{"id":525,"date":"2019-05-27T23:25:03","date_gmt":"2019-05-27T14:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/?p=525"},"modified":"2019-05-27T23:25:12","modified_gmt":"2019-05-27T14:25:12","slug":"virtual-cage-surrounds-restive-region-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/2019\/05\/27\/virtual-cage-surrounds-restive-region-in-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Virtual cage surrounds restive region in China"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Chris Buckley and Paul MozurPublished\u00a02:31\u00a0pm PDT, Friday, May 24, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

KASHGAR, China \u2014 A God\u2019s-eye view of Kashgar, an ancient city in western China, flashed onto a wall-size screen, with colorful icons marking police stations, checkpoints and the locations of recent security incidents. At the click of a mouse, a technician explained, the police can pull up live video from any surveillance camera or take a closer look at anyone passing through one of the thousands of checkpoints in the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To demonstrate, she showed how the system could retrieve the photo, home address and official identification number of a woman who had been stopped at a checkpoint on a major highway. The system sifted through billions of records, then displayed details of her education, family ties, links to an earlier case and recent visits to a hotel and an internet cafe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The simulation, presented at an industry fair in China, offered a rare look at a system that now peers into nearly every corner of Xinjiang, the troubled region where Kashgar is located.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the vision of high-tech surveillance \u2014 precise, all-seeing, infallible \u2014 that China\u2019s leaders are investing billions of dollars in every year, making Xinjiang an incubator for increasingly intrusive policing systems that could spread across the country and beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is also a vision that some of President Trump\u2019s aides have begun citing in a push for tougher action against Chinese companies in the intensifying trade war. Beyond concerns about market barriers, theft and national security, they argue that China is using technology to strengthen authoritarianism at home and abroad \u2014 and that the United States must stop it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Developed and sold by the China Electronics Technology Corp., a state-run defense manufacturer, the system in Kashgar is on the cutting edge of what has become a flourishing new market for services and equipment that the government can use to monitor and subdue millions of Uighurs and members of other Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Treating a city like a battlefield, the platform was designed to \u201capply the ideas of military cybersystems to civilian public security,\u201d Wang Pengda, a CETC engineer, said in an official blog post. \u201cLooking back, it truly was an idea ahead of its time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The system taps into networks of neighborhood informants; tracks individuals and analyzes their behavior; tries to anticipate potential crime, protest or violence; and then recommends which security forces to deploy, the company said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the screen during the demonstration was a slogan: \u201cIf someone exists, there will be traces, and if there are connections, there will be information.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A New York Times investigation drawing on government and company records as well as interviews with industry insiders found that China is in effect hard-wiring Xinjiang for segregated surveillance, using an army of security personnel to compel ethnic minorities to submit to monitoring and data collection while generally ignoring the majority Han Chinese, who make up 36% of Xinjiang\u2019s population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a virtual cage that complements the indoctrination camps in Xinjiang where the authorities have detained 1 million or more Uighurs and other Muslims in a push to transform them into secular citizens who will never challenge the ruling Communist Party. The program helps identify people to be sent to the camps or investigated, and keeps tabs on them when they are released.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Trump administration is considering whether to blacklist one of the Chinese companies at the center of the Xinjiang effort, Hikvision, and bar it from buying U.S. technology. Hikvision is a major manufacturer of video surveillance equipment, with customers around the world and across Xinjiang, where its cameras have been installed at mosques and detention camps. CETC owns about 42% of the company through subsidiaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cXinjiang is maybe a kind of more extreme, more intrusive example of China\u2019s mass surveillance systems,\u201d said Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied the technology in the region. \u201cThese systems are designed for a very explicit purpose \u2014 to target Muslims.