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Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

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Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#281

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

prepend wrote: post #244
dangus wrote: post #227

The headline is really alarmist, implying China in general is applying this practice, while the reality is that this is a practice limited to sensitive regions. It's pretty much in line with the status quo in Western China. China has been very protective of the Xinjiang region for a long time, and very restrictive on travel in and out, especially for foreigners. But here we go, we've started an alarmist comment threa…

What is a sensitive region? Are there any similar regions in Western Europe?

"Sensitive region" in this context means a region historically populated by a different ethnicity than which dominates the central government, and which would like to be free of that central government. In China these are specifically the Uighurs in Xinjiang versus the overwhelmingly Han Chinese central government.

States of emergency have been called in the past for various regions in Western Europe where violent separatist movements were active, but those moments have mainly abated, and besides, Western European governments these days are not so fond of mass surveillance as China.

Just across the strait of Gibraltar, however, one does encounter a similar situation in Morocco, namely in the region of Western Sahara which Morocco occupied back in the 1970s. Western Sahara is historically populated by a different ethnicity (the Saharawis) who chafed at Moroccan control of the region. Foreigners traveling on the roads through the region will encounter a long series of police roadblocks, and police do occasionally demand social-media accounts and passwords from travelers. The situation is vaguely like Xinjiang, although the Moroccan police are much more laidback, so a person can refuse to give them information and just bullshit about not having Facebook or Whatsapp. Compared to the very organized and rigorous Chinese police state, the Moroccan forces are pretty amateur.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#282

Post by zwaps »

iiuuhhggff wrote: post #129
bovermyer wrote: post #4

The title is a little misleading, as it's a region of China and not the entirety. However, the implications are still ominous. I'm curious, how did China develop into such a police state? Anyone able to point me to some reading on the subject?

There were multiple terrorist attacks in that region. Once China started cracking down, there haven’t been any.

We know that putting people in concentration camps by the millions is effective.

It takes a particular kind of cruelty to see the world from the eye of effectiveness only, and that thinking propagates through society.

No surprise that Chinese have been found to be the least honest and least trustworthy society in many experiments and studies, e.g.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/19/scie...

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-...

We are embedded in society, always. One should be careful thinking only about effectiveness and efficiency, and not individual dignity. There's a feedback.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#283

Post by godelski »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #118
mLuby wrote: post #96

>"China is using technology for the perfection of dictatorship." -Pete Buttigieg, 2020 US presidential candidate PRC may be blazing the trail, but as the tech becomes proved and available, I won't be surprised to see creeping adoption in more "free" countries (especially following crises).

Exactly. People are already used to much more surveillance than they used and this trend just keeps going. Sometimes it's China taking the lead, sometimes the US, sometimes other countries. But they all look at each other and slowly adopt what the other country is doing. I am pretty sure the next generation will never see anything other than complete surveillance by countries or corporations. And for them it will see…

To be honest most people already see surveillance capitalism as normal. Weirds me out for one.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#284

Post by malandrew »

BurningFrog wrote: post #65
mdorazio wrote: post #2

This bit is important: "Foreigners crossing certain Chinese borders into the Xinjiang region"... I'm not aware of Chinese authorities getting quite that draconian (yet) at the normal border entry points in Beijing, Shanghai, etc. However, I think it's still worth following the general advice that if you have sensitive data on your devices, leave them at home and use a burner phone/laptop + restore from the cloud late…

OK, Xinjiang is basically a low level war zone/prison camp. Quite different from the rest of China.

When I visited back in 2006 it felt like an occupied country. All the people were ethnic Uyghurs and only the police and military were Han Chinese. It was also the only part of China I visited where the police carried guns. Not only did they carry guns, but they were fully automatic weapons, not just something simple like a pistol.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#285

Post by malandrew »

xenospn wrote: post #119
jandrese wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically China is too big and doesn't have good natural internal borders so throughout history it has only held together when the central government was especially ruthless. It's just too easy to steamroll off of some early military victories, so all insurrection needs to be quashed before it ever really gets started. This means you need a brutal police state. In modern times the traditions of the past remain even a…

China is also working very hard to get rid of its minorities by simply distributing Han Chinese everywhere.

It's basically ethnic cleansing by dilution. In Xinjiang and Tibet it appears to go beyond just dilution, but that is the primary mechanism. When I was living there, there were tons of incentives to encourage Han Chinese to migrate to both Xinjiang and Tibet to completely dilute the local minorities to the point of irrelevancy.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#286

Post by igravious »

rwmj wrote: post #13

Before I went to China I bought a burner phone, mainly to install WeChat (which is also a kind of malware and also "required" in China). Basic Android phones are not too expensive these days - I wonder if it will become commonplace to own several and physically separate your life across them? FWIW I got a Huawei phone (Honor 10 Lite) for under 200 EUR, but much cheaper phones than that are available. Edit: To be clea…

> China is a police state

May be good to make the distinction between the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region† in the very north-west of China and the rest of China itself. The surveillance, monitoring, detention, "education", and de-radicalisation that are happening in Xinxiang are not to my knowledge representative of the rest of China. It is, of course, very troublesome that this illiberal dragnet exists anywhere in China. We would do well to remember that the crackdown (on the face of it) is a heavy-handed response to multiple Uyghur Muslim terrorist attacks‡ over decades that have claimed the lives of many and injured many more.

