JOHN TIRMAN: Welcome to MIT and
this event on the Uyghur crisis
in China.
On behalf of the Center
for International Studies,
I'm John Tirman,
and we welcome you
to this half-day
session, two panels,
and plenty of discussion on
this very important and urgent
issue.
Firstly, I thank the co-sponsors
of this event, Radius at MIT,
Harvard's committee on Inner
Asian and Altaic Studies,
Harvard FXB's Center for
Health and Human Rights,
MIT's Student Activities Office,
and the center's Human Rights
and Technology program.
And I particularly also want
to thank Michelle English
and Laura Kerwin, as
always, to organize
this event and the
series of Starr forums
throughout the year.
And I believe this
is the last Starr
forum of this academic year.
And I invite you to check
our website in late summer
for the autumn events to come.
Also, a welcome to
our livestreaming
audience on Facebook
and video, which will be
posted in a matter
of a few days.
We have a very full
schedule, which
I'd like to get to
very quickly today.
It will include two
panels of scholars,
and the first one
in a few moments.
But I want to point out that we
will have a question and answer
period after each
of the two panels.
And we should come to the
microphones in the aisles.
I think it's quite important
in a fraught and somewhat
emotional issue
like this that we
feel free to state
our views, but we
respect free discourse and civil
discourse throughout the day.
And we will be mindful
of that in all cases.
The two panels then
will be followed
by a breakout session
for those of you
who want to continue discussion,
and particularly those of you
who wish to consider next
steps to act on the things
that you have heard today.
And that will be down here in
this room for about 30 minutes
or so after the
last Q&A and panel.
So without further
ado, as they say,
I wish to introduce
the, I have to say,
extraordinary young woman who
has organized this conference,
a senior here at MIT, who really
has been the spirit and moving
force behind our gathering
today, Zuli Maimaiti.
[APPLAUSE]
ZULIKAYIDA MAIMAITI: Thank
you for gathering here today
for the conference on the
Uyghur Human Rights Crisis.
My name is Zuli.
And like Dr. Tirman
said, I'm a senior
studying biological
engineering here at MIT,
and doing neuroscience
research at Harvard.
I just want to echo
again Dr. Tirman's thanks
to our co-sponsors.
With the efforts of
both MIT and Harvard,
we're able to bring all of
our six speakers here today.
So welcome.
And thank you for being here.
I want to start the
conference with a saying
from the Chinese Confucius
literary tradition.
A saying that I heard from
my parents growing up,
as part of my Uyghur character.
A saying that I came
to learn and understand
as the core teaching
of many religions,
and at the heart of
cultures around the world.
And that is, never impose
onto others what you would not
choose for yourself.
Or in Chinese--
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
So this responsibility
that we have
to respect with an open mind
the dignity of each individual
by placing ourselves
in their shoes
taps into the hard-wired
depths of our empathy.
Therefore, I invite you to begin
this dialogue of understanding
our role in witnessing a
violation of an entire peoples'
human dignity.
The loss of the chance of
growing up, knowing who you are
or where you're from.
Of knowing the safety or
whereabouts of your loved ones.
Or peacefully
graduating, getting
married, having children.
Or even the simple
feeling of warmth
as you close your eyes
when you face the sun.
So why are we here?
Since the summer
of 2017, we have
seen from world media, US
congressional hearings,
and human rights
organizations, alarming reports
of massive internment
of millions of people.
Mostly Muslim, primarily
of Uyghur ethnicity,
but also Kazakhs and Kyrgyz.
In Xinjiang, we were
an autonomous region
located in Northwest China.
Under the eyes of the
world, Chinese authorities
have turned Xinjiang into a
most heavily surveilled police
state.
In response to the reports
of the massive internments,
people in positions
of power in China
first denied the
existence of such centers,
as can be seen from the
Consul General of China
in Kazakhstan stating, quote, we
do not have such an idea, back
in February, 2018.
Once evidence started to pile
with pictures and testimonies,
they then changed
their narrative,
and said that these internment
camps were a poverty
alleviation measure.
And less than a month
ago, China's Ministry
of Foreign Affairs stated, in
quote, building vocational,
education, and training
centers in Xinjiang
is a preventive measure,
and is totally legitimate.
Perhaps what's more
disheartening is
best encapsulated
when a Beijing based
anti-terrorism expert
stated in the Global Times,
in quote, by giving people
who have been influenced
by extremism a new chance
into training centers,
their human rights have
also been protected.
So with that, let's
take a glimpse
at what really happens within
the walls of those training
centers.
Here, I would like to show you
a short excerpt of testimonies
coming from three
camp survivors.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- My name is [INAUDIBLE],,
and I am 29 years old.
I am Uyghur.
Over the last three years, I
was taken to China's government
detention centers three times.
I spent a total of 10
months in the camps.
In May 2015, I returned
to China from Egypt
where I studied English.
I was arrested at the airport,
and my two-month-old triplets
were taken away.
The officers handcuffed me,
put a dark sack over my head,
and took me to a
detention center.
My older son had
died in their hands.
In April 2017, I was
taken to a detention
center for the second time.
I was interrogated for four
days and nights without sleep.
After being in the
camp for three months,
I kept having seizures
and losing consciousness.
I was finally released
to a mental hospital.
In January 2018, I was
detained for the third time.
They put chains on
my wrists and ankles,
put a black sack over my head,
and took me to a hospital.
I was stripped
naked and put under
a big computerized machine.
Then I was dressed in a blue
uniform with yellow vest,
worn by serious criminals,
and taken to a camp.
There were around 60
people in one of the cells
where I was held.
At night, 15 woman would
stand up while the rest of us
would sleep sideways.
And then we would
rotate every two hours.
Some people had not taken
a shower in over a year.
They forced us to
take unknown pills
and to drink some
kind of white liquid.
The pill caused us to
lose consciousness,
and reduced our cognition level.
The white liquid caused loss
of menstruation in some women,
and extreme bleeding in others--
and even death.
I also experienced
torture in a tiger chair
the second time I was detained.
I was taken to a special room,
and placed in a high chair.
Bands held my arms
and the legs in place,
and tightened when
they pressed a button.
The guards put a helmet
on my shaved head.
Each time I was
electrocuted, my whole body
would shake violently.
And I could feel the
pain in my veins.
I thought I would rather die
than go through this torture.
I begged them to kill me.
In another cell
where I was held,
there will 40 woman
aged between 17 and 62.
When I left the cell after about
three months, there were 68.
Most of them were
educated professionals,
such as teachers and doctors.
I witnessed nine deaths in
my cell in three months.
I cannot imagine how many deaths
there must be in all camps.
I still remember the
words of the officers
when I asked what my crime was.
They said, in quote, being
of Uyghur is a crime.
- [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
- Abduweli's account of his
treatment within the walls
of the facilities is horrific.
- First day is very bad.
The first thing they ask me to--
take off my clothes,
strip off my clothes.
And they slapped my buttock.
They abused me more
than 20 Chinese guys.
- When you say they
abused you, how?
- That-- any man
cannot accept that.
- You're saying they raped you?
- Yeah.
So I cannot--
I can't forget that.
I didn't tell anybody until now.
I hadn't tell anybody.
Because I-- I feel shame.
In the morning, three
police asked me,
one day, if you guys in
power, what you will do to us.
I said, look, I'm a human being.
I'm not an animal like you.
- What followed, he
says, was more violence,
this time at the
hands of inmates.
They put me in the cell
with the drug addicts
and with the killers.
And they beat me.
Like 24 hours.
- And where were the guards?
- Guards?
Don't care.
They want you be
tortured like this.
If you tortured a lot, it means
that you cooperate with them
during the interrogation.
- Abduweli believes
the rapes and beatings
were orchestrated to
force him into admitting
he was a terrorist.
- I'm a scholar.
I'm a writer.
And I had never
thought about that.
I'm not a terrorist.
I'm not a separatist.
And-- but I confessed.
- 101 East interviewed more than
a dozen other former detainees.
All shared similar
stories of abuse.
[END PLAYBACK]
ZULIKAYIDA MAIMAITI:
These are the stories
of only three individuals.
Now imagine the unheard
voices of millions of people,
surviving every second
in such enclosures.
Imagine students and
professors, teachers, academics,
punished for striving
for truth and knowledge.
Imagine mothers
and fathers robbed
of the chance of
embracing their children,
and kiss them on the forehead
on their wedding day.
Imagine toddlers
systemically engineered
to become orphans, stripped
from their parents, community,
and identity.
So why are people in position
of power in China committing
such atrocious crimes?
Here, I want to introduce just
some context to the conflict.
Since Xinjiang's announcement
of the Belt and Road Initiative
back in late 2013, Xinjiang
became a core region,
with its strategic location
along 5,600 kilometer border
with eight nations.
And in addition, its
vast mineral reserves.
Simultaneously,
Chinese authorities
resorted to a narrative of
legitimizing its surveillance
and mass internment on the basis
of countering three forces--
namely terrorism,
extremism, and separatism.
Now, like many violent and
confusing times in history such
de-extremification efforts
did not differentiate,
targeting thousands of
people just like you and me--
students, scholars,
academics, artists--
who are not at all
involved with such forces.
These individuals that you
see in these 100 posters that
are on the wall today are
right now at this moment
held in such enclosures.
All of them, influential in
their respective academic and
artistic fields.
In the words of
Abduweli from the video,
what did they do wrong?
As we celebrate our scholars'
drive for excellence
in academic institutions
like MIT and Harvard,
Chinese authorities are
persecuting and targeting
Uyghur scholars for
the same efforts.
Yet as I was-- we were together
preparing for this conference,
many times I was asked the
question of whether or not
I was ready to take
such a stance on such
a controversial issue.
But where is the controversy?
Are UN reportings of millions of
people taken into concentration
camps a controversy?
Are satellite images
of vastly expanding
construction of the
enclosures a controversy?
Is our oath of "never again"
in this society a controversy?
We are here to analyze how
once such a human atrocity
is reframed as controversial.
It automatically lends
itself to be questioned
on the basis of its legitimacy.
Yet, we're not
gathered here today
to explore the existence
of the centers.
We are also not here to
tell one side of the story,
because there are no sides.
When a man gets raped
by 20 men because he
was a teacher, whose
only crime was his will
and devotion of his life
to educate Uyghur children
to fulfill their dreams.
We are also not here to
explicitly condemn officials.
However, we are here
to figure out what
bridges we can build instead.
We are here to bear witness
to the undeniable evidence
of the violation of human
rights happening in Xinjiang.
We are here to
analyze how seemingly
benign academic, technological,
and economic collaborations
and contracts with China
may be inadvertently fueling
this crisis in human
dignity, love, and respect.
Now, I will focus my talk on the
second aim of the conference.
And that is to open a productive
dialogue amongst ourselves
in understanding how
technology is not used,
but abused by the
Chinese authorities.
And thinking more broadly
about how technology
is deployed in society at large.
Today, China leads the
world in both issued papers,
scientific and
engineering papers,
and issued patents
in nanotechnology
and artificial intelligence.
With multi-billion
dollar tech companies
thriving under government
initiatives and ambitions,
China plans to lead the
world further in digital,
robotic, and artificial
intelligence technologies
in less than a decade.
And of course, all of this
is not harmful by default.
However, it is a
double-edged sword,
as these tech
companies are recruited
by the Chinese authorities
to persecute minorities
under a frequently stifling
authoritarian regime.
Unfortunately, we
have been blind--
or have chosen to look away from
this enormous responsibility
that lies ahead.
In the deadly
collaborations, partnerships,
and funding from Chinese
research institutions and tech
companies that
participate, in effect,
in the violation of human
dignity and integrity.
And we don't
actually need to look
far to look for those benign
yet costly collaborations.
Within a two mile radius
of this very room,
we have BGI US headquarters,
which in 2017, launched
a genetic testing center
in Xinjiang to collect
DNA data from Uyghurs--
mostly from those
in camps, let alone
from consenting individuals.
We have Thermo Fisher, a company
that just recently stopped
selling their genetic
testing equipment in Xinjiang
for massive illegal collection
of Uyghur genetic data.
That can be used for
illegal organ harvesting,
and targeted prosecutions
of Uyghur dissidents.
We even have our
own institutions.
MIT CSAIL, forming a five
year research collaboration
with iFLYTEK, which according
to Human Rights Watch,
has enforced intrusive
collection of biometric data
from adults and
children in Xinjiang,
and used AI-enabled
recognition technologies
to establish big data
platforms that are explicitly
used by the police to target
ethnic minorities and those
with psychosocial disabilities.
This past February, MIT
rushed into another research
partnership with
Chinese AI giant
and global facial recognition
leader, SenseTime,
which has a joint venture with
Leon Technologies facilitating
government infrastructure in
Xinjiang for surveillance.
Partly because of ignorance.
And partly because higher
education in technology
teaches ethics
only incidentally.
And engages human rights
impacts of technology even more
superficially, if at all.
In costly ways, we, as students,
researchers, technologists,
and entrepreneurs are
passively participating
as Chinese authorities
build a 21st century police
state in Xinjiang.
And these technologies
include facial recognition,
phone surveillance,
DNA sequencing,
and biometrics verification.
All of it, done with our help.
Knowing how we have failed as
institutions and individuals
to overlook our potential
impact on a people
more than 7,000 miles away
may feel disheartening.
However, recognizing
this responsibility
gives us the power to
change our response.
Loving and supporting
our academic institutions
require much more than
sharing praises and avoiding
uncomfortable truths.
Sometimes, we need disruptions
to question the status quo
by standing up
for what is right.
And that is exactly why I am
standing before you today.
Because I believe in our
ability to bring about change.
Individually, do we become
overwhelmed with tragedy?
Or do we use our positions
as researchers, academics,
activists, journalists, or
politicians to think critically
and ethically before we engage
with Chinese authorities
and companies?
Institutionally, do
we avoid accusations?
Or do we educate the current
and future engineers,
technologists, and
leaders in the world
to confront China's
abuse of digital cyber
and biological technologies?
Do we merely inform ourselves
of what is happening?
Where do we begin to
share these stories?
And call US representatives
in protecting human dignity
and technological tyranny--
preventing
technological tyranny.
Now, MIT and Harvard
share a long history
of standing up for truth and
justice through understanding.
We are all connected
as one people.
The Uyghurs want what you
and I all seek deep within--
a way to live life with meaning.
The dignity to live
life with meaning.
The Uyghurs are a part of me,
but also, a part of all of us.
As collective humanity,
we have been tested
by the current and past wars.
We have been tried by
the bigotry and politics.
But in the words
of John F Kennedy,
we have also been unwilling
to witness or permit
the slow undoings of
those human rights
to which this nation has
always been committed,
and to which we
are committed today
at home and around the world.
Therefore, I invite you to
listen with an open mind
to all of our six
speakers here today,
and begin to understand and
reconsider the decisions we
make in academia.
Because when we care, we learn.
And as the conflict resolution
specialist Dr. Donna Hicks
once said, once we
learn, we no longer
can use ignorance as an excuse.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
With that, I'm excited to
introduce our three speakers
for the morning session,
whose bios actually
are included in the
handout that you received,
so feel free to refer to them.
First, we will hear from
Professor Sean Roberts.
Besides the fact that his work
is widely known with the Uyghur
community,
personally, he gave me
the hope for this conference
by being the first person
to respond within 30 minutes of
me sending out the invitation
emails.
And I remember screaming yes in
my dorm room when I saw that.
