原版文章由Darren Byler撰写，于2019年5月1日在《Logic》杂志上发表。中文版于一小撮 (Yi Xiaocuo)翻译。
在中国的西北边陲，国家正以科技驱动着一种新形式的“恐怖资本主义。
In northwest China, the state is using technology to pioneer a new form of terror capitalism.
2017年，一个20多岁的维吾尔男士Alim正在去见他朋友的路上，他们约好去一家商场里吃饭。这是中国西北部新疆维吾尔自治区的一座城市，Alim的家就在这里。在商场入口过安检时，他让机器扫描了身份证上的照片，又把脸对准装备了人脸识别软件的安检摄像头。突然间，警报声响起，保安允许他通过。但几分钟之内，附近“便民警务站”的警察就围了上来，把他带到了警局。在这片突厥穆斯林民族繁衍生息的土地上，这种快速响应的警务站成千上万，几乎每隔二三百米就有一个。
In mid-2017, a Uyghur man in his twenties, whom I will call Alim, went to meet a friend for lunch at a mall in his home city, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China. At a security checkpoint at the entrance, Alim scanned the photo on his government-issued identification card, and presented himself before a security camera equipped with facial recognition software. An alarm sounded. The security guards let him pass, but within a few minutes he was approached by officers from the local “convenience police station,” one of the thousands of rapid-response police stations that have been built every 200 or 300 meters in the Turkic Muslim areas of the region. The officers took him into custody.
Alim的心在狂跳。几周前，他从国外留学回来，一着陆他就被警察从飞机上带走，理由是他被全国通缉。警察告诉他说他在国外是可疑的，属于 “不放心人员” 。随后警察进行了所谓的 “体检” ，收集了他的各种生物识别数据，包括DNA、 血型、指纹、声纹和面部特征。在新疆，几乎所有的成年人都经历了这些。（据中国官方媒体新华网报道，将近3600万人通过这种“体检”，提交了生物识别数据，远远超出该自治区2450万常住居民的人数。）之后，他被带到了看守所，像这样的设施，也已遍布新疆各地。
Alim’s heart was racing. Several weeks earlier, he had returned to China from studying abroad. As soon as he landed back in the country, he was pulled off the plane by police officers responding to a nationwide warrant for his arrest. He was told his trip abroad meant that he was now under suspicion of being “unsafe.” The police then administered what they call a “health check,” which involves collecting several types of biometric data, including DNA, blood type, fingerprints, voice signature and face signature—a process which all adults in Xinjiang are expected to undergo. (According to the government, biometric data from 18.8 million of the region’s 21.8 million people have been collected through these checks.) Then they transported him to one of the hundreds of detention centers that dot northwest China.
过去五年间，中国开展了以科技驱动的“反恐人民战争”，这些看守所就是其中的重要组成部分。2014年，由习近平政权正式发起，这场“战争”最初的名义是回应维吾尔人的示威，以及针对安全部队和汉族平民的袭击。然而，示威的起因则是几十年来，对于民族歧视、警察暴行、维吾尔人失去土地的愤怒和绝望。自那以后，中国政府根据其含混不清的反恐怖主义法规，开始将维吾尔人所有表达伊斯兰教信仰的行为，都视作了宗教极端和民族分裂的迹象。如果被怀疑犯下了这样的罪行，这样的设施就是第一站。仅仅2017年，就有超过一百万突厥穆斯林这样遭到了拘禁。
Over the past five years, these centers have become an important node in China’s technologically driven “People’s War on Terror.” Officially launched by the Xi Jinping administration in 2014, this war supposedly began as a response to Uyghur mass protests—themselves born out of desperation over decades of discrimination, police brutality, and the confiscation of Uyghur lands—and to attacks directed against security forces and civilians who belong to the Han ethnic majority. In the intervening period, the Chinese government has come to treat almost all expressions of Uyghur Islamic faith as signs of potential religious extremism and ethnic separatism under vaguely defined anti-terrorism laws; the detention centers are the first stop for those suspected of such crimes. Since 2017 alone, more than 1 million Turkic Muslims have moved through these centers.
在看守所里，Alim不能睡觉，吃饭，还会遭受长达几小时的审问和辱骂。他在与我交谈时说，“整个过程让我极度虚弱，到最后我甚至在受到审问时歇斯底里地大笑。”其他被拘押者也透露，曾遭到痛苦的束缚、折磨、电击，和长时间的单独禁闭。在接受审讯之外的时间里，Alim和其他二十几个维吾尔男子被关在一个14平方米的牢房里，有些看守所的牢房里甚至关了六十多人。曾被拘押者说，他们只能轮流睡觉，因为没有地方让每个人都躺下。曾在看守所被拘押数月的维吾尔女士Mihirgul Tursun告诉我，“他们从来不关灯”。
At the center to which he had been sent, Alim was deprived of sleep and food, and subjected to hours of interrogation and verbal abuse. “I was so weakened through this process that at one point during my interrogation I began to laugh hysterically,” he said when we spoke. Other detainees report being placed in stress positions, tortured with electric shocks, and submitted to long periods of isolation. When he wasn’t being interrogated, Alim was kept in a fourteen-square-meter cell with twenty other Uyghur men, though cells in some detention centers house more than sixty people. Former detainees have said they had to sleep in shifts because there was not enough space for everyone to stretch out at once. “They never turn out the lights,” Mihrigul Tursun, a Uyghur woman who spent several months in detention, told me.
在新疆各地的成千上万个检查站，维吾尔人都会被查手机，这些被拘押的人士往往就是因为他们手机上的社交媒体 app 里被查出有宗教或政治内容。尽管从任何法律意义上说，这些内容并不构成真正的犯罪证据，但任何与伊斯兰信仰有关的电子记录，或者和任何犯过这种含糊“罪行”的人有牵连，都可能让一个维吾尔人落入看守所。原因或许是其他被拘押者的手机或微信里有他们的联系方式；或许他们曾在微信朋友圈里发送过穆斯林在祈祷的图片；或许多年以前他们曾发送过或收到过公安部门认为是“意识形态病毒”的伊斯兰教教导——也就是未经国家认证的，所谓的“野毛拉”的讲道；又或许是他们的某个亲戚移民到了土耳其或其他穆斯林为主体人口的国家，用国外的号码加了他们的微信。仅仅是有个家人在国外，或是像 Alim 一样曾经出过国，也常常会遭到拘押。
The religious and political transgressions of these detainees were frequently discovered through social media apps on their smartphones, which Uyghurs are required to produce at thousands of checkpoints around Xinjiang. Although there was often no real evidence of a crime according to any legal standard, the digital footprint of unauthorized Islamic practice, or even an association to someone who had committed one of these vague violations, was enough to land Uyghurs in a detention center. Maybe their contact number had been in the list of WeChat followers in another detainee’s phone. Maybe they had posted, on their WeChat wall, an image of a Muslim in prayer. It could be that in years past they had sent or received audio recordings of Islamic teachings that the Public Security Bureau, which polices social life in China, deems “ideological viruses”: the sermons and lessons of so-called “wild” imams, who have not been authorized by the state. Maybe they had a relative who moved to Turkey or another Muslim-majority country and added them to their WeChat account using a foreign number. The mere fact of having a family member abroad, or of traveling outside China, as Alim had, often resulted in detention.
