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One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority

In a major ethical leap for the tech world, Chinese start-ups have built algorithms that the government uses to track members of a largely Muslim minority group.

SenseTime is among the Chinese artificial intelligence companies developing facial recognition technology. Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

The Chinese government has drawn wide international condemnation for its harsh crackdown on ethnic Muslims in its western region, including holding as many as a million of them in detention camps.

Now, documents and interviews show that the authorities are also using a vast, secret system of advanced facial recognition technology to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said.

The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and goings for search and review. The practice makes China a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism.

The technology and its use to keep tabs on China’s 11 million Uighurs were described by five people with direct knowledge of the systems, who requested anonymity because they feared retribution. The New York Times also reviewed databases used by the police, government procurement documents and advertising materials distributed by the A.I. companies that make the systems.

The Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Chinese Surveillance State, Part 1

Using facial recognition software for ethnic profiling is only one way that Beijing is harnessing technology for social control.
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transcript

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Chinese Surveillance State, Part 1

Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Andy Mills, Alexandra Leigh Young, Jessica Cheung and Luke Vander Ploeg, and edited by Lisa Tobin

Using facial recognition software for ethnic profiling is only one way that Beijing is harnessing technology for social control.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today: Under Xi Jinping, China is pioneering a new form of governance by surveillance. In the first of a two-part series, my colleague Paul Mozur on how China piloted that system on one minority group in the country. It’s Monday, May 6.

Hi.

paul mozur

Hi.

michael barbaro

Headphones.

Paul, we’ve actually never met. You are in town from China. I’m hoping you’re going to tell me why.

paul mozur

Yeah, so I’ve been reporting in and around China for about 12 years. And there’s always been a lot of control. I think people are aware of that. They’re aware there’s censorship. They’re aware that people can be followed, and there is a certain amount of surveillance. But in the past five years, things have really changed and taken a much more dramatic and darker turn, really, when it comes to, especially, surveillance. And that coincides with the rise of Xi Jinping. China’s president who came into power about five years ago has really doubled down on control. And he has been not shy at all about using technology to exert that control. And there’s a lot of things that are invisible in how that works, but one of the very few visible symptoms are the cameras. There were always some cameras in China, but recently, past couple of years, the cameras have just gone in in this dramatic way. Some of them look like these baroque modernist sculptures or something. It’s like four cameras stretching off of a different pole, or you have a camera hanging from a tree. There’s these almost hidden cameras in the subway cars, these little holes. And if you look closely at them, you say, oh, my God, that’s actually a lens. I counted the cameras on my way to work one day, which is a two-subway-stop ride. And I passed, I think, 250 cameras.

michael barbaro

Wow.

paul mozur

Yeah.

michael barbaro

In what kind of places? Where are you seeing them?

paul mozur

All kinds of places. Every intersection will have dozens of cameras to catch people’s license plates as they drive by. About every 50 yards, you’ll have a camera on a pole that’s a dome camera that can zoom in and grab their faces or follow somebody if you have to. And when you walk down stairs, there’s these high-powered facial recognition cameras aimed at your face, with the idea of trying to figure out who you are as you walk by.

michael barbaro

And who’s on the other side of those cameras?

paul mozur

Yeah, it’s what I always wonder. We don’t always know. And this is the thing about China, is that it is an autocratic system with very little transparency. For the most part, what we assume is a newly empowered police force is using these to try to learn as much as they can about the population and track them.

michael barbaro

But to the degree that there’s a rationale for this, what is it?

paul mozur

Security. Safety. We want to make sure that if something bad were to happen in our neighborhood, we could protect ourselves. But in some recent reporting, what we discovered is the true breathtaking ways in which the police are already assembling lists of faces of people that they’re worried about, and even using it to mark people based on ethnicity and race, and track them and keep a record. It’s as if you were just counting only one group of people as they went around a city and keeping tabs so that you can go back and see which person that was. And in America, this would be horrendously unconstitutional. But in China, it had been happening for almost two years without anybody even noticing.

michael barbaro

And why would China want to do that? Why would it track a group of people by race through cameras and this classification system?

paul mozur

Right. So China has had this long issue with a Muslim minority known as the Uighurs, who live out in western China, this massive province, a fifth the size of China’s landmass, called Xinjiang. It’s mostly desert and really high mountains. It’s the old Silk Road. And these people have lived there for more than 1,000 years in these tiny little oasis cities around the desert. And China has occupied their land for several hundred years now. And as China has occupied it, for the most part, until maybe the past 50 or 60 years, it’s mostly just been a far-flung place. But under the Chinese Communist Party, they’ve really solidified power. And they’ve started to change the demographics. So they’ve created all these passive incentives to move Han Chinese into this region.

michael barbaro

To basically make it less Muslim? More Chinese?

paul mozur

Exactly. And so, 50 or 60 years ago, there were almost no Chinese, and it was all Uighurs. Now it’s 50 percent Chinese, 50 percent Uighur. And that’s created all of these conflicts.

