{"id":428,"date":"2019-05-10T00:17:44","date_gmt":"2019-05-09T15:17:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/?p=428"},"modified":"2019-05-10T00:17:54","modified_gmt":"2019-05-09T15:17:54","slug":"inside-chinas-massive-surveillance-operation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/2019\/05\/10\/inside-chinas-massive-surveillance-operation\/","title":{"rendered":"INSIDE CHINA’S MASSIVE SURVEILLANCE OPERATION"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/inside-chinas-massive-surveillance-operation\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

THE WOMAN REMEMBERS the first time she got a smartphone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was 2011, and she was living in Hotan, an oasis town in Xinjiang, 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\u2019t believe them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In early 2016, police started making routine checks on Atawula\u2019s home. Her husband was regularly called to the police station. The police informed him they were suspicious of his WeChat activity. Atawula\u2019s children began to cower in fear at the sight of a police officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The harassment and fear finally reached the point that the family decided to move to Turkey. Atawula\u2019s husband, worried that Atawula would be arrested, sent her ahead while he stayed in Xinjiang and waited for the children\u2019s passports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ABOUT THIS STORY<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

This article is a co-production with Coda’s Authoritarian Tech channel<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe day I left, my husband was arrested,\u201d Atawula said. When she arrived in Turkey in June 2016, her phone stopped working\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was alone in Istanbul and her digital connection with life in Xinjiang 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. \u201cSometimes I feel like the days I was with my family are just my dreams, as if I have been lonely all my life\u2014ever since I was born,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Atawula now lives alone in Zeytinburnu, a working-class neighborhood in Istanbul. It\u2019s home to Turkey\u2019s largest population of Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic minority native to Xinjiang, a vast, resource-rich land of deserts and mountains along China\u2019s ancient Silk Road trade route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Atawula is one of around 34,000 Uyghurs in Turkey. She is unable to contact any of her relatives\u2014via phone, WeChat, or any other app. \u201cI feel very sad when I see other people video chatting with their families,\u201d she says. \u201cI think, why can\u2019t we even hear the voice of our children?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Uyghurs in Xinjiang, 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\u2019t dare try to make contact, for fear Chinese authorities would punish their relatives. It\u2019s just one of the ways President Xi Jinping\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zeytinburnu, the Istanbul suburb where Atawula lives, lies behind the city\u2019s winding expressways, and is dotted with restaurants and caf\u00e9s serving Uyghur cuisine: wide, slippery noodles, lamb kebabs, and green tea. The Uyghur separatist flag\u2014a light blue version of the Turkish flag\u2014is a common sight. It\u2019s a banned image in China, representing East Turkestan, the name for Xinjiang despised by the Chinese government that almost all Uyghurs here give to their homeland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Xinjiang\u2014meaning \u201cnew frontier\u201d in Chinese\u2014was brought under the Communist Party of China\u2019s control in 1949. During the latter half of the 20th century, Uyghur independence was a threat that loomed over the party\u2019s agenda. The government tried to stamp out separatism and \u201cassimilate\u201d the Uyghurs by encouraging mass migration of Han Chinese, China\u2019s dominant ethnic group, to Xinjiang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the \u201990s, riots erupted between Uyghurs and Chinese police. In a white paper<\/a> published in March, the Chinese government defined the riots as \u201cinhuman, anti-social and barbaric acts\u201d perpetrated by separatist groups. Amnesty International, meanwhile, described the 1997 protests in Gulja, Xinjiang<\/a>, as a peaceful demonstration turned massacre, quoting exiled Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer. \u201cI have never seen such viciousness in my life,\u201d she said. \u201cChinese soldiers were bludgeoning the demonstrators.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the 9\/11 attacks, the Chinese government took a page from George W. Bush\u2019s war on terror and began targeting separatist groups in Xinjiang. In 2009, bloody ethnic riots broke out between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi, the Xinjiang 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\u2014digitally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The WeChat Lockdown<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014known as \u201cUndidar\u201d in the Uyghur language. It quickly became a vital communication tool across China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The launch of WeChat was \u201ca moment of huge relief and freedom,\u201d said Aziz Isa, a Uyghur scholar who has studied Uyghur use of WeChat<\/a> alongside Rachel Harris at London\u2019s SOAS University. \u201cNever before in Uyghur life had we had the opportunity to use social media in this way,\u201d Isa said, describing how Uyghurs across class divides were openly discussing everything from politics to religion to music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 2013, around a million Uyghurs were using the app. Harris and Isa observed a steady rise in Islamic content, \u201cmost of it apolitical but some of it openly radical and oppositional.\u201d 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, he said, \u201cdidn\u2019t understand the authorities were watching.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This kind of unrestricted communication on WeChat went on for around a year. But in May 2014, the Chinese government enlisted a taskforce<\/a> to stamp out \u201cmalpractice\u201d on instant messaging apps, in particular \u201crumors and information leading to violence, terrorism, and pornography.\u201d WeChat, alongside its rival apps, was required to let the government monitor the activity of its users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SUBSCRIBE<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
SUBSCRIBE<\/a> TO WIRED AND DON’T MISS OUR AWARD-WINNING LONGFORM FEATURES<\/a>.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Miyesser Mijit, 28, whose name has been changed to protect her family, is a Uyghur master\u2019s student in Istanbul who left Xinjiang 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mijit\u2019s brother, who was drafted into the Xinjiang police force in the late 2000s, warned her to watch her language while using technology. \u201cHe always told me not to share anything about my religion and to take care with my words,\u201d 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 Xinjiang for the university vacation period. Her precautions turned out to be insufficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Surveillance State Is Born<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

VIDEO BY CODA<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

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 Xinjiang. \u201cAll your life will be in the record,\u201d he told her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In May 2014, alongside the WeChat crackdown, China announced a wider \u201cStrike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism.\u201d 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 Xinjiang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After being subjected to daily police checks on her home in Urumqi, Mijit decided to leave Xinjiang 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. \u201cI got off the bus and everyone was checked one by one,\u201d she said. She was also greeted by devices affixed to the entrance of every supermarket, mall, and hospital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
NATASHA WIGODER<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.\u201cIt was like a monkey show,\u201d she said. \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 Xinjiang\u2019s Uyghur population and help track those deemed nonconformists. \u201cThe police station was full of Uyghurs,\u201d Abduwayit says. \u201cAll of them were there to give blood samples.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, Abduwayit was made to give a voice sample to the police. \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The voice-recognition program was powered by Chinese artificial intelligence giant iFlytek, which claims a 70 percent share of China\u2019s speech recognition industry. In August 2017, Human Rights Watch found information<\/a>indicating iFlytek supplied voiceprint technology to police bureaus in Xinjiang province. The company opened an office in Silicon Valley in 2017 and remains open about working \u201cunder the guidance of the Ministry of Public Security\u201d to provide \u201ca new experience for public safety and forensic identification,\u201d according to the Chinese version of its website<\/a>. The company says it offers a particular focus<\/a> to creating antiterrorism technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n