Ürümqi, China

The World Uyghur Congress, a group of exiles monitoring the plight of the Muslim minority group in China’s Xinjiang province, has pointed to evidence that Uighur forced labour was used to keep Chinese factory production running at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic earlier this year.

Uighurs were packed into blacked-out trains and charter flights, and transferred to key technology and textile factories. The scale of the forced migration from the closed “prison province” has been uncovered via videos posted to the Chinese social media site Douyin, and retrieved by exiles. The findings echo those of foreign academics, who have documented the use of Uighur forced labour. More than a million people have been interned in “re-education” camps in Xinjiang in recent years.

My comment: It’s not just the Uighurs. We now discover that the Chinese are already using computerized face recognition (challenging while face masks are being worn!) and listening devices that can track every citizen, monitor their conversations, record where they have been, who they have been with, and what their political opinions are.  This Orwellian, “1984” effort is a dire threat to the Western way of life, infuriating as it is already under the influence of social media.  The latter spy on us, but not yet (comprehensively), as they do in China.  Apparently the Serbian government is now buying and installing this capability.  Maybe other governments are doing so, or will certainly do so.  This is the antithesis of Epicureanism and is truly scary.