The global COVID-19 pandemic has made clear that Chinese technology companies are at the cutting edge of surveillance innovation and predictive analytics. In April 2020, Amazon, the wealthiest technology company in the world, received a shipment of 1,500 heat-sensing camera systems from the Chinese surveillance company Dahua. Many of these cameras, which are worth approximately $10 million, will be installed in Amazon warehouses to monitor the heat signatures of employees and alert managers if workers exhibit COVID-19-like symptoms. Other cameras included in the shipment will be distributed to IBM and Chrysler, among other buyers.
In 2017, Dahua received over $900 million to build comprehensive surveillance systems which supported a “re-education” system of extra-legal internment, checkpoints, and ideological training for Muslim populations in northwestern China. Since then, the U.S. Department of Commerce placed it on a list of companies banned from buying or selling in the United States. Yet despite the legal and ethical ramifications of buying products from Dahua, Amazon continues to do business with them.
With the help of Dahua and hundreds of other private and public Chinese companies, as many as 1.5 million Uighurs and Kazakhs have been “disappeared” into a widespread system of “re-education camps” in the Uighur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang).[1] Nearly all Uighurs and Kazakhs in China have an immediate family member who is, or has been, interned in this camp system. Uighurs now refer to themselves as a “people destroyed.” As I observed during a research trip to the region in 2018, many Uighur-owned businesses have closed across the country. Whole streets have been abandoned in Uighur towns and villages. Because of the re-education system, it is likely that within a single generation Muslim embodied practice and Turkic languages in Northwest China will cease to provide essential ways for Uighurs and Kazakhs to sustain their knowledge systems.[2] This process affects every aspect of their lives not only due to mass detentions, but also because of the way biometric and data surveillance systems supporting the camps have been used to monitor and transform their behavior.[3]