But everything really changed in 2009. What happens is, there’s violence in this small factory in southern China. And it turns out that there was a rumor that these two Uighur factory workers raped a Chinese woman, and then when the ethnic Chinese confront the Uighur population at the factory, a big fight breaks out, where, ultimately, two Uighurs end up beaten to death.

archived recording

[SHOUTING]

paul mozur

And there’s a video of this on YouTube, and it goes around.

archived recording

[SPEAKING MANDARIN]

paul mozur

And in a tinderbox like Xinjiang, where you have all of these other tensions there, it becomes one of the main causes for this massive outburst of rioting and anger in the capital of Urumqi.

Thousands of Uighurs take to the streets, some with knives, and they murder about 200 Han Chinese.

michael barbaro

Wow.

paul mozur

So it’s a brutal and large-scale race riot.

archived recording

[SHOUTING]

paul mozur

And following that, the military is mobilized. The internet is cut off in Xinjiang, so you cannot get online. Even phone calls outside the country are no longer allowed. It’s a new level of suffocating technological response. And so in the ensuing decade, what they’ve tried to do is figure out methods to systematize it. And so they’ve turned to the police, and they’ve turned to technology.

michael barbaro

Have you been back there recently?

paul mozur

Yes. So I went back in October to Kashgar.

It’s a transformed place. It’s one of the most bizarre places I think I’ve ever been. We’re, of course, followed by secret police wherever we go. There are checkpoints every couple hundred yards. And they’ve created these things called convenience police centers. So think of a convenience store, but it’s a police station instead. So these small concrete boxes with constantly flashing lights. And they’re every couple hundred yards, and police are in them. And they’ll set up checkpoints there. But the idea is to blanket the city with this very suffocating level of police presence and surveillance. This is an old, mud-brick city, filled with bazaars.

And now what you have is that look with these tremendously powerful facial recognition cameras hanging from a mud-brick wall, and there are cameras absolutely everywhere.

And so you have this very bizarre contrast of a place that in some ways feels like it could be timeless and 1,000 years old, with these hyper-modern technological solutions attempting to understand and track the populations.

michael barbaro

So tell me about that tracking. So clearly, China is very anxious that this Muslim population is going to revolt or just generally disobey the desires of the Chinese government. So how does that translate into this surveillance apparatus? What are they going to do with the image of a Muslim man or woman in this place that’s going to stop that?

paul mozur

Well, so they’ve already thrown about a million people in camps.

michael barbaro

Labor camps?

paul mozur

Well, they call them re-education camps. And we don’t have a lot of understanding of what happens inside. But it seems to be day-long classes and people being made to sit and hear Chinese Communist Party theory and propaganda and things like that. They need excuses to put people in these places. So if you have this massive surveillance system, you can find people that you think might be dangerous or might be risky. But the thing is, it’s so over the top and so extreme, people get thrown in because they’re an academic, because they’re influential, because they use technology, because they wouldn’t shave their beard, because they read the Quran. There’s a million different ways. What they’ve done is just tracked everybody all the time in a way that nobody even can go out their door without feeling the weight of the gaze of the state.

michael barbaro

Right. Everything you just described would be something that you could capture on camera. You would see someone with a beard. You might see someone reading the Quran. And that could be the trigger.

paul mozur

Right. And they’ve hung lots of cameras in mosques. So the Id Kah Mosque is this beautiful, mustard yellow mosque that sits in the center of old Kashgar. It’s the heart of Uighur Islam. And I think I counted more than 200 cameras inside the mosque, trying to capture worshippers who would come and go. And there aren’t many worshippers anymore, of course, because who’s going to go walk in front of those cameras and show their faces? And then that very easily can just go into a database, and then they have a data point. They know that Michael was right outside the Id Kah Mosque at this time. And then when he leaves the Id Kah Mosque, he’ll have to give his ID again. And then when he goes down to the marketplace, he has to give his ID again. And that way, you can build a comprehensive map of where you’re going. If you want to go to the bank, if you want to go to a grocery store, you have to do this. If you want to enter the old city, you have to do it. And so, it effectively just makes it impossible to do anything in this society without constantly giving up your private information to the state and to the police.

