Spying on the Uyghurs
“Spying on the Uyghurs: A first-person account from a Han Chinese student” is the title of a translated essay on the Taiwan Gazette by a Han Chinese person who studied the Uyghur language in Xinjiang.
I chose to major in the Uyghur language largely due to the employment rate in this field. People outside the region may not know, but we have a huge advantage when it comes to post-graduate employment.
Big internet technology firms like Tencent and NetEase are actively recruiting students from our program. On Chinese soil, aside from Mandarin-speaking WeChat users, the largest demographic group on WeChat are people who speak the Uyghur language as their mother tongue… However, the Uyghur language major is only open to students who do not speak Uyghur as their first language. All the teachers in our program are Uyghur by ethnicity, but the students are all from other ethnicities.
Other than tech companies, the best way out for students in the Uyghur language major is employment in various provincial police and state security departments. These positions usually involve surveillance and supervisory work, and the subject of such work is naturally the Uyghur people.
In other Xinjiang news, the South China Morning Post reports, “Hong Kong’s anti-terrorism task force headed to China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang on Thursday to study how their counterparts there have tackled extremists.”
