Instead of integrating them, China treats all Uyghurs as potential threats and alien elements in the country. It is almost ironic, given that their home region did not voluntarily become part of China. The Qing dynasty annexed it in the mid-18th century and has been under Beijing’s rule ever since. The Han majority now makes up such a large proportion of Xinjiang’s population that the region is considered an integral part of China after all. However, the Muslim part of the population is subjected to appalling unequal treatment and surveillance.
This is also increasingly the case in other parts of the country. The police in several municipalities and cities, including Shanghai, have upgraded their technology, as an exclusive analysis of tender documents by sinologist Bjoern Alpermann has revealed. These indicate that the authorities have been using facial recognition for years to identify citizens of Uyghur origin in the city and to record and analyze their daily routes and contacts with the help of AI.
For many, Shanghai may be far away, but Chinese total surveillance is closer than it appears. China exports the technology behind it to like-minded countries, spreading such practices across the planet and making it more and more the norm.
Moreover, many countries have close economic ties with China; the European supply chain law will make it possible to ask companies about the conditions in the region of origin. The exclusion and spying on an innocent minority continues to become less and less distant, Marcel Grzanna analyzes.
Chip manufacturer TSMC is making good progress with building its factory in Dresden. Felix Lee explains why skilled workers could be a critical bottleneck and how TSMC still manages to find enough skilled labor. One of the company’s goals is to manufacture chips for the German automotive industry.
Chinese security authorities are using artificial intelligence to systematically track Uyghurs in Chinese cities and generate individual movement profiles. This is confirmed by public tenders for corresponding software, which are exclusively available to Table.Briefings. The documents come from local police departments in Shanghai, various cities and counties in the coastal province of Zhejiang and the southwestern metropolis of Chengdu. The tenders are explicitly aimed at identifying members of the Uyghur minority in public spaces.
The date on the documents indicates that the authorities have been putting out tenders for the development of facial recognition programs that specifically scan for Uyghurs for at least six years. The most recent document is dated 2023 and bears the stamp of the Shanghai Xuhui District Police Department.
The authorities’ continued demand suggests that they still harbor a general distrust of the Uyghurs despite years of state re-education measures. “The documents clearly show that the Chinese security authorities continue to systematically treat the Uyghurs as potential criminals and thus as second-class citizens,” says Xinjiang expert Bjoern Alpermann from the University of Wurzburg. According to Alpermann, the fact that the tenders come from different parts of the country indicates that this practice is commonplace.
“This refutes the Chinese government’s narrative that, after a tough re-education phase, the ‘danger of extremism’ has now been banished and Uyghurs can enjoy their freedom as normal citizens of China and pursue their dreams,” says Alpermann, who discovered comparable evidence for the digital identification of Uyghurs as part of the research project “Remote Ethnography of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.”
The specifications for the bidders in the Shanghai tender are clearly formulated. Simply put, the artificial intelligence must recognize where Uyghurs are specifically located within the district and with whom they come into contact. Using images from 3,700 surveillance cameras in Xuhui alone, the software not only needs to be able to identify the individuals in question, but also alert the authorities in real-time. A separate file, including a movement profile for the past 30 days, is created for each person recorded based on the yī rén yī dàng (一人 一 档) principle.
The analysis results include facial images and facial data information. People with glasses or beards must also be recognized. In addition, the system needs to compare the analyzed information with the police’s facial image database to retrieve further data on the individuals immediately. The system will be used in 14 police stations, detention centers, and traffic police offices in Xuhui.
“The tenders are striking. They clearly indicate that the Uyghurs are still seen as a threat,” says anthropologist and China researcher Adrian Zenz from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington. “The conclusion is that a police state like China’s does not create security; it creates a mentality of insecurity,” says Zenz. His research on internment in Xinjiang is considered groundbreaking and has also been taken up by the United Nations.
All five documents available to Table.Briefings explicitly mention the need to identify Uyghurs, including an alert function. The 2022 document from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan in southwest China, also requires the analysis of “racial characteristics.”
