Nightmare of Chinese repression (country, time, interesting, live)

[Cida]

Long-form article, really interesting, and really scary. Weirdly, they're trying to attract tourists.


Surviving the Crackdown in Xinjiang
As mass detentions and surveillance dominate the lives of China’s Uyghurs and Kazakhs, a woman struggles to free herself.
In 2005, the Chinese government began placing surveillance cameras throughout the country, in a plan called Project Skynet. After Xi Jinping came to power, China rolled out an enhanced version, Sharp Eyes, envisioned as a system of half a billion cameras that were “omnipresent, fully networked, always on and fully controllable.” In Beijing, virtually no corner went unobserved. The cameras were eventually paired with facial-recognition software, giving the authorities a staggering level of intrusiveness. At toilets in Beijing’s Temple of Heaven Park, facial scans insured that users could take no more than seventy centimetres of toilet paper at a time
The detainees were forbidden to sit on their beds during the day, though after lunch they were made to lie down, with eyes shut, for a compulsory nap. At 10 p.m., they were ordered to sleep, but the lights in their cells were never turned off, and they were not allowed to cover their eyes with a blanket or a towel. (The younger women volunteered to take the top bunks, to shield the older ones from the light.) If anyone spoke, everyone in the room would be punished with an ear-splitting reprimand from a blown-out loudspeaker. Any nighttime request to use the bathroom was treated with contempt, and eventually the women stopped asking. Dispirited, uncomfortable, often verbally abused, they masked their pain, because displays of sadness were also punished. “You are not allowed to cry here,” the guards had told them. School taught them how to turn from the cameras, hide their faces, and quietly cry themselves to sleep.

For the whole Raffi Khatchadourian story:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...wn-in-xinjiang