Xinjiang police target Uyghurs with multimedia surveillance

A report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) has revealed that police in Xinjiang use a list of 50,000 multimedia files classified as “violent and terrorist” to identify Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim residents for interrogation. According to the New York-based organisation, storing the Quran on a phone can be enough to trigger a police inquiry. The list is a further example of China’s “abusive use of surveillance technology in Xinjiang,” HRW stated.
Police in the region utilise the list to cross-reference data from two apps, Jing Wang Wei Shi and Feng Cai, which authorities have mandated residents of Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, to install on their mobile devices. Maya Wang, acting Asia director at HRW, explained in an interview with Radio Free Asia (RFA) that the apps on people’s phones search for information and compare it against the master list.
The data collected by these apps, along with the master list scrutinised by HRW, is consistent with other Xinjiang surveillance systems. Wang described these systems as “multidimensional and multi-layered,” incorporating checkpoints and the Chinese government’s collection of biometrics.
HRW has repeatedly expressed concerns about China’s broad and vague definition of “terrorism” and “extremism,” which enables prosecutions, deprivation of liberty, and other restrictions for acts that do not intend to cause death or serious physical harm with political, religious, or ideological objectives.
The multimedia master list is part of a massive database containing over 1,600 data tables from Xinjiang, leaked to The Intercept in 2019. According to the news outlet, Urumqi police conducted surveillance and arrests between 2015 and 2019 based on police report texts found in the database. HRW examined the list, which was located in a separate section of the same database and had not been previously reported or analysed.
Between 2017 and 2018, HRW discovered that police conducted nearly 11 million searches on 1.2 million mobile phones in Urumqi, resulting in 11,000 matches with the master list involving over 1,000 different files on 1,400 phones. The analysis found that the list contained not only violent content but also materials with no evident connection to violence, such as common religious items.
HRW called on the UN Human Rights Council to launch an investigation and urged concerned governments to identify technology companies involved in the phone surveillance, working to end their participation. Wang emphasised the importance of understanding the situation in Xinjiang and its implications for China’s future and the relationship between technology and human freedoms globally.