Next, we will hear from Dr.
Darren Byler, whom I first
encountered digitally
through his articles.
Then, through his talk
at Duke University, which
started a lot of positive fervor
within the Uyghur community.
Then, we will hear from
Professor Rian Thum,
whose US congressional
testimony of the crisis
left the senators with deep
reflections and jolting
of the heart.
Without further delay, please
welcome to the stage Professor
Sean Roberts.
SEAN ROBERTS: Thank
you very much.
I'd like to thank
the organizers.
And it's a hard act to follow--
Zuli's very inspirational
introduction to this program
today.
I'm going to speak about
how we got to this point.
And I think one of
the important things
to remember-- something
this extensive and extreme
isn't due to one single thing.
I think that there's
been a perfect storm
of different things
that come together
around what's happening in
the Uyghur region of China.
First of all, there is
a long-standing conflict
between Uyghurs and
modern Chinese states,
which I'm going to talk
a little bit more about.
And I think that
is something that's
been going on for a long time.
And certainly feeds into
what's happening now.
I think we have to note that
Xi Jinping's style of rule
also plays a major part
in what's happening.
And certainly, many
people have pointed out
at meetings like this that we
see a lot of things happening
in the Uyghur region that are
also being ruled out elsewhere
in China.
I think it is important to note
the role of the Belt and Road
Initiative.
This region, where the
Uyghurs live and view
as their homeland, is a
critical strategic location
for the Belt and Road.
And I think for quite some
time, the Chinese government
has viewed the Uyghurs
as kind of a barrier
to the realization of making
that region into a transport
hub.
But the thing I'm going
to speak most about today
is the role of the war on
terror in basically facilitating
a discourse that, with
time, has targeted Uyghurs
by their identity as
potential terrorists.
So first, I'll talk about
the long-standing conflict
between Uyghurs and
modern Chinese states.
I like to call this the conflict
between Eastern Turkistan
and Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is the name that is
used by the Chinese government.
Many Uyghurs dislike
using the name.
It translates as new
territory or new border.
And it belies kind of the
more recent connection
of this region to modern China.
And I think this highlights
the fact that many Uyghurs deny
this name.
One name that's often
used is East Turkistan,
which has subsequently
been identified
by the Chinese
state as essentially
a terrorist organization.
Just using the
name East Turkistan
is assumed to be an
act of extremism.
But this gets at
the core, I think,
of what the conflict
between Uyghurs
and modern Chinese
states is about.
And it's about an issue
of self-determination
and territory.
That does not necessarily mean
separatism and sovereignty.
I think that there's lots of
ways we see self-determination
in the world today, aside
from separate nation states.
Uyghurs generally view this
region as their homeland.
They see themselves as
the indigenous population
of this region, along with
other Turkic nationalities that
live in the region.
And they also, I
think generally,
Uyghurs who think
about this, look at it
as having been conquered
by the Ching dynasty
in the 18th century, and
subsequently occupied
by modern Chinese states.
Now, you can look
at that critically
through a historical lens.
But I think what's
most important
is that's the general
understanding of this region
that Uyghurs have.
And the Chinese state has a
diametrically opposed vision
of this region as always being
part of China, a greater China.
And believing that
the Uyghurs are not
indigenous to this region.
In fact, I think
what's really striking
about this is in a recent
counterterrorism policy
paper of the Chinese government,
about a page and a half--
it begins with a page and
a half making this point.
That this is a region that's
always been part of China,
and the Uyghurs are
not indigenous to it.
So what does that
do of terrorism?
I'm not sure.
But it shows you how
important that narrative
is to the Chinese state.
And I think that
what we're seeing
in the conflict between Uyghurs
and modern Chinese states
is that it's a situation where
there has been a colonization.
And that has not
been recognized,
and has not progressed to
a post-colonial situation.
The Chinese state has
probably only twice--
the modern Chinese state has
only twice in its history
kind of ruled out
accommodating policies
that recognize the Uyghurs
attachment to this territory.
And they're very brief--
right after the revolution,
and right after the
Cultural Revolution.
So I think this has been
a long-standing conflict.
But it changed significantly
after September 11, 2001.
And that was, of
course, when we were all
introduced to the narrative
of global terrorism, which
has taken on a life of itself,
I would say, in the world.
And six weeks after 9/11,
the Chinese government
released a policy paper
claiming that all Uyghur
dissent inside China, inside
the People's Republic of China,
and all violent instances
that had happened
in this territory
throughout the 1990s,
had been perpetrated by a large
international network of Uyghur
terrorists funded
by Osama bin Laden.
And it included a variety
of organizations abroad,
most of which were human rights
organizations, political rights
organizations.
And it was mostly dismissed by,
I think, the Western audience.
In particular, people who
were studying this region
and the Uyghur people.
However, a year later,
both the US and the UN
recognized one of the
organizations outlined
in this paper, an organization
called the Eastern Turkistan
Islamic Movement, as being
a terrorist organization.
And I think that was the
beginning of a process
that we're seeing kind
of the fruits of now.
We saw, in addition to
the Chinese government
being able to use this
narrative of terrorism
to justify its approach
to Uyghur dissent,
it also led to a
proliferation of literature
in the west that basically took
Chinese claims at face value.
And this continues in security
studies and terrorism studies
to this day.
And the idea is that
this ETIM group that
presumably in the
early 1990s was already
involved in lots of terrorism
and funded by Osama bin Laden
had continued to do exactly
that into the present.
Now, I'm going to try to briefly
give you some facts about this
from my own research.
So the Eastern Turkistan
Islamic Movement--
which the people
who were associated
with this, if we can call it
an organization at all, never
used that term.
It was a group that
seemed to be established
in about 1998 in Afghanistan,
and existed until 2003.
And this person, Hasan Mahsum
was its original organizer.
And essentially,
it was a group that
was trying to establish an
insurgency within China,
a liberation movement
among Uyghurs.
As unrealistic as that was
at that time and certainly
would be at this
time, they were trying
to establish training camps,
and get some Uyghurs over
to train to go to war
against the Chinese state.
Basically, I don't
think they ever
had any significant resources.
They certainly don't
seem to have ever
received funding
from Osama bin Laden
or al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
In fact, they later
condemned the 9/11 attacks.
And they were driven
into Pakistan in 2002
when the US invaded Afghanistan.
And in 2003, Hasan
Mahsum was killed,
and basically, this
organization ceased to exist.
It's hard to say how many people
went through these training
camps.
But I'm quite confident it
was a very small number.
And there's no evidence
that they were ever
able to go back to China,
and carry out any violence.
Unfortunately, about
two years later,
an organization--
or at least videos
start to appear on the internet.
Created by this
man, Abdul Haq, who
had been involved with
Hasan Mahsud previously.
But he seems to have
moved into Pakistan,
and did establish
ties with al-Qaeda.
And he creates a
lot of different
videos over the period
from 2008 to 2013, where--
it's threatening
attacks on China.
But it basically
only shows Abdul Haq,
sometimes some stock footage
from back in the day Hasan
Mahsud.
But there's no evidence
that this group was ever
able to carry out any
attacks inside China.
And it's not clear it ever
had very much of a Uyghur
membership base or Uyghur
militants involved with it.
And I think this only
changed recently.
So my analysis of
this organization
was essentially a
recruiting tool of al-Qaeda.
Probably not a very
successful one.
But trying to attract Uyghur
leaving China to al-Qaeda.
So the terrorism threat from
2001 to 2013 in this Uyghur
region of China, or
in China in general,
is minimal, if not non-existent.
We don't see many
attacks that clearly
look like terrorist attacks.
We don't see a whole
lot of violence, period.
There were threats made
towards the Olympics
from this Abdul Haq person, from
the Turkistan Islamic Party.
But nothing really ever
transpired from that.
But fear grew out of this.
And I think that--
not-- I think to
a certain extent,
where I think the Chinese state
initially used this terrorism
threat opportunistically,
I think some people
within the state, and
certainly some Han Chinese
began to believe that
this was a real threat.
And this was further
exacerbated in 2009,
when there were mass ethnic
riots in the city of Urumchim
where basically Uyghurs and Han
Chinese went after each other
and were killing each
other in the streets.
This seems to have started
around a protest that
was put down by security
forces, but what we saw
was a boiling over of tensions.
But after that riot, basically
the crackdown was so severe,
international communications
and the internet
was completely shut off
in this region for a year.
Thousands of
Uyghurs disappeared.
Scores were arrested.
We started to see
more restrictions
on Uyghur mobility,
increased surveillance.
And we started to see
attacks on religion,
and including certain
Uyghur cultural attributes
that could be seen as
related to religion.
So then, even though
there was no sign
that this had anything to do
with religion or terrorism
or extremism, it became
kind of caught up
in that same discourse.
This crackdown was very severe.
And I think was a turning
point where we saw, first,
the beginning of a cycle
of violence and repression
inside China related to Uyghurs.
We saw some violent attacks
that look more like terrorism.
The details are not
very well known.
But every time there
would be a violent attack,
we would see more repression.
And then we we'd
see more violence.
And we have this cycle.
And at the same time we
had a significant number
of Uyghurs leaving the region.
Some going through human
trafficking networks
through Southeast Asia.
Some mysteriously, in
2015, the government
gave out passports
to all Uyghurs.
And we had a mass migration
of people legally,
just using their passports.
And most of these
Uyghurs were going
to Turkey, which
is one place that
was known among Uyghurs as a
safe haven, where they could go
and, if not receive
official refugee status,
at least be able
to live peacefully.
And finally, a group of
these hundreds of Uyghurs,
potentially a
couple of thousand,
found themselves in Syria.
And actually they were
associated with the Turkistan
Islamic Party.
And basically, this migration
allowed the Turkistan Islamic
Party to finally become
a fighting force.
So I think that
this process has led
to a general equating of
Uyghurs with terrorists
in the eyes of
the Chinese state.
By 2016, the People's
Republic of China
begins conflating
Uyghur identity
with terrorism and extremism,
seeing the Uyghur population
as kind of a virus infecting
China's harmonious society.
In fact, a lot of the
rhetoric of state officials
uses this kind of
biological language
about the infection of
extremism and of the Uyghurs
into China's larger population.
And for the Chinese
government, I
think it's begun to see the
solution that what has always
been really an overexaggerated
terrorist threat
as being the
transformation, destruction,
or quarantine of the Uyghur
identity and the Uyghur
population.
So we're going to
hear a lot about this.
I'm not going to go into
what's happened since 2016.
But we watched this
unfold, a lot of us who've
been studying the region.
We saw all of this
increased surveillance.
Starting the DNA sampling,
cell phone tracking,
facial recognition,
surveillance.
We saw the creation
of police stations
every 300 yards in urban areas.
And by 2017, we started seeing
that people were disappearing.
And we started learning about
these mass internment camps.
So I would suggest
that this is--
we're seeing
something that's kind
of a new form of
ethnic cleansing.
Ethnic cleansing is generally
associated with the Yugoslav
civil war, and associated with
the idea of establish of--
removing an ethnic
group from a territory.
But what we're seeing happening
in the Uyghur region of China
now is more an attempt
to cleanse the members
of the ethnic group.
To somehow change them
into different people.
I don't think it's an attempt
to change them into Chinese.
Because I don't think--
I think the relationship between
Uyghurs and the Chinese state
is such that Uyghurs are never
really accepted as Chinese.
But they are seen as a
dangerous element now.
And the idea is to
make them somehow
into a docile and
loyal population.
Now, I just want to end
with a note about how
I think the global war on terror
has facilitated this situation.
I mean, certainly
this is something
that the Chinese state is doing.
But I think the global war on
terror has allowed it to do it.
And I think it has in
some ways even encouraged
the Chinese state
to do what it's
doing in the Uyghur region.
First of all, the
fact that there
is no internationally recognized
definition of terrorism
is extremely troubling.
That we've been
fighting a global war
for 18 years against an
enemy that we can't define.
And this has allowed, I
think throughout the world,
a lot of a repressive,
authoritarian states to attack
domestic opposition-- and this
happens also in democratic
states--
and domestic opponents that
have legitimate grievances.
And to basically label
them as terrorists.
And I think this has a couple
very troubling results.
First, it can turn a group that
hasn't really been militant
into a more militant group.
It can kind of isolate
them to the point
where they see no other option.
And secondly, and I think most
troubling and most relevant
to what we're
talking about today,
the terrorism label essentially
dehumanizes the people
that are tagged with it.
And at the same
time, it very much
becomes associated with
their thought process.
Particularly, the conflation
of terrorism with extremism
means that extremism is
not just something you do,
it's something you think.
And so that is very easily
conflated with one, Islam.
And we're seeing that around the
world, where people are saying,
well, the real problem is Islam
that's leading to terrorism.
And in, I think, the
case of the Uyghurs,
it can be conflated with their
identity and their culture.
And so I think in
that context, we
can see that the
global war on terror
essentially lends itself to
genocidal type strategies.
And I think that's part of what
we're seeing in China today.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
DARREN BYLER: Thank
you all for coming.
It's a real honor to be here.
I'm going to pick up on
what Sean was talking about,
and turn now to talk to some
extent about the economics that
are driving some of this.
And also the role of technology
and how it emerged over time.
I'm going to talk about what
I call a Chinese security
industrial complex.
Or in some of my writing, I
call it terror capitalism.
So to get started
thinking about this,
we need to think
about the 1990s, which
is when China was really
opening up to the west,
when industrialization
was really taking off
in the eastern part
of the country.
That's when all the stuff
that says made in China
first began to arrive in
Walmart here in the US.
And to get access and to produce
those new forms of production
in industry, they
needed resources.
And so one of the
things that they needed
was oil and natural gas.
And that's when we saw
people moving west.
Moving to Xinjiang for
economic opportunities,
to work in resource extraction.
Because Xinjiang,
the Uyghur homeland,
is home to a large percentage
of Chinese oil and natural gas
and also coal.
It's now become a source for
industrial agriculture-- cotton
and tomatoes in particular.
And so when those folks
from eastern China
moved out to
Xinjiang, they began
to build out the hard
infrastructure of the region.
And that that looks like
pipelines and roads.
And other service industries
that are around those things.
So they can get access
to the natural resources.
And that really brought people
into the Uyghur homeland
to a larger extent.
Prior to this, there had been
a Han presence in the region.
But they lived primarily
in the northern part
of the province or the region.
As the infrastructure
build out began,
they started moving right into
the heartland of the Uyghur
population.
And there was a number
of effects from this.
This was an open up
the west campaign that
was sponsoring a lot of this.
It was a Chinese
state initiative.
And they wanted to integrate
the Uyghur population
with the country, that
was part of the goal.
But actually what happened
through this build out
was Uyghurs saw themselves being
dispossessed of their land.
Because in many cases, land
was actually taken from them.
But in a more general sense,
the economy began to shift,
and Uyghurs were excluded
from that new economy.
Because all of these
natural resource
extraction industries centered
only around Han labor.
Uyghurs where almost exclusively
excluded from those industries.
They just weren't
given those jobs.
And so the economy
began to shift.
Things became more
expensive, rents increased,
basic staples became
more expensive.
And Uyghurs saw themselves
becoming poorer.
Even as they were making
the same amount of money,
the economy was
shifting around them.
And so they saw themselves in
a more desperate situation.
Of course there
are some benefits
to having infrastructure.
There's roads and there's also
communications infrastructure.
And so by 2010, soon
after those large scale
protests in [INAUDIBLE]
was just talking about,
3G networks were built
out across the region.
