China is putting a western city where deadly ethnic violence broke out in 2009 under full surveillance, including ensuring “seamless” coverage of sensitive areas of the city with tens of thousands of cameras, Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday.
Security has been tight in Urumqi since tensions between the area’s largely Muslim Uighurs and members of the country’s Han majority flared into open violence in 2009. Uighurs have long resented what they see as an incursion by Han migrants into their ancestral homeland, the Xinjiang region.
The government said 197 people were killed in that outbreak of violence.
China has sentenced dozens of people for their involvement in the riots, most of them Uighurs. Beijing blamed overseas Uighur groups of plotting the violence, but exile groups denied it.
Just before the one-year anniversary of the violence last year, officials said about 40,000 high-definition surveillance cameras equipped with riot-proof protective shells had been installed throughout the region.
Nearly 17,000 were installed in Urumqi last year, Xinhua said. It was not clear if that figure was in addition to the one reported last year.
The surveillance coverage will continue to grow this year, according to Urumqi Mayor Jerla Isamudinhe, who spoke to the city’s legislature over the weekend, Xinhua reported.
Surveillance is “seamless” — meaning there are no blind spots — in sensitive areas of the city, the report quoted the head of the city’s information technology -office as saying.
It’s not unusual to see surveillance cameras by the thousands in Chinese cites, and authorities have been known to install them in sensitive areas like mosques in Xinjiang and in temples in Tibet, which saw its own burst of ethnic violence in early 2008.
Last fall, the UK-based consultancy IMS Research said more than 10 million surveillance cameras would be installed in China last year.
Beijing itself has more than 400,000, the China Daily newspaper reported in April last year.
Rights activists have objected to their widespread use, pointing out that China has very little in the way of privacy protections.
Tuesday’s report said 3,400 buses, 4,400 streets, 270 schools and 100 shopping malls in Urumqi are already under watch by the cameras.
The increase in surveillance is part of a pattern of tightening Beijing’s control over the region. After the 2009 violence, the region’s Internet, international telephone and text messaging links to the outside world were severed for more than half a year.
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