“#China’s rollout of thousands of 5G base stations throughout its far-western #Xinjiang region has raised suspicions that the technology will not be used for economic development but for enhanced digital surveillance of #Uyghurs and other Muslims.” rfa.org/english/news/u…
“The build-out in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is part of a nationwide expansion of the fifth-generation, or 5G, technology standard for broadband cellular networks that mobile phone companies began deploying worldwide in 2019.
With an area of 642,800 square kilometers (248,200 square miles), Xinjiang has the largest land area of all the provinces and autonomous regions in China, though most of the vast region consists of uninhabited deserts and mountains.”
“Xinjiang’s regional capital Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi) was one of China’s first cities to adopt 5G technology in October 2019, followed by a network rollout that covered other urban areas in prefecture-level cities.
“The 5G network rollout across the entire region will augment an existing pervasive digitized system that monitors the movement of residents through surveillance drones, facial recognition cameras, mobile phone scans ...
... as part of China’s efforts to control the predominantly Muslim population, experts said.”
“There are nearly a dozen 5G base stations for every 10,000 people in the region with a total population of roughly 12 million, the report said. All prefecture-level urban areas and county urban areas, and 90.5 percent of townships and towns, now have 5G network coverage.”
“But experts on surveillance in Xinjiang say that the new 5G infrastructure is helping authorities keep a closer eye on the Uyghur population, already subject to tight digital scrutiny for years.
“It’s definitely an interesting development. I have to imagine it will only make surveillance that much more pervasive and efficient," said @joshchin.
@geoffrey_cain said the rollout of 5G base stations across the vast, sparsely populated region is “overkill.”
“It’s very extreme, and it also strikes me as very suspicious,” he told RFA.
“It’s very extreme, and it also strikes me as very suspicious,” he told RFA.
Any technology deployed in Xinjiang will be used for surveillance, Cain said.
“The government of China has made it clear that the purpose of technology is first to develop the region, but that's the optimistic version,” he said.
“The government of China has made it clear that the purpose of technology is first to develop the region, but that's the optimistic version,” he said.
“The second reason is to control the people of the region, to control the Uyghur people, and the goal is to create a total security state. The government of Beijing wants to be able to see everything and know everything.”
“One of the reasons the government is closing camps and releasing the Uyghurs people is because they’ve turned the whole region into one concentration camp,” Cain said
“They have the tools they need to monitor everyone to control them, and they don’t need to spend all this money on camps to make it happen.”
“This is a very extreme form of surveillance because a data network is the easiest way to spy on people,” Cain said.
“More than any other technology that we have for the population, installing a data network all over the region will guarantee that everybody is constantly being monitored.”
“Their data is on the network,” he said. “They cannot escape the network no matter where they go.”
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