Revealed: Massive Chinese Police Database
January 29, 2021“While doing home visits, a community worker learned that [name redacted] . . . female, Uyghur, has no job and stays home to care for her young children . . . We did not see anyone there in the last few days. Community police searched on the police net and found out that the person was arrested in [hometown] on September 21st, 2017, the reason for arrest: Cellphone contains obscure chat program.”
Police in the Shuimogou district of Ürümqi investigated a young woman because her high school friend went to study at Stanford University and because the woman sometimes talked to her on WeChat.
Even phone calls or text chats involving outside countries invite scrutiny from authorities in Xinjiang. In Tianshan, the historic and majority-Uyghur center of Ürümqi, authorities reported sending a professional driver to re-education following an unusual phone call to a “key country.”