And so for the first time,
Uyghurs in the rural areas--
which is the
majority of Uyghurs--
had access to 3G networks,
and very soon, smartphones.
And so when I went for my
first year of fieldwork
as an anthropologist, I was
learning languages in 2011,
they were just starting to buy
these smartphones, especially
young people.
And starting to use them in
their homes across the region.
By 2011 or 2012, an app called
WeChat, which is a social media
app that allows people to
speak using oral communication,
came online as well.
And that was really
transformative for Uyghurs.
Because prior to this, it
was difficult for Uyghurs
to type on a smartphone.
The capability wasn't
there for their language.
And also many Uyghurs
are not fully--
they prefer to speak,
rather than to type.
Some of it has to do
with their education.
And they found very
quickly as using this app
that they could communicate
with each other fairly freely.
Because the state also
didn't have the capability
of regulating oral speech.
So they were able
to speak in Uyghur.
And the state wasn't
quite keeping up
with what they were saying.
And so they were talking
about a lot of things
they were talking about culture.
They were talking
about politics.
This was the time
of the Arab Spring,
so they were interested
in some of those issues.
They're interested
in Turkish movies,
Iranian movies, all kinds of
movies from around the world--
which is something I was
studying at the time.
But they're also
interested in religion.
So they're downloading
messages from teachers
based in parts of
Xinjiang, but also
based in Turkey and Uzbekistan.
Mostly conversations-- they
were interesting conversations
about what does it
mean to be Muslim.
Very normal kind
of Muslim stuff.
Like what's halal, what's haram?
What does it mean to be
a contemporary person
in the world today?
And so people began to get
to adapt their lifestyle
in certain ways, and became
more pious in their appearance
as Muslims.
So WeChat enabled
a couple of things.
It began to change religious
perspectives and practice.
But it also gave people
ideas about the city
and about being
a global citizen.
So during this time,
we saw lots of people
moving from rural areas
to regional centers,
and then from there to the city.
Especially young men, who were
incentivized by their families
or asked by their
families to go to the city
and try to find a job.
They came for a
number of reasons.
To find jobs was one of them.
But the other reason
was religious practice.
Because in the city, they were
able to practice their faith
more freely.
There's more
anonymity in the city.
So that meant that they could
go to the mosque more regularly.
They could dress how
they wanted to dress.
In the countryside,
in the rural area,
people would watch more closely.
The mosque space were full.
So in 2014, when I did a
second year of fieldwork,
this is what Friday
prayers looked like.
There was so many people that
couldn't fit inside the mosque.
But the mosque was also seen as
not the location of real Islam.
It was the center
of ritual practice.
But the Islamic practice itself
happened around the mosque
in prayer room spaces
and on people's phones.
People were passing
messages using SD cards,
using Bluetooth technology.
They would sit and
discuss messages.
They would share things.
They built online
personas as a WeChat user.
And the internet became
a really important part
of people's everyday life.
So many young men
that I interviewed
told me that putting
money on their phone card
was an important
part of their week.
If they couldn't put
money on their card,
they couldn't contact their
family back in the countryside.
They also couldn't find jobs.
And they also couldn't
perform their religiosity.
So the state was paying
attention to this.
They began to
realize that people
are using WeChat to
do stuff that they
thought was crossing the line.
And so they were trying to find
ways to assess and regulate it.
And they're also concerned
with the kind of trend
in violence that was happening
in spaces around the weaker
homeland.
But also in other
parts of China.
There was an attack in Kunming,
and another one in Beijing
that really alarmed people.
Especially in other
parts of China.
And the discourse of
terrorism really picked up.
Officials I interviewed
at this time
told me that they were seeing
among Uyghurs a talibanization
of the Uyghurs.
Uyghurs, they thought,
were becoming extremists.
So in 2014, they declared
the people's war on terror.
And that looked like this.
It was posters that were placed
in every alleyway in the Uyghur
neighborhoods, saying that
you're no longer permitted
to dress in these manners.
Women were no longer
allowed to veil themselves.
Young men, no longer
allowed to have beards.
And Islamic symbols
were now forbidden.
Instead, this poster
says, you should
look like a normal person,
a beautiful person.
And so pious
expressions of Islam
were now officially outlawed.
And there was also
new mechanisms
put in place to put people--
to expel people from the city,
and begin this reeducation
process.
It picked up two years later
to a much larger extent.
So what does this look like?
And building a little bit on
what Sean was talking about,
the people's war on
terror is one in which
the people are involved.
Everyone's invested.
If you see something,
say something.
It's that sort of thinking.
But it's also fought in
a different register.
So it's not about occupying
and bombing another country,
as the US has done in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead, it's about
targeting a population--
an native population--
that's in their own country.
Domestic populations
of people citizens.
It's minority Muslim
people that look
different-- that
are Turkic, that
speak a different language.
And so in that sense,
it's different than the US
model of war on terror.
It also uses different
technologies in different ways.
It's using cameras, checkpoints,
prisons, internment camps,
and forced labor.
So it's less about
overt violence.
But it's more about a
long, slow, deep violence.
This is funded and
operationalized
by technology, but also state
security and higher education.
That's why it's a
security complex.
These people are
working together
to build this new industry
around controlling
and re-educating the population.
The goal is to break the
autonomy of the Uyghur
internet, WeChat, and also
control their movement.
There's now 1,400 tech firms
that are working explicitly
on this in Xinjiang.
That's a growth from just
over the last decade.
And in the last two
years, $7.2 billion
have been invested
in this industry.
A couple of the examples
that I can point out
that have been produced
by this industry
is technology from a company
called Meiya Pico that
does AI-enabled
auto-transcription
and translation of
Uyghur spoken audio.
So you can see that's a
technology that's meant
to assess WeChat oral speech.
There's also new
programs put in place
to do the auto-detection
of Uyghur faces,
to operationalize ethno-racial
profiling as an explicit goal
of an AI system.
If you go to this region as
I did most recently in April
of last year, this is the sort
of thing you'll first notice,
is the convenience
police stations
that are every 300 meters
on every city block.
These are really
checkpoint-oriented facilities,
and also rapid response units.
But mostly, it's about
cameras that are based
in each of these stations.
And also the sort of
random checkpoints
that are or facilitated by them.
People coming out
of the station,
and then conducting spot checks.
They are also
racially profiling,
where it's basically looking
for Uyghur, young Uyghur that
look like they're
rural, that don't
look like they're from the city,
that are potentially suspect.
As you move through
the space, you'll
also find many checkpoints
between jurisdictions.
So as you move out of a
city, across the county line,
sometimes it's more
dense than that,
just going into a shopping mall
or any sort of institution,
there'll be a face recognition
enabled checkpoint.
Which functions as a
hard reset of the system.
Because as you move
through that system,
they have a very
clear idea of where
that person is in the world.
And it's only really looking for
Uyghurs or Turkic minorities.
Because most of
these checkpoints
have a green lane
associated with them,
where people are
not assessed at all.
So this checkpoint, which
I went through in April,
there is on the left
side of the checkpoint
is the back gate
of the checkpoint.
Which is opened by
a police officer
for people, based on their
appearance of their face.
They just simply look
at the person and say,
you can come through this way.
I wasn't sure which
lane to go through
because I'm not Uyghur or Han.
So I asked the Uyghurs
that I was in line
with in Uyghur which line
I should go to go through.
And they said, well,
you're speaking Uyghur,
you could possibly
be a city Uyghur.
So you should go
through the Uyghur line.
So I went through
the Uyghur line.
I had a passport, so I wasn't--
they had to assess
me differently,
because I don't
have a national ID.
Because the way the system
works is you scan your ID,
and then it matches the picture
on your ID to your face.
All of this infrastructure,
hard infrastructure,
is supported by data
that's been collected
in a sort of
unprecedented manner.
In 2016, 2017,
there was a program
put in place that was framed
as a public health initiative
called Physicals for All.
And this required Uyghurs--
and others in the province,
but Uyghurs in particular--
to go to their
local police station
and submit biometric data.
So it was a police officer
that was collecting this data.
So the public health
aspect of it was, I think,
lost in most cases.
Instead, was people giving
DNA, blood, and fingerprints.
But also speaking
into a device to get
a voice signature, unique voice
signature for each person.
They had to read the same
thing several times, until it
was sufficiently recognized.
And then they also
had their face scanned
from a variety of
different angles,
with different people doing
different expressions.
People talk about this
as a long process that
took, in some cases, an hour to
get a full scan of the person's
face.
Which tells us something
about the resolution
and the fidelity of those
images that are being collected.
And when 36 million
people do that,
you have a database
that's really
unprecedented in terms of
scale and fidelity resolution.
36 million is more than the
population of the region.
So that is telling
us either there's--
the official population of
the region is not what it is,
or people had to go and
do it more than once
to fully meet the
requirements of the system.
This is a coercive process.
People had to go to the
police station there
was no possibility not to
go to the police station
and submit your data.
This data was then put into
a system that we're not fully
sure as to what extent
it's operationalized--
although I have some
sense that it is working--
called Integrated Joint
Operations Platform.
There's more research
that needs to be
done on this this platform in
terms of who's servicing it.
We know certain companies that
are involved in parts of it.
But together, it's
a regional database
that's collecting
all of this data
and putting it in
a single space.
It's getting data from, in
addition to the biometric stuff
that's been collected, CCTV
cameras, Wi-Fi sniffers,
getting packets of information
as it moves through space,
looking through health
records, banking records,
family planning history.
And of course, all
of those checkpoints.
It's also supported
by a nanny app
that people have been asked
to install on their phones.
In [INAUDIBLE] at
least they're using
an app called Jingwant Weishi,
which is clean neck guard.
That's one of the ways
you could translate it.
In other spaces,
it's a different app.
But in general, people have
this app on their phone.
When I was there in April,
I was observing many people
having this app checked on
their phone at many checkpoints.
My research focus at
that time was really
going through
checkpoints, and doing
observations of how people
were interacting with police.
This app, as we understand
it, works to first certify
who is using the phone.
It's matched to the person's ID.
And then it searches
through all messaging
coming from that phone to
find unique identifiers
of your social network.
So it's looking at all
messaging from both video
and audio to text and
any other things that's
coming out of your phone.
Photos.
So together, all of
that stuff is then
compared to an external
database for any kind
of flagged materials.
It's gonna figure out who
you're connected with.
Users that have flagged
material on their phone
are supposed to
delete it immediately.
They can also be called in
to the police station if they
don't.
So in addition to all of this
quantitative kind of data
that's using tech, there's also
a qualitative aspect to it,
where people were asked
to go into Uyghur homes,
and also Kazakh homes.
Police officers,
but also what they
call relatives or civil
servants that are sent
to monitor and assess Uyghurs.
And in general, they
use 10 categories
to do these assessments.
People started out
with 100 points,
and you're considered
a safe person.
And then through this
assessment you're
determined to be safe,
unsafe, normal, or unsafe.
So you start with 100 points,
and each of these categories
count as minus 10.
So if you're of
military age, minus 10.
If you're Uyghur, minus 10.
If you're
underemployed, minus 10.
Which are sort of
categories of existence
that counted for
many, many people.
So already, most people
are just normal category.
Then if you traveled abroad,
you have a passport, gone
to one of 26 banned countries
or Muslim majority countries,
if you've overstayed a visa
or have a family member
living abroad, those
are all categories
that count against you.
Then there's three
important categories
that are focused on religion.
So if you pray
regularly, minus 10.
And if you have religious
knowledge, which
means like you pass
messages on WeChat,
your learned Arabic
or studied the Koran,
those are all things that
will count against you.
And those are the things that
caught many, many people.
Because they're actually
using technology
to assess these things.
Not just people saying, no, I
don't have religious knowledge.
There is also a category
about family life.
Teaching your children
about Islam in your home
is also forbidden.
So talking to people that
have been in this system
and gone through
these assessments--
this is [INAUDIBLE],,
who we saw a short video
from at the beginning
of this conference.
She said that in her
cell, there's really
two categories of people.
The people of her age, which
is the older generation,
were often taken to the cell
because they had their phone
number in someone else's phone.
Someone else had been
detained, and then they
went through that person's
phone and saw all the contacts.
And then those people
were also detained.
So that's one way that
technology is used
in kind of a really direct way.
But there's also digital
footprint searches
that are also pulling
people into the system.
She said that the
younger generation
of people that were
in the cell with her
had things on their
phone that they
had deleted a long time ago.
Or at least some
of them said that.
This one girl told her, I
deleted them a long time ago,
but somehow they restored them.
They were just pictures
of women in veils.
In one of them, a little girl is
holding her hands up in prayer.
And so that's enough to kind
of signify to the police
or to people doing assessments
that this is an extremist that
is suspicious, and
needs to be detained
for further assessment.
Once you're determined
to be unsafe,
you're sent to a camp,
which is something
that Ryan is going to talk
about in his talk, where you're
scheduled for reeducation.
There's camps all over
the province or region.
Most of them function as kind
of medium security prisons,
where people are held in
dormitories under lock--
locked-- in locked
cells with armed guards.
But there is a
re-education aspect to it.
Some people are learning
Chinese if their Chinese is bad.
Most people doing that.
But also learning
political thought.
And going through a sort
of forced confessions,
struggle sessions.
So that's what we
see possibly here.
Though it's really hard
to source these images
and know exactly
what's going on.
But we've heard
from some reports
that people have to
stand and denounce
their past crimes, studying
the Koran or what have you.
And then others are
meant to criticize them.
And through this
process, you gain
points towards eventual
release or movement
into a minimum security
space in the camp.
Those that successfully
graduate are
put into forced internships,
at least some of them,
close to the camp.
So this is an image that's
showing you prison-like areas.
And then recently built, just
over the last six months,
factory-type spaces
just to the north of it,
the red area, the
buildings with red roofs.
People in those spaces
are often learning
how to do textile work.
Maybe they already
knew, I don't know.
The people that so far that have
been moved into these spaces
are people that are actually
quite well educated.
Because they can speak
Chinese fluently,
and they know how to navigate
the political system,
and they can speak
and take tests well.
And so it's not clear that
these people are actually
getting much benefit from the
training at the sewing machine.
So just to begin
to wrap up, what's
been produced
through the system--
kind of throughout it, both
in the camps and outside
of the camps-- is a
new division of power.
Power in terms of
personal autonomy,
but also collective autonomy.
One person I interviewed
told me Uyghur are alive,
but our entire lives are
now spent behind walls.
It's like we are ghosts
living in another world.
A Han relative, someone
was sent to assess people
in their homes, told me, I
feel so much more freedom.
So much freedom now.
We can go anywhere we want.
And so from his perspective,
this was a monumental success.
It was something that
had produced real change.
And really, he felt,
empowering for himself.
The mosque spaces
that were overflowing
when I began my fieldwork
and through the midpoint
of my fieldwork are
now completely empty.
They're still open,
but there's checkpoints
at the front of them.
So no one is
entering the mosques.
Tech employees that
work in this space
talk about how what
they're building
has unlimited market potential.
Because the Belt
and Road Initiative
encompasses 60% of the
world's Muslim population.
They said there are all
kinds of applications
where this population management
tools can be put in place.
There's many tech
firms involved in this.
Most of the leading AI companies
in China are involved in this.
This is sort of a testing ground
to build out and experiment
with their technology.
China wants to invest $150
billion in AI by 2030.
They want to be a world
power when it comes to tech.
And so they're putting a
lot of money behind this.
