What was it like to be a Uighur in China?

What was it like to be a Uighur in China? Here’s a collection of some of my interactions with police officers when I live, work, and travel in China, from 2016 to 2017.

August 2016, a local police officer checking my ID card and our contract of the apartment. He also asked a lot of questions including what I do for a living, when would I go for work and when would I come back. I said sorry but I work for a tech company which means when I leave for work, I don’t know when I’m coming back, it could be 7 pm, 8 pm, 11 pm, or 2 am the second day.

October 2016, we needed a place to record some audio, so here’s a police officer at a cheap hotel near my workplace. He checked my ID, business card, materials for recording, asked for detailed information about the company I was working for. In the meantime, a female officer recorded all this.

January 2017, my mom and I check in at a hotel near a hospital, for her to take a nap before her eye surgery which arranged for that afternoon. So here’s an officer interrupting my mom’s nap and insisted to check every single bag in the room, including my obviously empty one.

June 2017, on my train home, a police officer taking pics of my ID and train ticket, using his own phone.

July 2017, on my train to Beijing, this train attendant asked for my ID and got refused. He was complaining about checking people all the time and left immediately after I started recording. He brought back a SWAT soon.

July 2017, after I refused to be checked by a train attendant, he brought back this SWAT. At the beginning of this video, the train attendant said “this is not my job” and told the SWAT “do your stuff by yourself.” SWAT guy was acting nice, he even chit-chatted a bit about them being forced to install a spy app on their Android phones.

When the SWAT was checking and shooting my ID with his device on the chest, the train attendant introduced the situation to a colleague, saying “She cares about justice and has a strong awareness about her rights.” Ya bet.

Here’s the form of “special passengers”. It shows ID number, address, departure station, arrival station, and ethnicity. what a coincidence, all of my fellow special passengers were Uighur.