Webcast: Monitoring the Muslim Minority in China
International Correspondent Megha Rajagopalan and Investigative Journalist Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian on Xinjiang
Modern technologies enable new ways of monitoring and tracking minorities – a whole new level of mass surveillance. The extent of this is probably nowhere more evident than in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. Massive amounts of private data are collected from facial recognition cameras and mobile apps to target Muslim Uighurs. Already in 2017, BuzzFeed News reporter Megha Rajagopalan wrote an article on how the Chinese government turned Xinjiang into a police state. Two years later the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), with Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian as lead reporter, published the “China Cables”. They confirmed what was long suspected: the systematic surveillance of the Muslim Uighurs. Reportedly hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have been held in camps. Outside of the camps there seems hardly any chance of walking around unobserved. In this webcast Megha Rajagopalan and Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian discuss the human rights situation in Xinjiang.
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian was the lead reporter for ICIJ's China Cables. She is an investigative journalist covering China for Axios from Washington, D.C. Bethany previously worked as a reporter and editor for the Foreign Policy magazine, was a national security reporter for The Daily Beast, and has also published with The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. She has published numerous ground-breaking investigations regarding China's covert funding and political influence in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
Megha Rajagopalan is an international correspondent (formerly China bureau chief) with BuzzFeed News and Asia 21 Young Leader. She has reported extensively on digital privacy, security, and growing abuses in Xinjiang and reported from China for six years. Most recently Megha has been interviewing over 30 people who were held in camps and prisons in Xinjiang. She was a 2011 Fulbright fellow in Beijing, where she conducted research on the Chinese news media and was previously a research fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.