These companies are
integrated with the West.
Some of them have
partnerships with institutions
here like MIT.
It's also not simply Chinese
investment money going
into this state investment.
There's also foreign
investment that's
supporting some of these
tech firms as well.
So Fidelity International,
Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia
and Sinovation
have all put money
into these tech companies.
So to finally conclude, from
Uyghur perspectives, what's
being produced by this
is open air prisons.
So both in the camp themselves,
but also outside of the camp,
all movement is monitored.
All kind of thought
is monitored when it
comes to digital communication.
And so people feel themselves
changing their human behavior.
It's also producing
what Uyghurs see
as a weakening of
basic institutions--
their faith, language,
family, and cuisine.
Those kind of basic
things that are still
parts of who they are as
native people to this space.
From the state perspective,
what's being produced
is long-term security,
long-term stability.
They also see unlimited
industrial growth outside
of China.
And in China.
But throughout kind
of the global south.
Those are kind of
the target spaces
where they want to go
next with this technology.
So I'll leave it at that.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
RIAN THUM: Thank
you all for coming.
And thank you to Zuli and
the whole team for organizing
this really impressive event.
As we've already seen from
the other presentations,
the history of the
construction of what
really looks like an ethno
totalitarian state in Xinjiang
is deeper than just the
last couple of years.
And I would throw out
one example of that, just
to give you another
sense of that.
Already, as early as 2010
or 2011, a lot of Uyghurs
were required to have something
called a people's convenience
card, or what they colloquially
called a green card, which
required them to get permission
to move from one city
to another.
And by 2015, that was
pretty much widespread.
So this is a--
we should have already been--
the alarm bells
should have already
been ringing for the
rest of the world
that something sort of
uniquely awful was unfolding.
But what really caught
the world's attention
was the building of
mass internment camps,
and the imprisonment of
an estimated high hundreds
of thousands, up to two
million people in those camps.
And what I want to do is
just step back a little bit
and talk about--
focus on that, and talk
about the evidence base.
And you'll get some
more of the evidence
base from other
speakers later, in terms
of testimonies from people
on the satellite images.
So I will focus on
the evidence that
comes from the mouth of
the Chinese state itself.
Because there is a lot of it.
And enough to make
this undeniable.
So the basic claim I want
to talk about is the--
well, let me just introduce a
little bit about these camps.
The people who are put
in these are put in them
without any criminal
charges, without any trial.
They never come before a judge,
they don't have a lawyer.
There is no appeal.
And in many, perhaps
most cases, there
is no notification
of family members.
People simply disappear.
I think in some ways, in
terms of the world gaining
recognition, gaining awareness
of what was going on,
the most important
evidence may have
been the system by which
the Chinese state advertised
for contractors to
build these camps.
A German scholar named
Adrian Zenz recognized
that the Chinese state was
advertising bids openly
online for
construction companies
to compete to build these camps.
And he harvested about 50
something of these notices,
and used that to produce the
first really thorough study
of the camp system, which came--
this study came out in about
2018--
March, was it?
April?
2018?
A lot of the journalism and
reporting that's followed
has been based ultimately
on this kind of evidence.
And it struck me that these
bids have not actually
been shown to the
public very much.
So I wanted to show one to you.
Most of these have now been
scrubbed from the internet
by the authorities, because they
realize how damning they are.
But we have screenshots of them.
And some of them have been
preserved on the Internet
Archive's Wayback Machine.
So here's a typical
example calling
for the construction of
a so-called legal system
education transformation
school in the town
of [INAUDIBLE],, which is
[INAUDIBLE] in Chinese.
You can see, some of the
information is blacked out.
You have to be like a registered
participant in the system
to see it.
But a lot of it is
open to the public.
For example, you can see that
it is the United Front Work
Department that is calling
for this construction.
And if you scroll down
on a lot of these,
you can get some details
of what kind of equipment
any bidder will have
to provide if they're
going to build these camps.
So for example,
this one has a lot
of very specialized security
terminology on different forms
of fence, which I've
somewhat-- fencing
and bars and things-- which
I've somewhat crudely translated
here.
So this is a major
kind of evidence
that journalists then
followed up on and created
even larger investigations.
Here's a really important
piece of journalism--
that I think has not been
paid enough attention to--
by AFP that looked at over
1,000 documents from the state
that they found
online, which catalogs
a lot of the kinds of equipment
that these so-called training
schools have.
Electric cattle prods, spiked
clubs, stun guns, razor wire.
Another interesting thing you
can see from these documents
is the changing of names for
these institutions over time.
And they're kind of--
it's kind of a
modular naming system.
They start out--
I'm just giving you a
representative sample--
they start out talking
about eliminating extremism.
Then they go, for
a little while,
you get this legal system thing,
which is sprinkled throughout.
Most common uniting
factor is the idea
of education and
transformation, which
you see over the course
of two and a half years.
And then ultimately, settling
on what they call them today,
which is a vocational skills
education training center.
But the mixing and matching of
these different model modular
units makes it clear
that these are basically
the same kind of institution
with the names changing
over time.
I also want to point out
the range of dates here.
One of the things
that's striking
about this program of
internment camp construction
is how incredibly
fast it has unfolded.
We get our first calls
for the construction
of these new buildings
around the summer of 2016.
Meaning that
basically, if we just
take this sort of middle
ground estimate of the number
of people of a million, which
is like 10% of the Uyghur
population, that means that
these facilities to house
a million people have been built
in the short space of only two
years.
While I'm at it,
I would also like
to point out that this
disappearance of about
a million people is on top of a
pre-existing mass incarceration
problem.
So even before this
mass internment program
was rolled out,
Xinjiang had a problem
very similar to the
mass incarceration
of African-Americans
in the US, whereby
Uyghurs were disproportionately
targeted in sentencing
and in arrests,
disproportionately
poorly represented
in court-- not
that there are very
many acquittals
in the Chinese justice system.
So there was already an
enormous number of Uyghursm
particularly Uyghur men in
the Chinese prison system.
This is outside of that this is
an extra legal system that just
added an additional 10%
of the Uyghur population
in those two years.
OK.
Another fascinating
source of evidence
that we get from the Chinese
state itself is its propaganda.
And if you like most people
have sort of come recently
to this story,
you're probably most
likely to be familiar
with the propaganda that
sells these camps as benign
skills training centers.
And the state has produced
several videos that
are filmed in staged camps.
They take real
camps, and then they
make some alterations to them.
For example, one that you
can see on satellite photos
is that they add fake sports
courts in the yards outside,
or paint like a symbol of a
sports team on the pavement.
Here, you can see a still
from one of those videos.
And one of the things
that's different
here is the kind of
people that they've
put in for this staged video.
You can see that it's mixed
gender, it's younger people.
And this, I think,
is probably aimed
at making this
look more like what
we would think of as a school.
When, in fact, other
images we have from inside,
which I'll show you in a moment,
are all segregated by gender.
And they tend to include a lot
more people in their 30s, 40s,
and 50s.
Another thing that we
see that's different here
from what we otherwise
know about the camps
is that we know that
many of these interment
and indoctrination camps
have a set of bars or wires
that separate the
teacher from the student.
So these, actually--
this has been
a very effective propaganda
move by the state,
because since there is a dearth
of images for the Western media
to use when they want to
illustrate their stories,
they've often taken these stills
from these propaganda videos
and said "image from a camp."
Well, it's not really
an image from a camp.
It's an image from a
staged version of the camp.
Nonetheless, this
propaganda drive
has given us some actual
data that might be--
well, it's not reliable,
but it certainly
has gestured to
things that turned out
to be true from
reports from inside.
For example, this was
really the first way
that we got a sense that
there was a large forced labor
component to the
internment system.
This is an image
from a tour that
was just given to journalists
a couple of days ago.
But this wasn't always
the way the state wanted
to represent these centers.
And you've probably
seen this image.
This comes from
officials in Xinjiang,
from a period in which there
was a lot more interest
in showing local audience--
and showing audiences
of other officials
that we, the state,
are taking care of these
dangerous and backwards
Uyghurs.
And so you see a
lot more emphasis
in the imagery that was coming
out around 2017 on the fences,
on the huge number of police
guards, on orderly rows,
on uniforms--
this kind of thing.
And if I have time
at the end of this--
which I'm not sure I
will because I forgot--
I don't know if I will, because
I forgot to start my clock--
but if I have
time, I'll show you
where you can access
the original government
post of this image.
We also have the changing
story of the Chinese state.
As Zuli mentioned, there was
an earlier set of soft denials.
And we're not sure about this.
We can't confirm
that these exist.
Or maybe a few times
they said they don't
exist to foreign audiences.
And then that
transitioned into well,
these are actually benevolent
education and skills training
centers.
At first, they implied that
they were not voluntary.
But then they had
a new propaganda
that said have all these
people in these staged camps,
saying we're here voluntarily.
Well recently, I think
it was about three weeks,
four weeks ago, they came
out-- the state came out
with a new white paper that
actually listed what they say
are the reasons for people
going into the camps.
And they say the
people in the camps
are those who participated
in terrorist or extremist
activities in circumstances
that were not serious enough
to constitute a crime.
What kind of terrorist
or extremist activity
is not serious enough
to constitute a crime?
That may seem on its face
to be kind of ridiculous.
It's more ridiculous if you
look at the Chinese terrorism
law, which includes things
like engaging in thought
that supports extremism.
So even the things you
think can be a crime,
under Chinese terrorist law.
But these are the folks who
don't even rise to that level.
These are things for which
you can't-- and also,
really heartbreakingly, number
three is people who've already
served out prison sentences, who
are arbitrarily deemed to need
further internment.
One last kind of evidence
I want to talk about that
comes from the mouth of
representatives of the state
is the responses that police
officers in the region
have given to journalists
who cold call their stations.
A lot of this has been done
by Radio Free Asia, which
has a really powerful group
of Uyghur-speaking reporters.
It's also been done by
other journalistic outfits.
And one of the really
striking things
that has come out
of what police say
is an expression of concern
from police officers
about not being able to meet
quotas that they've been given.
We have reports
of quotas of 20%.
The highest one that
police have reported
was 40% somewhere in Karkash.
And in this environment
where the police feel
like it's very
difficult to choose
who will go into the
internment camps,
they've had to resort to some
pretty fine grained analysis
of people's behavior.
And some of the things that
either the police have given,
or relatives have been told
by police as the reasons
that their family members
were chosen for interment,
include not watching state TV,
giving up smoking, traveling
to a foreign country.
And right now,
essentially, any Uyghur
who returns from a
foreign country to--
all known cases, people without
dual citizenship returning
to China end with the
disappearance of that person.
Expressing interest in
traveling to a foreign country,
having WhatsApp on
your smartphone.
This is something to remember
if you're hearing claims-- well,
well, no this is--
you're going to hear
people say, well, this
is a way of controlling
terrorism or controlling
resistance to the state.
This is what they're
actually controlling.
And I also want to point out an
interesting thing in the photo
that Darren put up of all the
different kinds of clothes
you can't wear, and
appearances you can't have.
One of those images
is actually taken--
is an image of Keanu Reeves,
one of the bearded images.
Because I think when
it's put in the context
of Islamic extremism,
it's easy for some people
to see a bearded person as
potentially a threat, given
the Islamophobic media
environment that we live in.
And I think it's quite
powerful to point out
that one of their examples of
what an extremist looks like
is a paparazzi photo
of Keanu Reeves.
OK.
How much time do I have,
since I failed to time myself?
OK, great.
All right.
So that's all I'll talk
about for the evidence part.
I want to use the remaining time
to make three general points.
More interpretive points.
And then show you
a database project
that I'm working on to help
Uyghurs report their friends
and loved ones who
have disappeared.
So the first
general point is one
that probably doesn't
need much evidence, given
the presentations
that preceded me.
But that is that the camps,
for all the emphasis they
get in the media, are really
one part of a larger system
of control of the Uyghur.
They're an extremely
important part,
not just for the
people in the camps,
but for their effect on the
people outside the camps.
As in any place where people
are subject to extreme efforts
of control from the
state, in Xinjiang,
Uyghurs have long had
very creative means
of evading control.
The example I like to use
is that the high prevalence
of banned books.
Books banned by the
state are often very
innocuous fiction and sort
of standard religious texts
that would not raise any
eyebrows anywhere else
in the world.
But Uyghurs used to have--
it was very easy to find
banned books in Xinjiang
as of five years ago.
There were whole publishing
industries putting--
underground
publishing industries
making everybody's
favorite novels
that the state doesn't like.
That is gone now and people are
now burning their own books.
They're now burying their
own books voluntarily.
And the reason is
that they now know,
because everyone has had a
family member or a friend,
or more likely many family
members and many friends,
disappear overnight without any
sort of recourse or opportunity
for appeal.
People know very well that
they live outside the camps
solely at the whim of
the security services.
And so now the
game is not so much
figuring out how to
get around the rules,
but rather figuring
out how to predict
what the rules might be.
And you can get a sense from
the previous slide of reasons
used to select people for the
camps, of how unpredictable
these rules might be.
It's not published
anywhere that you
have to greet official
on the street,
or you might go to the camp.
So people are really
in the business
of trying to predict what it
is the state might not like.
And that really serves as
a disciplinary backstop
to everything else
that's going on.
The checkpoints
like you see here.
the high presence of police who
get really great cooperation
from Uyghurs, because they
know that at any moment,
they can be disappeared.
Darren already
talked about that.
Rules for regulating how
people behave in public.
For example, this sign which
says you cannot pray in public.
Monitoring of the mosques,
which is then where
you should pray ostensibly.
But of course, if you
do pray in the mosque,
then you fill out
the kind of forms
that Darren was talking about.
Your score drops on how much of
a trustworthy person you are.
And it means that
Uyghurs are more--
what's the right word--
apparently enthusiastically
participating
in so-called ethnic
unity programs,
where they are compelled
to interact with Han fellow
citizens in kind of
constrained, artificial events.
The most extreme version of this
is the Becoming Family Program,
in which, according to
Chinese state media,
over one million public
employees in China,
Han ethnicity,
Han majority, have
been sent into Uyghur
homes to become
fictive family with them.
And when they're there,
they monitor them.
They keep notes
on their behavior.
And in many cases, as Darren
Byler's work has shown,
test them, by doing
things like offering them
alcohol, and seeing if they
wince when they take it.
And here, you can
see an image of that.
And even going so far as to
sleep in their beds with them.
A point that proceeds from
this, which I think is relevant
to the academic community,
which we need to think about
carefully and systematically,
is that this is a situation
in workers in which Uyghurs
cannot give consent.
And this is important
for people who
are thinking about doing
research in Xinjiang
for university
programs that have
collaborative efforts
with partners in China
who engage in research
programs in Xinjiang.
And it's something I think
is worth reviewing in our,
for example,
institutional review
boards for research projects.
There needs to be some special
consideration for Xinjiang,
which looks--
has many of the
characteristics that
make research in prisons kind
of a red flag for IRB research
review--
namely, the
inability to consent.
One other thing I want to--
my last of my three
general points
is that I often get the question
of, why are they doing this?
What is the end goal?
What do the leaders in the CCP
have in mind for this system?
Where are they heading?
Obviously, we can't know that.
More importantly, I
don't think they know.
No one can predict what to
what purposes these camps
will be put in five years.
And we know historically that
when large infrastructure
is built to imprison
lots of people
based on their ethnicity, that
often the goals of those camps
can change.
