Whether it be via football or fashion, the rest of the world is tied to what is happening in Xinjiang – as Antoine Griezmann has reminded us
What once seemed surely unthinkable has become, in just a few years, irrefutable. The evidence amassed by scholars, journalists and campaigners of grotesque human rights abuses in Xinjiang has begun to cut through to the wider public. On Thursday, the France and Barcelona forward Antoine Griezmann cut his commercial ties to the Chinese tech giant Huawei, saying there were “strong suspicions” that it has contributed to the repression of Uighurs. His statement followed a report that Huawei tested a facial recognition system developed by artificial intelligence firm Megvii that could be used to identify Uighurs and trigger an alert to their presence. (Huawei has said that its technologies are not designed to identify ethnic groups.)
In parallel, a rare leak of a prisoner list from a camp has shown how a government data programme has targeted Uighurs for detention simply for being young, using VPNs, or speaking to relatives abroad. These stories offer a truly chilling vision of a hi-tech surveillance society and give the lie to China’s claims that its actions in Xinjiang are focused on targeting terrorism and separatism, and do not treat a population as inherently suspect.
