Shanghai Launches New "Uyghur Ethnicity" Detection

•Published May 14, 2024 14:02 PM

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While PRC China authorities and companies have denied Uyghur detection or claimed that it stopped, a project just implemented in Tier 1 megacity Shanghai's business district, an area with nearly no Uyghurs, has implemented Uyghur detection across thousands of cameras, IPVM has verified from the project's documents.

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In this report, we examine how 14 police stations in central Shanghai are now equipped with Uyghur detection to target their investigations, track down unknown Uyghurs, and receive alerts on suspected Uyghur activity.

This is the second in a series of IPVM reports on Shanghai's newly expanding mass surveillance infrastructure. See our first: Shanghai District Tripling Mass Surveillance, Expanding Behavioral Analytics.

Xuhui District's Uyghur Targeting

Under a sweeping facial recognition expansion launched in late 2023, Shanghai's Xuhui District public security branch expects to capture 25.9 million faces daily.

Each provides a timestamped snapshot of a person's location, companions, and activities, which is matched to and stored in one of 50+ million individual files in Shanghai's municipal database.

It specifically detects "Uyghur ethnicity" based on a person's facial features, which is the only ethnicity or race mentioned.

Upon image capture, one of 12 new Portrait Retrieval Machines performs "Passerby Attribute Recognition" analysis on the person to assess "gender, age group, Uyghur ethnicity, [whether they're] wearing glasses, etc," according to its specifications, screen-capped below:

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(1) Passerby attribute recognition feature

The system should support the recognition of structured data on faces based on images of passersby, including gender, age group, Uyghur ethnicity, wearing glasses, etc., and store the structured data in the passerby portrait database. [emphasis added]

This results, known as "structured data," are stored with corresponding images for retrieval by police and "big data" analysis.

Sophie Richardson, a Stanford University visiting scholar and former China Director at Human Rights Watch, told IPVM the system is "wildly in tension with laws, both domestic and international, guaranteeing a host of different rights" and "at best, a perverse government impulse to surveil members of a particular community in a particular place all the time, regardless of what they're doing. At worst, it's just high tech discrimination."

Filtered Searches for Uyghurs

The system serves 14 Xuhui police stations, where users can "filter the passerby database by structured information to facilitate finding specific types of passersby," such as "Uyghur ethnicity." This "File Search" function can also rapidly query 30 days of historical data on individuals or groups, with up to a year available in long-term storage.

Functions that access "structured data" imply three main use cases.

The first is for investigations of offenses committed by an unknown person, enabling police to check for Uyghurs in the area using built-in racial profiling. Video analytics detecting characteristics - gender, clothing, etc. - are primarily useful when searching for an unknown person of some description.

As a result, the ability to filter by Uyghur ethnicity creates a risk of unjustified interrogation or detention of Uyghurs (or those thought to be Uyghurs). Per Richardson, "Being Uyghur is readily subject to being criminalized these days."

The second is to prioritize the resolution of "no-name files." Despite heavy investments in "One Person, One File" technology, with 25.9 million faces captured each day, even at a hypothetical 99.9% accuracy, that is 25,900 images each day not matched to an individual's file (e.g., due to angles or face obstructions). However, features exist to resolve them manually, and when Uyghur ethnicity is detected, it is added to the "no-name file." This implies police can prioritize potential Uyghurs in resolving those non-real-name files.

The third is for activity-based alarms. While specific alarm parameters for Xuhui are not specified, specifications clearly require that users can create activity-based alarms that incorporate "structured data." For instance, Xuhui could choose a gathering of individuals identified as Uyghur as one threshold to trigger an alarm, or several face captures of an unknown individual thought to be Uyghur, indicating an unknown Uyghur is in fact there rather than just one potentially anomalous detection.

These use cases are consistent with actual examples of vendors' city-level platforms that incorporate specifications for Uyghur detection, such as Dahua's Heart of City smart policing software. In technical documents for the software, Dahua explained how its "Real-time Uyghur Warnings" (维族人员实时预警) function.

Its C9505 Big Face Platform, which also included "Real-time Uyghur Warnings," is used for issues like "difficult query and suspect tracking."

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In particular, Dahua's system includes a "real-time warning mode for non-local Uyghurs," similar to an activity-based alarm.

Adding real-time warning mode for non-local Uyghurs

Log in to the web administrator's face system to study and analyze, click 'Add'
Select the real-time warning mode for non-local Uyghurs, enter the task name, enter the task remarks, and click 'Next'
Select the monitoring range, select the corresponding channel, and the settings appear... [emphasis added]

It also alerts to "Uyghurs with hidden terrorist inclinations," an unexplained standard lumped in with thieves, gangsters, fugitives, fraudsters, and prostitutes:

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Dahua has issued contradictory denials of this.

Unlikely to be Legitimately Needed

The population of Uyghurs in Shanghai is likely extremely small. In a 2014 profile of Uyghurs living there, Reuters reported 5,254 Uyghur residents (.02% of Shanghai's 25+ million people). Given China's intense discrimination against Uyghurs, the number living in a wealthy district like Xuhui is likely close to zero; any that do live there would be well-known to police and watched closely.

As such, Uyghur ethnicity detection is unlikely to be of much practical use, raising the question of why Xuhui required it in the first place. This same question can be raised about Uyghur detection deployed in other regions of China.

Richardson also raised this concern:

Presumably, there's already a huge amount of data gathered on Uyghurs in Shanghai, who are also not - as far as I know - a particularly large community in that city.

Several possible reasons exist. Uyghurs in China are often stereotyped as extremists. Per the Council on Foreign Relations, "In the eyes of Beijing, all Uyghurs could potentially be terrorists or terrorist sympathizers." However ineffective, Xuhui may have Uyghur detection features to justify the system as having terrorism mitigation features. Uyghur detection has also been specified in national standards for public surveillance projects.

Richardson commented that it reflects "a perverse government impulse" toward total surveillance and "high tech discrimination":

I think it says a lot about, at best, a perverse government impulse to surveil members of a particular community in a particular place all the time, regardless of what they're doing. At worst, it's just high tech discrimination empowered by a state that is not bound by any means of redress.

Whatever the reasons, the impact on Uyghurs is that, even outside Xinjiang, there is no escape from invasive surveillance. For Uyghurs who manage to leave the province, with permission or 'illegally,' public security bureaus are still watching.

Connects with Shanghai's Municipal Network

Project documents repeatedly refer to structured data being passed to the "Municipal Bureau database" i.e. the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau's citywide system. This indicates that Shanghai's system has, at a minimum, the ability to receive Uyghur ethnicity tags since Xuhui's system is "standardized" for it.

The below system diagram depicts the process by which "structured data...is synchronized to the data aggregation and distribution node of the [municipal] public security network" in yellow and light green.

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Violates Human Rights Principles

Richardson told IPVM:

Being Uyghur is readily subject to being criminalized these days. But the Shanghai project seems to be casting an even broader net on everyone, to try to essentially track what people are doing, and where they are, pretty much all the time and in all aspects of their lives.

I think it says a lot about, at best, a perverse government impulse to surveil members of a particular community in a particular place all the time, regardless of what they're doing. At worst, it's just high tech discrimination empowered by a state that is not bound by any means of redress.

More IPVM Reporting

See more IPVM reporting about Uyghur, ethnic, and racial analytics:

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