Report: Uyghurs in China subject to arbitrary arrests determined by AI programs

Human Rights Watch (HRW), a US-based NGO, exposed the Chinese government's use of a program called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform. Under the program, Uyghurs living in Xinjiang, the Chinese name for the region of East Turkestan, are flagged by the extensive surveillance state in the region. Chinese officials will then consider whether a flagged person should be sent to one of China's many concentration camps in the region.

The Chinese government is committing an ongoing genocide against the Muslim Uyghur minority in the northwest of the country. According to a report by the Canadian government released in October, over two million Uyghurs have been subject to mass detention in China's network of concentration camps, which the government further described as "the largest mass detention of a minority community since the Holocaust."

Survivors of the camps have reported rampant sexual abuse, including of children, forced sterilization, indoctrination, slave labour, organ harvesting, DNA theft, and various other human rights abuses committed by China's communist regime.

According to the HRW report, over 2,000 people have been detained in China's Aksu prefecture alone due to the AI technology. Many of the victims were only detained for the stated reason that they were flagged by the technology, with no other reason being provided.

Zhao Lijian, China's foreign ministry spokesman, said that the report was not "worth refuting." Lijian has deflected from his government's ongoing genocide in the past after Canadian UN Ambassador Bob Rae discussed the matter, claiming that Canada's falling birthrate is, by similar logic, evidence that Canada is committing genocide.

The report comes the same day as the Washington Post leaked documents related to China's use of AI technology to commit genocide. According to documents leaked from Huawei, the company has provided the Chinese government with technology that can analyze the ethnicities of individuals and sends off "Uighur alarms" when members of the ethnic group are detected. Another Chinese company, Megvii, was also implicated in the creation of this technology.

Huawei did not deny that the leaked documents originated from their company, but insisted that the program "is simply a test and it has not seen real-world application. Huawei only supplies general-purpose products for this kind of testing. We do not provide custom algorithms or applications."

Huawei has nevertheless been implicated by multiple organizations for their role in the cultural genocide of Uyghurs, with a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute alleging that Huawei benefits from Uyghur slave labour.