Democracy Digest has a really interesting article on China’s surveillance state and how it spreads from the Uyghurs to Central Asia and its connection with the Belt and Road project. According to the article,

China’s advanced surveillance regime is taking root along the length of the Belt and Road—especially the Belt, the overland Eurasian routes that were the origin of the government’s ambitious investment project. Recently, Kyrgyzstan opened a new police command center in its capital, Bishkek, putting its new facial recognition cameras to work, notes Bradley Jardine, a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute.

The initiative is part of Bishkek’s emerging effort to become a so-called smart city—a catchall term for cities with advanced data-processing capabilities, he writes for Foreign Policy:

Such projects are being implemented across the region with help from China. This April, Huawei closed a $1 billion deal with Uzbekistan to build a traffic-monitoring system involving some 883 cameras. Meanwhile Hikvision—another Chinese company under U.S. sanctions that advertises its ability to spot the faces of members of the Uighur minority in crowds—supplies major urban centers across Kazakhstan.

Read the full article from Democracy Digest here.