Bioethicist Heather Zeiger, a frequent contributor to Mind Matters News, published a longform piece in academic journal Dignitas on the way that China uses total surveillance to keep the restive far western province of Xinjiang obediently in the fold.

Briefly, most Xinjiang residents are Uyghurs — Turkic-speaking Muslims — in a country dominated by Chinese-speaking Han people.

It is somewhat like the relationship between mostly English-speaking Canada and mostly French-speaking Quebec — except for one really important thing. In Canada, conflicts are almost entirely a paper war. In Xinjiang, totalitarian China appears to be trying to simply assimilate the Uyghurs by force. It is using the full panopticon of modern technology to do so. Zeiger writes,

The Chinese government uses technology to track, surveil, and maintain stability across the entire country, but in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (herein “Xinjiang”) technology is used as a means of assimilation and intimidation in what many people have called a high-tech panopticon. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, described the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state as a “dystopian hellscape on a staggering scale in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” Amnesty International is one of several human rights groups that have accused the Chinese government of crimes against humanity.

Heather Zeiger, “A Christian Response to Xinjiang: Technological Repression and Cultural Genocide,” Dignitas 30, no. 2 (2023): 10–16. © 2023 The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity

What’s new is the sheer technological scope of the oppression:

Algorithms dictate which people should be investigated and detained, and algorithms hold police accountable to stop, interrogate, and arrest a quota of Uyghurs and other potentially troublesome people in certain counties in Xinjiang. Interviews with individuals who have been sent to the detention camps, described as vocational training schools or re-education camps to combat extremism, report torture, rape, and forced labor as well as brainwashing and indoctrination. Women have been sent to the camps for having too many children. Many said they were forcibly sterilized. These practices, plus transferring men to other parts of China to work, have resulted in an over 40% decline in births in the Xinjiang region over a five-year period, the largest decrease in birthrates for a region since the UN started keeping track of that data. Even those who are not detained are subjected to intrusive home searches, biometric data collection, and around-the-clock surveillance.

Zeiger, “Cultural Genocide”

Political theorist Cai Xia calls these practices neo-totalitarian — a hybrid of total surveillance theory and total surveillance practice, achievable only through AI.

International interest stems in part from the fact that Xinjiang province has valuable natural resources and in part because it is a testing ground for the rest of China — and, of course, for the question of how much control of every detail of everyday life other governments around the world could exercise. If permitted.

Dignitas is an academic publication of The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity.

You may also wish to read: U.S.-made DNA ID equipment is being sold to Xinjiang’s police. Engineering professor Yves Moreau’s research shows that a more serious approach to existing sanctions against such uses is needed. It is technically illegal for American-owned companies to sell equipment that can be used to oppress the Uyghurs but somehow the sanctions are evaded.