{"id":1203,"date":"2019-12-01T00:42:27","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T15:42:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/?p=1203"},"modified":"2019-12-01T00:42:27","modified_gmt":"2019-11-30T15:42:27","slug":"what-the-chinese-are-doing-to-the-uighurs-in-xinjiang-could-become-a-model-for-elsewhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/2019\/12\/01\/what-the-chinese-are-doing-to-the-uighurs-in-xinjiang-could-become-a-model-for-elsewhere\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs in Xinjiang could become a model for elsewhere"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/world\/2019\/11\/what-chinese-are-doing-uighurs-xinjiang-could-become-model-elsewhere?fbclid=IwAR08RAAmr_PD0B93gAlou5EI9ZMo18aPWtnK7RlDlVyaVrsCuk5G8zN8jPA<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

27 NOVEMBER 2019 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent episode of the dystopian anthology series\u00a0Black Mirror<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 spoiler alert! \u2013 the British police are called to a live crime scene. On the line are executives at Smithereen, an addictive American social media platform caught up in the situation. At every step, the firm turns out to know more about the perpetrator than the authorities of his sovereign country. The officers are public-spirited and decent, and the criminal is not a straightforward baddie or lunatic, but the sovereignties of both state and individual are overwhelmed by the reach of a Californian data giant that knows his darkest traumas, can listen in to him, and can plumb its algorithms to understand his emotional make-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The episode could be a dramatisation of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism<\/em>, the celebrated book by the American social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff. Seven years in the making, it anatomises the rise of \u201cinstrumentarian power\u201d, whereby firms capture data about human behaviour, process it and turn the resulting information advantage into an instrument of prediction and control. It is the tale of a new Gilded Age in which giant firms \u2013 real-life Smithereens such as Facebook and Google \u2013 have unfair and undemocratic power over states and individuals. Zuboff\u2019s thesis, like the Black Mirror<\/em> episode, leaves you briefly thinking: if only the state could wield the same data power as the top-knotted Silicon Valley billionaires. But then images of overreach and authoritarianism swim before your eyes and you think: oh God, that would be hell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It falls not to Black Mirror<\/em> to offer a glimpse of that other extreme but to journalists, because a world where the state wields even more data power than Facebook or Google already exists. It is Xinjiang, a mountainous region of north-west China and home to 11 million Uighurs, a mostly Muslim central Asian people. On 24 November the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) provided that glimpse, in the form of an unprecedented leak of secret Chinese government documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cache sheds light on a network of government camps \u2013 the largest internment of an ethno-religious minority since the Second World War \u2013 that can hold more than a million people. It exposes the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), the surveillance programme that decides who gets interned. The platform collects information from social media, other websites and apps, facial recognition cameras, health data and checkpoints, and uses it to identify citizens who might threaten China\u2019s one-party leadership and ethnically Han Chinese-dominated society. Things as banal as prayer and foreign travel can tip the balance. These people are often interned as \u201cstudents\u201d, subjected to dehumanising treatment and allowed to \u201cgraduate\u201d back into society only after they have undergone an \u201cideological transformation\u201d. The leaks show that in one week in June 2017 the IJOP flagged 24,412 \u201csuspicious persons\u201d, 15,683 of whom were rounded up. The system\u2019s arbitrariness, driven by algorithms based partly on artificial intelligence (AI), infantilises the population and creates a paranoid atmosphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might write this off as but a ghastly peculiarity of China\u2019s techno-autocracy. Even if that were the case, there would be a strong argument for sanctions on officials and firms involved in the Xinjiang nightmare. But it is not. Xinjiang is a Petri dish for technologies and methods that can be applied elsewhere. Governments and firms from around the world got to marvel at the emotion recognition systems pioneered in the region at China\u2019s main security trade fair in the city of Shenzhen last month. And while Google or Facebook may not cooperate with Western governments to the extent that their Chinese counterparts do with Beijing, China shows how naturally Big Tech and government can rub along together; the gulf between an omniscient Smithereen and the clueless British police portrayed in Black Mirror <\/em>may come to seem quaint. Zuboff has rightly argued that the West cannot be complacent about the elision of instrumentarian and authoritarian power, warning of \u201ca weakened democracy with a totalitarian leader who wants to grab control\u2026 It happened in the 20th century and can happen again.\u201d A big-data Weimar, in other words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is, however, hope in Zuboff\u2019s thesis. She notes that the original Gilded Age of monopolistic oil and railroad firms in the 19th century was tamed in the 20th century by new rules and institutions: trust-busting regulations, trades unions and eventually the New Deal welfare state (or social democracy, as it\u2019s called in Europe). One can extend her comparison: if Silicon Valley billionaires are the Rockefellers of the data age then China\u2019s leaders are the new Lenins, melding the power of data with that of the state to create an alternative, more abusively centralised model. Once more, in the early decades of a century human civilisation is faced with a grim choice between domination by private firms and domination by overmighty states. Yet once more, there is a healthier third way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, that is some form of data social democracy. States should be able to harness and tame the power of data and AI, but with clear controls and limits. New institutions must arise to mediate between interest groups. Civil society needs to step up (the campaign for the EU\u2019s new data privacy regime, the GDPR, is a good model). Most of all, sovereign citizens must hold sway over the new forms of power and be able, collectively, to curb monopolies. So where the call once was \u201cneither Rockefeller nor Lenin\u201d and \u201cneither Washington nor Moscow\u201d, now let it be \u201cneither surveillance capitalism nor techno-autocracy\u201d and \u201cneither Silicon Valley nor Xinjiang\u201d. Pluralism and democracy must win the day. Because \u2013 spoiler alert! \u2013 the alternative is nightmarish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/world\/2019\/11\/what-chinese-are-doing-uighurs-xinjiang-could-become-model-elsewhere?fbclid=IwAR08RAAmr_PD0B93gAlou5EI9ZMo18aPWtnK7RlDlVyaVrsCuk5G8zN8jPA 27 NOVEMBER 2019 In a recent episode of the dystopian anthology series\u00a0Black Mirror\u00a0\u2013 spoiler alert! \u2013 the British police are called to a live … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1204,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[24],"class_list":["post-1203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1205,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions\/1205"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuzb.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}