INTRODUCTION
DYSTOPIA ON THE DOORSTEP
They took Tahir Hamut’s blood first. Next came his voice- and fingerprints. They saved his face for last.
The police officer gestured at a stool set up opposite the camera, and Tahir felt the weariness wash over him. He and his wife, Marhaba, had spent the entire afternoon in that windowless basement, wordlessly waiting their turn at each new station, not daring to ask why they were there. The officers gave away nothing. Each sat behind his or her computer like an irritable robot, issuing instructions in a flat tone tinged with half-hearted menace.
In other parts of China, police often functioned as little more than glorified security guards. Unarmed and undertrained, they could occasionally be found on the streets retreating in exasperation from gaggles of ornery retirees upset at being asked not to monopolize public space. It was different in Xinjiang. Here on the country’s remote western edge, at the doorstep of Central Asia, the police were hard and well armed. Any interaction with them unfolded in an aura of peril and potential violence. The tension was tolerable in short bursts, but to confront it for hours was exhausting.
Tahir lowered himself onto the stool and watched as the officer fiddled with the camera. Instead of one large lens it had three mini-lenses mounted horizontally in a black casing roughly the length and thickness of a small billy club. He had worked as a filmmaker for more than fifteen years and had never seen anything like it.
The officer told Tahir to sit up straight, then adjusted the tripod until the lenses lined up perfectly with the center of his face. The camera was connected by a cable to a computer on the desk opposite him. A woman operating the computer issued instructions in a dull voice. Face the camera. Turn to the right, then all the way back to the left. Then turn back to face the camera. Then look up and down.
“Do it slowly,” she said. “But not too slowly.”
Tahir stared into the lens, his back straight and tense. He moved his head to the right, paused briefly, then began moving back to the left.
“Stop,” the woman said. “Too fast. Do it over.”
Tahir started again. The officer stopped him again. Too slow this time.
He got it right on the third try. As he moved, the lenses captured waves of light from a fluorescent bulb overhead as they bounced off his skin. The camera converted the waves into streams of ones and zeros that it fed into the computer, where a program transformed them into a mathematical likeness. The program assembled numbers to denote his high nose and dark complexion—traits that typically distinguished Uyghurs like him from China’s dominant Han ethnic group. It registered his hooded eyes and thin-pressed lips, which he kept frozen in a mask of practiced impassivity. It also spun a series of integers to represent the swept-back salt-and-pepper hair that brushed his shoulders in a rakish mane—the type of cosmopolitan flourish that stood out in a hinterland outpost like Urumqi, almost 2,000 miles west of Beijing.
When he was done, the woman told him to open and close his mouth. Tahir stared into the lens and made an O with his lips, like a goldfish gulping water. After he closed his mouth the woman nodded.
“You can go.”
Feeling dazed, he stood to the side as Marhaba had her turn. She struggled to maintain a consistent speed. With each failed attempt, her frustration grew. It took her six tries. When she was finished, the two climbed the stairs to the lobby of the police station and stepped out past a newly installed security gate into the early Urumqi evening.
In the distance, fading rays of May sunlight glinted off mountain peaks still wrapped in shawls of white snow. This was usually one of the nicest times of year in Xinjiang, a sliver of comfort sandwiched between the region’s jagged winters and boiling summers. But the warming weather did little to melt away the chill that enveloped the region’s Uyghur neighborhoods.
A rugged expanse of mountains, deserts, and steppe twice the size of Texas, Xinjiang has floated on the margins of the Chinese empire for millennia. It formally became a part of China in the late 1800s, when rulers of the last dynasty named it a province, but well more than a century later it still felt like another world. The differences were especially jarring in areas dominated by the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim group that traces its roots to the oasis towns dotting Xinjiang’s southern deserts. Uyghur enclaves conjured an atmosphere closer to Istanbul than Beijing, with thrumming bazaars, shop signs in Arabic script, and calls to prayer echoing from minarets—expressions of a distinct identity that China’s Communist Party wanted to erase.
Six months earlier, Party leaders had set in motion plans to impose an unprecedented level of control in Xinjiang. To aid the effort, local authorities had begun to weave a spider’s web of digital sensors across the region that would make it easier for local authorities to monitor Uyghurs and the region’s other Turkic minorities. Xinjiang had been crawling with surveillance for years, but the old systems required huge amounts of manual labor. Police could spend weeks scanning video footage or listening to audio recordings just to retrace the movements of a single target. The new systems used artificial intelligence to eliminate human inefficiencies. They could suck in feeds from hundreds of cameras and microphones simultaneously and sift through them to identify targets in a matter of minutes, sometimes even seconds—fast enough for security forces to scuttle out and wrap up their prey before it slipped away.
