> Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang — targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population to forcibly assimilate and subdue them.
It’s interesting to see videos on YouTube of Xinjiang. Foreigners haven’t been allowed there for a long time now, but recently there have been lots of influencers showing how great it is and how everything is normal and how happy people are. The thing that always stands out for me in these videos? There are very few older people in them. They’ve been mostly detained and sent through reeducation (concentration) camps. The children are raised by the state. Sent to state schools that separate them from their families and culture. And the goal is to make them part of the Chinese ideological state.
It’s a playbook China’s government has used over and over again:
But yea as the article clearly portrays, the extent of dystopian surveillance and harassment is deeply disturbing and straight out of a horrific fiction. I can’t imagine having cameras pointing straight into your house and having local goons show up and detain you every time you want to leave to complain to higher officials about the local ones. You’re a prisoner. Not a citizen.
hulitu•5mo ago
> US tech enabled the surveillance and detention of large populations in China
And in US, and in EU, and in every damn country where you have a phone and connect to the internet.
SilverElfin•5mo ago
It’s interesting to see videos on YouTube of Xinjiang. Foreigners haven’t been allowed there for a long time now, but recently there have been lots of influencers showing how great it is and how everything is normal and how happy people are. The thing that always stands out for me in these videos? There are very few older people in them. They’ve been mostly detained and sent through reeducation (concentration) camps. The children are raised by the state. Sent to state schools that separate them from their families and culture. And the goal is to make them part of the Chinese ideological state.
It’s a playbook China’s government has used over and over again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization_of_Tibet
But yea as the article clearly portrays, the extent of dystopian surveillance and harassment is deeply disturbing and straight out of a horrific fiction. I can’t imagine having cameras pointing straight into your house and having local goons show up and detain you every time you want to leave to complain to higher officials about the local ones. You’re a prisoner. Not a citizen.