As you probably already know, the Chinese government currently has some unknown large number of people—maybe as many as three million—in what it calls “reeducation camps.” These people are overwhelmingly Uighur Muslims, but other minority ethnic Turkic Muslims are being interred, as well. To the extent that China even acknowledges the existence of these concentration camps, they claim that they are rooting out a strain of terrorist thought that the Chinese government claims has taken hold in the population.
If you’re going to imprison and brainwash millions of people, you’re going to want a surveillance system to determine who the “problem” individuals might be, and to track people once they’ve been reintroduced to society. To facilitate that, the Chinese deployed a massive facial recognition system to track and control the minority population, using next-generation AI to record the movement and behavior of huge numbers of their citizens. And once you have a functional big brother surveillance system, you’ll want to sell it to other governments, too, if only to recoup some of your initial investment.
The New York Times daily podcast, imaginatively titled The Daily, did a two-part series this week on how the Chinese tested out their sweet new system of population observation and control on the Uighurs, a proof-of-concept they could stick in the marketing materials to sell their system to other governments. Part 2 tells the story of an American citizen whose family was imprisoned in one of those reeducation camps, and just how far the tentacles of Chinese surveillance extend around the globe.
All together, it’s less than an hour, and at least as terrifying as your average dystopian big brother thriller, but, you know, real.
