Image by Jan Vašek / Pixabay
By Sultan
According to information on social media such as Douyin and Twitter, Shanghai police have started checking the phones of Chinese citizens on a large scale; commuters, migrant workers, college students, and so on. The authorities want to determine whether the phone has foreign apps deemed illegal, such as Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Telegram, Potato, Shadowrocket, or photos and videos taken in Urumqi Middle Road in Shanghai, or whether the persona has installed a VPN.
In the regulations issued by particular departments, telephone inspectors must ask people to delete “forbidden” apps on the spot and to make a commitment not to install them again. Also, the authorities record person’s ID, phone number, parent’s ID number, live portrait, mobile phone, and other electronic devices. There is no official information on what kind of punishment a person would receive for the aforementioned ‘misconduct’.
Uyghurs in the diaspora know well that China is conducting phone checks on Uyghurs’ mobile devices in the homeland, in East Turkestan. There are check posts almost every hundred meters. China has been killing thousands of our innocent Uyghur brothers under the pretext of “eliminating religious extremism” and ‘cleaning the Internet’. The purge is still in full swing.
It is clear that in the above investigation campaign in Shanghai, they are also instilling fear and panic by asking for the identity of the phone holder’s parents.
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