Darren Byler: Big Brother vs China's Uighurs - a podcast by RNZ

Constant surveillance, cultural suppression and 're-education' are a day-to-day reality for the approximately 12 million Muslim minority Uighur people who live in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of northwest China. Activists and UN rights experts accuse China of using torture, forced labour and sterilisations. China denies rights abuses in Xinjiang and says its camps provide vocational training and are needed to fight extremism. Technology has become a cornerstone of the government's control methods. Uighur are required by the police to carry their smartphones and IDs listing their ethnicity and are tracked by face surveillance checkpoints located at jurisdictional boundaries, entrances to religious spaces and transportation hubs. University of Colorado anthropologist Darren Byler has been researching and writing about Uighur dispossession and also edits the website: The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia.

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