China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups. However, the software does not filter other ethnic groups besides the Uyghurs. The Uyghurs are one of the largest minorities in the People’s Republic. They are predominantly Muslim and are subject to strict family planning controls, which have significantly reduced their numbers in recent decades.
The Uyghurs concerned see their accusations against the Chinese government confirmed. “This shows how the Chinese government regards the Uyghurs as a foreign body separate from the majority Han ethnic group,” says Haiyuer Kuerban, Berlin Director of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). “This official stance confirms that the Uyghurs have never been part of the Chinese nation in the eyes of the government.” He added that the open discrimination was evidence of a dangerous government stance rooted in racist ideologies. They also showed that surveillance and discrimination against the Uyghurs was not limited to their home region, but had reached a nationwide dimension.
In 2009, hundreds of people were killed in ethnic clashes between Han Chinese and Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi. In response to a series of terrorist attacks by extremists, the state ultimately introduced a re-education program for Uyghur citizens.
The discrimination against all Uyghurs increased drastically as a result and led to the creation of camps in which a seven-digit number of Uyghurs have been held against their will since around 2017. The number of inmates in the camps has since decreased significantly. However, the number of Uyghurs sentenced to lengthy prison sentences has skyrocketed.
The fact that the threat situation in Xinjiang still exists in the eyes of Beijing became apparent last year when China’s President Xi Jinping visited the region and called for caution. Xi said that maintaining social stability should always be the top priority. His speech differed significantly from his words in 2020 when he emphasized the economic development of the region in Xinjiang and hardly mentioned the security situation.
There is not yet much to see of the new high-tech plant in northern Dresden. But the ground-breaking ceremony for the fab, which is short for “fabrication plant,” i.e., a semiconductor plant, is set to take place in the second half of the year. Christian Koitzsch, President of European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), the newly founded joint venture between Bosch, Infineon and NXP, made the announcement. They each hold a ten percent stake. The majority shareholder is Taiwan-based TSMC. Koitzsch previously headed a Bosch factory in Dresden and has been in charge of the new joint venture between Bosch and TSMC since the beginning of the year.
It is one of the largest construction projects in Germany, emphasized Koitzsch on Monday at the Taiwan-EU Semiconductor Forum in Berlin. But the project is proceeding according to plan. By the end of 2027, the Dresden plant will manufacture 40,000 wafers with a diameter of 300 millimeters per month. Wafers are the baseplates for the production of the actual chips. The TSMC plant in Dresden is the Taiwanese supplier’s first on the European continent.
TSMC is by far the world’s largest and most important contract manufacturer of semiconductor products and is one of the few companies that has mastered the 2-nanometer manufacturing process. On a piece of silicon the size of a fingertip, Taiwanese engineers are able to fit 200 billion transistors and significantly increase performance while keeping energy consumption low.
This miniature switch is the basis for digital arithmetic units on microchips. The smaller they are, the more performance can be achieved. Their most modern and smallest forms are what make AI systems possible in the first place. TSMC manufactures these superchips for companies including Apple, AMD, Google and Nvidia.
However, the Dresden plant will not burn the most advanced integrated circuits onto the silicon, but rather, it will burn much larger structures. These chip types have been around since the mid-2010s. So, these are not the chips with the smallest physical structure size that TSMC was one of the first to produce. However, production on a 22-nanometer scale is intended to produce advanced MCU technology, i.e., to be installed in microcontrollers used for sensors and the control of windscreen wipers and brakes, for example. This makes them particularly important for the automotive industry. And Germany is still the heart of this industry.
Around half of the enormous investment sum of around 20 billion euros will be borne by the taxpayer, five billion of which will come from the German government and another five billion from the EU as part of the Chips Act. Such high subsidies for a very profitable industry drew a lot of criticism. Some media wrote that this would equal five million euros of taxpayers’ money per job. However, Koitzsch stressed the many new jobs that will be created in the region. After all, the arrival of TSMC will bring more suppliers to the region. They will all create high-quality jobs.
