Based on Sekihei’s Sankei Shimbun opinion essay, “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as an ‘Open-Air Prison,’” this article examines the reality of constant surveillance, checkpoints, armed police patrols, and systematic human rights repression under Chinese Communist Party rule.
By exposing the abnormal daily reality in which Uyghurs are subjected to inspections dozens of times a day, it reveals the true nature of the Chinese state and the tragedy that befalls a people deprived of national independence.

2019-03-25
As a result, the people of Xinjiang are forced to undergo inspections more than a dozen times a day, and in some cases dozens of times a day, merely by going out into the city, shopping, and trying to live ordinary lives.

To call oneself a scholar or an intellectual at that level is an insult to human intelligence in the twenty-first century.
I am reposting here a chapter that I originally published on 2018-08-23 under that title.
The following is from an essay by Sekihei published in today’s opinion column of the Sankei Shimbun under the title “The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Is an ‘Open-Air Prison.’”
The eighteen members who make up the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination…
Together with the anti-Japan propaganda of China and the Korean Peninsula, and with those in Japan who sympathize with it… people calling themselves NPOs and the like, people unknown to ordinary Japanese, who can without exaggeration be called traitors to the nation…
As in Park Geun-hye’s tattling diplomacy until recently… they whisper to you ludicrous falsehoods that are beneath contempt….
And you, just as China intends, take them at face value….
And then, incredibly, against Japan, which has achieved the highest level of freedom and democracy in the world….
Precisely because of that….
There can exist people who act as agents of China and the Korean Peninsula and go all the way to the United Nations….
To tattle to you.
If they were Chinese, it goes without saying that they would be arrested and detained immediately and punished as traitors to the state with severe crimes including the death penalty….
You may be people so ignorant and benighted that you do not even know such things….
But to call yourselves scholars or intellectuals at that level….
Would be an insult to human intelligence in the twenty-first century.
What follows is Sekihei’s essay.
This month, at the session of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination held in Geneva, Switzerland, it was pointed out that “there is information that more than one million Uyghurs are being detained in China,” and this astonished people around the world.
In response, China’s representatives reacted strongly, calling it “groundless slander.”
Whatever the accuracy of the figure of “one million,” the oppression of the Uyghurs is an undeniable fact.
In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Uyghurs living there as a whole are in a situation where their freedom is being deprived and restricted in various ways and where they are under constant daily surveillance.
It goes without saying that the national surveillance system combining security cameras and artificial intelligence, which I wrote about in this column on May 31, covers the entirety of Xinjiang, but in addition to that, compulsory inspections under the name of “security checks” are now carried out on a daily basis in every public place in the region.
At the entrances of banks, post offices, hospitals, department stores, supermarkets, movie theaters, open-air markets, railway stations, and all manner of other facilities, checkpoints have been set up, and every person entering or leaving is required to present identification and to have all of their belongings and even the items they are wearing inspected.
As a result, the people of Xinjiang are forced to undergo inspections more than a dozen times a day, and in some cases dozens of times a day, merely by going out into the city, shopping, and trying to live ordinary lives.
In order to enter a noodle shop and eat a bowl of noodles, or even to go into a public restroom to relieve oneself, one must submit to an inspection.
In the case of banks, department stores, and large facilities, machines similar to those used in airport security checks are installed at the entrances, but inspections at ordinary noodle shops and small supermarkets literally rely on “human hands.”
That is to say, a large man stands at the entrance and stretches out both hands to touch the body of each person entering with his fingers, checking whether they are carrying anything “abnormal.”
Naturally, it makes no difference even if the person is a woman.
“Human rights” are virtually nonexistent.
Patrols by armed police and government personnel have also become a part of daily life.
Throughout Xinjiang, it has become an everyday sight to see armed police carrying automatic rifles on patrol, and for that purpose the Chinese government has dispatched two hundred thousand armed police to Xinjiang.
Apparently thinking even that was not enough, the government has further hired large numbers of “patrol personnel” as quasi-civil servants.
Or it has organized local residents into “volunteer patrol units” to monitor the towns.
The number of such people is estimated to exceed one million, and the government authorities are keeping watch over every corner of the autonomous region.
Thus, in today’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the people who live there, especially the Uyghurs, are subjected daily to surveillance and inspections, their basic human rights are arbitrarily trampled upon, and their dignity and freedom as human beings are being taken away.
In order to suppress the Uyghurs’ independence movement by force, the Chinese government has now turned the whole of Xinjiang into precisely an “open-air prison.”
The tragedy of the Uyghurs, who have lost the independence of their nation and their people, should teach us many things as well.
We should engrave in our hearts what kind of regime the Chinese Communist Party is, and what kind of result follows when the independence of a nation and a people is taken away by China.