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the city of Kashgar, with a population of 720,000 \u2014 about 85% of them Uighur \u2014 the CETC platform draws on databases with 68 billion records, including those on people\u2019s movements and activities, according to the demonstration viewed by a Times reporter at the industry fair, held in the eastern city of Wuzhen in late 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By comparison, the FBI\u2019s national instant criminal background check system contained about 19 million records at the end of 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The police in Xinjiang use a mobile app, made by CETC for smartphones running the Android operating system, to enter information into the databases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human Rights Watch, which obtained and analyzed the app, said it helped the authorities spot behavior that they consider suspicious, including extended travel abroad or the use of an \u201cunusual\u201d amount of electricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The app, which the Times examined, also allows police officers to flag people they believe have stopped using a smartphone, have begun avoiding the use of the front door in coming and going from home, or have refueled someone else\u2019s car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The police use the app at checkpoints that serve as virtual \u201cfences\u201d across Xinjiang. If someone is tagged as a potential threat, the system can be set to trigger an alarm every time he or she tries to leave the neighborhood or enters a public place, Human Rights Watch said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe government\u2019s arbitrary power is reflected, or coded, in the app,\u201d Wang said, adding that the system \u201cis programmed to consider vague, broad categories of behaviors, many of them perfectly legal, as indicators of suspiciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intelligence agencies in many countries use sets of behavior to single out individuals for greater scrutiny. But China has taken that approach to an extreme, treating the Muslim population in Xinjiang as suspect from the start and defining suspicious behavior in sweeping terms, including peaceful religious activities such as making a donation to a mosque.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Chinese government has defended the surveillance program, saying it has improved security in the region, and says the indoctrination camps in Xinjiang are job training centers. Hikvision has denied \u201cany inappropriate actions in Xinjiang,\u201d and CETC declined to comment when reached by phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CETC traces its roots to the military research labs that helped build China\u2019s first nuclear bomb, satellite and guided missile. Established as a state defense manufacturer in 2002, it soon expanded into civilian security matters, working with Microsoft, for instance, to create a version of Windows that meets the government\u2019s internal security requirements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, it turned to Xinjiang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Communist Party, which took control of the region in 1949, has long been wary of the Uighurs, whose Turkic culture and Muslim faith have inspired demands for self-rule, and sometimes attacks on Chinese targets. State investment in surveillance took off a decade ago after anti-Chinese rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi, killed nearly 200 people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real bonanza of security contracts came after Xi Jinping took the helm of the party in late 2012. Spending on internal security in Xinjiang in 2017 totaled $8.3 billion, six times as much in 2012, including funds for surveillance, personnel and the indoctrination camps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hikvision has received contracts in Xinjiang worth at least $290 million for its cameras and facial recognition systems. Another company tapping into Xinjiang\u2019s security gold rush is Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that the United States has described as a security threat. It signed an agreement last year with the region\u2019s police department to help officers analyze data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The multilayered program to harvest information from Uighurs and other Muslims begins on the edges of towns and cities across Xinjiang in buildings that look like toll plazas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of coins, they collect personal information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a recent visit to one checkpoint in Kashgar, a line of passengers and drivers, nearly all Uighur, got out of their vehicles, trudged through automated gates made by CETC and swiped their identity cards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHead up,\u201d the machines chimed as they photographed the motorists and armed guards looked on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are smaller checkpoints at banks, parks, schools, gas stations and mosques, all recording information from identity cards in the mass surveillance database.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Identification cards are also needed to buy knives, gasoline, phones, computers and even sugar. The purchases are entered into a police database used to flag suspicious behavior or individuals, according to a 2017 dissertation by a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences that features screenshots of the system in Kashgar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not everyone has to endure the inconvenience. At many checkpoints, privileged groups \u2014 Han Chinese, Uighur officials with passes, and foreign visitors \u2014 are waved through \u201cgreen channels.\u201d In this way, the authorities have created separate yet overlapping worlds on the same streets \u2014 and in the online police databases \u2014 one for Muslim minorities, the other for Han Chinese.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe goal here is instilling fear \u2014 fear that their surveillance technology can see into every corner of your life,\u201d said Wang Lixiong, a Chinese author who has written about Xinjiang as well as China\u2019s surveillance state. \u201cThe amount of people and equipment used for security is part of the deterrent effect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Chris Buckley and Paul Mozur are New York Times writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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