不用社交媒体也会招致怀疑，还有试图破坏SIM卡，或不带手机。由于不知道如何避免被拘押，有些维吾尔人把旧手机埋在沙漠里，有些人把旧的SIM卡装在小袋子里挂在树梢，或把存有伊斯兰教义的SD存储卡包在饺子里冷冻起来，期待有一天能让它们重见天日。也有人放弃了任何保存伊斯兰知识的希望，秘密地烧毁了数据卡。扔掉数码设备已经不是办法了，维吾尔人害怕这些设备会被警察们找回并追溯到主人的身份。公安部门使用人工智能技术，从每天几百万条的社交媒体内容中，扫描宗教图片，据称就连2017年前删除的“违禁”内容都可以查出。
Not using social media could also court suspicion. So could attempting to destroy a SIM card, or not carrying a smartphone. Unsure how to avoid detention when the crackdown began, some Uyghurs buried old phones in the desert. Others hid little baggies of used SIM cards in the branches of trees, or put SD cards containing Islamic texts and teachings in dumplings and froze them, hoping they could eventually be recovered. Others gave up on preserving Islamic knowledge and burned data cards in secret. Simply throwing digital devices into the garbage was not an option; Uyghurs feared the devices would be recovered by the police and traced back to the user. Even proscribed content that was deleted before 2017 —when the Public Security Bureau operationalized software that uses artificial intelligence to scour millions of social media posts per day for religious imagery—can reportedly be unearthed.
看守所里大多数维吾尔人的下一站不是长期徒刑，就是被无限期地关进不断扩张的大型集中拘禁营里，中国官方称其为“教育转化”中心。这些集中营相当于有中级安全级别的监狱，有些配有强制劳动的工厂，它们的运营目的是训导维吾尔人背弃伊斯兰身份认同，接受中国官方世俗和经济的原则。这些集中营里禁止使用维吾尔语，被拘押者必须学习汉语 （中国主要人口汉族的语言），现在被称为“国语”。目前只有极少数的被拘押者从这种“再教育”系统完全释放。
Most Uyghurs in the detention centers are on their way to serving long prison sentences, or to indefinite captivity in a growing network of massive internment camps which the Chinese state has described as “transformation through education” facilities. These camps, which function as medium-security prisons and, in some cases, forced-labor factories, center around training Uyghurs to disavow their Islamic identity and embrace the secular and economic principles of the Chinese state. They forbid the use of the Uyghur language and instead offer drilling in Mandarin, the language of China’s Han majority, which is now referred to as “the national language.” Only a handful of detainees who are not Chinese citizens have been fully released from this “re-education” system.
Alim算是比较幸运的。两周后他被放了出来，后来他得知是因为一个亲戚帮了忙。直到他在商场里被扣押的那一刻他才知道，他已经登上了“一体化联合作战平台”的黑名单，这个区域数据平台使用人工智能来监控新疆各个城市里的无数个检查站。只要他进入任何当地派出所管辖区域里的公共机构，比如医院、银行、公园和商场、经过其中各个检查站，平台都会立即通知警察。系统已经给他建了档案，并预测他是潜在的恐怖分子。
Alim was relatively lucky: he had been let out after only two weeks; he later learned that a relative had intervened in his case. But what he didn’t know until police arrested him at the mall was that he had been placed on a blacklist maintained by the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP, or 体化联合作战平台), a regional data system that uses AI to monitor the countless checkpoints in and around Xinjiang’s cities. Any attempt to enter public institutions such as hospitals, banks, parks or shopping centers, or to cross beyond the checkpoints of the dozen city blocks that were under the jurisdiction of his local police precinct, would trigger the IJOP to alert police. The system had profiled him and predicted that he was a potential terrorist.
警察们告诉Alim，想避免被再次拘留，他就应该“在家呆着”。尽管从法律意义上他是自由的，但官方却用他的生物信息和数字记录将他画地为牢。他说，“我在愤怒的同时也感到十分恐惧”。现在，这些数据成了幽灵，挥之不去地困扰着他。
Officers told Alim he should “just stay at home” if he wanted to avoid detention again. Although he was officially free, his biometrics and his digital history were being used to bind him in place. “I’m so angry and afraid at the same time,” he told me. He was now haunted by his data.
无限的市场潜力
Unlimited Market Potential
针对Alim和其他维吾尔人的监控和预测性归纳系统，是过去十年间中国新极权主义国安工业综合体的一个产物。目前，数十家中国科技公司正在研发和推广新产品来迎接新的“全球反恐战争”，这场战争首先在国内打响，而且侧重于科技战场。在这种新形势之下，战争机器更关注人脸识别技术和人工智能，而不是无人机和海豹突击队。武器都是中国制造而非美国，所谓的恐怖分子不是“野蛮的”外国人，而是本国的、被视为威胁当权者，阻碍国家资本主义扩张的的少数民族。
The surveillance and predictive profiling systems that targeted Alim and the many Uyghur Muslims he met in detention are the product of a neo-totalitarian security-industrial complex that has emerged in China over the past decade. Dozens of Chinese tech firms are building and marketing tools for a new “global war on terror,” fought in a domestic register and transposed to a technological key. In this updated version of the conflict, the war machine is more about facial recognition software and machine learning algorithms than about drones and Navy SEAL teams; the weapons are made in China rather than the United States; and the supposed terrorists are not “barbaric” foreigners but domestic minority populations who appear to threaten the dominance of authoritarian leaders and impede state-directed capitalist expansion.
