Experts suspect China’s rollout of 5G base stations in Xinjiang will only boost surveillance

The build-out in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is part of a nationwide expansion of the fifth-generation or 5G, technology standard for broadband cellular networks that mobile phone companies began deploying worldwide in 2019, reports Radio Free Asia.

China is rolling out this technology to further digitize its economy and society.

With an area of 642,800 square kilometers (248,200 square miles), Xinjiang has the largest land area of all the provinces and autonomous regions in China, though most of the vast region consists of uninhabited deserts and mountains, RFA reported.

Xinjiang’s regional capital Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi) was one of China’s first cities to adopt 5G technology in October 2019, followed by a network rollout that covered other urban areas in prefecture-level cities.

The 5G network rollout across the entire region will augment an existing pervasive digitized system that monitors the movement of residents through surveillance drones, facial recognition cameras, and mobile phone scans as part of China’s efforts to control the predominantly Muslim population, experts told RFA.

China has built more than 30,000 5G base stations in Xinjiang, adding another roughly 10,000 this year at a cost of 1.65 billion yuan (U.S. $230 million), according to an Oct. 10 report by state-run Tianshan Net-Xinjiang Daily, the official news website of Xinjiang as quoted by RFA.

There are nearly a dozen 5G base stations for every 10,000 people in the region with a total population of roughly 12 million, the report said. All prefecture-level urban areas and county urban areas, and 90.5 percent of townships and towns, now have 5G network coverage.

“The 5G network will further deepen the coverage of counties and townships, and ‘county and county access to 5G’ will further consolidate the foundation of digital Xinjiang,” the report said.