For which reason, I think we
need to keep our eyes open
for the possibility of--
there doesn't seem to be a goal
of mass killing at the moment.
But that does not mean
that can't be something
that might emerge later.
All right.
I think I have a
few minutes left,
with which I will take
advantage of this moment,
where I think there are a
fair number of Uyghurs who
are in the audience.
And also-- oh, this
is the wrong one.
This is the source of
the now famous image.
A story that was passed
around on WeChat,
and promoted by a
government bureau.
But since the
Facebook stream will
have a lot of Uyghurs
watching, I think,
I want to introduce
a website that
has been generously designed
by a company in Germany
called Enlightenment,
which does kind
of a mix of database
construction
and political consulting.
And this website is
designed to allow
Uyghurs to report on missing
friends and family members.
The web addresses
is izdeymiz.org.
It's the [INAUDIBLE]
we are searching.
I-z-d-e-y-m-i-z dot org.
And you'll see an incredible
database project later today
by Gene Bunin, which
is designed to collect
the testimonies of people
who've been in the camps,
and people whose relatives
have been sent to the camps.
Those are people who have
kind of stuck their neck out,
and risked retribution from
the authorities in Xinjiang.
And often, actually, that
has led to the release
of their relatives in Xinjiang.
But this database is designed
for a slightly different
purpose, which is to preserve
the anonymity of the reporter
as much as possible.
I hope you all know that every
time you go to a website,
it's collecting all
kinds of information
about your computer.
And that information can
be used to identify you.
So our security approach here
is to actually not keep data
that we don't want
to get hacked.
So the amount of data
collected is minimal.
And the user can actually change
whatever data is collected
to protect their own privacy.
And if you are a non-Uyghur
speaker, and you try this out
and it's not working, that's
because there's like a captcha
thing at the bottom that
is a question in Uyghur
that you have to
answer correctly.
OK.
I'll wrap up there.
And thank you all
for your attention.
[APPLAUSE]
ZULIKAYIDA MAIMAITI: Yes, now
please have the three speakers
at the front.
We'll have our Q&A session,
but only for maybe 10 minutes.
So at this time, if
you have any questions,
please come to the two
mics that are over here.
And we would like to ask that--
we only have time for
one question per person.
So please give everyone
the opportunity
to ask their question.
So your time will be
limited at the mic.
So thank you in
advance for that.
So we can have our
first question.
AUDIENCE: You talked about
there are some Uyghurs who
speak Chinese, who in
the internment camp
get to work on the textile.
And I'm just curious,
what about Uyghurs
who don't speak Chinese?
I mean, what happen to them.
And I guess there has to be
Uyghur-speaking people sort
of working--
communicating with them
in the camp, I guess.
Yeah, so that's my question.
DARREN BYLER: So
my understanding--
and it's somewhat limited,
because we don't have direct
access to the camps--
but my understanding
based on interviews
from people that have been
detained and then released
is that the camp space itself
is a Chinese medium space only.
You're not permitted to
speak Uyghur in that space.
The rooms that people live
in have microphones in them.
And even in some of
the images that Rian
was showing from the first
batch of propaganda images
from that kind of
Potemkin camps was--
you could see
microphones in them.
And people talked about this--
the microphones are listening
to us so we can't speak Uyghur.
If we speak Uyghur,
we will be punished.
There's also cameras
in most of the spaces,
where they have kind of full
access and view of people.
And even the bid reports,
they talk about this,
that they need the
camera systems that
will be comprehensive so
there's no blank spaces.
So there's kind of complete
control inside the camp.
My understanding from
people that I know that went
to the camps not knowing a lot
of Chinese is that they're--
one of the main things
that they focused on
was Chinese language
education, learning Chinese.
And so you actually have to
pass Chinese language exams
to move up into the like
most minimum security
levels of the system.
And then eventually,
you can graduate
or something like that to
the forced labor internship
program.
This is sort of the
general sense we have.
I don't have a lot of
specifics about how all it
works in every case.
But this is the general
sense I get from it.
Yeah.
And you'll be punished
if you do speak Uyghur.
So, I mean, most people
know a little basic Chinese.
But they have to
learn very quickly how
you ask for things in Chinese.
They're listening to
speeches, oftentimes.
There's distance learning
that's happening in some spaces.
But they're actually taking
Chinese language class
everyday, for hours at a time.
AUDIENCE: Thank you
so much for everything
that you've said so far,
and for being here today
I had a question about how--
we understand that technology
has played a really important
role in Uyghurs communicating
with each other,
learning the status
of friends and family
who are in these
camps across borders.
Also, as you've talked about,
as we'll see more today,
the surveillance
technology is something
which has the capacity to
betray people-- to reveal
these so-called
extremist thoughts,
or something which may be
subversive to the state.
So I'm wondering if you
could reflect on how
people's relationship to
their personal technology,
particularly smartphones,
has shifted in how they're--
basically, how they're relating
to intimately used technology.
DARREN BYLER: Sure,
I'll answer that.
Thanks for coming.
Good to see you.
So my sense from when
I was there in April
is that people now--
especially younger
people have smartphones,
and they're still using them.
But they're using them
for political performance,
in a lot of ways.
Like on a daily basis
or weekly basis,
you need to post political
content, showing your loyalty
to the state.
And so it becomes that
sort of space for them.
Not having a smartphone, going
through a checkpoint where
their smartphone is
asked for, is also looked
at as suspicious,
especially if you're
of a certain age and
socioeconomic status.
Some people I think try to game
the system slightly by having
a dumb phone, not a smartphone.
But I think you have to like--
it really depends on your
social positionality as to
whether or not that's an
effective strategy for pushing
back against the system.
You're right to point out that
the technology is both tracking
people, but also enabling
us to see in real time
how these things are developing
over time, how information
is flowing around the world.
And so there's ways that we
can sort of hack the system,
by getting that information and
getting it out to the world.
And so that's something that's
new in an internment camp
system, is having
security technology that's
integrated with the world.
The market is also doing this
with the bid contracts, that
are there to give us a trail.
Follow the money.
AUDIENCE: Professors
Roberts, Byler and Thum,
I hope I'm saying that right--
thank you.
You have actually taken a step
that very few academicians
sometimes take, in
relating to something
that is as controversial
as the Uyghur issue.
My name is [INAUDIBLE].
I'm with the Save
Uyghur Project.
The question for you is--
let's go back a few years to the
beginnings of the 2000s, when
the Han Chinese are
moving in and they're
trying to develop the
area commercially.
Typically, if there
have been no attacks
as such against the
general population,
you would think
that they would try
to actually integrate the Uyghur
into economic development.
However, the Chinese actually
chose to isolate them.
Is there any aspect
of economic--
what do you say--
you know, essentially economic
genocide in this case,
if I might term it as such.
Have you been able to
formulate any opinions on that?
Thank you.
RIAN THUM: Well,
Uyghurs did not benefit
as much as you might hope from
the economic development that's
taken place over the
last 20 or 30 years.
It's quite normal to
advertise positions
and say that Uyghurs
are not allowed
to apply for the positions.
And in fact, in basic
manual labor employment
a lot of the
employees were brought
in from the interior of China,
or were migrant laborers
from the interior of China.
For example, if you look at
the old city of Kashgar, which
was destroyed and then rebuilt
in a kind of Disneyland tourist
type of replica of the
city, a huge number
of the people who were
engaged in that rebuilding
were Chinese workers
from the interior.
So there doesn't seem to have
been a concerted effort--
despite a lot of government
officials' claims that
the opening up the west campaign
and the economic developments
campaign were hoped to quell
Uyghur dissatisfaction with
the state--
there doesn't seem to
be much effort put in
to make sure that economic
development would directly
benefit the Uyghurs.
Aside from the benefits of
roads, expanded electricity--
which a lot of Uyghurs
in the countryside
have told me they
really appreciate,
the actual economic
activity in creating those
was mostly made
unavailable to Uyghurs.
SEAN ROBERTS: And I think one
of the things that's interesting
is there was a portion
of the Uyghur population
that actually did benefit
economically significantly
during that period.
And a lot of those people now,
I'm seeing them reflect on--
people who are maybe
outside the country
reflecting on social
media about their parents,
and also people
I've met in Turkey--
who are kind of dumbfounded
that now they're being attacked.
Because they were
kind of trying to--
they were trying to integrate,
and they were benefiting.
And I think one of the
things that concerns
me is that in some cases--
I think, you know,
if you look at what's
happening in some of the
presentations that Rian--
some of the things Rian
and Darren were saying--
it seems that these
camps and who's interned
is somewhat arbitrary,
and somewhat decided
on the local level.
And I don't have any kind
of hard evidence for this,
but I'm concerned
that to some degree,
there may be some
people that actually
have significant
amount of property who
end up getting interned.
And that property may be
going to other sources,
possibly in the
local government.
And so we might be seeing
at least on the local level,
not necessarily centrally
planned, some sort of land grab
also involved in this.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
I'm Dennis.
I'm Fulbright visiting
researcher from Slovenia,
former Yugoslavia.
I have like two short
questions, so sorry for that.
If you can compare the
situation in Uyghuristan
with what was going
on in Tibet, and also
if you want to compare
the camps after the war--
was this like similar
to what is going on now?
And the third part
is also how can you
compare also what is going on
with Uyghurs and Hui Chinese?
Is there some similarities?
But for my research
focus is most important,
I am thinking about
how Han Chinese think
about this, if you go
outside the propaganda?
Do they have
information about what
is going on in Uyghuristan?
Or is this also
the question of--
I don't know-- big
minority of the Chinese,
not know what was going
on in Tiananmen Square?
Something like that?
Even when, I don't know, if
Chinese come here to study--
maybe you talk with how
they feel about this.
Is this like, they
feel like this
is an attack on their ethnicity
or on their country when you're
talking about those
things, because of the lack
of the informations?
Thank you very much.
RIAN THUM: I'll talk
about the Hui and leaders.
Islam is generally seen
by the party in China
as a foreign religion,
and explicitly
in policy proclamations,
as a religion
in need of synthesization,
of transforming
to be more Chinese.
And that policy not only affects
the Uyghurs, but also the Hui,
which is the ethnic group
distinguished from the Han
most by their practice of Islam.
They're Chinese speaking
for the most part.
And so we've seen some
increasing pressure on the Hui.
And Hui people in some parts
of China are quite nervous.
It's ranged from
the widespread--
what's the right word--
not demolition, but the
transformation of mosques.
They're taking the
domes off of mosques.
And then in some cases, even
rebuilding the minarets to look
like what the state views as
truly Chinese architecture.
A river has been
renamed in [INAUDIBLE]..
But even in Beijing, there was
a closure of a very important
Islamic bookstore.
There have been closures of
some mosques in [INAUDIBLE]..
So this is-- the government's
nervousness about Islam
in general, which is supported
by widespread Islamophobia
online that often takes the
form of han netizens complaining
about things being called halal
or ritually pure by Muslims.
So yeah, the Hui are
nervous, but they
have a long-standing reputation
as being closer to the majority
ethnic group and therefore more
trustworthy than the Uyghurs.
It's a mix of racism
and Islamophobia
that results in stronger
attention to the Uyghurs,
but also some on the Hui.
DARREN BYLER: And just to
speak quickly about the way Han
people in other parts of
China view this, in general,
people in China
don't know the extent
of what's happening there.
They may have heard that
there is more security,
that Xinjiang is now safe and
so they can go there to travel.
That's something I hear from my
own students and their parents
talking about Xinjiang.
But in general, I
don't think they
understand the extent
to which people
have been taken to camps.
They think it's
exaggerated by the West.
And they think the
camps themselves are not
camps but actually schools.
Even in Xinjiang
itself, Han people
were telling me that
they don't know really
what's going on in
those camps, or they
would call them schools.
But they did understand
that it's punishment,
that they must have done
something to go to the camp.
And so they do have a sense,
to some extent, that there
is something going on in
terms of a criminal justice
kind of positioning
or a criminal--
it's a carceral
system, but not--
they can't speak
freely about it,
and so they don't really
have a sense of it.
Others though,
especially people that
are involved in the system,
see it as a benefit to them,
that now finally the Xinjiang
problem is being resolved,
the Uyghurs are being
tamed by this system,
and they see it as a success.
They like the technology also.
They see the technology
as cutting edge,
and it means that China is
advancing and really protecting
their interests.
ZULIKAYIDA MAIMAITI: All right.
At this time, I
think we're short.
JOHN TIRMAN: Let's
thank the panel.
ZULIKAYIDA MAIMAITI: Thank you.
So for the next hour, we will
hear three talks focusing more
on the theme of technology.
And first, we will have Ms.
Jessica Batke, whose articles
on the crisis I read
almost religiously,
I would say, in recent
years to get a better grasp
of the scale of the crisis.
Next, we will have Mr. Gene
Bunin, whose absolute devotion
to the humanitarian catastrophe,
as he would call it,
gives hope to everyone that
humanity will triumph one day.
And without further ado, please
welcome Ms. Jessica Batke.
[APPLAUSE]
JESSICA BATKE: Hi, everyone.
Thanks again for having me here.
And I hope now that
you're fed and watered,
we're ready for a session two.
I'm here to talk
a little bit more
about the evidentiary basis
for what we know about what's
happening in the Uyghur region.
And Rian already talked
to a lot about this.
But I'll just say
part of the reason
that we have to have
this conversation is
because the Chinese
government has made it very
difficult to know
firsthand what's happening
in a lot of these places.
It's really hard for independent
researchers or journalists
to get in there and do
independent investigative
reporting.
But despite that, there are a
number of means at our disposal
that allow us to
understand the scale
and scope of this mass
incarceration campaign,
and indeed be very confident
that it's actually happening.
As Zuli said at the beginning,
it's not a controversy.
It's actually happening.
So what are the things
from which we can
draw evidence and estimates?
And Rian already talked
about one of those,
and that's the
government say-so.
That's what they're
telling us themselves.
So that includes the
procurement documents
that he showed you, and
also their own propaganda.
These documents, though,
have allowed us--
have led us to another
really important means
for understanding the scale and
the scope of what's happening,
and that is satellite imagery.
So these notices, these
procurement notices or tender
notices, a lot of times will
give a very specific location
for where they'd like
to build a facility.
And so that allows
researchers to go
on Google Earth or other
satellite imagery programs
and look at those
locations over time.
Has this location changed?
How so?
When?
What was there before?
What's there now?
And what are some
visual markers that we
can look for in these
satellite images
to understand what it is
that we're actually seeing?
Are there things that
we can see that indicate
that this is a place that
people are being held
against their will and not
just some vocational education
school?
So this first example
is from a BBC report,
and it's a really
striking example
because it's basically
constructed out of whole cloth.
You can see this
is from July 2015.
It's a pretty empty site.
And then, by April 2018, you
have this facility there.
The BBC reporters who were
doing this actually did
go-- this facility is about
an hour outside of Urumqi.
They went there.
They tried to go.
They of course were
not allowed to go in.
But what they did
once they were in town
was just cold call a bunch
of random local businesses
and ask them what
was there, and people
did in fact say it's
re-education school.
One person said, "Yes,
that's a re-education school.
There are tens of thousands
of people there now.
They have some problems
with their thoughts."
In case there's any question
what a re-education school is.
And then, this is--
so this is the same
facility in April 2018.
And it's not just that
they're being built,
but they're constantly
being expanded.
This image isn't
quite as good, but you
can see it's much larger.
And that's just from
April to October.