现代历史上，针对受压迫人群部署的管制系统，不论是北美的日裔集中营，还是南非种族隔离时期的有色人种身份证，新技术的运用都至关重要。在中国，科技军备明目繁多，观察者已很难完全跟踪记录。新疆的监控网络遍布各处，从墙上的摄像头，移动设备里的芯片，到维吾尔人的面相特征。配备了人脸扫描仪和生物识别的检查站跟踪着他们的一举一动，净网程序记录着他们手机里的每一次点击。
In the modern history of systems of control deployed against subjugated populations, ranging from North American internment camps to the passbooks of apartheid-era South Africa, new technologies have been crucial. In China, that technological armament is now so vast that it has become difficult for observers to fully inventory. The web of surveillance in Xinjiang reaches from cameras on the wall, to the chips inside mobile devices, to Uyghurs’ very physiognomy. Face scanners and biometric checkpoints track their movements. Nanny apps record every bit that passes through their smartphones.
还有一些程序可以自动识别维吾尔人的声纹、将维吾尔语语音转换成文字并翻译、扫描数字通讯记录，寻找任何可疑的社会联系，标记伊斯兰教的表述，识别对汉语不够热情的态度。深度学习系统可以实时从监控视频中识别几百万张人脸，以此建立起可以用于鉴别可疑行为的数据库，进而预测谁将会成为“危险”人员。这种由“计算机视觉”技术自动生成的预测，可以由数十种行为激发，比如穿着伊斯兰教服饰，不参加爱国主义升旗仪式或升旗仪式有缺勤，等等。所有的系统都整合到了“一体化联合作战平台”上，供该平台从它监控的维吾尔人的日常行为中学习特征。
Other programs automate the identification of Uyghur voice signatures, transcribe, and translate Uyghur spoken language, and scan digital communications, looking for suspect patterns of social relations, and flagging religious speech or a lack of fervor in using Mandarin. Deep-learning systems search in real time through video feeds capturing millions of faces, building an archive which can help identify suspicious behavior in order to predict who will become an “unsafe” actor. The predictions generated automatically by these “computer vision” technologies are triggered by dozens of actions, from dressing in an Islamic fashion to failing to attend or fully participate in nationalistic flag raising ceremonies. All of these systems are brought together in the IJOP, which is constantly learning from the behaviors of the Uyghurs it watches.
这种预测性算法号称会通过识别恐怖威胁，让新疆更加“安全”，但它抽取的生物识别和行为数据，来自每一个维吾尔人的肉体。这些安保和监控系统之所以如此强大（利润想必也十分丰厚），是因为可以毫无限制地侵入维吾尔人的数字生活和日常行动。“反恐”的旗号给科技公司提供了一个巨大的空间来研发、实验、改进这些程序。哈佛大学学者Shoshana Zuboff在她最近关于“监控资本主义”著作中指出，消费者一直在泄露宝贵的数据，之后被资本势力捕获，使他们能够预测我们的偏好和未来行为，进而从中获利。在新疆维吾尔自治区，这个逻辑被推到了极致。对于中国的国安工业联合体来说，维吾尔人生活的首要目的只是产生数据而已。
The predictive algorithms that purport to keep Xinjiang safe by identifying terrorist threats feed on the biometric and behavioral data extracted from the bodies of Uyghurs. The power—and potential profitability—of these systems as tools of security and control derives from unfettered access to Uyghurs’ digital lives and physical movements. The justification of the war on terror thus offers companies a space in which to build, experiment with, and refine these systems. In her recent study on the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” the Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff notes that consumers are constantly off-gassing valuable data that can be captured by capital and turned into profitable predictions about our preferences and future behaviors. In the Uyghur region, this logic has been taken to an extreme: from the perspective of China’s security-industrial establishment, the principal purpose of Uyghur life is to generate data.
被高压监控驯服之后，维吾尔人又作为劳工，输送进了中国制造产业。官方说辞将反恐人民战争包装成是一种“扶贫”措施。这就要求对边缘化的穆斯林群体重新培训，让他们从政治上驯服，经济上还要有生产力。中国政府执行这种社会秩序的方式是，修建起监狱和集中营，拘押这个国家十分之一以上的突厥穆斯林人口。集中营里直接配备有纺织业和其他产业的车间，集中营里的培训直接与其衔接，被拘押者要无限期地在此劳动。中国政府把这种极低薪酬的工作称为“实习培训”。
After being rendered compliant by this repressive surveillance, Uyghurs are fed into China’s manufacturing industries as labor. Officially, the People’s War on Terror has been framed as a “poverty alleviation” struggle. This requires retraining marginalized Muslim communities to make them politically docile yet economically productive. China enforces this social order with prisons and camps built to accommodate over ten percent of the country’s Turkic Muslim population. The training that happens in the camps leads directly to on-site factories, for textiles and other industries, where detainees are forced to work indefinitely. The government frames these low-wage jobs as “internships.”
对中国政府来说，对维吾尔人的高压控制也是一个样板，以便向全球的威权政府推销中国的科技实力。全球包括美国、法国、以色列、菲律宾等二十多个国家的一百多个政府机关和企业，都会参加在新疆首府乌鲁木齐举办的一年一度的中国–亚欧安防博览会。由于乌鲁木齐是面向穆斯林世界的战略性口岸，这个展览会成了整个东亚最有影响力的安防技术大会。
Controlling the Uyghurs has also become a test case for marketing Chinese technological prowess to authoritarian nations around the world. A hundred government agencies and companies, from two dozen countries including the United States, France, Israel, and the Philippines, now participate in the annual China-Eurasia Security Expo in Ürümchi, the capital of the Uyghur region. Because Ürümchi is a strategic entrepôt to the Muslim world, the expo has become the most influential security tech convention across East Asia.
展览会以及中国安防技术工业的主要精神，可以说就是穆斯林人口需要管理，并转变为生产力。中国产业界认为，这是中国对全球安全未来的重要贡献之一。新型安防工业的主要代表之一，立昂技术(Leon Technology)的发言人在 2017 年的博览会上表示，全球60%的穆斯林主体国家都在中国的国际发展总计划“一带一路”之中，所以他们在新疆研发的人口控制技术“具备无限潜力”。
The ethos at the expo, and in the Chinese techno-security industry as a whole, is that Muslim populations need to be managed and made productive. This, from the perspective of Chinese industry, is one of China’s major contributions to the future of global security. As a spokesperson for Leon Technology, one of the major players in the new security industry, put it at the expo in 2017, 60 percent of the world’s Muslim-majority nations are part of China’s premier international development initiative, “One Belt, One Road,” so there is “unlimited market potential” for the type of population-control technology they are developing in Xinjiang.
