Astana can’t afford to push Beijing too hard, even on behalf of its own citizens detained in Xinjiang re-education camps. In early 2017, reports began to emerge that Chinese authorities in Xinjiang were ratcheting up security, flying in troops, and parading police convoys through the region’s cities. Chen Quanguo, appointed Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang the previous…
China’s massively popular social media platform WeChat appears to have further tightened requirements for user registration, demanding access to all files and media content, and potentially giving the authorities access to everything on a user’s smartphone, RFA has learned. A newly registered WeChat account resulted in a pop-up request on Thursday, calling for permission to…
Authorities in Qaraqash (in Chinese, Moyu) county, in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), have detained nearly half of the population of a village in “political re-education camps,” according to a local official. Beginning in April 2017, Uyghurs accused of harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” views have been jailed or detained in…
China’s surveillance state already tracks people’s faces. Now it’s also going to track their cars, the Wall Street Journal has reported (paywall). From July 1, China’s Ministry of Public Security will oversee a program to install a radio-frequency identification chip in the windshields of new cars when they’re registered. While installing the chips won’t be mandatory this…