There are also positive effects for all of Germany and the EU. “Every sector needs semiconductors nowadays,” emphasized Bernhard Kluttig, Head of the Industrial Policy Department at the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), at the forum in Berlin. Microchips are irreplaceable in a modern industrial environment. Ultimately, not only a few thousand, but over ten million jobs in Germany’s entire manufacturing sector depend on them. Kluttig also called it an investment in the future that will pay off, adding that Europe needs this expertise.
Moreover, he says this is not purely a subsidy business; TSMC does not just follow the money, but also the market. “No semiconductor company sets up shop just because of government subsidies,” emphasizes Gunnar Thomas, Managing Director of TSMC Europe. It is only worthwhile for a company to relocate if there is a sufficient customer base. And this is available in the form of European car manufacturers, Thomas said.
Preparations for the construction of the Dresden plant are in full swing. It is designed to employ around 2,000 people. Koitzsch has observed that the necessary specialists are already arriving. The first cooperation with the TU Dresden has started, he says, and 30 students are already participating in an exchange program and are being sent to Taiwan to be trained at TSMC’s own training center in the city of Taichung, among other places.
He himself has already visited the TSMC headquarters in Hsinchu, Taiwan. The city is home not only to TSMC but also to dozens of semiconductor manufacturers, including UMC, Elan, Windbond, and Powerchip, which are also global leaders. Given this density of semiconductor companies, Hsinchu is now considered the world’s actual Silicon Valley. Koitzsch announced that the TSMC plant in Dresden would invite doctoral students, among others, to develop and use specialized chips for their research projects on-site.
At the forum in Berlin, Koitzsch also reiterated why TSMC decided to invest around ten billion euros in its first European fab in Dresden. Dresden’s ecosystem was convincing: It is already the largest microelectronics hub in Europe with an existing supplier industry, as well as institutions such as the Technical University of Dresden and other research institutes such as Helmholtz and Fraunhofer with a strong focus on microelectronics. In the end, this was the package that convinced TSMC.
He also addressed the water problem, which has been raised several times. After all, the arrival of a chip giant, which requires a lot of water for production, makes it clear that Dresden’s existing supply will not be sufficient in the long term, especially as Infineon will also be significantly expanding its existing plant. That is why experts assume that the water demand will almost double by 2040. For this reason, a new process water supply system will be built at a cost of around 250 million euros. It will be completely independent of the existing drinking water distribution network and fed from treated river water from the Elbe.
The G7 are demonstrating a united front against China’s attempt to bring products onto global markets at below cost. One day after the EU announced increased tariffs on Chinese EVs, Ursula von der Leyen’s signature is clearly recognizable in a statement by the heads of state and government. In the statement, the G7 accuse China of creating harmful overcapacities and distorting global competition through non-market economy practices such as subsidies, threatening domestic jobs and industries as well as the economic resilience and security of the G7 states.
This not only sounds very similar to how the EU justifies its tariffs, but also reads like an echo of the statements made by the US government under Joe Biden, who is also present in Italy. The G7 are also indirectly threatening China with further possible punitive tariffs. They warn of additional measures that they will take – if necessary – to protect workers and companies against unfair practices.
In its statement, the group of established developed nations also expresses concern about China’s support for Russia in the war in Ukraine. The G7 call on China to stop supplying goods that can also be used for military purposes and “stop enabling and sustaining Russia’s war against Ukraine.” This would have security policy consequences that could be felt worldwide. Here, too, there was an echo of current politics. The US government only imposed new sanctions against supporters of the Russian war on Wednesday, including Chinese companies.
The G7 group consists of Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, Canada, the USA and the EU. In geopolitical terms, it is increasingly positioned in opposition to Brics+, which claims to represent the Global South vis-à-vis the former colonial powers and established developed countries. fin
The Euro 2024 is also interesting to Chinese soccer fans – like this man in a pop-up store in Hangzhou. However, the time of the live broadcasts of the evening matches could once again cause sleep deprivation in East Asia. The kick-off for the opening match between Germany and Scotland will be at three o’clock on Saturday morning.