过去五年多以来，反恐人民战争已经让立昂技术 (Leon)、美亚柏科(Meiya Pico)、海康威视(Hikvision)、旷视科技(Face++)、商汤科技(Sensetime)和大华技术(Dahua)等众多中国科技公司取得了史无前例的增长。据估计，仅仅过去两年，国家已经在新疆安防科技方面投资将近72亿美元。在新疆首先试用的一些技术已经在一些威权国家找到了新客户，比如在撒哈拉以南的非洲。广州的初创公司云从科技 (CloudWalk) 收到了3.01亿美元的国家拨款，2018年，该公司敲定了一项与津巴布韦姆南加古瓦 (Mnangagwa) 政府的战略性合作计划，建立一个国家级的 “大型人脸识别项目” ，来解决那里的 “社会安全问题” （云从科技尚未透露这项计划的总金额）。现在，津巴布韦的各个机场、铁路、和车站的人流，已经开始靠人脸数据库连同其他生物识别数据实行管理了。事实上，维吾尔人的家园已经成为了中国 “恐怖资本主义” 的孵化中心。
Over the past five years, the People’s War on Terror has allowed Chinese tech startups such as Leon, Meiya Pico, Hikvision, Face++, Sensetime, and Dahua to achieve unprecedented levels of growth. In just the last two years, the state has invested an estimated $7.2 billion on techno-security in Xinjiang. Some of the technologies they pioneered in Xinjiang have already found customers in authoritarian states as far away as sub-Saharan Africa. In 2018, CloudWalk, a Guangzhou-based tech startup that has received more than $301 million in state funding, finalized a strategic cooperation framework agreement with the Mnangagwa administration in Zimbabwe to build a national “mass facial recognition program” in order to address “social security issues.” (CloudWalk has not revealed how much the agreement is worth.) Freedom of movement through airports, railways, and bus stations throughout Zimbabwe will now be managed through a facial database integrated with other kinds of biometric data. In effect, the Uyghur homeland has become an incubator for China’s “terror capitalism.”
一种生活方式
A Way of Life
维吾尔网络世界过去不是这样一个处处陷阱充满压迫的空间。2011年，当我第一次来乌鲁木齐做民族志田野调查时，自治区才刚刚开通了3G网络。2014年再来时，这座城市里几乎每个成年人都使用上了智能手机，维吾尔语 app 的下载量显示，1200万维吾尔人口中约有45%拥有智能手机。很多维吾尔人开始用微信语音和视频和在农村的家人和朋友保持联系，用手机购物和销售产品，了解世界大事，和国内外的维吾尔人交朋友。年轻的电影制片人可以即时和成千上万的关注者分享自己的短片和音乐视频。通过网络，像维吾尔英语教师Kasim Abdurehim和流行偶像Ablajan这样的文化名人（他们后来被政府归为“不放心人员”）一夜之间就产生了上百万的粉丝群。
The Uyghur internet has not always been a space of exploitation and entrapment. When I arrived in Ürümchi in 2011 to conduct my first year of ethnographic fieldwork, the region had just been wired with 3G networks. When I returned for a second year, in 2014, it seemed as though nearly all adults in the city had a smartphone; downloads of Uyghur-language apps suggested approximately 45 percent of the Uyghur population of 12 million was using one. Many Uyghurs had begun to use WeChat to share recorded messages and video with friends and family in rural villages. They also used their phones to buy and sell products, read about what was happening in the world, and network with Uyghurs throughout the country and around the globe. Young Uyghur filmmakers could now share short films and music videos instantly with hundreds of thousands of followers. Overnight, Uyghur English teachers such as Kasim Abdurehim and pop stars such as Ablajan—cultural figures that the government subsequently labeled “unsafe”—developed followings that numbered in the millions.
从政府的视角来看，最值得担忧的现象是一些身在在中国和土耳其、未经国家批准的维吾尔宗教导师取得了深厚的社会影响力。从1950年代开始，新建立的中华人民共和国便向新疆大量输送汉人定居，对维吾尔人来说，伊斯兰教、突厥文化认同和维吾尔语言，就一直是对汉族文化规范和中国世俗价值观的一种抵抗。在新疆进入被定居者殖民数十年的阶段之前，逊尼派伊斯兰教和突厥认同就为两个独立的东突厥斯坦共和国提供了基础。出于这两个因素，再加上对维吾尔文明的建筑环境（传统房屋庭院、以清真寺为中心的社区、苏菲派的麻扎）深深的依恋，多数维吾尔人哪怕经历了毛泽东时代强制同化的种种运动，仍然感觉与殖民者大相径庭。
Most unsettling, from the perspective of the state, unsanctioned Uyghur religious teachers based in China and Turkey developed a deep influence. Since the 1950s, when the newly founded People’s Republic of China began sending millions of Han settlers to the region, Islamic faith, Turkic identity, and the Uyghur language have been sources of resistance to Han cultural norms and Chinese secularism. Sunni Islam and Turkic identity formed the basis for the independent East Turkistan republics that predated the decades of settler colonization. Together with deep-seated attachments to the built environment of Uyghur civilization—courtyard houses, mosque communities, and Sufi shrines—they helped most Uyghurs feel distinct from their colonizers even in the teeth of Maoist campaigns to force them to assimilate.
国家政府时时刻刻都想要消除这种差异。从1958年毛泽东的宗教改革运动开始，国家限制了维吾尔和其他穆斯林民族进入清真寺，禁止进行伊斯兰葬礼习俗和学习伊斯兰知识。几乎不存在不受国家控制的伊斯兰学校、不受国家认证的毛拉。18岁以下的年轻人禁止进入清真寺。过去十年中，随着社交网络在维吾尔人当中传播，出现了一个虚拟空间来探索和了解作为穆斯林的意义，这也让维吾尔人感受到维吾尔认同首先源于信仰和语言，感受到他们对原生传统生活的渴望，感受到自己属于从乌鲁木齐延伸到伊斯坦布尔的突厥穆斯林社群。
The government has always pushed to efface these differences. Beginning with Mao’s Religious Reform Movement of 1958, the state limited Uyghurs’ access to mosques, Islamic funerary practices, religious knowledge, and other Muslim communities. There were virtually no Islamic schools outside of state control, no imams who were not approved by the state. Children under the age of eighteen were forbidden to enter mosques. As social media spread through the Uyghur homeland over the course of the last decade, it opened up a virtual space to explore what it meant to be Muslim. It reinforced a sense that the first sources of Uyghur identity were their faith and language, their claim to a native way of life, and their membership in a Turkic Muslim community stretching from Ürümchi to Istanbul.