And Darren already talked
about how some of these
are also having factories
added onto them.
So it's not just that these
camps are appearing out
of nowhere, but that they're
always being expanded,
or at least some of them are.
So those are new facilities.
In other cases,
the government has
appropriated facilities that
were already in existence
and modified them to make them
suitable for incarcerating
people.
This comes from Shawn Zhang,
who is a law student in Canada.
He's done a lot of amazing
research on satellite imagery.
And you can see this
is in [INAUDIBLE],,
and this is in 2017 on the left,
and then 2018 on the right.
And you can see that
this sports field's
been covered over with
buildings which are likely--
they could be dorms for inmates.
And again, he knows
that this is a facility
because there was a
procurement notice put up
asking for bids to do
construction in this location.
So let's talk a little bit
more about what lets people
know, besides--
or at least confirm
from the-- once you've
got the location from
the procurement notices,
how can you confirm maybe
that this is a site?
Two of the most really
obvious visual markers
that people are relying on
are watchtowers and razor wire
fences.
And you can see these.
You can see the shadow
of the watchtower
down there at the bottom.
And an image-- this is again
from Shawn Zhang's research.
Interestingly, there
was a really good report
I recommend everyone
take a look at,
came out yesterday by Bloomberg.
And reporters were taken on a
tour of a re-educate facility--
so-called re-education facility.
And of course, the reporters
were shown a very happy place
where people were learning
lots of great life skills.
But really interestingly,
if you looked
at satellite images of
that camp last year,
you saw watchtowers
and razor wire fences.
And just before
the reporters were
allowed to go in for
this visit, there
were no watchtowers
and razor wire fences.
So it remains to be seen
whether that is something that's
going to happen across
these facilities now
that the Chinese
government knows
that outside researchers
are using these as markers
to determine the nature
of these facilities,
or if that's just
something that's
temporary that was done for this
particular set of reporters.
We don't know yet.
So just looking at the satellite
images, experts and academics
have been able to make
estimates about how many people
could plausibly be held
in these locations.
So this is back to this
example from the beginning,
Dabancheng outside Urumqi.
The BBC consulted
several teams of experts
with relevant expertise,
and they came up
with estimates of
how many people
they thought that this
facility could hold.
And on in the low
end, it was 11,000.
That number is as large as--
is on par with the
largest prisons on Earth.
And that assumes that
each inmate would have
their own sleeping quarters.
From a lot of
witness testimony, we
know that's probably
not the case.
And in fact, one of the experts
said that 11,000 is likely
a significant underestimate.
The large-- the high end of
the estimate 130,000 detainees.
And that assumes that people
are being housed in dormitories.
So we don't really know.
And as we know--
as you can see, this is not
a very precise estimate.
But if you have this
kind of capacity,
you really don't need a
lot of these facilities
to start approaching being
able to hold a million people--
incarcerate a million people.
Oh.
Sorry.
In a separate analysis, the
Australian Strategic Policy
Institute, they also went
and analyzed 28 facilities,
again looking from
satellite images.
And they saw that just
in those 28 facilities
there was 2.7 million square
meters of floor space.
And again, not all
camps are the same size.
They're not all that big.
But really, if you have
something like that,
you don't need a ton
of those before you're
able to start incarcerating
the million figure
that people have been citing.
So we have the government
telling you themselves
what these things are.
We have satellite imagery.
And we also have
extrapolation based
on reporting on the
ground and interviews
with people on the ground.
So two case studies have
independently, or at least as
of last year
independently, arrived
at around one million
people being incarcerated
in these facilities.
The first estimate is from the
German scholar Adrian Zenz,
who Rian mentioned earlier.
There was a document
that was purportedly
leaked from public security
authorities in Xinjiang
and made its way
to Newsweek Japan.
This is part of
it, not all of it.
This shows the counties
here on the left,
and then this gray column is the
number of people incarcerated
in each of those places.
And it said that there
was nearly 900,000 people
incarcerated in 68 counties
in Xinjiang as of spring 2018.
But this is not a
complete data set.
It was missing a number of
large population centers.
So what Zenz did was
he used the figures
that were available here to
generate an estimated detention
rate.
And he generated one
estimated detention rate
for areas that are
proportionately
high in ethnic
minority population,
and a different
detention rate for areas
that have a higher
percentage of Han population,
on the assumption that
in areas where there's
more ethnic minorities,
you're going to see a higher
rate of incarceration.
So he used this
estimate and applied it
across Xinjiang, which
include the places that
were not in this data set.
He came up with about a
10% incarceration rate
in minority majority areas
and 5% in Han majority areas.
And so he used that to generate
an estimate of how many people
are going to be--
were incarcerated at that time.
And he came up with the
figure you can see there--
anywhere between
several hundred thousand
and just over one million.
Now, he's since updated
this, just last month I
think, up to 1.5 million.
And as you can see,
that's nearly one
in six people, adult members
of the ethnic minority
community in Xinjiang.
He updated this estimate based
on satellite images and witness
testimony.
And the second
estimate that we have--
similarly, it's an extrapolative
estimate done by the Chinese
Human Rights Defenders.
They called people
throughout 2017 and 2018.
They called eight
different villages
in southern Xinjiang,
southern Xinjiang
having a higher percentage of
ethnic minority populations.
And these were the
estimates that they
got from those interviewees
how many people were
detained in their villages.
So they used those to
estimate detention rates.
And again, they ended up around
one million as an estimate
for the entire province
of people being detained.
And that includes
people that are
incarcerated around the clock.
That number does
not include people
that are attending
daytime or evening time
re-education sessions.
And even work that
doesn't go this far,
people that aren't necessarily
generating detention--
or region-wide detention
estimates, they're still--
as was mentioned earlier, people
reporting detention quotas
in different areas.
So Radio Free Asia, as Rian
mentioned, cold calls people.
They've done a lot of really
great reporting on this.
And they have reported
in various areas
that local officials
have told them
that they have a 10% detention
quota that they have to meet.
They have to detain 10% of
the people in that area.
One person said 40%.
So these are all in
line with each other.
Reporting that we're hearing
from independent sources
all point to this
general figure,
at least as of last year.
And as I mentioned
earlier, these
are not precise estimates.
It's incredibly hard to be
precise because people are not
allowed to go in and
ask questions and do
independent investigations.
But I think that
they are credible.
And I would also point to
State Department estimates.
In March of this year,
the State Department
said that 800,000 to possibly
more than 2 million Uyghurs
have been or are being held.
The problem with the State
Department estimates,
of course, is that we can't
see the math behind them.
We don't know what
they're based on.
I am really biased.
I used to work there.
This is exactly
the sort of thing
that I would have
been working on.
So I tend to put great stock
in them, but that's me.
I'm a biased observer
in that case.
Other suggestive trends.
What other things can we
use that strongly support
all the rest of the
evidence that we have?
Another one is the
arrests, that we
have seen a massive
jump in arrests
over the last few years.
So if you look
between 2016 and 2017,
there was a 700% increase
in criminal detentions
in Xinjiang.
And both Chinese Human Rights
Defenders and Radio Free Asia
report that at least
some of these detentions
are the result of
people that were first
held in these camps--
which, as has been mentioned
before, extra legal.
They're outside the
judicial system.
So people get
swept up in a camp,
and then they're
transferred over
to the formal criminal justice
system for prosecution.
We do not know how
many people went
into the formal criminal justice
system through this mechanism,
but it's an incredible
amount of people.
So even if you said maybe
only 10% of these arrests
could be accounted for by
people who were first in camps,
that's still 20,000 people.
If you think that
more of these arrests
come from people that were
transferred over from the camp
system, you're looking
at hundreds of thousands
of people.
So again, it's not
hard to start getting
towards a million
people being detained
is a very reasonable estimate
for what's happening.
Finally, another
very strong piece
of evidence about what's
happening in these camps
and that gives us an
accurate picture of the scale
and scope and really the
nature of what's happening
are witness testimonies.
And that is what Gene is
going to talk about next,
so I'll leave it there.
[APPLAUSE]
GENE A. BUNIN: OK.
So thank you, Jessica,
for the nice segue.
I'm going to do something
very cliche first
and thank the organizers.
So thank you for inviting
me to come and speak here.
It's very rare that
I actually get out
to this part of the world.
Usually, I'm based as close
to Xinjiang as possible,
ideally in Xinjiang, but I can't
really go back there now, so
mostly in Central Asia.
But so it's very nice to
come here to meet everybody
and to see all of you guys and
talk to you about these very
important issues.
So what I'm going to talk
about today will be something
that I've been working
on for the past,
let's say-- more or less
full-time for the past seven
months.
So it's a personal
initiative, and it's
my way to try to help put an end
to this thing that's happening
in Xinjiang right now.
And were I wiser, I probably
would have started this,
I don't know, a year earlier.
Or maybe, were I
really wise, I probably
would have started taking
photos of IDs of people
that I met in Xinjiang
maybe 10 years earlier
and just storing them so I could
then later know who they were
in case they were detained.
But alas, still better
late than never.
So basically, this
is my project.
It's-- well, hopefully
it will be "our project,"
quote-unquote, as more and
more people get involved.
But it's a victim's database.
And it's actually
the grueling work
of going through the victims
who are in Xinjiang currently,
in Xinjiang's current reality
or were there at some point
recently, and counting them one
by one and list-- collecting
testimonies about them
from relatives and friends
abroad and building that
all into a database which
is actually publicly
available here at shahit.biz.
So if you have a smartphone,
if you have a laptop,
and you want to just take it
out and browse and play around,
you're more than welcome to.
I won't be offended.
So my goal here is
really very tutorial.
This database has gotten more
and more attention recently
in the media among other
people, but still I
imagine most people in this room
probably have not looked at it,
do not know how it works, or
don't know the fine details.
So I'm going to explain
that and also justify
why I think it's important
to have something like this
and how you could use it.
So before I do all that, I'm
going to try to confuse you.
And so the goal of this
slide is to confuse you.
But in so doing,
I want to impress
upon you a very important
point, and that's
when we talk about
Xinjiang in the media
and probably in conferences
like this, we focus on camps.
I think Rian already
mentioned this.
It's not really just camps.
It's much, much more than that.
But if you actually try to dig
into how complicated it is,
it gets really ugly.
And so I guess what
I'm trying to do
is, if you want to
talk about and focus
on camps, that's totally fine.
But at least keep in mind
that the whole system, all
of Xinjiang today, it's not
an understatement-- sorry,
it's not an
exaggeration, it's not
an overstatement to say that
the whole place is really
a big camp.
So camps are one part of this.
And this is like
pick your poison.
By no means--
I could talk about
this for hours,
and every one of
these arrows actually
has an argument behind it.
And we could talk for hours
about every one of these arrows
and what the evidence
for those is.
I don't have time to
do that right now,
so I'm just going to
gloss over all of this.
So the camps or the camp
system-- because actually,
there's various types of camps.
Some are lenient.
Some closer to, say, prisons.
The camps are just one part.
Then, of course, you have
prisons, the formal prisons,
which are another part.
Another part that I think has
not gotten very much attention
but probably should is the suos.
And suos is a Chinese term.
So there's [SPEAKING CHINESE]
and these are like the police
detention centers.
And often, they're
transit points,
so we don't hear about them.
But often people go there, and
then they get taken to a camp
or to a prison.
And sometimes people stay
there for quite a while.
And so these are
like the black holes.
These are probably
the worst places
in terms of things like torture
because their job is often
to interrogate, to investigate,
to get people to admit crimes.
And so these are
maybe the worst.
This is where you hear the
worst of the stories that
come out from Xinjiang.
They're often from this suos.
And so actually, like
Mihrigul Tursun's testimony,
Gulbakhar Jalilova's,
Abduweli Ayup's.
They're actually not from camps.
They're from the suos.
And I think that's also
an important distinction
just to keep in mind.
But even if you're not in
these kind of, let's say,
proper incarceration
places, you can
also, let's say, leave a
camp and go to a forced--
some sort of forced labor.
They can be a factory,
but there's also
testimonies that talk
about people being forced
to work as security
guards, people being forced
to work at the kindergarten.
People who, let's
say, are teachers
normally to go and to teach
at one of the camps again.
So there's many things that
people can be forced to do.
And that too is a
type of detention.
Then there's hospitals,
some of which
are partially
converted to camps now.
There are hospitals,
for example,
where the first, I don't know,
nine floors will be normal,
for normal people and
for normal patients,
and then everything above that
will be for camp detainees.
And so that's another
type of detention.
Then, for kids whose
parents have been taken,
you have orphanages.
That's a type of detention
because these kids
have no choice.
They have to go there.
Then, on top of
that, you also have
what I decided to call community
correction because it's
very similar to the way that
minor offenders seem to be
treated in China in general.
And that's people like
drug addicts, for example.
They are forced to stay
in their community,
and they cannot leave
without permission.
They have to go to frequent,
let's say, sessions, meetings.
And they're constantly watched
to see what they're doing.
And this is what a lot
of people in Xinjiang
are in fact under right now, is
a sort of community correction.
So they have to
go to flag raising
ceremonies, political meetings.
They have checkpoints
on the streets.
They constantly check
their ID, their phone,
and they're constantly
being surveilled.
So this too is a
type of detention.
This is probably the one
that most people are under.
And of course, more abstract--
here I really generalized--
but ultimate form of detention
is death.
Because in most, if not all, of
these other forms of detention,
people do prematurely die.
And that's been documented.
I think now in a
database we have
something like 3,600
testimonies collected.
About 62 of those are
people who are dead.
So it's about 1 1/2 percent
of the database is dead.
So here, I just want
to say that when
I'm talking about Xinjiang
victims and documenting them,
we're talking not about just
even camps or even camps
and prisons, but all of this.
So why-- why is there--
why did this
database get created?
As I said, I would have
done it much earlier.
But I guess the
most simple reason
was that in the
summer of 2018, there
was a rise in the number of
testimonies-- quote-unquote
"testimonies," very informal
testimonies that started
to show up from
friends and relatives
on things like social networks.
So these will be very simple.
For example, a person could
just hold up a phone and say my,
name is da-da-da.
My father, da-da-da,
is currently
being held in a camp
since April of last year,
and I want to ask international
rights organization,
I want to ask the
president of my country,
to help me do
something about that.
And people would post
that on social networks.
And the problem with that is
that on social networks, people
comment, and then people
like them, people share them,
and two days later,
people just tend
to move on and forget them,
and they're not documented.
So in, let's say,
the late summer of--
oh, I can't go back.
In the late summer
of last year, there
started to be more and
more of these coming out.
And so it seemed
like there was a need
to do something with them
and start to collect them.
And I just want to
point out something
that's actually quite
loud here is that this
was in the summer of--
I'm saying in the late
summer of 2018 people started
talking about this more and
coming out and testifying.
Whereas the detentions,
they started maybe
in the April of 2017.
So it took a year and
a half after people
had been detained
already for people
to start going out and
saying, oh hey, by the way,
my father, my family members are
in detention, and going public
about it, which says
something in itself.
Now, there's a lot of other
reasons that went into this,
and I will try to
quickly gloss over these.
I think the most
primary reason for why
I thought this would be
useful was this inspiration,
this more abstract goal
of inspiring more people
to speak out.
Because it's very,
very hard to speak out
if there's maybe 10
other people doing it,
because as soon as
you do it, you're
afraid that the
Chinese government is
going to punish your relatives.
Or the relatives who are
not in detention right
now may be put in detention
because you went public
about your family.
