Xinjiang's Government Does Not Merely Surveille and Monitor Its Subjects But Seeks "To Purge Their Thoughts"

By Daniel Pipes Middle East Quarterly Spring 2022 The Perfect Police State An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future By Geoffrey Cain New York: Public Affairs, 2021. 287 pp. $17.99. ------- Prior colonial rulers – the Spanish in Mindanao, the Dutch in Aceh, the French in Algeria, the Russians in Central Asia – have sought to control their Muslim subjects and defang Islamic sentiments, always failing. Can the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the territory historically known as East Turkestan and renamed Xinjiang by its Chinese overlords, succeed in this task? As Cain's title suggests, he believes it can. An investigative journalist and technology writer, he emphasizes the mix of the indomitable CCP will and twenty-first-century methods. From first-hand experience and extensive interviews alike, he reports that there exists no "surveillance state so well-honed and menacing as this one," not even North Korea's. Xinjiang's government does not merely surveille and monitor its subjects but seeks "to purge their thoughts" of bad ideas, a wholly different undertaking and one intimately tied to the Uyghur’s' Turkic and Islamic identities. The goal is cultural genocide without killing. As an apparatchik in a detention camp put it, "We are the surgeons who operate on your brains, your ideology. Your minds are poisoned. Now, we will give you medicine. You must be grateful to our great nation for this medicine." Cain describes in detail the impact of a state-imposed video camera in a Uyghur household. Of course, this effort requires the active participation of high-tech companies, and they (Microsoft in particular) have been only too willing to oblige. He calls CCP control over Xinjiang an "apartheid relationship." As might be expected, this has turned some nominal Muslims into active ones: "I decided I was, in my heart, Muslim, because China kept pushing me away, as some kind of other." The human costs are already stunning and only getting worse: "Every Uyghur I interviewed from 2017 to 2020 had at least two family members and three friends who had disappeared. ... about one-third reported that their entire families were gone, and they were the only ones who had escaped." Cain predicts that the technology and methods tried out in Xinjiang will eventually extend to other places. ---- The above text may be cited; it may also be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL. Copyright © 2022 Daniel Pipes, All rights reserved. Source: Middle East Forum URL: https://www.newageislam.com/books-documents/xinjiang-s-government-merely-surveille-monitor-its-subjects-but-seeks-to-purge-their-thoughts/d/126574 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism