Xinjiang's Government Does Not Merely Surveille and Monitor Its Subjects But Seeks "To Purge Their Thoughts"
By
Daniel Pipes
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2022
The
Perfect Police State
An
Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future
By
Geoffrey Cain
New
York: Public Affairs, 2021. 287 pp. $17.99.
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Prior
colonial rulers – the Spanish in Mindanao, the Dutch in Aceh, the French in
Algeria, the Russians in Central Asia – have sought to control their Muslim
subjects and defang Islamic sentiments, always failing. Can the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) in the territory historically known as East Turkestan and
renamed Xinjiang by its Chinese overlords, succeed in this task?
As Cain's
title suggests, he believes it can. An investigative journalist and technology
writer, he emphasizes the mix of the indomitable CCP will and
twenty-first-century methods. From first-hand experience and extensive
interviews alike, he reports that there exists no "surveillance state so
well-honed and menacing as this one," not even North Korea's. Xinjiang's
government does not merely surveille and monitor its subjects but seeks
"to purge their thoughts" of bad ideas, a wholly different
undertaking and one intimately tied to the Uyghur’s' Turkic and Islamic
identities. The goal is cultural genocide without killing. As an apparatchik in
a detention camp put it, "We are the surgeons who operate on your brains,
your ideology. Your minds are poisoned. Now, we will give you medicine. You
must be grateful to our great nation for this medicine."
Cain
describes in detail the impact of a state-imposed video camera in a Uyghur
household. Of course, this effort requires the active participation of
high-tech companies, and they (Microsoft in particular) have been only too
willing to oblige.
He calls
CCP control over Xinjiang an "apartheid relationship." As might be
expected, this has turned some nominal Muslims into active ones: "I
decided I was, in my heart, Muslim, because China kept pushing me away, as some
kind of other."
The human
costs are already stunning and only getting worse: "Every Uyghur I
interviewed from 2017 to 2020 had at least two family members and three friends
who had disappeared. ... about one-third reported that their entire families
were gone, and they were the only ones who had escaped." Cain predicts
that the technology and methods tried out in Xinjiang will eventually extend to
other places.
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© 2022 Daniel Pipes, All rights reserved.
Source: Middle East Forum
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/books-documents/xinjiang-surveille-monitor-thoughts/d/126574
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