Intense backlash shows limits to surveillance

BEIJING — A Chinese university’s plan to conduct a blanket search of student and staff electronic devices has come under fire, illustrating the limits of the population’s tolerance for surveillance and raising the prospect that tactics used on Muslim minorities may be creeping into the rest of the country.

The Guilin University of Electronic Technology is reconsidering a search of cell phones, computers, external hard disks and USB drives after a copy of the order leaked online and triggered such an intense backlash that it drew rare criticism in state-run newspapers.

Searches of electronics are common in Xinjiang in China’s far west, a heavily Muslim region that has been turned into a virtual police state to tamp down unrest. They are unheard of in most other areas, including where the school is located in the southern Guangxi region, a popular tourist destination known for spectacular scenery, not violence or terrorism.

That’s why the planned checks worry some.

“Xinjiang has emerged as China’s surveillance laboratory,” said James Leibold, a scholar of Chinese ethnic politics and national identity at La Trobe University in Australia. “It is unsurprising that some of the methods first pioneered in China’s west are now being rolled out in other regions.”

Under President Xi Jinping, the government has in recent years tried to tighten controls over what the public sees and says online and stepped up political oversight of universities. Sometimes, these measures have run into a new generation of Chinese accustomed to greater freedoms, sparking public outcry and occasionally government retreat.

The leaked notice in Guilin warned that hostile domestic groups and foreign powers are “wantonly spreading illicit and illegal videos” through the internet. It said the search for violent, terrorist, reactionary and obscene content, which was to be conducted this month, was necessary to resist and combat extremist recordings that it called mentally harmful.

The order triggered a public uproar last week.

Posts on China’s Twitter-like Weibo site with hashtags on schools checking electronic devices were viewed nearly 80 million times. Users voiced privacy concerns, comparing the measure to computer chips inserted in brains and the George Orwell novel “1984.”

Xinjiang is home to a large Uighur population, a Muslim ethnic group that has long harbored simmering resentment against rule from Beijing. A series of riots and attacks blamed on separatist Uighurs has prompted a sweeping crackdown on Muslims in the region.

China has rolled out one of the world’s most aggressive surveillance and policing programs in Xinjiang and Tibet.