Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
05-05-2023
BEIJING/ TAIPEI: Chinese authorities monitor the phones of ethnic minority Uighurs for the presence of 50,000 known multimedia files that are used to flag what Beijing views as extremism with possession of the Quran enough to trigger a police interrogation, according to a forensic investigation by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
While the list of “violent and terrorist” content includes violent audio, video and images produced by armed groups such as ISIL (ISIS), it also includes material from organizations that promote the identity or self-determination of Uighurs, a mostly Muslim minority, in far-western Xinjiang.
The organizations include the separatist East Turkestan independence movement, the World Uyghur Congress exile group and the United States government-funded news outlet Radio Free Asia.
The files also include information about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which is heavily censored in China.
Some content flagged for review, however, is non-political, including a Chinese travel show filed in Syria called “On the Road”, readings from the Quran and Islamic songs, according to a metadata analysis of the list by the rights group.
“The Chinese government outrageously yet dangerously conflates Islam with violent extremism to justify its abhorrent abuses against Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang,” said Maya Wang, acting China director at HRW.
“The UN Human Rights Council should take long overdue action by investigating Chinese government abuses in Xinjiang and beyond.”
The master list analyzed by HRW is part of a wider 52GB trove of documents from a Xinjiang police database that was leaked to the Intercept, a US-based media outlet, in 2019, but not made public until now.
Chinese police in the Xinjiang capital Urumqi have required residents to download an app called Jingwang Weishi, which gives authorities the ability to monitor the contents of their mobile phones. Visitors to Xinjiang can also be required to download a similar app called Fengcai.
While police officially monitor for “extremist” material, HRW said an analysis of the police database suggests that, in many cases, ethnic Muslims are flagged as supporters of violent extremism for simply practicing or showing interest in their religion.
An analysis of 1,000 files flagged by police in 11.2 million searches of more than 1 million phones between 2017 and 2018 showed that 57 percent of the content identified as problematic was ordinary religious material, HRW said.
Just 9 percent of the flagged files contained violent content and 4 percent contained content calling for violence, according to the rights group. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
