China’s surveillance apparatus envelops Uyghur Muslims through engineered digital subjugation

Evidence

Scholars have dubbed this policing that envelops Xinjiang as “preventive repression,” and even “Big Brother” would be a severe understatement. The gaze of the state, on the daily routine of Uyghur Muslims in Kashgar, Urumqi, and cities and villages throughout Xinjiang, is ubiquitous and incessant. It exists in the form of facial recognition cameras affixed to street poles or mobile cameras in the form of “spy doves,” algorithmic vetting linked to smart cards carried by Uyghur residents, and perpetual mining and tracking of data from the very smartphones they carry everywhere they go. This digital state of subjugation “bring[s] a desperate and ferocious loneliness into everyday life, tearing apart communities, turning children against their parents. It is the engineers of these systems—the algorithm tinkerers, the face recognition designers, the DNA mappers, the ‘smart’ pedagogists” who design the dystopian laboratory of life, or what remains of it, in Xinjiang. In the camps and beyond them, Islamophobia in China is brutally engineered to destroy the Uyghur Muslim people and remove them from a land the government seeks to absorb, and remake, in the image of an atheist, Communist, and Han China. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 625

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Western anti-Muslim surveillance programs discussed earlier in this book and to broader state-surveillance literatures like Zuboff-style surveillance capitalism runs.
• QUESTION: The phrase ‘preventive repression’ deserves tracing to its originating scholars for a comparative definition across states.