Big Brother and big data at work in Xinjiang
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.7 • 710 Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2019
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, who covers China for Axios, was the lead reporter on an explosive leak of documents detailing the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslims in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region. This week, she joins Kaiser and Jeremy to discuss her report, titled Exposed: China’s Operating Manuals for Mass Internment and Arrest by Algorithm. The leaks include what she describes as a "manual for operating the camps," and reveal how Chinese police are using big data to identify individuals deemed at risk for Islamic extremism or separatism in Xinjiang.
9:43: What do the leaks mean?
14:53: A timeline of events in Xinjiang
18:57: The “Integrated Joint Operations Platform”
24:50: The world’s highest-stakes “testing,” in Xinjiang camps
33:58: What can, and should, the U.S. do?
Recommendations:
Jeremy: One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, by Andrea Pitzer.
Bethany: The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt, a look at totalitarian governments in the 20th century.
Kaiser: The December issue of The Atlantic, themed “How to Stop a Civil War.” With an emphasis on a few essays: The dark psychology of social networks, by Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell; Too much democracy is bad for democracy, by Jonathan Rauch and Ray La Raja; and The dishonesty of the abortion debate, by Caitlin Flanagan.
This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
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| 0:45.7 | That's audible.com slash Wondery UK. Welcome to the Cynica podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with SubChina. |
| 1:04.4 | SubChina is simply the best way there is to keep on top of all the important news coming out of China. |
| 1:09.2 | Our indispensable daily newsletter features a roundup of the news from hundreds of sources, |
| 1:13.1 | plus links to the original writing on our website. |
| 1:16.3 | Sign up for Sub-China Access, and you get all that and much more with the stories on everything |
| 1:19.6 | from the Belt and Road to local entrepreneurship and innovation in China, |
| 1:23.4 | from the travails of ethically Chinese researchers in the U.S. in this age of creeping McCarthyism, |
| 1:28.3 | to China's ongoing extra-legal internment of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates over a million Uyghurs and other Muslims in China's Xinjiang region. |
| 1:37.3 | We are sure you'll agree it's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. |
| 1:48.1 | I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you today from the Cinnika South Studio in downtown Durham, |
| 1:48.8 | North Carolina. |
| 1:53.8 | Joining me from fabled Goldcorn Holler in Nashville, Tennessee is Jeremy Goldcorn, |
... |
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