Read on Twitter
Thread: Over the past six months I’ve been pouring over a “safe city” feasibility study recovered by @MareikeOhlberg & Jessica Batke. It provides a detailed analysis of what surveillance platforms are designed to do in Xinjiang. https://www.chinafile.com/library/reports/xinjiang-shawan-county-smart-safe-project-feasibility-study https://twitter.com/ChinaFile/status/1344304031922065408
2. This particular proposed system centered around a Megvii algorithm called Face++. The system would use a base data set collected from the entire population within its jurisdiction, to place people on particular watch lists. https://www.chinafile.com/extensive-surveillance-china
3. It would use face-recognition cameras in high-traffic areas and mosques, checkpoints, surveillance hubs and shequ (社区) monitoring centers, to automate the detection of movement. It would become more & more precise over time as it collected more & more data on each person.
4. I also found bid contracts that indicate that some version of the proposed system was implemented in the small Bingtuan town of Shawan. The 105 million yuan system was built in 2017-2018, and costs 17 million yuan per year to maintain for 10 years. https://archive.fo/MAt0q
5. Other bid contracts said directly that the system was premised on a new ID system that centered on iris scans and portrait collection. https://archive.fo/RtZB9
6. Its goal was to track the entire population of the county, but particularly those sent to detention facilities and reeducation camps. https://archive.fo/Une1d
7. It is important to note that according to the Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook, Shawan has an adult Muslim population of only around 48,000, less than 15 percent of them are Uyghur. The vast majority of people in Shawan are Han & work for the Bingtuan. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hzjLGjTazZPHCEaJ2CFAxuPZ7BNIJ89P/view
8. Yet despite this in 2019 Shawan built a detention facility that architect Raphael Sperry says can hold 7,000-20,000 people – roughly 15-40 percent of all adult Muslims. (Location: 44.34727005, 85.63985628)
9. The Xinjiang Victims Database ( @Shahitbiz) lists over 100 verified cases of Muslims who were detained in Shawan since 2017. https://shahit.biz/eng/#map
10. Analyzing this sample population of detainees & drawing on research I conducted in Kazakhstan in early 2020, I tell the story of a “love marriage” between Mahmutjan Abla & Nurbai Qunapia, a Uyghur & Kazakh couple that was detained in the first waves of Shawan disappearances.
11. I also tell the story of @UW student Vera Zhou, a secular Hui student who went home to see her Han boyfriend in October 2017. She was detained in another Bingtuan town called Kuytun, directly adjacent to Shawan. After her release she was tracked by the surveillance system.
12. I also draw on the story of Baimurat, a contracted security officer, who worked in surveillance hubs and detention centers in yet another Bingtuan town called Qitai, directly east of Shawan. https://www.noemamag.com/the-xinjiang-data-police/
13. His account shows how Safe Cities enveloped these small Xinjiang towns and created forms of paralyzing fear and unthinking. For example, he describes a coworker being taken away for giving a Uyghur detainee a cigarette in front of the cameras.
14. Shawan is an important parallel to effects of "smart cities" in U.S. It shows how in both cases, entire communities are targeted by surveillance & how this extends carceral supervision into urban space. In Xinjiang these connections are more direct. https://manifold.umn.edu/read/digitize-and-punish/section/5d70850d-46b7-4655-aa8b-3697faed33a9#intro
15. Shawan also sheds light on what Gilles Deleuze refers to as "control societies." Shawan shows that when material enclosures are joined by digital enclosures they introduce profound capacities for banal cruelty among minoritized populations.
https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf
https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf
16. This article was greatly improved through careful and evocative editing (as always) by @susanjakes, fact checking by @SegalWilliams, support from Jessica Batke, and the brilliant and brave work of an unnamed research assistant and friend in Kazakhstan. END