Instead of integrating them, China treats all Uyghurs as potential threats and alien elements in the country. It is almost ironic, given that their home region did not voluntarily become part of China. The Qing dynasty annexed it in the mid-18th century and has been under Beijing’s rule ever since. The Han majority now makes up such a large proportion of Xinjiang’s population that the region is considered an integral part of China after all. However, the Muslim part of the population is subjected to appalling unequal treatment and surveillance.
This is also increasingly the case in other parts of the country. The police in several municipalities and cities, including Shanghai, have upgraded their technology, as an exclusive analysis of tender documents by sinologist Bjoern Alpermann has revealed. These indicate that the authorities have been using facial recognition for years to identify citizens of Uyghur origin in the city and to record and analyze their daily routes and contacts with the help of AI.
For many, Shanghai may be far away, but Chinese total surveillance is closer than it appears. China exports the technology behind it to like-minded countries, spreading such practices across the planet and making it more and more the norm.
Moreover, many countries have close economic ties with China; the European supply chain law will make it possible to ask companies about the conditions in the region of origin. The exclusion and spying on an innocent minority continues to become less and less distant, Marcel Grzanna analyzes.
Chip manufacturer TSMC is making good progress with building its factory in Dresden. Felix Lee explains why skilled workers could be a critical bottleneck and how TSMC still manages to find enough skilled labor. One of the company’s goals is to manufacture chips for the German automotive industry.
Chinese security authorities are using artificial intelligence to systematically track Uyghurs in Chinese cities and generate individual movement profiles. This is confirmed by public tenders for corresponding software, which are exclusively available to Table.Briefings. The documents come from local police departments in Shanghai, various cities and counties in the coastal province of Zhejiang and the southwestern metropolis of Chengdu. The tenders are explicitly aimed at identifying members of the Uyghur minority in public spaces.
The date on the documents indicates that the authorities have been putting out tenders for the development of facial recognition programs that specifically scan for Uyghurs for at least six years. The most recent document is dated 2023 and bears the stamp of the Shanghai Xuhui District Police Department.
The authorities’ continued demand suggests that they still harbor a general distrust of the Uyghurs despite years of state re-education measures. “The documents clearly show that the Chinese security authorities continue to systematically treat the Uyghurs as potential criminals and thus as second-class citizens,” says Xinjiang expert Bjoern Alpermann from the University of Wurzburg. According to Alpermann, the fact that the tenders come from different parts of the country indicates that this practice is commonplace.
“This refutes the Chinese government’s narrative that, after a tough re-education phase, the ‘danger of extremism’ has now been banished and Uyghurs can enjoy their freedom as normal citizens of China and pursue their dreams,” says Alpermann, who discovered comparable evidence for the digital identification of Uyghurs as part of the research project “Remote Ethnography of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.”
The specifications for the bidders in the Shanghai tender are clearly formulated. Simply put, the artificial intelligence must recognize where Uyghurs are specifically located within the district and with whom they come into contact. Using images from 3,700 surveillance cameras in Xuhui alone, the software not only needs to be able to identify the individuals in question, but also alert the authorities in real-time. A separate file, including a movement profile for the past 30 days, is created for each person recorded based on the yī rén yī dàng (一人 一 档) principle.
The analysis results include facial images and facial data information. People with glasses or beards must also be recognized. In addition, the system needs to compare the analyzed information with the police’s facial image database to retrieve further data on the individuals immediately. The system will be used in 14 police stations, detention centers, and traffic police offices in Xuhui.
“The tenders are striking. They clearly indicate that the Uyghurs are still seen as a threat,” says anthropologist and China researcher Adrian Zenz from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington. “The conclusion is that a police state like China’s does not create security; it creates a mentality of insecurity,” says Zenz. His research on internment in Xinjiang is considered groundbreaking and has also been taken up by the United Nations.
All five documents available to Table.Briefings explicitly mention the need to identify Uyghurs, including an alert function. The 2022 document from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan in southwest China, also requires the analysis of “racial characteristics.”