While an argument could be made that if any part of China is a police state then all of it is the same could have been said of, for instance, the United Kingdom at the height of the Troubles. At the time the UK deployed watch towers, mass stop and search checkpoints, and harsh anti-terrorism laws that encroached on everyone's freedoms. This was in Northern Ireland but the rest of the UK was relatively unaffected. And nobody at the time that I'm aware of called the UK a police state. The measures were seen as a clumsy response to localised terrorism.

What I'm saying is: yes we know that China is authoritarian, yes we know that it is totalitarian (bar Hong Kong and even that is crumbling…), yes we know China employs a (some would say draconian) social credit scoring system – but it might even still be a stretch to label China in its entirety as a police state when the measures being discussed (installing surveillance apps on phones at security crossings) are localised to one region of ~25 million people out of a country of ~1.4 billion. I'd like to think that if the whole of China was treated the same way there would be an uprising. For the record the ethnic composition of Xinjiang is: 45.84% Uyghur, 40.48% Han, 6.50% Kazakh, 4.51% Hui, 2.67% Other.

Calling WeChat "a kind of malware", what do you mean by this? I would see a miniscule difference between WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or whatever and WeChat – none of these corps, be they Tencent or Facebook or whoever are cuddly and friendly, they're all out to extract as much revenue and profit from the eyeballs they engage as humanly possible. If you think WeChat is a kind of malware I expect you think the same about WhatsApp and FB Messenger. If you don't, why don't you? Is WeChat actually required in China? I can't find any article to corroborate this claim. Or are you just saying that it's extremely inconvenient to get by without it. One could say the same about Google or Facebook services in the West.

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang

‡ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#287

Post by BurningFrog »

pjc50 wrote: post #271
BurningFrog wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan already was a rich industrialized nation before WW2. China was one of the poorest countries on earth in the 1980s.

China was a nuclear power since 1964. Part of the reason Nixon had to go there in the first place.

True, but you can't eat nuclear bombs.

China was a communist military dictatorship. All resources went to the military, while millions starved to death.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#288

Post by BurningFrog »

learc83 wrote: post #273
BurningFrog wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan already was a rich industrialized nation before WW2. China was one of the poorest countries on earth in the 1980s.

>Japan already was a rich industrialized nation before WW2. Look at the previous century and how quickly they modernized. As for other examples of extreme growth this century. Look at South Korea, Taiwan, the USSR etc... China shows a difference in scale due to population size, but it's growth rate was certainly not unprecedented.

I actually think it is unprecedented!

Not only was China poor on an African level. It had a communist command economy. Compare to how the former Soviet block countries have floundered in the same period, despite starting from a higher economic level.

Maybe South Korea and Taiwan are comparable, I don't know. China's rise is still by its size the biggest event in world history the last 30 years. And no one in 1989 would have predicted it.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#289

Post by zaroth »

pmiller2 wrote: post #154
zaroth wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dating sites would not be covered.

You have a public profile on which you can post status updates and photos. Sounds like it’s covered, to me.

It’s not covered. The form lists specific social networks and asks for the usernames to those networks.

Here’s what the form actually says;

> Select from the list below each social media platform you have used within the last five years. In the space next to the platform’s name, enter the username or handle you have used on that platform. Please do not provide your passwords. If you have used more than one platform or more than one username or handle on a single platform, click the ‘Add Another’ button to list each one separately. If you have not used any of the listed social media platforms in the last five years, select ‘None.’”

Here’s a screenshot of the form:

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.flyertalk.com-vbulletin/569...

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#290

Post by Circuits »

dang wrote: post #116
Circuits wrote: post #38

I find myself torn when it comes to how the Chinese are handling Muslims and the Islamic religion in general. One one hand, I realize the religion is dangerous and pervasive. On the other hand I want people to be able to believe what they want to believe and practice those beliefs; however, at what expense? If the practice of those beliefs leads to cultures where sharia law is the rule of law? Yes, very torn here. ED…

You started a religious flamewar. That's not welcome on HN, and we ban accounts that do it. Please stick to the site guidelines and don't do this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am not going to apologize for challenging the status quo and having opinions of my own just because you threaten to ban me from an obscure tech news machine...

people like me are not going to go away no matter how deep your bury your head into the sand. We will be here waiting for you whenever you come up for air.

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