michael barbaro

And what you’re describing is the definition of dystopia.

paul mozur

Yeah. And it goes even deeper than this. Around 2017, 2016, in Kashgar, we’ve heard that many people were called in for compulsory medical checkups. And they never got the results of the medical checkup. But what the medical checkup was was they had to give a blood sample, and their faces were scanned. And they had to give a voice sample, irises were scanned. And so just a mass collection of a single ethnicity’s biometric information. And we don’t really know entirely what they’ll do with all of that. In our reporting, we’ve seen parts of this. We’ve seen some of the dossiers. And so they can map people’s family relationships.

michael barbaro

Wow. And what might the Chinese government do with that information? About family members, all those connections?

paul mozur

They use it to lean on people. And they use it to intimidate people. And they use it to show that they are so powerful that there would be no point, in a way, to resist or push back. And you could see it in the population, the fear.

michael barbaro

I’m trying to understand where this leads to, because this doesn’t seem like an effort to acculturate people or to encourage them toward a Chinese identity. If anything, the people who are being subjected to this would most likely resent the Chinese government, right?

paul mozur

Right. I think the thinking goes further than that. The hope is ultimately to, I think, change the population fundamentally — to re-engineer a new way of life for these people that is basically Chinese. And I think the ultimate goal here is to eradicate Uighur culture. And the thing is, if they fail, well, then they have a culture so completely in their control that it’s no longer a threat in any way.

michael barbaro

Paul, what’s the relationship between what’s happening to the Uighurs and the larger surveillance state in China? If the rest of China is already Chinese, how does this all connect?

paul mozur

So a lot of people like to call Xinjiang the laboratory for Chinese surveillance. So if you have any kind of draconian solution to tracking somebody or figuring out what somebody is doing on their phone, you can try it out in Xinjiang, and then see what happens. In Xinjiang, they can get away with a lot more, because you have an ethnic minority that is already so beset that they can’t really push back.

michael barbaro

A group without any power.

paul mozur

Right, exactly. In the rest of China, you see something that’s a little bit more passive, but you see a constant creep.

On the subway, for instance, you start to see more checkpoints. The police just sit out where people are transferring, and they just stop people at random, and they scan their ID card, just like what happened in Xinjiang. And one of the things our reporting showed is that it’s not just Uighurs they’re looking for in these cities. They’re making lists of people’s faces depending on what kind of group they are. So they are making lists of the mentally ill. They’re making lists of people with a past history of drug use. They’re making lists of people who would petition the government or complain about the government. But they also have lists of every single person registered to live in that city. So the idea isn’t just to track these small groups. It’s to track everyone, with the idea that if somebody were to get out of line, then you know everything about them to begin with.

michael barbaro

So this is about every single person in China?

paul mozur

Yes.

[music]

michael barbaro

I’m struck that all of this is happening at the same time that China is becoming a world power whose influence is growing so much overseas, because those things don’t quite seem to be consistent. In fact, they seem to be very contradictory.

paul mozur

Right. And I think they’ve basically proved that wrong, that you can have censorship and you can have a closed society, in some ways, and a controlled society, but also have a booming tech sector. And this is the first time in probably 30 years that we’ve had an autocratic state alongside the United States at the cutting edge of technology. So if you think about it, democracies have dominated technological creation since the fall of the Berlin Wall, effectively. Now China’s coming along, and they’re making technologies, but these technologies are suited for their purposes. And in a lot of cases, those purposes have some authoritarian component to them, or some point of control to them. Very intentional control. And in fact, as they’ve risen, they’ve used all of this as a selling point. So think to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. This is China’s coming-out party as a new superpower.

[music]

paul mozur

They’ve outfitted the capital with tons of security to make sure it goes well, to make sure there’s no protests, but also to make sure there’s no attacks or anything. And so they load up the city with 300,000 cameras that the government was controlling.

michael barbaro

Because, of course, this is a moment where you actually do want a lot of security.

paul mozur

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So they really pulled out all the stops.

