The impact of China’s high-tech repression on Uyghurs: a case study of Uyghur diaspora in Turkiye

ABSTRACT

There is a plethora of research on the determinants of state repression. Concomitant with the advancement of technology, there is a growing body of literature on high-tech repression. However, relatively scarce attention has been paid to the impact of high-tech repression on individuals. This study makes a novel contribution to the literature by analysing the impact of China’s high-tech repression in East Turkestan on the identity, beliefs and practices of Uyghurs. We analyse the impact of state surveillance in East Turkestan based on surveys and focus group interviews with members of the Uyghur diaspora (who experienced China’s repressive practices in the region and subsequently migrated to Turkiye) between July and September 2023. The overwhelming majority of the survey respondents indicated that high-tech repression severely reduced their social interactions and cultural practices in East Turkestan and that this repression has negatively affected their view of the Chinese state and technology in general. Most of the respondents indicated that after witnessing this type of repression, they clung more to their national identity. Our focus group interviews provide more in-depth results on the impact of high-tech repression. The participants shared their experiences of how constant surveillance disrupted their daily lives, neighbourly relations, mobility and personal well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• East Turkestan
• Uyghurs
• high-tech repression
• surveys
• focus group interviews

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful recommendations. We are grateful to Karimjan Hoshur, our Turkish surveyors Ulku Mara, Tarik Pasali, our Uyghur surveyor Medine Nazimi, and all other Uyghur surveyors who wished to remain anonymous, due to security-related reasons, for their support to our project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

We confirm that written informed consent was provided by the research subjects for the publication of the survey and interview results.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The Chinese official term for the region is Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), which most Uyghurs view as colonial. This article refers to the region as East Turkestan, which is a historical name.

2 Only in 2016, 90,866 security related positions were advertised for the region (Zenz and Leibold 2017).

3 In an article published in Foreign Affairs, Greer (2018) describes 48 ways to be dispatched to a political education camp, some of which are ‘telling others not to swear’, ‘speaking with someone who has traveled abroad’.

4 Only in 2014, approximately 7000 Uyghurs arrived in Turkiye (Flanagin 2015).

5 We acknowledge this as a limitation of our study since this could mean that some of the greater repression remains unreported in this study. We further note that this study did not systematically analyse repression by time periods.

6 In 2014 and 2015, the Kashgar prefecture gave free TVs to poor households, then subjected those who refused to watch them to re-education (Zenz 2024).

7 For a detailed analysis of China’s re-education campaign in the region, see Zenz (2024) and Zenz (2019).

8 For the securitization of the region, see Zenz and Leibold (2020). Participant 3’s account relates closely to the work described in Zenz and Leibold (2017).