因为网络，数百万维吾尔人对自身的伊斯兰实践是否虔诚有了新的思考，也同时了解了如何自救和创业。他们开始想象逃离这个剥夺他们基本自由的威权国家，如何在不能申请护照，就业歧视，和失去土地的社会环境中生存。他们开始寻找与中国官方强加的现代化所不同的现代生活的可能性。与其永远被汉文化视为他者（不像汉人，不说汉语），他们更愿意从焕然一新的突厥和伊斯兰价值观中，寻找普世的、当代的文化身份。他们可以接受穆斯林世界的清真食品标准，穿从伊斯坦布尔进口的最新服装，和中国的汉族社会保持距离。从土耳其和迪拜进口的食品、电影、音乐和服饰，成为一种区隔标志。女人们开始戴头巾，男人们开始了一日五次的礼拜，不再抽烟和饮酒。有些人认为音乐、舞蹈和电视也要避免。
Because of the internet, millions of Uyghurs felt called to think in new ways about the piety of their Islamic practice, while simultaneously learning about self-help strategies and entrepreneurship. They began to imagine escaping an oppressive state which curtailed many of their basic freedoms by such means as restricting access to passports, systematic job discrimination, and permitting the seizure of Uyghur land. They also began to appreciate alternative modernities to the one the Chinese state was forcing upon them. Rather than being seen as perpetually lacking Han appearance and culture, they could find in their renewed Turkic and Islamic values a cosmopolitan and contemporary identity. They could embrace the halal standards of the Muslim world, wear the latest styles from Istanbul, and keep Chinese society at arms-length. Food, movies, music and clothing, imported from Turkey and Dubai, became markers of distinction. Women began to veil themselves. Men began to pray five times a day. They stopped drinking and smoking. Some began to view music, dancing and state television as influences to be avoided.
我在田野调查中遇到的汉族官员把这种网络推动的宗教虔诚看作是维吾尔族的“塔利班化”。和其他迁入新疆的汉族人一样，他们渐渐觉得去维吾尔地区变得不安全了，在虔诚的突厥穆斯林周围感觉不适。官员们常引用昆明火车站事件，以及北京和乌鲁木齐的驾车伤人事件，来说明全体维吾尔人已经被恐怖主义意识形态操控。
The Han officials I met during my fieldwork referred to this rise in technologically disseminated religious piety as the “Talibanization” of the Uyghur population. Along with Han settlers, they felt increasingly unsafe traveling to the region’s Uyghur-majority areas, and uneasy in the presence of pious Turkic Muslims. The officials cited incidents that carried the hallmarks of religiously motivated violence—a knife attack carried out by a group of Uyghurs at a train station in Kunming; trucks driven by Uyghurs through crowds in Beijing and Ürümchi—as a sign that the entire Uyghur population was falling under the sway of terrorist ideologies.
对汉族官员来说，维吾尔社交网络尽管非常“危险”，也给他们提供了新的控制手段。2009年7月5日，维吾尔高中生和大学生在Facebook和维吾尔语的博客上组织示威游行，为在东莞玩具厂被汉族工人杀害的维吾尔工人维权。几千名维吾尔人走上乌鲁木齐街头，要求政府对他们死去的同胞作一个回应。当武警暴力镇压时，很多维吾尔人推翻了公交汽车，袭击了汉族路人，最终据报道导致190人死亡，大多为汉族。随后几周，上百乃至上千的维吾尔年轻人被警方带走。新疆维吾尔自治区的互联网自此关闭了九个月以上，Facebook和Twitter被封锁。
But, as dangerous as the rise of Uyghur social media seemed to Han officials, it also presented them with a new means of control—one they had been working for several years to refine. On July 5, 2009, Uyghur high school and college students had used Facebook and Uyghur-language blogs to organize a protest demanding justice for Uyghur workers who were killed by their Han colleagues at a toy factory in eastern China. Thousands of Uyghurs took to the streets of Ürümchi, waving Chinese flags and demanding that the government respond to the deaths of their comrades. When they were violently confronted by armed police, many of the Uyghurs responded by turning over buses and beating Han bystanders. In the end, over 190 people were reported killed, most of them Han. Over the weeks that followed, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young Uyghurs were disappeared by the police. The internet was shut off in the region for over nine months, and Facebook and Twitter were blocked across the country.
2010年新疆的互联网恢复运行，不过值得注意的是，Facebook、Twitter及其他非中国的社交媒体应用不见了。之后不久，国家安全部门、高等教育机构，以及私营企业开始逐渐瓦解维吾尔网络的自主权。大部分的维语网站从自由的虚拟世界，变成了能让政府机关用技术手段学习和预测犯罪行为的场所。2014年的反恐怖主义法定义模糊，几乎把维吾尔人的几乎所有犯罪行为都当成了恐怖主义的表现，小到偷了汉族邻居的一只羊，大到抗议抢地和拆迁。新法规将宗教虔诚视作 “极端主义”，并将其与宗教暴力混为一谈。新疆安防技术工业不断膨胀，从几家私企扩展到1400多家公司，聘用了几万员工：从底层的维吾尔族保安到汉族的摄像头安装工，从电信工程师到编程人员。习近平政府宣布新疆进入紧急状态，反恐人民战争打响，伊斯兰恐惧症制度化。
Soon after the internet came back online in 2010—with the notable absence of Facebook, Twitter, and other non-Chinese social media applications—state security, higher education, and private industry began to collaborate on breaking Uyghur internet autonomy. Much of the Uyghur-language internet was transformed from a virtual free society into a zone where government technology could learn to predict criminal behavior. Broadly defined anti-terrorism laws, introduced in 2014, turned nearly all crimes committed by Uyghurs, from stealing a Han neighbor’s sheep to protesting land seizures, into forms of terrorism. Religious piety, which the new laws referred to as “extremism,” was conflated with religious violence. The Xinjiang security industry mushroomed from a handful of private firms to approximately 1,400 companies employing tens of thousands of workers, ranging from low-level Uyghur security guards to Han camera and telecommunications technicians to coders and designers. The Xi administration declared a state of emergency in the region, the People’s War on Terror began, and Islamophobia was institutionalized.
智能恐怖
Smart Terror
到2017年，新疆经历了三年的“严打”政策。三年间，便民卡制度已经让维吾尔人的家园成了一座露天监狱，成百上千的警察监控着被国家杀害和“ 被消失”的维吾尔家庭。此后，政府又有了新战略。新的自治区党委书记陈全国推行了“ 转化”维吾尔人的政策。当地官方使用了公共健康领域的语言，把“三股势力”，即“宗教极端势力、民族分裂势力、暴力恐怖势力”，称为互相联结的 “意识形态的癌症” 。
In 2017, after three years of operating a “hard strike” policy in Xinjiang—which involved instituting a passbook system that turned the Uyghur homeland into a what many considered an open-air prison, and deploying hundreds of thousands of security forces to monitor the families of those who had been disappeared or killed by the state—the government turned to a fresh strategy. A new regional party secretary named Chen Quanguo introduced a policy of “transforming” Uyghurs. Using the language of public health, local authorities began to describe the “three evil forces” of “religious extremism, ethnic separatism and violent terrorism” as three interrelated “ideological cancers.”