China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups. However, the software does not filter other ethnic groups besides the Uyghurs. The Uyghurs are one of the largest minorities in the People’s Republic. They are predominantly Muslim and are subject to strict family planning controls, which have significantly reduced their numbers in recent decades.
The Uyghurs concerned see their accusations against the Chinese government confirmed. “This shows how the Chinese government regards the Uyghurs as a foreign body separate from the majority Han ethnic group,” says Haiyuer Kuerban, Berlin Director of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). “This official stance confirms that the Uyghurs have never been part of the Chinese nation in the eyes of the government.” He added that the open discrimination was evidence of a dangerous government stance rooted in racist ideologies. They also showed that surveillance and discrimination against the Uyghurs was not limited to their home region, but had reached a nationwide dimension.
In 2009, hundreds of people were killed in ethnic clashes between Han Chinese and Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi. In response to a series of terrorist attacks by extremists, the state ultimately introduced a re-education program for Uyghur citizens.
The discrimination against all Uyghurs increased drastically as a result and led to the creation of camps in which a seven-digit number of Uyghurs have been held against their will since around 2017. The number of inmates in the camps has since decreased significantly. However, the number of Uyghurs sentenced to lengthy prison sentences has skyrocketed.
The fact that the threat situation in Xinjiang still exists in the eyes of Beijing became apparent last year when China’s President Xi Jinping visited the region and called for caution. Xi said that maintaining social stability should always be the top priority. His speech differed significantly from his words in 2020 when he emphasized the economic development of the region in Xinjiang and hardly mentioned the security situation.
There is not yet much to see of the new high-tech plant in northern Dresden. But the ground-breaking ceremony for the fab, which is short for “fabrication plant,” i.e., a semiconductor plant, is set to take place in the second half of the year. Christian Koitzsch, President of European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), the newly founded joint venture between Bosch, Infineon and NXP, made the announcement. They each hold a ten percent stake. The majority shareholder is Taiwan-based TSMC. Koitzsch previously headed a Bosch factory in Dresden and has been in charge of the new joint venture between Bosch and TSMC since the beginning of the year.
It is one of the largest construction projects in Germany, emphasized Koitzsch on Monday at the Taiwan-EU Semiconductor Forum in Berlin. But the project is proceeding according to plan. By the end of 2027, the Dresden plant will manufacture 40,000 wafers with a diameter of 300 millimeters per month. Wafers are the baseplates for the production of the actual chips. The TSMC plant in Dresden is the Taiwanese supplier’s first on the European continent.
TSMC is by far the world’s largest and most important contract manufacturer of semiconductor products and is one of the few companies that has mastered the 2-nanometer manufacturing process. On a piece of silicon the size of a fingertip, Taiwanese engineers are able to fit 200 billion transistors and significantly increase performance while keeping energy consumption low.
This miniature switch is the basis for digital arithmetic units on microchips. The smaller they are, the more performance can be achieved. Their most modern and smallest forms are what make AI systems possible in the first place. TSMC manufactures these superchips for companies including Apple, AMD, Google and Nvidia.
However, the Dresden plant will not burn the most advanced integrated circuits onto the silicon, but rather, it will burn much larger structures. These chip types have been around since the mid-2010s. So, these are not the chips with the smallest physical structure size that TSMC was one of the first to produce. However, production on a 22-nanometer scale is intended to produce advanced MCU technology, i.e., to be installed in microcontrollers used for sensors and the control of windscreen wipers and brakes, for example. This makes them particularly important for the automotive industry. And Germany is still the heart of this industry.
Around half of the enormous investment sum of around 20 billion euros will be borne by the taxpayer, five billion of which will come from the German government and another five billion from the EU as part of the Chips Act. Such high subsidies for a very profitable industry drew a lot of criticism. Some media wrote that this would equal five million euros of taxpayers’ money per job. However, Koitzsch stressed the many new jobs that will be created in the region. After all, the arrival of TSMC will bring more suppliers to the region. They will all create high-quality jobs.
