China Surveillance

China is ramping up its ability to spy on its nearly 1.4 billion people to new and disturbing levels, giving the world a blueprint for how to build a digital totalitarian state......... The United States and other countries use some of the same techniques to track terrorists or drug lords. Chinese cities want to use them to track everybody. ...... The rollout has come at the expense of personal privacy. The Times found that the authorities parked the personal data of millions of people on servers unprotected by even basic security measures. It also found that private contractors and middlemen have wide access to personal data collected by the Chinese government...... The surveillance networks are controlled by local police, as if county sheriffs in the United States ran their own personal versions of the National Security Agency. ..... the Chinese surveillance state is spreading past its borders. ..... “Each person’s data forms a trail” .... “It can be used by the government and it can be used by bosses at the big companies to track us. Our lives are worth about as much as dirt.” ..... This single system is part of a citywide surveillance network encompassing license plates, phone numbers, faces and social media information ....... how China turned one city into a virtual prison. ..... Even for China’s police, who enjoy broad powers to question and detain people, this level of control is unprecedented. Tracking people so closely once required cooperation from uncooperative institutions in Beijing. The state-run phone companies, for example, are often reluctant to share sensitive or lucrative data with local authorities ....... In recent years, Chinese police made use of fears of unrest to win more power and resources. ....... In Zhengzhou, police can use software to create lists of people. They can create virtual alarms for when a person approaches a particular location. They can get updates on people every hour or every day. They can monitor whom those people have met with, especially if both people are on a blacklist for some kind of infraction, from committing a crime to skipping a debt payment. ....... Police are not hiding their surveillance push. Even the perception of overwhelming surveillance can deter criminals and dissidents alike. ......... At the complex in Zhengzhou, residents were unfazed when told that the cameras and boxes were part of a sophisticated surveillance system. .......... Across China, unprotected databases hold information on students and teachers in schools, on online activity in internet cafes and on hotel stays and travel records. ....... Online data leakage is a major problem in China. Local media reports describe how people with access to the data sell private details to fraudsters, suspicious spouses and anyone else, sometimes for just a few dollars per person. ........ A technology contractor called Shenfenbao, for example, had access to real-time records of every person staying in some 1,200 hotels in the southern city of Xiamen. ....... Mr. Lin, who added that his company also offered algorithms to flag women who check into multiple hotels in one night for suspicion of prostitution. ....... Signs of a backlash are brewing. In Shanghai, residents pushed back against a police plan to install facial-recognition cameras in a building complex. In Zhejiang Province, a professor filed a lawsuit against a zoo after it required mandatory facial-recognition scans for its members to get access. ........... In the Shijiachi residential complex, where the facial recognition replaced key card locks, the rebellion has been powered by wire and plywood........ Agnes Ouyang was heading to work in Shenzhen last year when two police officers told her she had jaywalked and would need to show them her identity card. When she refused, she said, they grabbed her roughly and used a phone to snap a photo of her face......... Within moments, their facial-recognition system had identified her, and they issued her a ticket for about $3. ......

the country lacks a strong court system or other checks against government overreach. But outside the realm of politics, Chinese life could be freewheeling and chaotic thanks to lax enforcement or indifferent officials.

...... “Under Xi Jinping, we’re seeing the flowering of a police state.” ....... Chinese police now boast that facial-recognition systems regularly catch crooks. At a tourist island in the picturesque port city of Xiamen, authorities say they use facial recognition to catch unlicensed tour guides. Shanghai police have begun using helmets with a camera embedded in the front. Databases and procurement documents also show they search out the mentally ill, people with a history of drug use or government gadflies. ...........

“I said, ‘how did you find me?’” Ms. Ouyang said. “He said, ‘it’s easy for the police to find a person.’”

........ she worries about her future in a country where everything is watched and controlled........ “You’re uncomfortable with it,” she said. “But if you don’t do it, then there’s no possibility of living a life. There’s no way out.”

Raising The Stakes On Non Political Solution In Hong Kong

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam invokes emergency powers, announces face mask ban

Beijing and Carrie Lam are obviously nowhere near looking at the other four demands. They seem to think there is a police soltion to the whole situation. They want to tire out the protestors. They want to wait it out.

Your opponent will do what your opponent will do. But you have to chalk out your own strategy.

Leaderless is not a movement. Disorganized is not a movement. It bothers me that the Hong Kong protestors choose not to be politically organized.

The mask is a human reaction to the surveillance cameras. People don't want Big Brother to know where they are all the time. That invasion of privacy is so total. This is a global issue.

