Introduction

These reports are drawn from more than 400,000 internal police reports that were submitted to the Urumchi Public Security Bureau between April 2017 to April 2019. Although the sole purpose of this “Report App” that was built by the state contractor Landasoft was to increase surveillance within the public and encourage state workers and civilians to report suspicious activities or deviant people as part of the mass internment campaign in Xinjiang which was framed as “People’s War on Terror.” These internal reports were obtained from Landasoft by investigative reporter Yael Grauer as part of a report produced by The Intercept in 2021 during which time they were shared with the Xinjiang Documentation Project. The reports included here have not been published elsewhere in either Chinese or English translation. They provide a granular, ground-level view of the way anti-Muslim racism was institutionalized by mandating the public to spy on Muslim neighbors. They also demonstrate how the system created tremendous disruptions to urban social life by removing mass numbers of Uyghurs and other Muslims from the city and stigmatizing their family members.  They also show how, over time, the system was normalized.  

Methods

Members of the Xinjiang Documentation Project coded these reports using a keyword method such as 民族，维族，敌情 (Ethnicity, Uyghur, Enemy Intelligence) and 收押，识别，不便（Custody, Recognise, Inconvenience) to pinpoint reports that spoke most directly to the mass campaign and the condition of Uyghurs and other Muslims over the three years of the reports. All of the reports had serial numbers and publication dates while some also had the reporters’ names, telephone numbers, and workplaces. In order to allow readers to be assured of the report’s authenticity and to track the authority of the report authors we have included the serial number and the publication date for each piece of information. When possible we have also included the author’s name and their affiliated state office. We also included the state worker or citizen informants phone numbers in order for readers to further verify the credibility of the source. 

Distribution 

Collected data is distributed into 10 categories based on these keywords. In the first category, “enemy intelligence,” we compiled general reports that revealed the systematic racialization that Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities faced as the mass campaign was operationalized. Other categories assessed the effect of digital surveillance and the labeling of Uyghurs in finely detailed categories of suspicion or untrustworthiness. The reports also detail the economic effects of the campaign, for instance how the mass detention of Uyghurs meant that it became difficult to find bread and meat in the city because so many bakers and butchers had been removed.

The reports also detail how the surveillance system came on-line. They show how spot checks of IDs and phones, using digital forensics tools, were the main methods for diagnosing the untrustworthiness of Uyghurs and other Muslims. They show how facial imagery was collected through this process and how the facial recognition system was operationalized. They also show how police officers and community workers reported that Muslims attempted to evade smartphone checks by using “dumb” phones or leaving phones at home. Han citizens also complained about the inconvenience of checkpoints and phone checks–though none of the complaints about checkpoints and facial recognition systems questioned their legitimacy. Instead the complaints were primarily that there were “bugs” in the system, that it should more finely tuned to not inconvenience non-Muslim citizens.

Human surveillance was also in place. For example, police officers and community workers always kept close relationships with many Uyghur families (mostly family members of detainees) to monitor their daily activities and emotions. Starting in June 2017, vigilant Han civilians started to surveille their Muslim neighbors and report Muslim behavior that appeared to them to be deviant or “abnormal.”

In a general sense, the reports demonstrate with chilling precision and everyday human-to-human contact, how state violence was normalized through the implementation of a technological and bureaucratic system of mass surveillance.

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