China’s dystopian police state tracks Uyghur Muslims’ every move in Xinjiang

China’s state-run surveillance and big-data technology has reached a Big Brother-like system by controlling every aspect of people's lives as in George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel,“1984”.

New research has unveiled that a Chinese surveillance company has been tracking the movements of more than 2.5 million people in a region where authorities have waged a crackdown on Muslim minorities, The Independent reported on Tuesday.

Dutch cybersecurity expert Victor Gevers uncovered an online database containing names, photos, ID card numbers, birth dates and employment details of Uyghur Muslims monitored in the Xinjiang region.

Police checkpoints and security cameras have been recording the location data of residents, however the database was left unprotected for months by facial-recognition technology company SenseNets Technology.

“It was fully open and anyone without authentication had full administrative rights. You could go in the database and create, read, update and delete anything,” Gevers said.

"It's a 'Muslim tracker' funded by Chinese authorities in the province of Xinjiang to keep track of Uyghur Muslims," he noted in a series of Twitter posts.

Some 54.9 per cent of the people in the database were identified as Han Chinese, the country's ethnic majority, while 28.3 percent were Uyghur and 8.3 percent were Kazakh, both Muslim ethnic minority groups.

Many refer to China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region -- home to many ethnic minorities, including the Turkic Uyghur people -- as East Turkestan.

Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group that make up 45 percent of the population of Xinjiang, accuse China of carrying out repressive policies that restrain their religious, commercial and cultural activities.

Established under the pretext of “political reeducation” for China’s Muslim population, Beijing has amped up its construction of detention camps in the past three months, expanding them by an additional 700,000 square meters, according to satellite imagery.

China’s Muslim incarceration camps have attracted heavy criticism from the international community as Beijing continually denied their existence and repeatedly rejected allegations of abuses against the country’s Uyghur minority for years, opting to call them “vocational camps” instead.

Xinjiang region is home to around 10 million Uyghurs. The Turkic Muslim group which makes up around 45 percent of the population of Xinjiang, has long accused China’s authorities for cultural, religious and economic discrimination.