China says has been influenced by Islamic extremism.

Unprecedented levels of police blanket Xinjiang’s streets in many cities. Cutting-edge surveillance systems track where Uighurs go, what they read, who they talk to and what they say.

Through rare interviews with Uighurs who recently left China, a review of government procurement contracts and unreported documents, and a trip through southern Xinjiang, the Associated Press pieced together a picture of a campaign that’s ostensibly rooting out terror — but instead is instilling fear.

Most of the more than a dozen Uighurs interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity for fear that Chinese authorities would punish them or their family members.

The Xinjiang regional government did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But China’s government describes its Xinjiang security policy as a “strike hard” campaign that’s necessary following a series of attacks in 2013 and 2014, including a mass knifing in a train station that killed 33. A Hotan city propaganda official, Bao Changhui, said: “If we don’t do this, it will be like several years ago — hundreds will die.”

Authorities refer to the detention program as “vocational training,” but its main purpose appears to be indoctrination. Training sessions on “Mandarin, law, ethnic unity, de-radicalization, patriotism” are described as lasting anywhere from three months to two years.

In Korla, one center the AP visited was labeled a jail. Another was downtown on a street sealed off by rifle-toting police.

Southern Xinjiang, where Korla is located, is one of the most heavily policed places on earth.

Xinjiang’s published budget data shows public security spending this year is on track to increase 50 percent from 2016 to roughly $6.8 billion. It’s quadrupled since 2009, when a Uighur riot broke out in Urumqi, killing nearly 200 people.

But much of the policing goes unseen.

Shoppers entering the Hotan bazaar must pass through metal detectors and place their national identification cards on a reader while having their faces scanned. AP reporters were stopped outside a hotel by a police officer who said the public security bureau had been remotely tracking the reporters’ movements by watching surveillance camera footage.

The government’s tracking efforts have extended to vehicles, genes and even voices. A biometric data collection program appears to have been formalized last year under “Document No. 44,” a regional public security directive to “comprehensively collect three-dimensional portraits, voiceprints, DNA and fingerprints.” The document’s full text remains secret, but the AP found at least three contracts referring to the 2016 directive in recent purchase orders for equipment such as microphones and voice analyzers.

China has also turned to a familiar low-tech surveillance tactic: recruiting the masses.

A Uighur businessman from Kashgar who fled China said his four brothers and his father were in prison because of his escape and that families tasked with spying on one another in his community had also been punished. Members from each were sent to re-education centers for three months, he said.

A document obtained by U.S.-based activists and seen by the AP shows Uighur residents in the Hebei Road West neighborhood in Urumqi, the regional capital, being graded on a 100-point scale. Those of Uighur ethnicity are automatically docked 10 points. Being aged between 15 and 55, praying daily, or having a religious education, all result in 10-point deductions. A neighborhood police official in Urumqi surnamed Tao confirmed that every community committee in the city needed to conduct similar assessments.

Uighurs abroad say it’s too risky to stay in touch with their families in China.

A Uighur student who moved to Washington after the crackdown this summer said that after his move, his wife, a government worker still in Urumqi, messaged to say the police would show up at her home in 20 minutes. She had to say goodbye: after that she would delete him permanently from her contacts list.

Later, he couldn’t help himself placing one last call home. His daughter picked up.

“Mom is sick but she doesn’t want me to speak to you. Goodbye,” she said.