Making a living as a programmer also became difficult, says a former Bilkan developer, who wished to remain anonymous out of concerns for his family’s safety. In 2016, the government began requiring websites to establish or be overseen by a party member of Communist Party branches, making it difficult to get blacklisted.
Authorities have also expanded the list of blocked websites from Google and other western social media platforms to GitHub and Stack Overflow, popular developer tools platforms that remain available to programmers in the rest of China.
The Uyghur IT sector, especially website owners, continues to target the Uyghur IT sector as these individuals are influential in society, said Abduweli Ayup, a language activist who maintains a list of Xinjiang intellectuals who are in the camp system. disappeared, a list of names of more than a dozen people who work in the technology sector. “They’re the guiding force in the economy — and after that guiding force disappears, people become poor,” Ayup says.
Xinjiang’s digital erasure is just the latest blow to its online atmosphere. In 2009, after riots broke out in Urumqi, China hit back with an internet shutdown and a spate of arrests of bloggers and webmasters. Advocacy organization Uyghur Human Rights Project estimates that more than 80 percent of Uyghur websites did not return after the shutdown.
But although the region was plagued by small-scale periodic internet outages, the Uyghur internet had become more vibrant. And for the Uyghur community, those websites were a place for both rediscovering Islamic religious practices and having conversations about hot-button issues such as homophobia, trans issues and sexism. More importantly, the internet helped Uyghurs create a different image of themselves than the Chinese state media, said Rebecca Clothey, an associate professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “An online space where they can talk about issues that are relevant to them gives them the opportunity to think of themselves as a unified mass,” she says. “Without it, they’re scattered.”
Uyghurs in Xinjiang are now using domestic platforms and apps from Chinese tech giants. While WeChat still hosts Uyghur language accounts, the platform is known for its censorship system.
However, some Uyghurs have found small cracks in the wall through which they communicate and express themselves. People hold up message boards during video calls for fear that their conversations will be overheard. Young people are switching their conversations to game apps.
On the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, owned by ByteDance, Uyghurs have covertly filmed scenes from Xinjiang that differ from state propaganda videos featuring laughing dancers in traditional robes. Some have filmed themselves crying over photos of their loved ones. Others have conquered orphanages with children of detained Uyghurs or people being loaded onto buses, a possible reference to forced labour. The clips are stripped of information, leaving conclusions to the viewers.
Recently, Chinese authorities have rolled back some controls on the Uyghur language, Byler says. In late 2019, Beijing announced that people detained in vocational training centers in China had all “graduated”, while scaling back some of the more visible signs of its high-tech police state.
However, Uyghurs abroad say many of their friends and relatives are still in camps or have received arbitrary prison sentences. Ekpar Asat was sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of inciting ethnic hatred and discrimination. And while some parts of the Uyghur internet are being archived for future digital archaeology, much of it is simply gone forever. “That just got eliminated overnight, and there’s not much of a way to recover that information,” Byler says.
This article was originally published in the May/June 2022 issue of WIRED UK magazine.
