China cables reveal 23 Australian citizens 'red-flagged' in Uighur crackdown
November 24, 2019The “bulletins” also highlight the power and reach of China’s surveillance dragnet, which combines data scooped up from automated online monitoring, with information collected in more old-fashioned ways, by officials who use an app to input it by hand.
The Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) combines all this information in a detailed database of everything from an individual’s exact height and electricity use, to the colour of their car, whether they socialise with neighbours and even if they prefer to use the front or back door to their house.
The cables reveal that in a single week in June 2017, IJOP flagged up 24,412 “suspicious” individuals in one part of southern Xinjiang alone. Of these, more than 15,000 were sent to re-education camps, and a further 706 were jailed.
That rate of detentions, if matched across the region and continued over time, would explain how hundreds of thousands of people have been swept into camps already.