China, US, Hong Kong, Xinjiang

China Lost the United States First I was enthralled by the apparent success of China’s development model, manifested in the urban landscapes of Beijing and Shanghai. ......... the inequitable ways in which China treats U.S. persons and companies at home and overseas. ...... the almost inevitable surveillance foreigners encounter from the moment they cross the border. Foreigners risk a complete abrogation of their individual rights and any form of legal recourse or due process upon entering the country—putting them, of course, in the same position as the vast majority of Chinese citizens. ....... the typical scrutiny that high-profile foreign businesspeople endure but fail to publicize for fear of retribution or the impact on their bottom line. ...... Outside of a few dozen special cases, there is effectively no route to permanent immigration or even established residence in China; even long-term foreign residents often deal with visa issuance on a year-by-year basis. Foreign employees are forced to pay into a pensions and social security system that no one, so far, has been able to tap into. ........ Foreign journalists, who are private citizens permitted to work in China, are treated as covert operatives of their country of origin and routinely have their visas revoked for doing their job.... China uses visa status, business licensing approvals, and professional credentials as political tools, rewarding those individuals and companies that toe the government line while banishing those that do not. Chinese state media, meanwhile, is free to spew government-backed narratives and disinformation throughout the Western world. ......... In time, China will become an isolated, techno-totalitarian state, with only a few sycophantic foreigners left to be paraded out by official media and claim that China remains open to foreign citizens and businesses alike. ...... in Xi’s China, the only end is the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party—at the expense of Chinese citizens and the rest of the global community. ...... China ought to start behaving like the benevolent global actor it claims to be. If it doesn’t, it will become a global pariah, risking the instability that it so often professes to avoid.

The End of Hong Kong Is Almost Here
Chinese Propaganda Paints Hong Kong as a Spoiled Brat Hong Kong protesters know how they see themselves. One crowdfunded statue of the “Goddess of Democracy”—adapted from an image originally adopted during protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989—depicts the archetypal “front line” protester, complete with hard hat, gas mask, and protective goggles.

"In each store I visited, the only Uighur-language book was a copy of Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China."

A chilling account of China’s war on Uighur culture by @cdcshepherdhttps://t.co/sGKvawUQfS

— Nectar Gan (@Nectar_Gan) September 12, 2019

China, US, Hong Kong https://t.co/dk2RGjqxW3 @JAustinLowe @PeterMartin_PCM @BeijingPalmer @Nectar_Gan @osmastro @anniekowalewski