But then what they did when all these international leaders arrived to see the Olympics is they took them into the back rooms where you could see all these cameras operating. They show the screens. They show, this is how our policing system works.

michael barbaro

So who is in there?

paul mozur

So we don’t know everybody that visited. But what we do know is that countries like Ecuador sent delegations — places that might be struggling with democracy or even already being led by strongmen, who have come to check this out. And there’s screens up with video footage from these thousands and thousands of cameras. And they can see how the Chinese security forces can see everything. They look at it, and they say, well, this is pretty powerful. I wonder if we could get this. And that’s where it starts. And so now what we’re seeing is those technologies are beginning to flow to the world. And so all of a sudden, on the streets of Quito, you see the same cameras that you would see in Shanghai. And that’s not just happening there. That’s happening in Venezuela. That’s happening in Bolivia. That’s happening in Angola. That’s happening in Pakistan. It’s happening around the world.

michael barbaro

Paul, what do you make of this global spread of surveillance, starting in China? What does it tell you about the changes you’ve seen in China in recent years and where all this is headed?

paul mozur

It tells me that, I think, the Chinese government believes it has created a different model and a new model, and they want to propagate it. They want to spread it. And they want to give other countries the ability to do what they’ve done and, in that way, influence the world. So this is — governance by data, governance by mass surveillance, is, in a way, the Chinese model now, and they want to bring it to the world. And what this encourages is authoritarianism, because it uses technology unapologetically to consolidate power by understanding what everybody’s doing and where they are at any given moment. And I think it’s an important moment for democracies like the United States, because they need to recognize this is happening, but also say, well, what does the United States stand for in all this? Do they stand for data collection, as well, without telling anybody? Do you stand for something else? Because the United States at this point is so lost in its own debates —

michael barbaro

Right. So do we stand in contrast to that?

paul mozur

Right. Exactly. And that’s the thing — as I write about this from China, it’s unclear where the United States stands in all of it.

michael barbaro

In a world where this model that you’re describing is spreading around the world, how exactly does China benefit from that? Because there are fewer and fewer places where a democratic government without surveillance challenges it?

paul mozur

I think the idea is if you give the people you’re dealing with these systems, you increase their power. And that means the people you’re dealing with are more likely to keep dealing with you and be the ones in power. So there’s a sort of perpetuation. But I think there’s also just a broader sense of the more countries around the world that do this, the more it’s deemed acceptable by the world, and the more that they have reliable partners who are following what they’re doing and reliant on them and allow them to push how governance works. And so in a way, they become the axle, and all of these different places become the spokes in this wheel, the new version of global governance, a new alternative to the messy democracies of the past.

michael barbaro

Governance by data.

paul mozur

Governance by data and surveillance.

michael barbaro

Paul, thank you very much.

paul mozur

Thanks.

michael barbaro

On Sunday, The Times reported that the Trump administration has decided not to confront China over its repressive treatment of the Uighurs, for fear that it could disrupt the final stages of a major trade deal between the two countries. The administration had considered imposing economic sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the repression, but has since backed away from that plan. In Part 2, we’ll hear from one Uighur man living in the U.S. who is trying to fight for his family in the camps in China.

We’ll be right back.

[music]

michael barbaro

Here’s what else you need to know today.

On Sunday, fighting between Israel and Gaza escalated into the worst combat since the full-blown war between them in 2014. Four Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinian rocket and missile attacks, prompting Israel to take aim at individual militants in Gaza, killing at least nine of them and as many civilians.

archived recording (benjamin netanyahu)

[SPEAKING HEBREW]

michael barbaro

During a news conference, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, promised massive attacks against the militants in Gaza.

archived recording (benjamin netanyahu)

[SPEAKING HEBREW]

michael barbaro

The Palestinian rocket attacks mostly struck civilian targets in southern Israel with no military value, including a building that houses a kindergarten and the oncology department of a medical center. The violence is the latest in a long-running series of clashes that have produced temporary ceasefires that are quickly broken. And President Trump on Sunday said that Special Counsel Robert Mueller should not testify before Congress, setting up another confrontation with congressional Democrats, who have requested Mueller’s appearance. In a tweet, the president said that Mueller’s report was conclusive and that Americans do not need to hear from him again. “No redos for the Dems,” he wrote. Because Mueller was appointed by the Department of Justice, which answers to the president, it appears that Trump has the authority to prevent Mueller from testifying.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

Chinese authorities already maintain a vast surveillance net, including tracking people’s DNA, in the western region of Xinjiang, which many Uighurs call home. But the scope of the new systems, previously unreported, extends that monitoring into many other corners of the country.

