Xinjiang and the global rise of mass surveillance
Many aspects of mass surveillance technology may have been perfected in Xinjiang, but its use is hardly exclusive to China. For companies, the security industry presents a “market opportunity.”
On August 31, 2017, a spokesperson for Leon Technology, a Xinjiang-based police surveillance contractor, noted that “according to statistics, the total number of Muslim countries participating in the ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy accounts for 60% of the global Muslim population.”
Drawing something of an equivalence between these nations and China’s own Turkic Muslim populations, he noted that “in Xinjiang there is a large population of Muslims,” and because of security concerns that were inherent to this population, “the government has spared no expense to heavily invest in the security industry, and this number is constantly increasing.” All of this led the spokesperson to conclude that “the security industry in Xinjiang now presents a market opportunity with huge and unlimited potential.”
The transcript of the spokesperson’s comments (expertly translated by Jeffery Ding) is one of the clearest statements of the way state contractors in Xinjiang saw themselves in relation to China’s domestic war on terror and the future of global high-tech security and policing.
Due in part to an early Xinjiang policing partnership with the AI giant SenseTime, Leon has grown exponentially. Although it (like SenseTime) was added to the U.S. entities list due to its involvement in designing and building aspects of Xinjiang’s reeducation camp system, as it moved out of its partnership with SenseTime and began acquiring other companies, Leon increased its valuation to as much as 14.7 billion yuan (up from 59 million yuan, or $2.1 billion to $8.5 billion, in 2017). It now operates a supercomputer data center not only near the largest Xinjiang re-education camp complex in Dabancheng, but also in Chengdu, and it has established a subsidiary in Wuhan. Leon is but one story of how surveillance tech companies became rich by building so-called “safe-city” systems to monitor Muslims in Xinjiang.
The hundreds of millions of dollars invested in Xinjiang surveillance created a system of digital enclosure that is part of the structure of dispossession that confronts Uyghurs. It is layered on top of the material enclosure of Uyghur lands through fences, roads, pipelines, and the paperwork that form the resource extraction economy which dominates the Xinjiang economy. The digital enclosure works to extend colonial dispossession beyond land and the body simultaneously. Utilizing a compound labor regime that is reminiscent of Apartheid South Africa, hundreds of thousands of Uyghur villagers have been deemed surplus, removed from their land and communities, and assigned to work in privately owned and securitized factories.
However, the logic of colonial racial capitalism in this context is not exhausted by the theft of land and labor. As in contemporary Indian and Israeli colonialisms, it wants the behavioral data of the colonized, too. As Sahana Ghosh argues, biometric surveillance in Indian-Bangladeshi borderlands aimed at monitoring Muslims is geared toward generating detectability, leading to the automation of anti-Muslim racism at the population level. The resulting data collection has significant consequences for the advancement of computer vision technologies and the expansion of dataveillance instruments globally.
In the Chinese context, computer vision start-ups who receive state security contracts develop commercial applications in the space of two years. The digital enclosure of the Uyghurs and the symmetrical, high-fidelity datasets it has produced is also an incubator at scale for machine-learning technologies. It is part of what has made China a leading exporter of digital forensics, superseded only by its antecedents, Israel and the United States.
This brings me back to the Leon Technology spokesperson and his 2017 idea that “the security industry in Xinjiang now presents a market opportunity with huge and unlimited potential” because 60 percent of the world’s Muslim population lives in the Belt and Road. By 2019, Leon Technology had opened an international branch of its business in Saudi Arabia. In 2021, the surveillance company secured two Saudi contracts worth a reported 40 million yuan ($5.8 million) to build a King Salman Global Maritime Industries Complex Project (along with the U.S. based state-contractor Honeywell and a Saudi Ministry of Justice Information Project.
Recent reporting from Adam Satariano and former China tech reporter Paul Mozur shows that the types of policing surveillance systems Leon built in Xinjiang are now becoming the norm in Gulf States and other spaces along the Belt and Road in the Middle East. They show how Israeli digital forensics companies are vying with American, Canadian, and Chinese companies for the same or interlinked contracts to build such systems.
From Mozur’s perspective, China’s model of “safe-city” mass surveillance is now in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and run through Huawei and Hikvision systems — high-tech security contractors who received hundreds of millions of yuan in contracts to build systems in Xinjiang. As Mozur noted in a tweet, “It’s hard to see how China-style mass surveillance, with its risks of political misuse, does not become mainstream globally.”
Indeed, in another recent report from Mozur and Satariano on Israeli policing of Palestinian populations, they note the way Palestinians are being automatically sorted into three color-coded categories that correspond to their threat potential — a schematic nearly identical to the policing system that Leon Tech contributed to in Xinjiang. Perhaps even more troubling was the way they noted that Israeli security was now integrating Hikvision cameras into Israeli-built systems.
It appears as though the Leon Technology spokesperson was prophetic when he said in 2017 that Xinjiang security was a growth industry.
