Hawzah News Agency (Xinjiang, China) - CJ Werleman reports on China’s horrific persecution of the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang.

It’s now beyond doubt to any reasonable person that China is carrying out the world’s largest industrial scale persecution of a religious minority since the Holocaust, but what remains in question is our ability to grasp the full extent of the horrors taking place against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

China has established a hi-tech totalitarian system that gives the Communist Party total and absolute control of every citizen in the country, deploying GPS tracking and voice and facial recognition capabilities that allow the government to, not only track the movement and location of every Chinese ID card-carrying resident, but also control the behaviour of those it deems to be a pesky minority.

For the political leadership in Beijing, the Uyghur, the indigenous occupants of Xinjiang, pose a potential future threat to its ability to realise its goals via the ‘One Belt, One Road’ economic strategy, which aims to provide China unfettered access to markets in Europe and Asia, thus allowing it to mitigate the risk it views the Malacca Strait chokepoint to be to its long -term survival.

“In response to real and perceived instability, Party authorities have constructed a sophisticated, multi-layered network of mass surveillance in Xinjiang, part of Xi Jinping’s grand strategy for achieving ‘social stability and enduring peace’ in this strategic frontier region,” observes James Leibold, an assistant professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne. “The resulting surveillance society includes both covert and overt monitoring as well as the categorisation, exhortation and disciplining of its population in the name of safety, civility and progress. As it watches, the Party-state sorts its citizenry into those deemed ‘normal’ and thus trustworthy, and those who are ‘deviant’ or ‘abnormal’ in their thoughts or demeanour.”

In the collective mind of the Communist Party, the religion of Islam and Uyghur ethnic culture itself is deemed to be deviant behaviour, which explains why Beijing has established a ruthless and barbaric system that starts with identification before moving towards separation, detainment, indoctrination, and then reintegration.