Image
Shoppers lined up for identification checks outside the Kashgar Bazaar last fall. Members of the largely Muslim Uighur minority have been under Chinese surveillance and persecution for years.Credit...Paul Mozur

The police are now using facial recognition technology to target Uighurs in wealthy eastern cities like Hangzhou and Wenzhou and across the coastal province of Fujian, said two of the people. Law enforcement in the central Chinese city of Sanmenxia, along the Yellow River, ran a system that over the course of a month this year screened whether residents were Uighurs 500,000 times.

Police documents show demand for such capabilities is spreading. Almost two dozen police departments in 16 different provinces and regions across China sought such technology beginning in 2018, according to procurement documents. Law enforcement from the central province of Shaanxi, for example, aimed to acquire a smart camera system last year that “should support facial recognition to identify Uighur/non-Uighur attributes.”

Some police departments and technology companies described the practice as “minority identification,” though three of the people said that phrase was a euphemism for a tool that sought to identify Uighurs exclusively. Uighurs often look distinct from China’s majority Han population, more closely resembling people from Central Asia. Such differences make it easier for software to single them out.

For decades, democracies have had a near monopoly on cutting-edge technology. Today, a new generation of start-ups catering to Beijing’s authoritarian needs are beginning to set the tone for emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. Similar tools could automate biases based on skin color and ethnicity elsewhere.

“Take the most risky application of this technology, and chances are good someone is going to try it,” said Clare Garvie, an associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. “If you make a technology that can classify people by an ethnicity, someone will use it to repress that ethnicity.”

From a technology standpoint, using algorithms to label people based on race or ethnicity has become relatively easy. Companies like I.B.M. advertise software that can sort people into broad groups.

But China has broken new ground by identifying one ethnic group for law enforcement purposes. One Chinese start-up, CloudWalk, outlined a sample experience in marketing its own surveillance systems. The technology, it said, could recognize “sensitive groups of people.”

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A screen shot from the CloudWalk website details a possible use for its facial recognition technology. One of them: recognizing “sensitive groups of people.”Credit...CloudWalk
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A translation of marketing material for CloudWalk’s facial recognition technology.Credit...The New York Times

“If originally one Uighur lives in a neighborhood, and within 20 days six Uighurs appear,” it said on its website, “it immediately sends alarms” to law enforcement.

In practice, the systems are imperfect, two of the people said. Often, their accuracy depends on environmental factors like lighting and the positioning of cameras.

In the United States and Europe, the debate in the artificial intelligence community has focused on the unconscious biases of those designing the technology. Recent tests showed facial recognition systems made by companies like I.B.M. and Amazon were less accurate at identifying the features of darker-skinned people.

China’s efforts raise starker issues. While facial recognition technology uses aspects like skin tone and face shapes to sort images in photos or videos, it must be told by humans to categorize people based on social definitions of race or ethnicity. Chinese police, with the help of the start-ups, have done that.

“It’s something that seems shocking coming from the U.S., where there is most likely racism built into our algorithmic decision making, but not in an overt way like this,” said Jennifer Lynch, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “There’s not a system designed to identify someone as African-American, for example.”

The Chinese A.I. companies behind the software include Yitu, Megvii, SenseTime, and CloudWalk, which are each valued at more than $1 billion. Another company, Hikvision, that sells cameras and software to process the images, offered a minority recognition function, but began phasing it out in 2018, according to one of the people.

The companies’ valuations soared in 2018 as China’s Ministry of Public Security, its top police agency, set aside billions of dollars under two government plans, called Skynet and Sharp Eyes, to computerize surveillance, policing and intelligence collection.

In a statement, a SenseTime spokeswoman said she checked with “relevant teams,” who were not aware its technology was being used to profile. Megvii said in a statement it was focused on “commercial not political solutions,” adding, “we are concerned about the well-being and safety of individual citizens, not about monitoring groups.” CloudWalk and Yitu did not respond to requests for comment.

China’s Ministry of Public Security did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

Selling products with names like Fire Eye, Sky Eye and Dragonfly Eye, the start-ups promise to use A.I. to analyze footage from China’s surveillance cameras. The technology is not mature — in 2017 Yitu promoted a one-in-three success rate when the police responded to its alarms at a train station — and many of China’s cameras are not powerful enough for facial recognition software to work effectively.

