Taipei, Taiwan – Chinese language authorities monitor the telephones of ethnic minority Uighurs for the presence of fifty,000 recognized multimedia recordsdata which might be used to flag violent extremism, with possession of the Quran sufficient to set off a police interrogation, in accordance with a forensic investigation by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Whereas the checklist of “violent and terrorist” content material consists of violent audio, video and pictures produced by militant teams similar to ISIS (ISIL), it additionally consists of materials from organisations that promote the identification or self-determination of Uighurs, a principally Muslim minority, in far-western Xinjiang.
The organisations embody the separatist East Turkestan independence motion, the World Uyghur Congress exile group and america government-funded information outlet Radio Free Asia.
The recordsdata additionally embody details about the 1989 Tiananmen Sq. bloodbath, which is closely censored in China.
Some content material flagged for overview, nonetheless, is non-political, together with a Chinese language journey present filed in Syria known as “On the Highway”, readings from the Quran and Islamic songs, in accordance with a metadata evaluation of the checklist by the rights group.
“The Chinese language authorities outrageously but dangerously conflates Islam with violent extremism to justify its abhorrent abuses in opposition to Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang,” mentioned Maya Wang, performing China director at HRW.
“The UN Human Rights Council ought to take lengthy overdue motion by investigating Chinese language authorities abuses in Xinjiang and past.”
The grasp checklist analysed by HRW is a part of a wider 52GB trove of paperwork from a Xinjiang police database that was leaked to the Intercept, a US-based media outlet, in 2019, however not made public till now.
Chinese language police within the Xinjiang capital Urumqi have required residents to obtain an app known as Jingwang Weishi, which provides authorities the power to observe the contents of their cell phones. Guests to Xinjiang will also be required to obtain an analogous app known as Fengcai.
Whereas police formally monitor for “extremist” materials, HRW mentioned an evaluation of the police database means that, in lots of circumstances, ethnic Muslims are flagged as supporters of violent extremism for merely practising or displaying curiosity of their faith.
An evaluation of 1,000 recordsdata flagged by police in 11.2 million searches of greater than 1 million telephones between 2017 and 2018 confirmed that 57 p.c of the content material recognized as problematic was atypical spiritual materials, HRW mentioned.
Simply 9 p.c of the flagged recordsdata contained violent content material and 4 p.c contained content material calling for violence, in accordance with the rights group.
A leaked checklist of two,000 detainees at a re-education facility in Aksu prefecture in 2018 confirmed that 10 p.c had been detained for downloading “violent and terrorist” multimedia or having a connection to somebody who downloaded it, HRW mentioned.
Uighur and different Turkic Muslims are topic to heavy surveillance as a part of the Chinese language Communist Occasion’s efforts to eradicate cultural, linguistic and non secular variations from the nation’s majority Han tradition.
Rights teams estimate that greater than 1 million individuals have been detained in re-education camps – known as “vocational coaching centres” by authorities – in recent times below the marketing campaign, which was launched after a sequence of bombings and knife assaults in Xinjiang within the 2000s.
After launching the “Strike Arduous Marketing campaign in opposition to Violent Terrorism” in 2014, Beijing escalated its efforts to incorporate mass surveillance by means of biometric information assortment, policing apps and facial recognition know-how.
Beijing has denied committing human rights abuses in Xinjiang and defended its re-education centres as vital instruments to fight violent extremism and alleviate poverty.
