The Xinjiang Data Police

Preparing For War

Baimurat saw the advertisement for the new job sometime around December 2016. He had come back to China from Kazakhstan a few years before in order to find better medical care for his second child. But despite his college degree from a Chinese university, he had not been able to find steady work. Like more than 80% of Kazakh and Uighur college graduates, he was chronically underemployed.

Baimurat had grown up in Xinjiang, the northwest border region of China where Turkic Muslim Kazakhs and Uighurs make up the majority of the population. He understood that Muslim-majority countries like Kazakhstan had much more to offer him in terms of financial opportunities. But since his family was back in China and the medical system was better there, he made the difficult choice to return.

In late 2016, the local Public Security Bureau in his home county of Qitai began recruiting people to become “assistant police” — a type of citizen policing role that the authorities described as a kind of supermarket or mall security guard position. “Since I graduated...