There are also positive effects for all of Germany and the EU. “Every sector needs semiconductors nowadays,” emphasized Bernhard Kluttig, Head of the Industrial Policy Department at the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), at the forum in Berlin. Microchips are irreplaceable in a modern industrial environment. Ultimately, not only a few thousand, but over ten million jobs in Germany’s entire manufacturing sector depend on them. Kluttig also called it an investment in the future that will pay off, adding that Europe needs this expertise.
Moreover, he says this is not purely a subsidy business; TSMC does not just follow the money, but also the market. “No semiconductor company sets up shop just because of government subsidies,” emphasizes Gunnar Thomas, Managing Director of TSMC Europe. It is only worthwhile for a company to relocate if there is a sufficient customer base. And this is available in the form of European car manufacturers, Thomas said.
Preparations for the construction of the Dresden plant are in full swing. It is designed to employ around 2,000 people. Koitzsch has observed that the necessary specialists are already arriving. The first cooperation with the TU Dresden has started, he says, and 30 students are already participating in an exchange program and are being sent to Taiwan to be trained at TSMC’s own training center in the city of Taichung, among other places.
He himself has already visited the TSMC headquarters in Hsinchu, Taiwan. The city is home not only to TSMC but also to dozens of semiconductor manufacturers, including UMC, Elan, Windbond, and Powerchip, which are also global leaders. Given this density of semiconductor companies, Hsinchu is now considered the world’s actual Silicon Valley. Koitzsch announced that the TSMC plant in Dresden would invite doctoral students, among others, to develop and use specialized chips for their research projects on-site.
At the forum in Berlin, Koitzsch also reiterated why TSMC decided to invest around ten billion euros in its first European fab in Dresden. Dresden’s ecosystem was convincing: It is already the largest microelectronics hub in Europe with an existing supplier industry, as well as institutions such as the Technical University of Dresden and other research institutes such as Helmholtz and Fraunhofer with a strong focus on microelectronics. In the end, this was the package that convinced TSMC.
He also addressed the water problem, which has been raised several times. After all, the arrival of a chip giant, which requires a lot of water for production, makes it clear that Dresden’s existing supply will not be sufficient in the long term, especially as Infineon will also be significantly expanding its existing plant. That is why experts assume that the water demand will almost double by 2040. For this reason, a new process water supply system will be built at a cost of around 250 million euros. It will be completely independent of the existing drinking water distribution network and fed from treated river water from the Elbe.
The G7 are demonstrating a united front against China’s attempt to bring products onto global markets at below cost. One day after the EU announced increased tariffs on Chinese EVs, Ursula von der Leyen’s signature is clearly recognizable in a statement by the heads of state and government. In the statement, the G7 accuse China of creating harmful overcapacities and distorting global competition through non-market economy practices such as subsidies, threatening domestic jobs and industries as well as the economic resilience and security of the G7 states.
This not only sounds very similar to how the EU justifies its tariffs, but also reads like an echo of the statements made by the US government under Joe Biden, who is also present in Italy. The G7 are also indirectly threatening China with further possible punitive tariffs. They warn of additional measures that they will take – if necessary – to protect workers and companies against unfair practices.
In its statement, the group of established developed nations also expresses concern about China’s support for Russia in the war in Ukraine. The G7 call on China to stop supplying goods that can also be used for military purposes and “stop enabling and sustaining Russia’s war against Ukraine.” This would have security policy consequences that could be felt worldwide. Here, too, there was an echo of current politics. The US government only imposed new sanctions against supporters of the Russian war on Wednesday, including Chinese companies.
The G7 group consists of Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, Canada, the USA and the EU. In geopolitical terms, it is increasingly positioned in opposition to Brics+, which claims to represent the Global South vis-à-vis the former colonial powers and established developed countries. fin
The Euro 2024 is also interesting to Chinese soccer fans – like this man in a pop-up store in Hangzhou. However, the time of the live broadcasts of the evening matches could once again cause sleep deprivation in East Asia. The kick-off for the opening match between Germany and Scotland will be at three o’clock on Saturday morning.