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) September 12, 2019

Fear and oppression in Xinjiang: China’s war on Uighur culture Beijing’s crackdown on minorities reflects a broader push towards a single ‘state-race’ ...... a former classmate had reported Yarmuhemmed’s family as being overly religious, resulting in a police search of the family home. Earlier that year, the authorities had ramped up scrutiny of all Muslim groups in the region, encouraging individuals to report their neighbours if they behaved “suspiciously” — which could mean anything from failing to socialise to fundraising for a local mosque........ Yarmuhemmed, 28, was arrested, tried and jailed for 10 years. Asqar never found out what he’d been charged with....... What happened to the Yarmuhemmeds — police searches, sudden detentions, the separation of families — has been repeated across hundreds of thousands of households in Xinjiang in the past few years, as China’s Communist party has placed the entire region in lockdown....... The Uighurs, who are mostly Muslim, make up nearly half of Xinjiang’s 24 million population. Scholars estimate that about 1.5 million Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui and other mostly Muslim minorities have been interned in camps that the government describes as aiming to “transform through education”, while hundreds of thousands more have been arrested and jailed. ........ During the crackdown, it has become almost impossible for Uighurs to leave Xinjiang to study or live abroad, due to a rigorous process of checks by the police before they can be granted a passport........ Testimony from former internees and government procurement documents suggests that camps such as the one Behram is being held in are run like prisons. Beatings, solitary confinement and other harsh punishments are meted out if internees do not follow orders........ Former detainees have described how the facilities run ideological indoctrination courses, where they must learn Mandarin Chinese, recite laws banning unapproved religious practice and sing songs praising the Chinese Communist party. ........ the Communist party’s attempts to assimilate Uighurs into Han Chinese cultural traditions. ...... Those on the list alongside Husenjan make up the backbone of Uighur intellectual life: doctors, computer scientists, musicians, anthropologists and authors. ....... Many are moderate and non-religious. ....... “cultural genocide”, a term usually defined as the forced assimilation of an indigenous group with the aim of eliminating its cultural distinctness. ....... The Alaska-sized region known today as Xinjiang has historically been home to a multitude of ethnic groups, many of them closer culturally to Central Asia than to eastern China, from skiing hunter tribes in its mountainous north to the desert traders of the ancient Silk Road in its south....... China’s Qing dynasty claimed the region as its “new frontier” — the literal translation of Xinjiang — in the 18th century, following a series of bloody military campaigns that wiped out the local Tibetan Mongal Dzungar rulers....... Xinjiang is central to President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road plan to build a network of roads, railways and ports to bolster trade between China and Eurasia. ...... Today, Xinjiang is the front line of China’s experiments to build an all-encompassing surveillance state, powered by both technology and a rapid increase of police boots on the ground. On a recent trip to the region, I was trailed continuously by state-security agents, who stopped and questioned each person I spoke to, even shopkeepers and waiters........ Every time I took a taxi, the driver would receive a call from local police, usually within 10 minutes. Once, a talkative Han Chinese driver answered the call on loudspeaker. After being told that the caller was from the ministry of public security, the driver immediately replied: “Where would you like me to take him?”  ....... It is almost as hard to find out about missing persons from within Xinjiang as it is from outside. ....... When Kamaltürk Yalqun, a Uighur who lives in exile in Philadelphia, read about the film on the Radio Free Asia website, it confirmed his worst fears about the fate of his father, Yalqun Rozi. A prominent Uighur intellectual, Rozi had been an editor for the official Xinjiang Education Publishing House and one of the main editors for the textbooks. ....... “Schools are the principal front in an ideological struggle against separatism that is long, recurring, intense and at times extremely fierce; it is a conflict without smoke.” ...... For more than a decade, the textbooks were used, without major incident, in schools across Xinjiang. Then, in 2014, the authorities’ attitude suddenly shifted. ........ Since it was founded, China’s Communist party has swung between support for and repression of minority groups....... In its early years, the party cast itself as an active defender of ethnic-minority rights; its 1931 constitution recognised self-determination and “complete separation from China” for each minority, should they want it. ....... Under Xi, however, that discussion has largely disappeared. It has been replaced with a trend towards minority assimilation, often by force, in line with Xi’s vision of a unified Chinese nation....... “After 2009, there is a growing chorus of scholars and officials who say China is in danger of losing its grip over Tibet and Xinjiang and needs a radical reset of its ethnic policies,” says Leibold of La Trobe University. Among the loudest voices calling for a “new generation” of ethnic policies was Hu Lianhe. ...... Alongside a professor from Tsinghua University called Hu Angang — the two are not related — Hu Lianhe suggested that attempts to promote multi-ethnic states elsewhere in the world had failed and China should push different ethnicities to “blend together” into a single “state-race”. ....... That year, Xi formally launched the “people’s war on terror” and vowed to strike hard against the “three evil forces of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism” in Xinjiang. ..... a system of “grid” policing developed during his tenure in Tibet, hired thousands of additional officers and rapidly expanded the size and number of “transformation-through-education” camps in the region. ....... Of the more than 300 names on his list, about a third relate to the Uighur-language textbooks. Aside from Rozi, there is Satar Sawut, the former director of Xinjiang Education Supervision Bureau, and former Xinjiang University president Tashpolat Teyip, alongside dozens of other writers, editors and illustrators....... officials, who were starting to view the Uighur language as a serious threat. “Language is the main difference between Han and Uighurs. ...... a professor at the official Xinjiang Communist party school wrote an article that described the Uighur mother tongue movement as “the fourth evil force”, alongside those of “separatism, religious extremism and terrorism”....... Every year, tens of thousands of Uighur and other minority students are offered fully funded places at boarding schools in majority Han areas of inland China. ........ The mass internment programme has left many minority children without their parents; the authorities have built a network of de facto orphanages and boarding schools that can hothouse the children in Han Chinese environments....... since 2017, the Chinese state had created “a vast and multi-layered care system that enables it to provide full-time or near full-time care” for children from as young as one or two years of age....... The facilities were likely to be part of “a deliberate strategy and crucial element in the state’s systematic campaign of social re-engineering and cultural genocide in Xinjiang”, Zenz wrote. ..... Even the language used by Chinese authorities has shifted. The term “Han language”, once the most common way of describing Mandarin Chinese, has been replaced by “national language”. ...... In each store I visited, the only Uighur-language book was a copy of Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China.

China, US, Hong Kong, Xinjiang https://t.co/dk2RGjqxW3 @cdcshepherd @FTMag @suelinwong @teamlipei @YuanfenYang

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) September 12, 2019