Darren Byler, “Living in a Ghost World,” New Internationalist 522, December 2019: 26–30.
Summary
Darren Byler describes the open-air surveillance, internment camps, and population control in Xinjiang.
Abstract
Since 2016, at least a million people have been sent to re-education camps as part of the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uyghur people. […] in March 2014, there was an attack in a train station: a group of Uyghur young people, dressed in black and carrying Islamic flags, cut people with knives and killed over 30. Because my partner and I are American they didn’t view us with suspicion, but my Uyghur friends told me that often during visits the authorities would look under their beds, search computers, search smartphones. […] China is a strategic counterweight to the United States and other Western nations; Muslim-majority states don’t want to cut off relations with China because that will make them more of a target for the West.\
Keywords: Labour transfer, Re-Education, Securitization, Surveillance