According to a May 4 investigation by Human Rights Watch (HRW), police in Xinjiang province of China use a master list of 50,000 multimedia files that they deem “violent and terrorist” to flag Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim citizens for questioning. In Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, authorities searched 1.2 million mobile phones in total over the nine months between 2017 and 2018, according to research by HRW into the metadata of this master list. This phone search was made possible by the automated police mass surveillance systems in Xinjiang.
China’s counterterrorism law defines “terrorism” and “extremism” in an overly broad and vague manner
As a result of Beijing’s deployment of surveillance technologies in Xinjiang, according to HRW’s acting China director Maya Wang, Uyghurs who just store the Quran on their phones may result in a police questioning. The international NGO with headquarters in New York has often expressed worry about China’s strategy for combating what it refers to as “terrorism” and “extremism.” “The counterterrorism laws in China define “terrorism” and “extremism” in an overly broad and vague manner that facilitates prosecutions, deprivation of liberty, and other restrictions for acts that do not intend to cause death or serious physical harm for political, religious, or ideological aims,” the report said.
More than 1,400 Urumqi residents had phones, and Human Rights Watch searches turned up more than 1,000 distinct files on those phones that matched those on the police master list. Following an investigation, it was discovered that 57% of the matching files appeared to include standard Islamic religious texts, including readings of all surahs (chapters) of the Quran. The collection, which is 52GB in size, contains more than 1,600 data tables from Xinjiang that were released to the Intercept in 2019. The texts of police reports that were included in this database, according to a revelation by the American media outlet The Intercept, were used by police in the capital of Xinjiang to conduct surveillance and make arrests between 2015 and 2019.
Human Rights Watch also found another related list in the database that has the same MD5 hashes – the unique signature of these files
“The master list of multimedia files that Human Rights Watch examined is located in a different part of the same database and has not been previously reported on or analyzed. Some of the numbers in this reporting have been rounded up so that the authorities cannot identify the source of the leak,” the HRW highlighted in its May 4 report. This master list’s information was examined, and it turned up images, audio files, and video files with violent content as well as other things with no obvious relation to violence. These media files included information regarding the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre as well as images of beheadings and other forms of torture that appeared to have been carried out by the Islamic State, drug cartels, etc. The documents in the archives dealt with overseas organizations like the World Uyghur Congress and the East Turkistan Independence Movement. The files also included religious material from the Islamic faith, such as wedding music and Quran readings.
“Human Rights Watch also found another related list in the database that has the same MD5 hashes – the unique signature of these files. This list apparently contains the search result of the Jingwang Weishi app, a surveillance application,” the report further said. Al-Jazeera said that inhabitants in Urumqi were ordered to download Jingwang Weishi, which enables law enforcement to view the contents of people’s phones. And a similar app called Fengcai may also be needed to be downloaded by travelers visiting Xinjiang. Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims were subjected to rights abuses and the suppression of fundamental freedoms in Xinjiang by China, according to a request by Human Rights Watch (HRW) to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC).