It’s 2020, imagine you are living in a closely monitored Orwellian world where all your actions are being watched, except the tracking down is not being done by large televisions but a completely digitized surveillance system with AI-equipped cameras that can track every movement of yours. Your Government is against your whole race of people, but unlike Winston, you can not even buy a diary to write down your thoughts because every transaction you make or every breath you take is also observed by an evil hawk at all times.

The point here is that anyone who says that China’s government is exactly like 1984’s is wrong. It’s far worse. This is what happens when an authoritarian society gets aid from high-tech science, something China is best at. But this becomes even worse when you are part of a minority ethnic group which is not welcomed by this so-called totalitarian government and that is the plight of Uyghurs in China today.

Uyghurs are ethnically Turkic Muslims who follow Islam. Their demand for Xinjiang to be an independent state from China on claims of it belonging to Turkestan has made them separatists in the eyes of the government who sees them as nothing more than terrorists.

So, Xinjiang has been turned into a surveillance state that relies on cutting-edge technology to monitor millions of people. It uses a grid system in which cities and villages are split into squares of about five hundred people. Each square has a police station that closely monitors inhabitants by regularly scanning their identification cards, taking their photographs and fingerprints, and searching their cell phones. Not to forget, the facial recognition cameras are everywhere. But that’s not even the worst part. The Chinese government also collects and stores citizens’ biometric data, DNA samples, and personal information to determine if they are ‘safe’, else they are conveniently locked upon suspicion of having criminal intentions.

In the words of a Chinese Administrative spokesperson, they have the “potential” to commit a crime so why wait for the crime to actually happen?

Since China was not getting enough blueprints from Fictional Books to base its administrative policies on, the next best thing was Anime. If you have seen Psycho-Pass that is its exact plotline. A utilitarian society is governed by the Sibyl system and people are arrested before they actually commit a crime using technology to determine their mental state and therefore their criminal intentions. The very notion of utilitarianism stands for actions based on the amount of good they cause in society overall at the cost of a few people, thus justifying such actions. And what about free will? Just because someone is likely to commit a crime does not mean that they will and that is where the importance of free will comes. Unfortunately, no one gave a memo to the Chinese government about it.

China is not even using some highly sophisticated system to determine criminal potential, instead, it decided that it would be fair enough to base this on their own whims and fancies. So, how does the Chinese government decide who is suspicious and has the potential to commit a crime? It’s very simple. If you attend services at a mosque, you are a potential criminal. If you have more than 3 children, you are a potential criminal. And if you send a text containing Islamic verses to a friend, I’m sorry to inform you but you are worse than a criminal. To put in a nutshell, if you are a Muslim living in China you are nothing but a latent criminal in the eyes of the Government.

These ‘potential threats to society’ are sent to “re-education” camps which is China’s euphemism for concentration camps. More than a million Muslims have been arbitrarily detained. Detainees are forced to pledge loyalty to the CCP and renounce Islam. They have to sing praises for communism and learn Mandarin with cameras and microphones monitoring their every move. Others said they were tortured and subjected to sleep deprivation during interrogations. There are reports of sexual abuse as well. Thousands of these Muslim Uyghurs are forced into cheap labor and work under coercive conditions for big brands such as Apple and Nike who, not surprisingly, blatantly deny any such claims. Next time you use your AirPods, remember that although you are enjoying high quality sound, somewhere someone’s voice is not being heard.

There might not be clarity when it comes to what else is going on in these concentration camps but what one does know for sure is that
the Uyghur population has fallen 84% between 2015- 2018 according to China’s own reports and nobody dares to talk about it. There is no doubt that another genocide is happening, just that instead of mass killing like the Naziflagbearer-of-race-purity did, China is using a slow process of eradication of the Uyghur ethnicity through sterilization, abortion and
encouraging inter-racial marriages among other things.

There’s growing international criticism of China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims but beyond issuing critical statements no country has come forward to take any action against it. Is China really becoming the all-powerful terrifying world power who could violate the human rights of its own citizens and no one could do anything but watch as it does so?