China's Far West provinces (inc. Tibet)

[davidbfpo]

A Reuters article that combines open source (now removed) Chinese documents, analysis of satellite imagery and comments - including the Chinese explanation. The scale of the effort is amazing.
Link:https://www.reuters.com/investigates...s-camps-china/

[Bill Moore]

A Reuters article that combines open source (now removed) Chinese documents, analysis of satellite imagery and comments - including the Chinese explanation. The scale of the effort is amazing.
Link:https://www.reuters.com/investigates...s-camps-china/

A strategy that only an authoritarian country could employ. An attempt to remove the threat by impounding all military age males, and torture them to compel them to drink alcohol, eat pork, and denounce Allah, as though that will weaken their resolve to support jihad when and if released. It is probable the vast majority didn't support jihad to begin with, but will be more likely to in the future if the opportunity presents itself, since they learned to really hate the Chinese now. Getting to the opportunity, outside the gulags the Chinese have implemented robust population control measures, and have encouraged / forced the migration of several thousand Han Chinese into the region, some of which have moved in with Muslim families to monitor their behavior. This is North Korea on steroids.

I'm think back to one of Bob's World posts where he argued cognitively that the U.S. conducted proactive COIN with our Civil Rights Bill, clearly the Chinese are taking a very different approach. They are conducting similar operations in Tibet, but not nearly as oppressive. They see religion as a mental illness, although communism proven to be failed system in similar to religion in that believers then to deny facts that counter their beliefs. In short, it is a secular religion with its own form of radicalization.

[AdamG]

Central Asians cry out over China's secret detention camps

Last month Alymkulova and a dozen others formed a lobby group, called the Committee to Protect the Kyrgyz People in China.

The group has called for the Kyrgyz government, which depends heavily on Chinese economic assistance, to press Beijing about the camps in Xinjiang.

Chinese officials have described the camps as "vocational education centres" for people who appear to be drawn towards Islamist extremism and separatism.

https://news.yahoo.com/central-asian...101732645.html

[davidbfpo]

An article by a long time expert visitor to Xinjiang who is able to catalogue the changes. Near the start:

I witnessed the most abject sense of fear and trauma I have encountered in 27 years of researching identity and religion among its Uighur communities. Mosques were deserted and cloaked in razor wire, restaurants were stripped of their halal signage, and local people carefully avoided any expression of religious piety.

She ends with:

I felt compelled to read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four when I returned home. The parallels between that masterpiece and a Xinjiang now in the grip of “de-extremification” and “thought liberation” are astonishing. In the book’s final part, the protagonist’s government torturer reveals that the state does not “merely destroy our enemies, we change them. . . [So] long as [the heretic] resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. . . You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

Link:http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-o...t-talk-anymore

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to WoTR for this article by Dr Jerome Doyon, a SME @ Oxford University.

Unlike most active Western CT policies the PRC:

it targets the community rather than individuals.

(Ends with)...Xinjiang can be seen as a laboratory for the Chinese party-state’s social engineering policies.

Link:https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/co...orism-tactics/

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to WoTR for this article, with both details on law enforcement cooperation - not always working - and whether there are many fighters.
Link:https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/ch...hters-problem/

[davidbfpo]

Yet another article on China's use of technology for mass surveillance, this time exposed to view by accident. So via The Soufan Group's briefing and BLUF:

• A Dutch cybersecurity researcher reported that Chinese company SenseNets exposed millions of people’s facial recognition information.
• China has used facial recognition to target Muslim ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.
• Venezuela is also adopting an identification card system similar to the Chinese model to track and collect information about their citizens.
• Personal information collected by states and their corporate partners is valuable to criminals and its exposure could place citizens at greater risk.

Link:https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbri...ently-exposed/

There is a wider application of this technology.