Wednesday, 10 April 2019

Digital Dictatorship: China crackdown on Uyghur Muslims

Uyghurs are Turkic people of Islamic faith, Xinjiang is the homeland of the Uyghurs; China’s largest province and the world’s largest open prison.

Xi Jinping, China’s dictator and president for life targets Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, government officials and intelligence agencies’ representatives contact Uyghurs in other countries such as the United States and demand that they provide information.
Escaping from China does not necessarily imply that a Uyghur is out of the government’s reach; almost every Uyghur has some friends and/or relatives held in custody, detained in one of China’s concentration camps, being tortured, forced to renounce their faith while singing anthems of the Chinese Communist Party, may or may not be casually electrocuted or forced into restraint devices and stress positions for hours… and most importantly, may or may not be dead.
Millions of Uyghurs are detained in Chinese concentration camps; which is perhaps the most dreadful human rights crisis in the world these days. Dictators of China have struggled to control the region and its people for long years, surveillance technology is the new weapon in their campaign.
China is using DNA to track Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang; the kind of a Digital Dictatorship that was never tackled in a Hollywood movie; utilizing technology to serve an agenda of racism, religious intolerance and ethnic cleansing. According to human rights watch, the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang are collecting DNA samples along with other Biometric data from all residents in the Xinjiang province who are aged between 12 and 65 years; to improve accuracy of ethnic targeting.

In every 100 meters or so you can see a police station implanted in Xinjiang, aided with enormous amounts of CCTV cameras, with facial recognition technology; in order to enable the state’s totalitarian control over the region’s residents. With this kind of technology, they are most probably capable of counting each citizens breaths.
The locals can rarely have a chance to communicate their fears to foreign reporters (who rarely visit the province and try to investigate the issue); armed guards and surveillance cameras are spread all over the region, when Chinese flags are enforced on roof tops of several buildings, including the dimes of the mosques.
The Digital Dictatorship of China is moving forward to apply a “Social Score” system in which almost every instance of a citizen’s life is recorded, and the score is calculated accordingly. Low Social Scores may mean imposing restrictions on citizens in terms of travel, banking services, transportation, employment… or even detainment.





Miserable enough for the majority of the Chinese citizens, this system involves enormous burden on ethnic minorities in China. If you are a Hun Chinese, you are deemed trustworthy and granted freedom of movement (as long as you do not oppose the state or have trouble meeting any of your social, legal or financial obligations), if you are a Uyghur, you start with an average score, with restrictions imposed on travel and religious practices. If you are a Uyghur male who breaks those restrictions, you are marked as untrustworthy and detained in what the Chinese Communist Party calls “Education and Training Centers”.
China is facing “International Condemnation” for its mass detainment of ethnic Uyghurs, and its crackdown on Tibetans and people of various faiths:
·        The Swedish government has granted refugee status to China’s Uyghur Muslims.
·        Republicans and Democrats in the United States condemned the Chinese government’s treatment of the situation, without using diplomatic or economic tools to enforce changes.
·        The Turkish government also condemned the crackdown on Uyghur Muslims in China, but did not actually do anything beyond the official statement of condemnation; diplomatic ties and trade agreements with the Chinese government are still steady.
·        Imran Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan was asked in an interview if he would speak out against what is happening in China, and he simply responded “If I had enough knowledge, I would speak about it; it is not so much in the papers”.
·        Mohamed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia claimed that the Chinese government is entitled to handle its own internal issues.
·        The Egyptian government position is almost identical to that of Saudi Arabia
Muslim Dictators Love China; fun facts about Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia:
The Turkish dictator along with the Muslim Brotherhood group condemn the Egyptian and the Saudi dictators for violations of basic human rights and tend to mention them as "Enemies of Islam". 
The Saudi and the Egyptian Dictators on the other hand condemn the suppression of basic civil liberties in Turkey, consider the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group supported primarily by the dictators of Turkey and Qatar (when they are not considered a terrorist group by most governments, including these of the United States and the United Kingdom), and often refer to them as "Enemies of Islam" as well. 
Yet, these dictators can manage to agree on the love of Uncle XI!

What is clear is that there is a brutal repressive crackdown conducted by the Chinese government in Xinjiang, and technology is at the center of it.


Related Books: 







No comments:

Post a Comment