Xinjiang Dispatch

How China Turned a City Into a Prison

A surveillance state reaches new heights.

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We visited Kashgar several times to see what life is like. We couldn’t interview residents — that would have been too risky for them, because we were constantly followed by the police. But the restrictions were everywhere.

Every 100 yards or so, the police stand at checkpoints with guns, shields and clubs. Many are Uighurs. The surveillance couldn’t work without them.

Muslim minorities line up, stone-faced, to swipe their official identity cards. At big checkpoints, they lift their chins while a machine takes their photos, and wait to be notified if they can go on.

The police sometimes take Uighurs’ phones and check to make sure they have installed compulsory software that monitors calls and messages.

Xinjiang is in China’s far west, but it feels more part of central Asia. Ethnic minorities — including Uighurs, Kazakhs and Tajiks — outnumber the Han Chinese majority here. They are mostly Sunni Muslims with their own cultures and languages.

Sometimes their choices made no sense. One erased this picture of a camel, though I was able to restore it. “In China there are no whys,” he said.

For Uighurs, the surveillance is even more pervasive. Neighborhood monitors are assigned to watch over groups of families, as in this photo. An army of millions of police and official monitors can question Uighurs and search their homes. They grade residents for reliability. A low grade brings more visits, maybe detention.

This is Dilnur. She fled Kashgar to Turkey three years ago and has lost touch with her family in Xinjiang. But she remembers the searches: “They don’t care if it’s morning or night, they would come in every time they want.”

Orphanages have been taking away the children of detainees. We don’t know how many, but the government says that orphanages like this one held 7,000 children across Kashgar alone last year.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. In streets, doorways, shops, mosques. Look at this stretch of street. We counted 20 cameras.

Chinese companies are earning a fortune selling this surveillance technology. They make it sound like a sci-fi miracle allowing the police to track people with laser precision.

Demo at the World Internet Conference, 2017

But spend time in Xinjiang and you see that the surveillance state acts more like a sledgehammer — sweeping, indiscriminate; as much about intimidation as monitoring.

Demo at a trade show, 2017

At the mosque, worshipers register and go through a security check.

Inside, they pray under surveillance cameras that the police can monitor.

Children are interrogated. “In the kindergarten, they would ask little children, ‘Do your parents read the Quran?’” Dilnur told us. “My daughter had a classmate who said, ‘My mom teaches me the Quran.’ The next day, they are gone.”

The very architecture of Kashgar has been altered to make the city easier to control.

The Old City, a maze-like area of mudbrick homes, has mostly been demolished. The government said it was for safety and sanitation. But the rebuilding has also created wider streets that are easier to monitor and patrol.

Some areas are still undergoing demolition and reconstruction.

The new brick homes seem more comfortable, but Uighurs mourn their old neighborhoods. Tourists wander the refurbished alleys, often unaware of the ancient lanes they replaced. But visitors are kept far from the indoctrination camps on the edge of town.

This piece of land in southern Kashgar was empty in August 2016.

Now this is a re-education camp with a capacity of roughly 20,000 people. The government says it is a vocational training center. A recent satellite image shows the camp occupies more than 195,000 square meters.

This camp is not the only one growing. These 13 camps in Kashgar have all jumped in size, reaching 1 million square meters last year.

Christopher Buckley, Paul Mozur and Austin Ramzy are foreign correspondents for The New York Times. Chris and Paul last visited Kashgar in October.

Produced by Josh Williams, Sergio Pecanha and Joe Ward.
Additional work by Malachy Browne and Meg Felling.

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Map sources: Australian Strategic Policy Institute; Digital Globe
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How China Turned a City Into a Prison