(WASHINGTON EXAMINER) — Chinese officials are developing high-tech mechanisms to monitor and suppress religious believers as an alternative to physical detention camps, according to a senior United States diplomat.
“The big one that really concerns me is their use of advanced technologies,” Ambassador Sam Brownback, the State Department’s lead official for international religious liberty issues, told the Washington Examiner. “So they’ll have less people locked up probably in the future but more people under oppression by uses of cameras and artificial intelligence and social credit systems, where they will be controlling you.”
Those tactics might help Beijing obscure the repression targeting minorities such as the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang, where the regime has established mass detention facilities that U.S. officials liken to the “concentration camps” of Nazi Germany. Brownback is emphasizing, through an international ministerial on religious freedom, that the repression will be as severe as it is invisible.