Yet they help advance China’s architecture for social control. To make the algorithms work, the police have put together face-image databases for people with criminal records, mental illnesses, records of drug use, and those who petitioned the government over grievances, according to two of the people and procurement documents. A national database of criminals at large includes about 300,000 faces, while a list of people with a history of drug use in the city of Wenzhou totals 8,000 faces, they said.

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A security camera in a rebuilt section of the Old City in Kashgar, Xinjiang.Credit...Thomas Peter/Reuters

Using a process called machine learning, engineers feed data to artificial intelligence systems to train them to recognize patterns or traits. In the case of the profiling, they would provide thousands of labeled images of both Uighurs and non-Uighurs. That would help generate a function to distinguish the ethnic group.

The A.I. companies have taken money from major investors. Fidelity International and Qualcomm Ventures were a part of a consortium that invested $620 million in SenseTime. Sequoia invested in Yitu. Megvii is backed by Sinovation Ventures, the fund of the well-known Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.

A Sinovation spokeswoman said the fund had recently sold a part of its stake in Megvii and relinquished its seat on the board. Fidelity declined to comment. Sequoia and Qualcomm did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

Mr. Lee, a booster of Chinese A.I., has argued that China has an advantage in developing A.I. because its leaders are less fussed by “legal intricacies” or “moral consensus.”

“We are not passive spectators in the story of A.I. — we are the authors of it,” Mr. Lee wrote last year. “That means the values underpinning our visions of an A.I. future could well become self-fulfilling prophecies.” He declined to comment on his fund’s investment in Megvii or its practices.

Ethnic profiling within China’s tech industry isn’t a secret, the people said. It has become so common that one of the people likened it to the short-range wireless technology Bluetooth. Employees at Megvii were warned about the sensitivity of discussing ethnic targeting publicly, another person said.

China has devoted major resources toward tracking Uighurs, citing ethnic violence in Xinjiang and Uighur terrorist attacks elsewhere. Beijing has thrown hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and others in Xinjiang into re-education camps.

The software extends the state’s ability to label Uighurs to the rest of the country. One national database stores the faces of all Uighurs who leave Xinjiang, according to two of the people.

Government procurement documents from the past two years also show demand has spread. In the city of Yongzhou in southern Hunan Province, law enforcement officials sought software to “characterize and search whether or not someone is a Uighur,” according to one document.

In two counties in Guizhou Province, the police listed a need for Uighur classification. One asked for the ability to recognize Uighurs based on identification photos at better than 97 percent accuracy. In the central megacity of Chongqing and the region of Tibet, the police put out tenders for similar software. And a procurement document for Hebei Province described how the police should be notified when multiple Uighurs booked the same flight on the same day.

A study in 2018 by the authorities described a use for other types of databases. Co-written by a Shanghai police official, the paper said facial recognition systems installed near schools could screen for people included in databases of the mentally ill or crime suspects.

One database generated by Yitu software and reviewed by The Times showed how the police in the city of Sanmenxia used software running on cameras to attempt to identify residents more than 500,000 times over about a month beginning in mid-February.

Included in the code alongside tags like “rec_gender” and “rec_sunglasses” was “rec_uygur,” which returned a 1 if the software believed it had found a Uighur. Within the half million identifications the cameras attempted to record, the software guessed it saw Uighurs 2,834 times. Images stored alongside the entry would allow the police to double check.

Yitu and its rivals have ambitions to expand overseas. Such a push could easily put ethnic profiling software in the hands of other governments, said Jonathan Frankle, an A.I. researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I don’t think it’s overblown to treat this as an existential threat to democracy,” Mr. Frankle said. “Once a country adopts a model in this heavy authoritarian mode, it’s using data to enforce thought and rules in a much more deep-seated fashion than might have been achievable 70 years ago in the Soviet Union. To that extent, this is an urgent crisis we are slowly sleepwalking our way into.”

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An undercover police officer in Kashgar.Credit...Paul Mozur

Paul Mozur is a Shanghai-based technology reporter. He writes about Asia's biggest tech companies, as well as cybersecurity, emerging internet cultures, censorship and the intersection of geopolitics and technology in Asia. He previously worked for The Wall Street Journal. More about Paul Mozur

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Facial Scans Tighten China’s Grip on a Minority. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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