On their way home, Tahir and Marhaba drove past signs of the web’s expansion: new clusters of pristine off-white surveillance cameras clinging like malevolent barnacles to lampposts and the sides of buildings; metal barriers wrapped in razor wire that funneled residents to entrance gates where their identities could be checked; police armed with handheld black smartphone scanners marching in and out of new outposts that had suddenly appeared at seemingly every intersection.
More and more the neighborhood felt like a war zone.
As he drove, Tahir felt a queasy blend of puzzlement and relief. The experience in the basement had been strange. He couldn’t fathom what the police planned to do with everything they had recorded. Whatever it was would almost certainly not be to their benefit given the direction things were going in Xinjiang. More than anything, though, he was thankful the officers had allowed him and Marhaba to leave.
In recent days, the couple had heard tales from friends in southern Xinjiang about Uyghurs being snatched up by police and taken away to mysterious facilities. Police referred to the places as schools but wouldn’t say what was being taught in them. As far as anyone knew, no one who had been sent to “study” had been allowed to return. Tahir figured it was just a matter of time before Uyghurs in Urumqi would start to be sent off as well.
Tahir also assumed his past made him a likely candidate to disappear. An artist known and respected among Xinjiang’s intellectuals, he played an influential role in preserving and shaping the Uyghur culture that the Party saw as a source of resistance. He had a passport and a record of foreign travel, which meant he could have made connections with Xinjiang separatists abroad. And as a youth he had a track record for rebellion, including a leadership role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, that at one point landed him in a labor camp. When he and Marhaba were called into the police station, he had assumed their time had come to be “educated.” It was hard to believe they had been able to simply walk out.
Others were less fortunate. Over the next few weeks, Tahir and Marhaba watched as their neighborhood slowly emptied out. One day, Tahir wandered outside and realized the smell of the tandoor naan flatbread, a warm swirl of yeast and sesame that conjured a thousand memories, had suddenly disappeared. The young men who ran the ovens were nowhere to be found. Soon other young men—butchers, fruit vendors, drivers—began to vanish. Then middle-aged men and some women. Sidewalks that had previously swarmed with crowds on weekends became lonely expanses of concrete where scattered footsteps seemed to land with an echo.
It didn’t take long for Uyghurs in Urumqi to draw connections between the spreading surveillance, the biometric data collection, and the disappearances. A proliferation of new security gates made it impossible for residents to move around the city without having their ID cards and faces scanned. Some Uyghurs’ cards or faces set off alarms, which led to them being shuffled off to police stations, and from there to the shadowy schools. Reports began to circulate about a system the government had built to categorize Uyghurs according to how “safe” for society they were.
Over time, Tahir started to understand the implications of the visit to the police basement. The government now had a collection of his biometric markers, none of which he could change. With the scan of his face on file, the surveillance cameras could recognize him from any angle. If this new system decided he was a threat to the social order, he wouldn’t have anywhere to hide.
* * *
Over the Communist Party’s seven decades in power, Xinjiang has been China’s most fractious region, riven by ethnic tensions between Uyghurs and Han Chinese migrants that have periodically exploded into deadly violence. Against the odds, the Party has brought the territory under total control using a combination of internment camps, brainwashing, and mass surveillance.
The Communist Party’s offensive in Xinjiang ranks among the most unsettling political developments of the twenty-first century. Chinese leaders have revived totalitarian techniques of the past and blended them with futuristic technologies in an effort not to eradicate a religious minority but to reengineer it. The campaign is one part of a radical experiment to reinvent social control through technology that is forcing democracies around the world to confront the growing power of digital surveillance and to wrestle with new questions about the relationship between information, security, and individual liberty.
State surveillance has been with us as long as there have been states. As far back as 3800 BCE, Babylonian kings in what is now Iraq pioneered an embryonic form of mass data collection, using cuneiform and clay tablets to keep a constantly updated record of people and livestock. The ancient Egyptians, Romans, and Persians followed suit, conducting regular surveys of their populations that grew more detailed and sophisticated over time—efforts to render their societies “legible,” in James C. Scott’s memorable description. For any state, being able to read the populace—being able to see at a glance who lives where, how many people are in a given household, what they own, and how much they earn—is critical for basic acts of governing like levying taxes, conscripting soldiers, and doling out grain. Throughout history, social control has been inseparable from the harvesting of personal information.
The evolution of state surveillance has proceeded in lockstep with new leaps in technology. The arrival of photography in the 1840s revolutionized the identification of individuals. The invention of wiretapping a few decades later made it possible for police to eavesdrop undetected on private conversations. A century later, the popularization of the computer and the advent of the internet magnified the reach of virtually every existing surveillance tool and catalyzed the creation of innumerable new ones.
Copyright © 2022 by Joshua Chin and Liza Lin
