I have sometimes thought that it was a very good thing that the Nazis, despite all their Germanic thoroughness, were still in the relative dark ages of technology. I’m not just talking about weaponry. I’m talking about keeping track of people.

They tried—oh, how they tried. And considering the tools they had at hand, they certainly were able to rather efficiently control, round up, torture, enslave, and/or kill a host of people.

But there still were those who managed to go into hiding and elude their grip. It was difficult to do even then. If the Nazis had had modern technology I believe it would have been far more difficult.

Which brings us to what’s been going on in the Chinese area known as Xinjiang, according to this Spiegel article.

The surveillance is supposedly aimed at monitoring the minority group known as the Uighurs, who are Sunni Moslems. This Wiki article describes the history of Uighur unrest in the region: there has been a separatist movement, and some riots and terrorist attacks. But it’s hard to know which came first, the oppression or the violence. There are other Muslim ethnic groups in the same region who are not violent and are not being discriminated against, so the situation does not seem to be about the Moslem religion per se and is apparently based on the separatism. But whatever the situation and whatever the justification or supposed justification, it sounds as though everyone living in the area is under siege, and it’s the thoroughness and nature of the methods used by Chinese authorities that got my attention.

From the Spiegel article:

Xinjiang, one of the most remote and backward regions in booming China, has become a real-life dystopia. It provides a glimpse of what an authoritarian regime armed with 21st century technology is capable of.

With its ultra-modern skyline, the capital of Xinjiang is home to a population of some 3.5 million, 75 percent of which are Han Chinese. The Uighurs make up the largest minority. Kazakhs, Mongolians and Chinese-speaking Muslim Hui people also live here…

The Chinese decided to deal with it by making the area into a surveillance state. Nineteen Eighty-Four, but with many more tools at their disposal than Orwell’s telescreens [emphasis mine]:

Beijing brought in hardliner Chen Quanguo, party boss in Tibet, and put him in charge in Xinjiang. Within two years, he implemented the same policy he enacted in Tibet and installed police stations across the region. These bunker-like, barricaded and heavily guarded buildings now litter every crossroads of the major cities.

Chen also introduced a block leader system not unlike the old German “Blockwarts,” with members of the local Communist Party committee given powers to inspect family homes and interrogate them about their lives: Who lives here? Who visited? What did you talk about? Even the controllers are getting controlled: Many apartments have bar code labels on the inside of the front door which the official must scan to prove that he or she carried out the visit.

To optimize social control, neighbors are now also instructed to turn each other in…

“Qu xuexi,” meaning to go or be sent to study, is one of the most common expressions in Xinjiang these days. It is a euphemism for having been taken away and not having been seen or heard from since. The “schools” are re-education centers in which the detainees are being forced to take courses in Chinese and patriotism, without any indictment, due process or a fair hearing.

Much of this, of course, is just tried-and-true traditional Communist control (informing, and re-education camps, for example). But there’s much more, and some of it is new [emphasis mine]:

…the provincial government has recruited over 90,000 police officers in the last two years alone — twice as many as it recruited in the previous seven years. With around 500 police officers for every 100,000 inhabitants, the police presence will soon be almost as tight as it is in neighboring Tibet.

At the same time, Beijing is equipping the far-western region with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, with cameras illuminating every street all over the region, from the capital Urumqi to the most remote mountain village. Iris scanners and WiFi sniffers are in use in stations, airports and at the ubiquitous checkpoints — tools and programs that allow data traffic from wireless networks to be monitored.

The data is then collated by an “integrated joint operations platform” that also stores further data on the populace — from consumer habits to banking activity, health status and indeed the DNA profile of every single inhabitant of Xinjiang.

It’s not as though China has some tradition of liberty. It doesn’t. We do. But unless we are constantly devoted to preserving it, it can become fatally compromised, and technology is a key method for doing this.

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]