Muslim Surveillance in China and Japan
High tech and anti-Muslim sentiment
Zannatul S. Isaque
An undergraduate interdisciplinary researcher studying Mathematics and the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. Isaque is interested in the history of technology, engineering, and computing as well as the history of mathematics in Ancient India and early Islamic empires.
This article is part of the series “Capital, Technology and Utopia”, which is a collaborative project between Henna Platform and the department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilization at The University of Toronto. You can read in this series also: Building the Economy of Mount Lebanon Through Bargaining by Timothy Boudoumit, The Jaffa Orange, Haunted by Hayley Birss, Taming the Egyptian Monster by Mosab Alnomire, and The Rebellious Gaze of Abbas Kiarostami by Nora Mezo-Willingham.
Read the Arabic Article Here.
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Surveillance capitalism, specifically facial recognition technology, is of growing concern to Muslims and those who might be mistaken for one. Contemporary cases of ethno-religious profiling in China and Japan make this clear. Unconcerned with countering terrorism, surveillance capitalism has created a profit motive that fuels the surveillance of Muslims. Facial recognition technology, though innovative as a security measure for phones or watches, has the potential to transform entire countries into surveillance states, and thereby to facilitate human rights abuses (Schweig 2022).
First, I will examine how surveillance capitalism exists in China. Second, I will argue that incidents in Japan, such as the recent Muslim surveillance program, suggest a large support of anti-Muslim sentiment and future possibilities for targeted discrimination with the rise of technological innovations.
China’s International Surveillance Industry
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff coined the term surveillance capitalism as “A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales” (Zuboff 2019). She understands this as human behaviour, commodified for profit, collected by companies like Facebook, through digital surveillance. The commodification of human behavior in China is evident by the government’s internment of Uighurs, Kazaks, and other Turkic Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang region. As many as 1.8 million Muslims are being detained in re-education camps, subjected to forced sterilization, forced labor, and forced religious conversion. This is ostensibly for the purpose of countering terrorism and stymying the Uighur separatist movement (Ramzy and Buckley 2019, Zenz 2020). But, since religion is not a visually identifiable trait, ethnic appearance and nationality are used as a proxy in order to profile individuals as Muslim. This is called ethno-religious profiling (Takahashi 2019).
The Chinese government operates facial recognition cameras in the streets of Xinjiang, a predominantly Uighur region, and requires individuals to scan their faces and identification when entering certain public places (Chin 2017). Profiles are then created and those deemed suspicious are scrutinized by an AI technology called Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), which automates a list of profiles for detention (Khatchadourian 2021). This predictive policing, it goes almost without saying, is subject to computer error. Profiles can be deemed suspicious for as little as being too quiet or growing a beard (Khatchadourian 2021). Forced labour in the Xinjiang internment camps includes cotton picking, the export of which has become a large industry. Companies accused of using the products of such labour include Muji, Uniqlo, Target, Cotton On, H&M, Jeanswest, Ikea, and Dangerfield (Handley and Xiao 2019). The more people detained as a result of AI surveillance technology, the more forced labour Chinese textile firms have at their disposal.
China also leads the global market in AI surveillance. According to the AI Global Surveillance (AIGS) Index, out of 176 countries, 75 are actively using AI technology for mass surveillance. Sixty-three of these are supplied by the Chinese firms Huawei, Hikvision, Dahua, and ZTE. Huawei alone supplied at least fifty and provides ongoing tech support. Pitches of AI mass surveillance technology by Huawei to the national security agencies of various governments have been accompanied by ‘soft loans’ from the Chinese government to encourage purchase from Chinese firms (Feldstein 2019). Huawei, as well as other Chinese firms, therefore profit off of the surveillance of behaviour on a global scale, and the Chinese government subsidizes the cost of surveillance for countries otherwise unable to afford it.
The Chinese government is capitalizing on the surveillance of others by supplying governments globally, in addition to capitalizing on the forced labour of those surveilled in internment camps, targeting Muslims specifically. Huawei has claimed not to be state-owned company, but receives significant subsidies from the Chinese government while is alleged to have less independence than publicly acknowledged (Feldstein 2019). Hikivision is owned by the Chinese state (Feldstein 2019). While many in the media have criticized China for being a surveillance state, the evidence suggests that China should be criticized instead for leading the surveillance industry globally.