But of course, once you
have hundreds of these,
once you have
thousands of these,
hopefully once we have
tens of thousands of these,
it's not a scary
because you just see
this big pile of testimonies.
You add yours, and
then it will be lost.
And so it's not such a
big step then to add it.
And so that was one goal.
Another goal was to try
to, at least symbolically,
get the different ethnic
groups to work together.
Because this is really funny.
Again, we often talk about
this as an Uyghur issue.
It is certainly not
only the Uyghur issue.
The Uyghurs have
the most victims
in terms of the absolute number,
but relatively speaking, things
are just as bad for the Kazakhs,
for the Kyrgyz, for the Uzbeks,
for the Tatars, and a lot
of these other ethnic--
for the Hui as well-- a
lot of these other ethnic
either Turkic or
Muslim minorities
who live in Xinjiang.
But strangely enough,
often Uyghur activists
you talk about the
Uyghurs, Kazakh activists
talk about the Kazakhs,
Kyrgyz activists
talk about the Kyrgyz,
and there's not
a lot of, I don't
know, shout outs,
let's say, in between, which I
feel like that needs to change,
at least symbolically.
This gives a way to take
testimonies from everybody.
And in fact, a lot of the
documentation for this
has come not from
Uyghurs but from Kazakhs.
So about half of the data
base is still Kazakhs.
And so this gives a way
to put everything together
in one place.
So [INAUDIBLE] is ethnic unity.
Another reason was to give--
get more people mobilized,
give more people a way to help.
Because this was
a common question,
and it's still a question
that I hear, is--
this is horrible,
what can I do about it
as somebody who's completely
out of the situation?
And now, we currently
have maybe 10 to 20 people
who are working, volunteering
or part-timing for this database
project.
And some of them maybe are only
doing a few hours per month.
Some of them are doing
a few hours every day.
And these are
people who probably
would have been doing something
else, maybe not even Xinjiang
related, had this not come up.
And so this has gotten
more people involved.
It's also crowdfunded.
So we run purely on donations.
And I think we have something
like 200 donors at this point.
And so again, that's 200
people who, perhaps they
wouldn't know what
to do otherwise,
who at least have been
able to help in this way.
So that's another goal.
Of course, more concrete, this
is another-- as Jessica said,
this is another form of
documentation or proof.
So in addition to satellite
images and in addition
to the government tenders to the
Chinese government's own press
state releases, this
is also-- testimonies
are another type of evidence.
It's also a very--
it has the potential
to be, and I
think it already
is a very important
analytical and investigative
tool, because if you're
a journalist, if
you're a scholar,
and you want to, say, search
about factories in Xinjiang,
you can download
the whole database.
You can search for
the word "factory,"
and you can find the
relevant testimonies
and perhaps find the
relevant information.
And you can also look at
specific demographics.
So if you want to look
at young Uyghur men
from [INAUDIBLE]
for whatever reason,
then you can also look at those
specific testimonies as well
and zoom in and look
for things there.
And the last point for why
I think this is important--
and this was not
here originally.
This was not something
I had in mind
when I started this
up in September.
But it's something
that-- because I didn't
know what was going to happen.
I didn't know.
I couldn't really call--
I wanted more people to
contribute testimonies,
but I couldn't say--
I couldn't tell people to do
that because I didn't know--
like, will this make their
relatives safer or will this
make their relatives in more--
would this put their
relatives in more danger?
But I think as time has shown
now, China is incredibly--
the Achilles heel of the
current Chinese authorities
seems to be bad PR.
And they react very,
very badly and very,
very comically when some of
these cases get publicized.
So sometimes you'll get people
released a day after somebody
goes and makes a video
online and just puts it
on YouTube saying, such-and-such
a relative is in a camp.
And the next day,
they'll suddenly
get news that this person has
been released after not hearing
from them for a year or two.
And sometimes that seems
like a strange coincidence,
but there's dozens
of such cases.
And it also allows
us to be a watchdog.
So if you create-- if you
file a testimony for somebody,
you put it in there,
we now have a file.
We can keep track of that case.
And if, God forbid,
something happens to them,
if they die for example,
we can also note that.
We can try to publicize that.
We can give that to somebody.
We can give it to
journalists, et cetera.
So like I said, it's a website.
shahit.biz is literally "witness
we," or "we are witnesses."
And being a website,
this is a public website,
so everything is public.
You can read all of
these testimonies.
All the names are public.
All the Chinese ID
numbers are public and.
That's kind of the point.
And so anybody can read
all the testimonies.
Like I said, anybody
can export them and do
whatever they want with them.
And anybody can submit.
And this is-- it takes
maybe 5 to 15 minutes.
I'm going to do a
demo at the end where
I'm going to submit a testimony
in real time, so to speak.
And I strongly
encourage people who--
I'm sure there are
people here who
have friends or relatives
who are in that sort of--
in Xinjiang in some
sort of detention.
I strongly encourage you to
write a testimony for them.
However, that being said, even
though anybody can submit,
the majority of
the content is not
just people going on the website
and submitting testimonies.
The majority is still
this grueling work
that, let's say, we do
and the volunteers do,
that the part-timers
who work with us do,
and that's parsing the internet
for publicly reported cases
of victims.
So that can be through video
testimonies on YouTube.
That can be through
social media posts.
That can be through media, just
traditional media, and also
NGO reports.
So we look at everything.
We find victims.
We try to get their story.
And we put them
into textual format,
and we throw them
into this database.
And that's over 90% of the
current-- of the database
right now.
I would like that to change.
I would like more
people, of course,
to go and submit directly.
But for the time
being, this is OK also.
So a typical testimony
looks something, let's say,
like this.
So you have a textual component
where you write all the stuff.
You write who the testifier is.
You write who the victim is.
You write something
about the detention.
You write about the victim;s
current status if you know it.
There is also metadata
component where you tag
and you categorize the victim.
So you give them
an age category.
You give them a gender category.
And that's what makes
it possible to do
all the analytical work,
the other component
of this project.
Then, we are not anonymous.
So if you're anonymous, you
can go to Rian's, for example,
database, like he explained.
We are completely public.
Again, that's the point.
So if you want to
testify, you have
to put your full
name of the victim.
And if you can, we
strongly encourage
putting the Chinese ID
number, because that's
how you let somebody--
that's really how you can go
to, say, the Chinese authorities
and point a finger at a
particular victim and say,
where is this person right now?
And you can't really
do that if you
say that, well, my friend
[INAUDIBLE] from Kashgar
is in a camp.
They'll say, well, we have
5,000 [INAUDIBLE] in Kashgar.
Which one do you want?
And then they can pretend
that they don't know.
But with a Chinese number,
they can't really do that.
And so then, in
addition to that,
there's also
supplementary material,
so video, audio, da-da-da.
So here, I'm just going to
go and show a few examples.
So the site is not
very beautiful.
That's also maybe
kind of the point,
because it's really more about
functionality at this point.
But this is a screenshot
of one testimony.
And here, again,
you have the name.
Here you have all the metadata.
And then here you
have the textual part.
And then here you have
any supplementary stuff,
which is in this case a video.
So this is a very, let's
say, bare bones testimony.
There's not a lot of
information in here, in fact.
But they can also
be quite complex.
So this is an
example of testimony
that has a lot of
info, a lot of updates,
a lot of multimedia, audio
interviews, pictures,
certificate scans,
numbers, et cetera.
And so I would like to submit
one and show you how it's done.
But before I do that,
I want to just touch
upon this issue of reliability.
So it's not, at least
in my opinion of course,
enough to have one
or two testimonies
and say that these are facts.
You can never say
testimony is a fact.
It's a type of evidence.
But a testimony from one or
two people is not a fact.
It's just what people say.
And we don't claim
to do more than that.
We don't claim to report facts.
We just report what people
write or say, period.
So we don't try to
extrapolate and draw
things out of the testimony.
So we just try to report
what people say, ideally.
Of course, when you
have hundreds of these,
then it's up to you as a, I
don't know, an informed reader
to go through these and
make your own conclusions
about what that means.
And if hundreds of
people are saying
that they're doing
such and such,
then there's probably reason
to believe that they're really
doing such and such.
That being said, even for
individual testimonies,
it's possible to
corroborate some things.
It is possible to build
further on the things
that we have in a
given testimony.
So here I'm going to give a
very tragic and very almost
outrageous example that
I was personally very
skeptical about but which ended
up getting more corroborated
and which made me a
lot less skeptical.
And so this is a
testimony, again,
for a Kazakh, Akyl Khazizuly.
So again, this is a screenshot.
The original testimony came
through these YouTube video
interviews from his friends
and relatives in Kazakhstan.
And I'm going to tell
you his story the way
that they told it.
So this is not me
telling you facts.
This is just me narrating what
they themselves talked about.
And so he was a government
appointed imam in Changji
prefecture not far from Urumqi.
He at one point was arrested.
He was tortured.
They say it was in a camp.
I suspect probably
it was a [INAUDIBLE]
It was probably a
pretrial detention center.
But they say camp, so
OK, we'll write camp.
He was then-- he
fainted, apparently,
after 20 days of this.
He was sent to
hospital for 10 days.
He was released.
He was allowed to go home.
And after returning
home, I think
he was home for only
two or three days,
and they told them
that he would have
to go back to detention again.
And so this is where the
testimony gets really crazy,
and this is where the
skepticism should come in.
His wife, in an attempt to
save him from going back
to detention, killed herself.
So she committed suicide.
And what happened
was, basically, she
committed suicide.
He didn't know about it.
He woke up in the morning,
I think on the day
that he was supposed to
go back to detention.
He found the door
of the house locked.
Again, I'm just reporting
what people here were saying.
He found the door
locked from the outside.
Some neighbors helped
him get out of the house.
They went in the yard.
They walked around,
and they found her body
in a methane production
well of the house.
Ironically, this does not
save him from detention.
What happened instead was that
the authorities came and they
accused him of
murdering his own wife
and sentenced him to
30 years in prison.
Again, this is what
his relatives said.
When I first heard it, I
was also a bit skeptical.
This is the kind of story,
it sounds so extreme that--
Xinjiang is quite
bad, but it's not--
it can't be that bad everywhere.
But what's interesting is that
when one of our researchers--
we have, again, his
Chinese name here--
one of our researchers looked
for his Chinese name or one
of our part-timers looked
for his Chinese name
on the Chinese internet
and found first an article
that he himself had authored
less than three weeks
before detention
which showed that-- it
was a very pro-government
article by an imam.
It was the right location.
It was the right name.
So at first, at the
very least, this
proved that this person exists,
that this person existed.
And then, there was
another announcement
from the procuratorate
of how this person was
arrested for murder and
was now being investigated.
And so suddenly, this story
which at the beginning may
have been very--
sounded too-- very
outlandish, did not
seem so outlandish anymore.
And now, to take it even one
step further, when all of this
ends--
And I don't think
it's a question of if.
I think it will end.
The question is when.
But when it will
end, you could--
and we have his address.
You could go to this house, and
you could look-- for example,
is there a methane production
well in that house?
And if there is, that
corroborates it even further.
So this is an example
of one testimony
and how you can
potentially build
upon that with other evidence.
So now, I will
finish with a demo.
And so I'm actually going to
submit a testimony right now
for a friend of mine
who was actually
arrested two years ago.
So again, the timeline
here should be amazing.
Two years have passed.
Now I'm finally submitting
a testimony for him.
So this is somebody who
was arrested two years ago.
And I couldn't submit a
testimony for a very long time,
even after I started this
project, because I simply
didn't know his last name.
And that's a problem.
A lot of people have this.
We might have people in
Xinjiang that we know,
but actually, we
never asked-- we never
take pictures of their IDs.
We don't know their last name.
We just talk to them
on a first-name basis.
And so this person is--
he was a bookstore owner, a
bookshop owner in Kashgar,
which is this most Western-most
town in Xinjiang and in China.
This is kind of a goofy picture
of the two of us from 2015.
So his name is Abduheni.
He's retired.
He's from Kashgar
as far as I know.
He was running
this bookshop that
sold mostly Uyghur
literature after retirement,
and he was running it
together with his son.
This is a photo from
Baidu Street View
of the bookshop still in 2016.
And I think this is as recent
as you can get with Baidu Street
View in Xinjiang, is 2016.
After that, there's
no fresh images.
So here's a photo of
some kids in his store
during off-school hours.
Here's his WeChat
background photo.
And so I found out that he had
been detained, that he had been
arrested in November of 2017.
I came back to Kashgar in
September of 2017 that year.
The bookstore was
closed for two months.
Then suddenly it opened.
I was able to talk to
people who knew him better.
And they told me that
in April of that year,
he had been arrested, sentenced
to seven years in prison,
and his son had been
taken away as well.
His son was in a camp--
so an open camp where
people could still come
and occasionally visit him.
But in Abduheni's case,
he was in a prison,
not even in Kashgar
but apparently
an Aksu in a closed facility.
And nobody knew what
was happening with him.
And again, this is the
retired bookshop owner.
So then, I also went--
I have his WeChat.
I looked on his WeChat, and
that actually corroborated it.
Because then you
look on his WeChat,
and his posts stop
in April 2017.
And if you look
at his last post--
if you look at his
last post, people
who are familiar with
Uyghur literature
will see this is
[INAUDIBLE],, so these
are very popular historical
novels that are banned now,
of course.
But I think they were
already banned by 2017,
but a lot of people
just didn't know.
I think, as somebody already
mentioned, a lot of literature
was banned, but people could
still get it or sell it.
And so he had posted
this thing where he said,
I got the first editions.
So the first editions of
these are very, very valuable
because books like these go
through censorship and editing
lots and lots of times,
dozens of times sometimes.
And these are the
first editions.
And so you say to
yourself, this is great.
They're clean.
They're in good condition.
It was a sort of advertisement.
And this was the last thing he
had posted before, I assume,
he was taken away.
So again, I didn't know his
last name for a very long time.
I couldn't write a
testimony for him.
But about a week ago,
a friend and I actually
searched again the
wonderful Chinese internet,
and we found the actual
bookstore in Kashgar
in that location with all the--
everything matches.
And we found his name.
So it's actually
Abduheni Abdullah.
And so now I'm going to
write a testimony for him.
And so I've done all
the grueling work
so you don't have
to go through it.
And so this is--
I'm just filling in the fields.
I'm the testifying party.
This is my testimony.
I'm not submitting
for anybody else.
He's a friend, somebody
I've known since 2014.
Here I've written all his stuff,
including his Chinese name.
Then, location.
Somebody told me that
he was in-- somebody
who knew the situation knew he
was in a closed prison Aksu.
Arrested in April 2017.
For the reason for detention,
I can only speculate.
But again, books were
probably the reason.
But again, we don't know
the official reason.
Victim status-- in
the prison in Aksu.
I hope he's still alive.
We don't know.
And then, how did I learn about?
I learned it from somebody who
knew the situation firsthand.
And then some extra information.
His son was also detained.
And the bookstore is now closed.
So having done all that, I'll
just very quickly conclude.
So then, if I go now
to this website--
again, so here's the website.
I click on the Submit
tab, which I already did,
and you get this form,
which I've already
filled out with the content
I just talked about.
So you fill out all the stuff.
Not all of it is mandatory,
but I put in all of it.
And then, this is where
you do the metadata.
So age-- I don't
know his exact age.
Gender-- male.
Ethnicity-- Uyghur.
Location-- well, surprisingly
not in Kashgar but in Aksu.