因为网络数字世界让未经批准的伊斯兰教信息得以流传，政府官员便下令用人工智能技术来侦察和根除这些邪恶信息。早在2015年，习近平就宣布网络安全是国家首要任务，现在党内高层给中国科技公司更多激励来研发技术，帮助政府控制和改造维吾尔社会。政府招标了数十亿元的合同来奖励科技公司在整个新疆建立“智能”安防技术系统。
Because the digital sphere had allowed unauthorized forms of Islam to flourish, officials called for AI-enabled technology to detect and extirpate these evils. Already in 2015, Xi Jinping had announced that cybersecurity was a national priority; now Party leadership began to incentivize Chinese tech firms to build and develop technologies that could help the government control and modify Uyghur society. Billions of dollars in government contracts were awarded to build “smart” security systems across the Uyghur region.
推行“转化”政策的时间点，刚好和2017年公安部门研发的人工智能“一体化联合作战平台”同时。美亚柏科(Meiya Pico)开始向地方和自治区政府出售可以侦测图片中维吾尔文字和宗教符号的技术，这项技术就是由国家资金赞助的。该公司还开发了自动转写和翻译维吾尔语语音信息的软件。
The turn toward “transformation” coincided with breakthroughs in the AI-assisted computer systems that the Public Security Bureau rolled out in 2017 and brought together in the IJOP. The Chinese startup Meiya Pico began to market software to local and regional governments that was developed using state-supported research and could detect Uyghur language text and Islamic symbols embedded in images. The company also developed programs to automate the transcription and translation of Uyghur voice messaging.
海康威视(Hikvision)推出了能够自动识别维吾尔面部特征的软件。具备人工智能的程序已系统学习了众多不同种族的人脸图像数据库，再加上可以在弱光条件下工作的高清摄像头，当一个人走在街上，这些技术就足以从面部形状和肤色来判断其的民族身份。立昂技术(Leon)的发言人对中国领先的一家科技出版物说，这些摄像头整合了立昂研发的人工智能系统，可以在 “几秒钟” 之内识别可疑的行为和个人。其他程序包括自动搜索维吾尔人的网络活动，跟学校、工作单位、银行、医疗和生物识别数据库相对照，可以预测和寻找异常行为者。
The company Hikvision advertised tools that could automate the identification of Uyghur faces based on physiological phenotypes. High-resolution video cameras capable of operating in low-light conditions were linked to AI-enabled software trained on an extensive image database of racially diverse faces; together, these technologies could determine the ethnicity of a person based on the shape and color of the person’s facial features—all while the person strolled down street. A Leon Technology spokesperson told one of the country’s leading technology publications that the cameras were also integrated with an AI system made by Leon that could flag suspicious behavior and individuals under special surveillance “on the scale of seconds.” Other programs performed automated searches of Uyghurs’ internet activity and then compared the data it gleaned to school, job, banking, medical, and biometric records, looking for predictors of aberrant behavior.
这些新技术的部署需要大量的人力和技术培训。新疆招聘了超过十万名新警察，他们的一项工作就是实施Alim所经历的“体检”，给全自治区几乎所有人建立生物识别档案，然后从各个角度扫描他们面部的不同表情，创建面部签名，于是就有了高清的个人表情档案。所有的维吾尔人必须安装净网卫士应用程序，他们在手机上说了什么、读了什么、写了什么，以及他们联系的所有人都在监控之下。
The rollout of this new technology required a great deal of manpower and technical training. Over 100,000 new police officers were hired. One of their jobs was to conduct the sort of health check Alim underwent, creating biometric records for almost every human being in the region. Face signatures were created by scanning individuals from a variety of different angles as they made different facial expressions; the result was a high-definition portfolio of personal emotions. All Uyghurs were required to install the Clean Net Guard app, which monitored everything they said, read, and wrote, and everyone they connected with, on their smartphones.
高级别的警察大多是汉族。他们负责对整个穆斯林人口做出定性评估，为“一体化联合作战平台”的深度学习系统提供基于访谈调研的更复杂的数据。面对面访谈之后，片区警察对新疆超过一千四百万穆斯林少数民族人口做出评估，决定他们的属于“放心人员”，“一般人员”，还是“不放心人员”。他们评估的依据包括这些类别：是否维吾尔族、年龄段、是否无业、是否每日礼拜、有无未经许可的宗教学识、是否持有护照、去过26个穆斯林为主的国家、曾签证逾期、有境外关系人、曾在家教过孩子伊斯兰教知识等等。被判定为“不放心人员”的会被送到看守所，经过审问、认罪、和指认其他“不放心人员”等程序。通过这种方式，警察会决定一个人是否应该送去称为“教育转化中心”的集中营。
Higher-level officers, most of whom were Han, were given the job of conducting qualitative assessments of the Muslim population as a whole—providing more complex, interview-based survey data for IJOP’s deep-learning system. In face-to-face interviews, these neighborhood police officers assessed the more than 14 million Muslim-minority people in the province and determined if they should be given the rating of “safe,” “average,” or “unsafe.” They determined this by categorizing the person using ten or more categories: whether or not the person was Uyghur, of military age, or underemployed; whether they prayed regularly, possessed unauthorized religious knowledge, had a passport, had traveled to one of twenty-six Muslim-majority countries, had overstayed their visa, had an immediate relative living abroad, or had taught their children about Islam in their home. Those who were determined to be “unsafe” were then sent to the detention centers where they were interrogated and asked to confess their crimes and name others who were also “unsafe.” In this manner, the officers determined which individuals should be slotted for the “transformation through education” internment camps.
