The U.S. tech companies behind China’s mass surveillance
In January, the United States declared that China’s brutal treatment of the Uighur people in Xinjiang amounted to genocide. ‘I believe this genocide is ongoing, and we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy the Uighurs by the Chinese party-state,’ said Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state. British MPs made a similar declaration in April. Beijing fervently denies the accusation, and some experts maintain that ‘cultural genocide’ is a more appropriate label. But whatever we call it, the systematic attempt to erase Uighur identity, culture and history is a heinous crime against humanity.
In The Perfect Police State the American journalist Geoffrey Cain shows how Xinjiang, China’s remote northwest region, became ‘the world’s most sophisticated surveillance dystopia’. He traces the authorities’ development of new technologies to monitor and control Muslim and other ethnic minority citizens whose religion and culture make them politically suspect. And he takes us through the iron gates of Xinjiang’s ‘re-education centres’ — actually mass internment facilities, which he bluntly calls concentration camps, — where prisoners are ritually humiliated and brainwashed.
The horrors of China’s policy of forced assimilation in Xinjiang have been well documented before by a few brave foreign correspondents and researchers. Cain relies heavily on their work, but he has some fresh stories to tell from his own interviews with Uighur refugees. One of them is Maysem, a young graduate student in Turkey who is sent to a re-education camp after returning home to Xinjiang for the summer vacation. There she is forced to chant slogans praising the Communist party and write paeans to China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping: ‘You are the sun, you are the moon, you are the mountains!’ Even Kim Jong-un would be impressed.
Yet the real value of Cain’s book is its tying together of the different threads of reportage on ‘the Situation’ in Xinjiang — as it is euphemistically called on the ground. He is especially good at explaining how this vast, sparsely populated desert region became a laboratory for China’s emerging techno-authoritarianism.
China’s ruthless domination of Xinjiang is a sign of its wider ambitions, as Jeremiah Jacques explained in his recent article “‘They Want the World to Bow Down to China’”:
Prime Minister Hudayar said that the situation in Xinjiang, or East Turkistan, is just one part of the story. “[I]t is a very common thread of China trying to dominate more and more of the world,” he said. “First they invaded southern Mongolia, or what China calls Inner Mongolia. Then they invaded East Turkistan. Then a couple of months later, they invaded Tibet. Essentially, they’ve been doing the same policies of colonization, genocide and occupation in all three of these countries.”
Chinese government troops and agents have ruthlessly forced Mongolians, Uyghurs and Tibetans to submit not only a large percentage of their incomes, but also themselves, their families, their bodies and their minds to the Communist Party.
And Hudayar says this is only the beginning. China’s behavior around the world shows that the Communist Party’s ambitions have no bounds. “[L]ook at institutions like the Confucius Institutes and Chinese soft power through the Belt and Road Initiative,” he said, and how China is “setting up many colonies in Central Asia, even parts of Africa, teaching the local population Chinese and buying off their political elites to make them more aligned with China.” Controlling a huge and growing economy, Chinese leaders are also “using loans and entrapping nations through debt traps, and pretty much taking away those countries’ sovereignty piece by piece.”
The perverse Chinese regime wants to dye the planet red.
Read the rest of his article to see how this ambition ties in with Bible prophecy.