The Crimean War (1853-1856) was the first to feature the technologies of photography and telegraphy. It was called the ‘armchair war’ because, from a distance, an audience watched events unfold by viewing photos and illustrations from newspapers. Those two technologies helped abuses done during the war to be challenged under public scrutiny (Bektas 2017). This is because people are more comfortable hearing about atrocities than actually seeing them. The Chinese government has restricted social media usage with this in mind. Much like how photography and telegraphy captured evidence and swiftly communicated abuses in the Crimean War, social media can do for Chinese citizens who are faced with human rights abuses.
Impending Futures of Muslims in Japan
Lebanese scholar Jurji Zaidan, reflecting common Arab views in the late nineteenth century, admires Japan’s ability to rapidly advance and become a world power by use of reform and willingness to adopt foreign ideas, and encourages other Eastern states to follow Japan’s example and study its civilization in order to achieve progress (Philipp 2014).
Alongside the immense success of Japanese culture in foreign film, fashion, food, tourism, and technology industries in the last few decades, one would think that Japan is warm to foreigners and its legal system would protect them from human rights abuses. This is unfortunately not the case. In 2010, internal documents of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police (TMP) were published on a file-sharing website, revealing that every Muslim residing in the country had been surveilled from roughly 2002 to 2012.
Apart from monitoring all 110,000 Muslims in the country in 2012, there was elevated surveillance of certain ‘high risk’ individuals. ‘High-risk’ behaviours included: exhibiting critical views on Western culture, engaging in prayer, refraining from alcohol and non-halal food, using prepaid phones, going to internet cafes, carrying cameras, renting cars, introversion, and shaving. Entire nationalities were flagged as ‘high risk’. One report demanded increased surveillance of all Lebanese nationals in Tokyo, another stated that third party universities gave police detailed information on hundreds of students from countries in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and another on how staff from the Iranian embassy in Tokyo were under increased surveillance. Buildings such as mosques, halal eateries, Muslim-owned businesses unrelated to religion, student dorms, as well as places where Muslims lived or were employed were under constant surveillance. They counted how many people went in and out on a given day (Takahashi 2019).
This surveillance program, thought of as a countermeasure against terrorism, reportedly was in response to Japan sending their Self Defence Forces to Iraq in support of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. Oddly enough, Muslims of Japanese descent were not put under surveillance, although there were about 10,000 in 2013 (Takahashi 2019). This is the racialized aspect of ethno-religious profiling and, as an example of selective discrimination, is driven less by a fear of religion than it is a distrust of non-Japanese people. A civil suit was filed in 2011 against the Japanese government on behalf of a group of seventeen Muslims whose private information was leaked, and argued that this program violates international human rights standards, such as their right to privacy, right to practice their own religion, and right to be free from discrimination. All but one was awarded around $50,000 USD in damages, but this only due to the government not being able to prevent the release of their personal details. Their arguments that this program had violated their human rights was dismissed, and appeals were ultimately dismissed (Takahashi 2019).
Demonstrating how low of a priority human rights protection is taken in the Japanese legal system, the Muslim targeted surveillance operation was never publicly acknowledged. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police claimed that the leaked information had not been targeted and the information was just on potential security risks, but the Tokyo Metropolitan Police confirmed that there was a high probability that the information was collected by their police force in a statement in December 2010 (Takahashi 2019).
There have been no statements made on the future of this surveillance program, or any future developments. According to the 2019 AI Global Surveillance (AIGS) Index by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Japanese government now uses ‘smart policing’, which is the use technologies that use automation in their collection of individual information, and the two major companies supplying facial recognition technology to the Japanese government are Hikvision and NEC (Feldstein 2019). Hikvision is the Chinese state-owned firm that develops the facial recognition technology that is used in the Xinjiang internment camps. Economic sanctions have been imposed on the company from many European governments and the U.S. (Lohr 2019). It is unknown why Japan has not yet placed economic sanctions on this company.
Chinese state-owned business Hikvision profits from the Japanese government’s surveillance of its own people. NEC, a Japanese firm, is the second largest supplier of facial recognition technology after Huawei, supplying facial recognition technology to fourteen governments (Feldstein 2019). Japan’s participation in the multimillion dollar surveillance industry is relevant to Muslims because of Japan’s history of ethno-religious profiling and mass surveillance. Worryingly, the Japanese government has made no official statements on whether or not that operation has ended. Meanwhile it has bought technology from a firm that profits from the surveillance of Muslims in internment camps, and hosts firms profit from mass surveillance of governments globally. What the current status of the surveillance operations targeting Muslims by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police – as revealed by leaked documents – is unknown. What it means for Japanese Muslims that there has been innovation in surveillance is unknown.
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