这些评估不是一次性的。很多穆斯林通过了第一次评估，但后来又被拘押，原因是被别人指认为“不放心人员”。数万名维吾尔人被捕的案例都是由于多年前的微信聊天记录被当作证据，来证明他们需要被“转化”。国家另外安排了110万名汉族和维族 “大哥大姐” 到维吾尔家庭进行为其一周的长期评估，成为不请而来的 “客人” 。在这段时间内，这些人会评价这些在集中营之外的维吾尔人的“安全”程度，强迫他们参加某些伊斯兰教派认为不虔诚的行为，比如喝酒、抽烟和跳舞。作为测试，他们会给维吾尔家庭的主人带来食物，但不说里面的肉是否清真。这些 “大哥大姐” 尤其关注的是，过去十年里有家人被警察击毙或带走的维吾尔家庭。他们会寻找任何反感或对中国爱国主义教育不积极的迹象和态度。他们会给孩子们糖果，来让他们报告自己父母的真实想法。所有的这些信息都会被输入到“一体化联合作战平台”里。
The assessments were iterative. Many Muslims who passed their first assessment were subsequently detained because someone else named them as “unsafe.” In as many as tens of thousands of cases, years of WeChat history was used as evidence of the need for Uyghur suspects to be “transformed.” The state also assigned an additional 1.1 million Han and Uyghur “big brothers and sisters” to conduct week-long assessments on Uyghur families as uninvited guests in Uyghur homes. Over the course of these stays, the relatives tested the “safe” qualities of those Uyghurs that remained outside of the camp system by forcing them to participate in activities forbidden by certain forms of Islamic piety such as drinking, smoking, and dancing. As a test, they brought their Uyghur hosts food without telling them whether the meat used in the dishes was halal or not. These “big sisters and brothers” focused on the families of those who had been shot or taken away by the police over the past decade. They looked for any sign of resentment or any lack of enthusiasm in Chinese patriotic activities. They gave the children candy so that they would tell them the truth about what their parents thought. All of this information was entered into databases and then fed back into the IJOP.
“一体化联合作战平台”永远在维吾尔人生活的背景里运行着，学习着。政府的希望是它最终需要越来越少的人力资源。最终的目标是在自治区加强安全控制的同时，解放安防劳动力，并将其转移到“教育转化中心”的工作上去。
The IJOP is always running in the background of Uyghur life, always learning. The government’s hope is that it will run with ever less human guidance. The goal is both to intensify securitization in the region and to free up security labor for the work of “transformation through education.”
量化的自我
Quantified Selves
我第一次面对人脸扫描仪是2018年，在乌鲁木齐南城维吾尔聚居区的一家酒店里。前台的男人用维语告诉我不用扫描人脸注册，因为我有外国护照。但当我坐高铁离开乌鲁木齐时，汉族警官指导我该如何扫描护照照片，并让我站好，好让摄像头清晰地拍到我的脸。一个小时后，我在吐鲁番出站时，必须在当地派出所再次人工核对我的脸。负责的是一个汉族女警官，她让一个维族警察用她的手机扫描了我的护照照片，并将扫描结果和她对我的脸拍的几张照片进行比对。我问这有什么必要，她说“这是为了你的安全”。
My first encounter with the face-scanning machines was at a hotel in the Uyghur district of Ürümchi in April 2018. Speaking in Uyghur, the man at the front desk told me I did not need to scan my face to register because I had foreign identification. But when I left the city on the high-speed train, Han officers instructed me on how to scan my passport picture and stand “just so” to enable the camera to get a good read of my face. Exiting the train an hour later in Turpan, my face had to be verified manually at the local police station. The officer in charge, a Han woman, told a young Uyghur officer to scan my passport photo with her smartphone and match that image with photos she took of my face. When I asked why this was necessary, the officer in charge said, “It is to keep you safe.”
我经过了很多维吾尔族城镇和人脸识别检查站，很惊讶居然没有发现有人跟踪我。但每次检查站的警官们似乎已经预计了我的到来。我才意识到，摄像头现在几乎可以像卧底警察一样精确地了解我的行踪了。我的运动轨迹也被人工智能的深度学习系统记录分析了，我也参与了“一体化联合作战平台”系统的训练工作。
As I moved through Uyghur towns and face-recognition checkpoints, I was surprised not to find handlers following me. When the officers at one checkpoint seemed to have anticipated my arrival, I realized the reason: cameras were now capable of tracking me with nearly as much precision as undercover police. My movements were being recorded and analyzed by deep learning systems. I, too, was training the IJOP.
为了躲避摄像头，我坐了维吾尔人开的黑车，躲进了维吾尔语书店，和维吾尔小贩一起抽了手卷烟，问他们教育转化系统的问题。我盼望着躲进这些“一体化联合作战平台”的盲点可以保护和我谈话的人们。行程结束几周后我听说，警察长时间审问了另一个曾长期居住在新疆的美国人，打听我的活动。
In order to avoid the cameras, I took unauthorized Uyghur taxis, ducked into Uyghur bookstores, and bummed hand-rolled cigarettes from Uyghur peddlers while I asked questions about the reeducation system. I hoped that slipping into the blind spots of the IJOP would help to protect the people I spoke with there. A few weeks after my trip, I heard that another American who had lived in the region for an extended period was interrogated by public security officers about my activities.
美国的科技圈对中国人工智能科技仍然存在怀疑。我见过的人工智能政策领域的很多专家，都谈到Jathan Sadowski写的一篇文章“徒有虚名的人工智能”，文中着重提到中国安防技术未能达到承诺的效果。他们频繁提到，深圳的一个系统本应该识别闯红灯路人的面部，然后将他们的身份投射到一个繁忙路口的超大屏幕上，结果系统无法跟上所有乱穿马路的人，还需要手动搜集数据，达到公共羞辱闯红灯路人的目的。他们指出中国科技公司和政府部门其实聘用了大量低收入的警察，来监控网络流量、查看摄像头拍摄的大量视频。就像美国的机场安检程序一样，很多专家认为，与其说是监控本身，不如说是监控的威胁成分，导致人们调整自己的行为。
In the tech community in the United States there is some skepticism regarding the viability of AI-assisted computer vision technology in China. Many experts I’ve spoken to from the AI policy world point to an article by the scholar Jathan Sadowski called “Potemkin AI,” which highlights the failures of Chinese security technology to deliver what it promises. They frequently bring up the way a system in Shenzhen meant to identify the faces of jaywalkers and flash them on jumbotrons next to busy intersections cannot keep up with the faces of all the jaywalkers; as a result, human workers sometimes have to manually gather the data used for public shaming. They point out that Chinese tech firms and government agencies have hired hundreds of thousands of low-paid police officers to monitor internet traffic and watch banks of video monitors. As with the theater of airport security rituals in the United States, many of these experts argue that it is the threat of surveillance, rather than the surveillance itself, that causes people to modify their behavior.
