The US tech companies behind China’s mass surveillance

In January, the United States declared that China’s brutal treatment of the Uighur people in Xinjiang amounted to genocide. ‘I believe this genocide is ongoing, and we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy the Uighurs by the Chinese party-state,’ said Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state. British MPs made a similar declaration in April. Beijing fervently denies the accusation, and some experts maintain that ‘cultural genocide’ is a more appropriate label. But whatever we call it, the systematic attempt to erase Uighur identity, culture and history is a heinous crime against humanity.

In The Perfect Police State the American journalist Geoffrey Cain shows how Xinjiang, China’s remote northwest region, became ‘the world’s most sophisticated surveillance dystopia’. He traces the authorities’ development of new technologies to monitor and control Muslim and other ethnic minority citizens whose religion and culture make them politically suspect. And he takes us through the iron gates of Xinjiang’s ‘re-education centres’ — actually mass internment facilities, which he bluntly calls concentration camps, — where prisoners are ritually humiliated and brainwashed.