Detention type, formal prison.
Detention time, April
2017, in that period.
Detention reason--
I can speculate,
but I don't really know, so I'm
going to leave this unclear.
Health status-- again,
he had no health problems
when he was detained, but of
course I worry about that.
But for the time being, unclear.
Profession-- he had his
own private business,
so I will put private business.
I don't have his ID number.
And then, I'll just
enter my contact email.
This is just how-- we don't
display this information,
but if we want to
get back to you
and ask you for additional
info, other stuff,
this is what we do.
And then, if I had
any additional info,
like pictures
which I had here, I
can then send it to this email.
So then, I submit the testimony.
It says, "Testimony
submitted!" then goes through.
And then, it is added to
the pending list with all
the other pending testimonies.
And this is another one.
And then his should
be right here.
So then, when I go home,
I'll log in as an admin,
for example, and I'll just--
I'll check his testimony and
make sure everything's fine.
I'll make sure
nothing's missing.
And then I'll
accept it, and it'll
be added to this pool of--
so it will be number 3,641.
So that's it.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
JOI ITO: Hello.
I'm Joi Ito, the director
of the MIT Media Lab.
And I'm probably the least
informed about this topic
of everyone here.
So I'm very grateful
to, first of all,
all the people who have
been working on this topic
and for helping me
get more informed.
But I'm broadly very
interested in human rights
and the relationship
with technology
and our role as Harvard and
MIT and academia in general
on this topic.
So I wanted to talk
mainly about that.
And I think one of the
things which is not just
true in this case but
true broadly, I think,
is the role of technology
in surveillance
and human rights
and other things.
And I think we've heard
some specific examples,
but I thought I'd talk about
it a little bit generally.
And specifically to MIT with
the new College of Computing
and this continuing
investment in
and ascension of the
engineering and sciences
and in the world in
terms of their influence
and the scale in which
they're being deployed,
I think thinking about
the ethical things is
quite important.
I remember when JJ Abrams, who's
one of our directors fellows--
he's a director, for those
of you who don't know--
he visited the Media Lab.
And we have 500 or so projects.
And he asked, do
you do anything that
involves things like
war or surveillance
or things that arm
people and oppression?
And all of the faculty and
students said, no, of course
we don't do that kind of thing.
We do technology for good.
And he said, well, let
me reframe that question.
Can you imagine an evil villain
in any of my shows or movies
using anything here to do
really terrible things?
And everybody went, yeah!
And I think what's
important to understand
is that most engineers and
scientists are doing things
and developing things to
try to help something,
whether it's trying to
model the brains of children
in order to increase the
quality and the effectiveness
of education or to use
sensors to help farmers
with their agriculture.
But what most people don't
spend enough time thinking about
are the dual-use nature
of the technology,
the fact that
technology can easily
be used for things that aren't
the thing that the designers
have meant to design.
Now, I think there's a lot
of arguments about whether--
whose job is it to think
about these things?
I would say if I took
the faculty of my lab
and put them on a line between
"we should think about all
of the social implications
before doing anything" to "we
should just build stuff and
society will figure it out,"
I think it's probably a
fairly even distribution.
And I would say, probably
at MIT, that's roughly true.
And I think my argument
is that, no, we actually
have to think more about
the social implications
of technology before
designing them.
It's very hard to
un-design things.
And I'm not saying
that it's an easy task,
and I'm not saying that we
have to get everything perfect.
But I think that having
a more coherent view
of the world and
these implications
is tremendously important.
Susan Silbey, who's the
current chair of the faculty,
I was with her the
other day describing--
so the Media Lab is a
little over 30 years old,
and I've been there
for now eight years.
But I was very involved in the
early days of the internet,
and I was describing how when
we were building the internet,
we thought, if we could just
provide voice to everybody,
if we could just connect
everybody together,
we would have world peace.
I really believed that
when we were starting.
And I was expressing
how naive I felt now
that the internet has
become something that's
more akin to the little
girl in The Exorcist,
for those of you
who've seen the movie.
But Susan, being the
anthropologist and historian,
said, well, when you guys talked
about connecting everybody
together, we knew, the
social scientists knew
that it was going to be a mess.
And I think one of the
other really important parts
of the learning with the
conversation with Susan
was the extent to which
the humanities have thought
about a lot of these things.
History has taught us
a lot of these things.
I know that it's somewhat taboo
to invoke Nazi Germany in too
many conversations,
but if you look
at the data that was
collected, for instance,
in Europe to support social
services was used by the Nazis
then later to round up
and persecute the Jews.
And similarly, I think--
it's not exactly
the same, but a lot
of the databases
that we're creating
to help poor and
disadvantaged families
are being used by the
immigration services
to find and target
people for deportation.
So even the databases
and technology
that we use and create
for the best of intentions
can be subverted, depending
on who's in charge.
And so I think thinking
about these systems
is tremendously important.
And at MIT, we are--
and I think Zuli mentioned
some of the specifics,
but we are engaged
in and working
in either tech companies
that are working directly
in surveillance technology as
well as technologies that could
be easily used in these things.
And thinking about
this is very important.
I will point out that there
are whole disciplines that
work in this.
STS, Science Technology Society,
that's really what they do.
They think about the impact
of science and technology
in society, think about
it in a historical context
and provide us with a
framework for thinking
about these things.
So thinking about how to
integrate anthropology and STS
into both the curriculum and
the research at MIT, I think,
is tremendously important.
The other thing I think
is allowing engineers
more freedom to explore.
I think one of the
problems with scholarship--
I apologize for those of
you who aren't in academia.
This is somewhat parochial.
But there's-- this
is a slight tangent,
but I think last month, Eric
Topol had a paper that showed
that all of the most impactful
machine learning and medicine
papers that had been published,
none of them had been
clinically validated.
And so what happens in computer
science, you get some data,
you tweak it, and you get
a very high effectiveness,
and then you walk away.
And then the clinicians
come in, and they say,
oh, but we can't
replicate this, and we
don't have the expertise.
And it doesn't of pass
over into this other field.
And I think one of the other
challenges that we have is
that, as we start to explore
this technology, a lot
of our reward systems, a
lot of the incentive systems
that we have for the
technical people,
isn't to explore the
social implications,
isn't to think about what
the other things are.
And so you fall a little
bit short of actually
getting to-- well, what
does this actually mean?
I teach a course together
at the Harvard Law School
called the Applied Ethics
and Governance Challenges
in Artificial Intelligence.
And we have some
research in that field.
But just to give
an example, we were
looking at risk scores used
by the criminal justice
system for sentencing and
pretrial assessments and bail.
And we initially thought,
oh, we just use a blockchain
and make it valid, and
we verify the data,
and we'll just make
it more efficient.
But as we started looking at it,
we realized that, first of all,
the whole system
was somewhat broken.
And as we started going
deeper and deeper into it,
we realized that these
prediction systems we're
making policing and judging
possibly more efficient,
but that they were--
basically, prediction takes
power from the predictee
and gives it to the predictor.
And so what you're doing is
you're trying to say, OK,
if you happen to live
in this zip code,
you will have a
higher recidivism
rate, which is the incidence
of being rearrested.
But rearrest has probably more
to do with policing and policy
and the courts than it
does of the criminality
of the individual.
But by saying that this
risk score can accurately
predict how violently criminal
this person is likely to be,
you're pushing the agency or
your attributing the agency
to the individual when actually
probably it's the system.
And by saying and
moving the argument
to the accuracy
of the prediction
rather than taking a look at
the system and saying, who
is the cause of this system?
And it's actually weirdly
reminiscent, if you look at--
Caley Horan in history
is writing a book
on the history of insurance
and the insurance and redlining
and the way in
which the argument
about insurance pricing--
it's called actuarial fairness--
became a legitimate
way to use math
to discriminate against people,
and took the debate away
from the feminists and
the civil rights leaders
and made it an argument
about accuracy of algorithms.
And so I think one of the
key things-- and so our--
researchers that were
working on this, trying
to make better risk scores,
have now completely pivoted
to we should not be using
automated decision making
in criminal justice, and we
should be using computers
to look at the long-term
effects of policies
and not to predict the
criminality of individuals.
But one of the problems
I find, whether we're
talking about tenure cases
or publications or funding,
is we don't allow our
researchers, often,
to end up in places
that contradict
the fundamental place
where they started.
So I think that's
another thing that's
really important, is how
do we create both research
and curricular opportunities
for people to explore?
But I think as we
think about this,
and thinking about
this conversation,
how we integrate this into
our educational system,
our academic process
is really important.
And I love that we have scholars
that are working on this.
But how do we bring
this to the engineers
and the scientists
is something I think
that I'd love to think about and
maybe in the breakout sessions
we can work on.
And I want to pivot a
little bit and talk about--
I know there are people who
view this meeting as maybe
provocative or political.
It reminds me of
several years ago
when we had this March for
Science when I was at a dinner
table with a bunch of faculty.
And I won't name the faculty.
And some of them-- and I gave
a talk at the first March
for Science.
And some of them said,
why are you doing that?
It's very political.
We try not to be political.
We're just scientists.
And I said, well,
when it becomes
political to tell
the truth, when
being supportive
of climate science
is political, when
it's trying to support
fundamental scientific
research is political,
then I'm political.
So I don't want to
be partisan, but I
think if truth is
politics, then I
think we need to be political.
And it's not a new thing.
If you look at the
history of MIT,
or just the history
of academic freedom--
so there's sort of declaration
of academic freedoms
I think in 1940 or so.
There's a bunch of
interesting MIT history.
In the late '40s and '50s
we had the McCarthy period,
where we were going
after Communists
and left wing people
because of the fear
of the threat of Communists.
And many institutions were
turning over their left wing,
Marxist academics or
firing them under pressure
by the government.
But MIT was quite
good about protecting
their Marxist-affiliated
faculty.
And there was a very famous
case, Dirk Struik, who--
in 1951, he was indicted
by the Middlesex Grand Jury
on charges of advocating
the overthrow of the US
and Massachusetts.
And at the time, MIT put
him on leave with pay.
So he was somewhat--
he was suspended.
But once the court
abandoned the case out
of a lack of
evidence and the fact
that states shouldn't
be ruling on this,
MIT reinstated Professor Struik.
And this is the quote
from the president
at the time, James Killian--
"MIT believes that its faculty,
as long as its members abide
by the law and maintain the
dignity and responsibility
of their position, must be
free to inquire, to challenge,
and to doubt in their search
for what is true and good.
They must be free to examine
controversial matters,
to reach conclusions
of their own,
to criticize and be criticized.
And only through such
unqualified freedom
of thought investigation can
an educational institution,
especially one
dealing with science,
perform its function
of seeking truth."
And I think this is really--
sometimes, many of
you may wonder why
we have tenure in universities.
And we have tenure to protect
our ability to question
authority, speak the
truth, and really say
what we think without
fear of retribution.
There's another-- I'll
just name a few cases.
But there's another
important case.
This is in the early 1990s where
MIT and a bunch of Ivy League
schools came up with
this idea to provide
financial aid for low income
students on a need basis.
And the Ivy League
schools got together
to coordinate on how
they would assess need
and how they would figure out
how much to give the students.
And weirdly, the United
States government
sued the Ivy League
schools, saying that this
was an antitrust case.
It was kind of ridiculous
because it was really
sort of a charity.
But again, then Chuck Vest--
most of the other universities
caved in after this lawsuit.
But Chuck Vest, the
president at the time,
said, "MIT has a long
history of admitting students
based on merit and a
tradition of ensuring
these students full
financial aid."
Blah blah, blah.
And he opposed this.
And a multi-year lawsuit ensued
in which, eventually, we win.
And then, this as-needed
scholarship system
gets enshrined and actually
policy in the United States.
So many of the people who are
here at MIT today probably
don't-- actually, 50
years ago, if you--
there is a great documentary
where MIT students and faculty
are clashing, literally on
the streets, with the National
Guard, protesting Vietnam.
So MIT has been, in the
past, a very political place
when it meant protecting
our freedom to speak up.
I think more
recently, we've had--
I personally, for example,
when Chelsea Manning was--
her fellowship at the
Kennedy School was rescinded,
she emailed me and asked if she
could speak at the Media Lab.
I was thinking about it, and
I asked the administration
what they thought, and they
thought it was a terrible idea.
And they told me that.
And then, when they told
me, I said, you know,
now that means I
have to invite her.
And I remember our provost,
Marty, saying, I know.
And that's what's, I think,
wonderful about being here
at MIT, is the fact that
the administration-- so
for instance, on
the Saudi issue,
the administration did a report.
It was a--
I know there are some critics
of it, but it was like, well,
we're going to let people
decide what they want to do.
And then, I think each
group is permitted
to make their own decision.
And MIT, so far,
in my experience,
has always stood by the academic
freedom of whatever unit
it is that's trying to
do what they want to do.
And so I think we're in
a very privileged place.
And I think that it's not only
our freedom but our obligation
to speak up and also to fight
for the academic freedom
of people in our community
as well as other communities
and provide leadership.
So I really do want to thank
the organizers for doing that.
I think it's very
bold, but I think
it's very becoming of
both MIT and Harvard.
And I read a very
disturbing report
from Human Rights
Watch talking about how
Chinese scholars overseas were
starting to have difficulties
in speaking up.
And I think that this is
somewhat unprecedented.
And because of technology, I
think a country's ability--
and I think there are similar
reports about Saudi Arabia.
But countries' abilities to
surveil their citizens overseas
and impinge on things
like academic freedom
is a tremendously
important topic
to discuss and think about,
both technically, legally,
and otherwise, how to protect
the freedoms of students
studying here I think is also
a very important thing for us
to talk about.
So thank you, again,
for making this topic
now very front of mind for me.
And I'd love to try to
now, maybe on the panel,
describe some
concrete steps that we
can take to continue to protect
this freedom that we have.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ZULIKAYIDA MAIMAITI: Thank you.
Can I invite all the speakers
to come up to the stage?
Now we will have
our Q&A session.
Again, like last time, we only
have limited time, so keep it
at one question at a time.
And yes, so just come to the
two mics that are on both sides.
Thank you.
You can start.
AUDIENCE: Thank
you all very much.
I'd like to follow up with
a question for Professor
Ito, if he could comment
in a bit more detail
on what he sees as
the implications
of the surveillance state and on
the meaning of the accumulation
of vast amounts of data, either
by states or by private firms,
that is happening, as we have
seen in some detail here,
in Western China, where all
kinds of personal information
has been exhaustively gathered,
and an entire ethnic group,
apparently, digitized,
effectively.
And I think that the
reaction of many of us
is, well, that's just
terrible, but at the same time,
we are aware that Alexa
and Siri are gathering--
and Google, as Rian
Thum reminded us all--
that every time we
get on a website,
somebody is collecting
that information.
And it seems that reactions,
in fact, can be quite varied.
And some people feel
comforted by the fact
that information
is being gathered,
and they don't mind sacrificing
some privacy for a greater
sense of security.
Others are more disturbed
or made anxious by that.
It's clear there is
no consensus on this.
It's also clear that
more and more data
is being gathered on more
and more people in more
and more places and will be
used in more and more different
ways.
This is something you
think about all the time.
I wonder if you can
give us a sense--
some people are
pointing to what's
happening in Xinjiang
as evidence of-- this
is where the world is going.
I wonder if you see it
that way, and if so, what
the implications are.
Or if you don't see it that
way, then is this an exception?
And what are the
implications of that?
Thank you.