尽管有很多证据可以支持这种质疑，但是人工智能监控系统却能越来越多地自动识别网络上的伊斯兰教活动，造成百万穆斯林被拘押，这足以说明人工智能协助的监控和警务系统在新疆部署之后，造成了怎样的实际效果。就连在谷歌和其他企业工作的西方技术专家都坦言，中国科技公司现在已在计算机视觉技术方面领先世界，这都归功于中国直接资助科技公司在全国搜集、监控、利用、汇报数亿人口的个人隐私数据。
Yet while there is a good deal of evidence to support this skepticism, a notable rise in the automated detection of internet-based Islamic activity, which has resulted in the detention of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, also points to the real effects of the implementation of AI-assisted surveillance and policing in Xinjiang. Even Western experts at Google and elsewhere admit that Chinese tech companies now lead the world in these computer vision technologies, due to the way the state funds Chinese companies to collect, monitor, utilize, and report on the personal data of hundreds of millions of users across China.
在乌鲁木齐以西1500公里的喀什，我碰到了几十个自称是“亲戚”的汉族公务员。这些“大哥大姐”当中的几位，用溢美之词讲述着他们在维吾尔农村地区感到多么“安全”。现在，维吾尔人生活的社区，对汉族人似乎安全了。“一体化联合作战平台”也跟踪汉族人的轨迹，但他们对这种监控的体验却是顺滑的。比如说在火车站，他们走的是预先许可的“绿色通道”，限制维吾尔人的科技却让汉族居民更自由了。
In Kashgar, 1500 kilometers west of Ürümchi, I encountered dozens of Han civil servants who had been told to refer to themselves as “relatives.” Several of these “big brothers and sisters” spoke in glowing terms about the level of safety and security they felt in the Uyghur countryside. Uyghur communities, it seemed, were now safe for Han people. The IJOP tracks movements of Han people as well, but they experience this surveillance as frictionless. At railway stations, for example, they move through pre-approved “green lanes.” The same technology that restricts the movements of Uyghurs makes the movements of Han residents even freer.
“去过喀什的人都会知道，那边的气氛真的是很凝重”，立昂技术的发言人在2017年的中国–亚欧安防博览会上对记者说。他的意思是说，那时候喀什感觉太过维吾尔了。是他们开发的一个人工智能项目改变了原本“凝重”的气氛，让汉族迁入者和官员们更能自由地呼吸了。他说，”通过这个项目的不断推进，我们在农村地区的视频接入就有一万多部，如此多的图像，会‘束缚’住很多看视频的人。我们急需优秀的技术，尤其是像人工智能和人脸识别这类技术，来解放我们大量的警力、人力“。
“Anyone who has been to Kashgar will know that the atmosphere there was really thick and imposing,” a Leon Technology spokesperson told reporters at the China-Eurasia Security Expo in 2017. He was implying that, in the past, the city felt too Uyghur. One of the Uyghur-tracking AI projects that Leon developed made that “thick atmosphere” easier for Han settlers and officials to breathe. “Through the continuous advancement of the project, we have a network of 10,000 video access points in the surrounding rural area, which will generate massive amounts of video,” the spokesperson said. “This many images will ‘bind’ many people.”
事实上，“一体化联合作战平台”和立昂技术帮助中国政府用种种方式“束缚”了维吾尔人——束缚他们的政治和文化表达，把他们困在检查站和劳改营里。这些限制措施，以及维吾尔人受到压迫的景象所造成的结果，是汉族迁入者和国家政府感到了不断放大的自由和权力。
Like the rest of the IJOP, the Leon project helps the Chinese government to bind Uyghurs in many ways—by limiting their political and cultural expression, by trapping them within checkpoints and labor camps. The effect of these restrictions, and of the spectacle of Uyghur oppression, simultaneously amplifies the sense of freedom and authority of Han settlers and state authorities.
我在新疆遇到的汉族官员，常常拒绝承认，可能是年轻维吾尔男子失踪、时常被警察枪杀，国家霸占维吾尔人的土地资源，激发了维吾尔人之前一轮轮的抵抗。他们看不到国家禁止宗教教育，限制维吾尔人出国，广泛的就业歧视，与维吾尔人愈发渴望自由、公正、寻求宗教慰藉之间，有着紧密的联系。因为严打，汉族官员觉得维吾尔社会的伊斯兰教信仰和政治抵抗明显减少了，也很骄傲地看到维吾尔人开始热情地学习“通用语言”，抛弃宗教节日，拥抱汉族文化价值观了。从他们的角度看，这套新的安全系统是一个里程碑式的成功。
The Han officials I spoke with during my fieldwork in Xinjiang often refused to acknowledge the way disappearances, frequent police shootings of young Uyghur men, and state seizures of Uyghur land might have motivated earlier periods of Uyghur resistance. They did not see correlations between limits on Uyghur religious education, restrictions on Uyghur travel, and widespread job discrimination on the one hand, and the rise in Uyghur desires for freedom, justice, and religiosity on the other. Because of the crackdown, Han officials have seen a profound diminishment of Islamic belief and political resistance in Uyghur social life. They’re proud of the fervor with which Uyghurs are learning the “common language” of the country, abandoning Islamic holy days, and embracing Han cultural values. From their perspective, the implementation of the new security systems has been a monumental success.
一位和田的维吾尔生意人Dawut对我说，检查站和新安保系统的背后，是一个被掏空的维吾尔社会。来建立实行这套系统的政府官员、公务员和技术员似乎完全无视维吾尔的人性。国家看到的维吾尔生活只是计算机眼中所看到的那种。这让Dawut这样的维吾尔人感觉，他们的生命只是作为数据而存在着——屏幕上的编码，或是集中营里的人数。渐渐地，他们适应着这套系统，先是行为，然后是思想。
A middle-aged Uyghur businessman from Hotan, whom I will call Dawut, told me that that, behind the checkpoints, the new security system has hollowed out Uyghur communities. The government officials, civil servants, and tech workers who have come to build, implement, and monitor the system don’t seem to perceive Uyghurs’ humanity. The only kind of Uyghur life that can be recognized by the state is the one that the computer sees. This makes Uyghurs like Dawut feel as though their lives only matter as data—code on a screen, numbers in camps. They have adapted their behavior, and slowly even their thoughts, to the system.
“维吾尔人还活着，但是他们的整个生活都在墙里，”Dawut轻声说，“就好像活在另一个世界的幽灵一样。”
“Uyghurs are alive, but their entire lives are behind walls,” Dawut said softly. “It is like they are ghosts living in another world.”
（作家是华盛顿大学的人类学家，研究维吾尔人受到的剥夺、文化呈现，以及中国西北的“恐怖资本主义”。）
Darren Byler is an anthropologist at the University of Washington, where he researches Uyghur dispossession, cultural performance, and “terror capitalism” in northwest China.