Authorities in the Chinese region of Xinjiang are using predictive policing and medical surveillance to gather micro clues about Uyghurs and empower neighbour informants to ensure compliance at every level of society, according to a report.
The research of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute ASPI Thinktank detailed the expansive use of grassroots committees integrated with China s extensive surveillance technology, to police their Uyghur neighbours movements and emotion.
The findings shed further light on the extraordinaire scope of the Chinese Communist Party's CCP of the purportedly autonomous region, going beyond police crackdowns and mass arrests to ensure total control.
The report also revealed the identities of officials, including two former visiting fellows from Harvard University and organisations that make up the political architecture of the years-long crackdown by Beijing on Uyghurs, which rights organisations say have included detention of an estimated 1 million people in re-education camps.
The report showed the nominally unified local committees mirrored Mao-era revolutionary neighbourhood committees with daily meetings delegating home visits and investigations and assessing whether any individuals need re-education However, according to ASPI, leaked police records showed the modern-day committees also received micro clues from China s predictive policing system, IJOP the integrated joint operations platform Such clues could include someone receiving an unexpected visitor or receiving an overseas call and would prompt inspection visits modelled on neighbourly interactions.
Instruction manuals cited by ASPI taught committee members in the city of Kashgar were advised to give warm wishes to their Uyghur relatives and show children candy while observing the Uyghur targets.
Xinjiang s grassroots government control mechanisms are part of a national push to enhance grassroots governance, which seeks to mobilize the masses to help stamp out dissent and instability and to increase the party domination in the lowest reaches of society, the report said.
It detailed the case of an 18-year-old Uyghur man, Anayit Abliz, in r mqi, who was sentenced to three years in a re-education camp after he was caught using a filesharing app which is widely used in China to share movies, music and other censored content. While he was detained, officials from the neighbourhood committee visited his family members six times in a single week, inspecting family s behaviours and observing whether they were emotionally stable, the report said.
The think tank said the IJOP was maintained by the national leadership council PLAC The PLAC, called by the CCP s National Law and Order Committee, is China's knife handler of the political and legal system reporting directly to the PPC's Zentral Committee. The report found it wielded vastly expanded operational and budget control in Xinjiang, an expansion seen before in mass political campaigns.
Xinjiang's bureaucratic inner workings in the last seven years fit a wider pattern of authoritarian rule in Hong Kong, wrote the report & lead author Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, saying some tactics used in the campaign were replicated elsewhere, while others for China were conceived in Xinjiang in other regions including China.
Since 2014, ASPI has also unmasking the basic information of more than 440 state and deputy county committee secretaries in the Chinese region, including at least two who had been educated as visiting fellows at Harvard.
The report reported that the most senior national party secretaries were the vast majority of county officials over the last seven years were from Han ethnicity. It said a tradition was that in September no Uyghur could be identified among secretaries, but they often served as a ceremonial second command figure. ASPI said its findings showed the CCP promise of nominal autonomy for the autonomous region a fig leaf The report also alleged that, in addition to mass internment and coercive labor assignments, residents in China s far western Xinjiang Region were also compelled to participate in Mao-era mass political campaigns.
And speaking about the report, China s embassy in London denied the allegations and accused the ASPI of being an anti-China rumour-maker It claimed its re-education centres were vocational training schools operating as part of its anti-terrorism efforts no different from the distance and disengagement programme DDP of the UK or the deradicalisation centres in France. The ASPI report partly funded by the UK, Australian and US governments adds to a growing body of evidence about Beijing crackdown in Xinjiang. Human Rights Watch has accused China s government of crimes against humanity while some western governments have officially declared the government to be conducting genocide. China has denied all these accusations.
The report said Xinjiang authorities expected the extreme and repressive practices of the 2017 re-education campaign to become the norm by the end of 2021, a stage the party state calls comprehensive stability. A recent media report from Xinjiang by Associated Press revealed a reduction in visible means of control and suppression, but a continuing sense of fear among the population and ongoing surveillance.