Chinese Tech Firms Allegedly Developed Facial Recognition to Identify People by Race, Targeting Uyghur Muslims

In July 2018, Huawei and the Chinese Academy of Sciences filed a patent describing AI techniques for identifying pedestrians by attributes including 'race (Han, Uighur).' This patent was discovered by video surveillance research group IPVM, which also found similar patents filed by facial recognition firm Megvii, AI company SenseTime, and other Chinese tech firms for systems capable of recognizing Uighurs and ethnic minorities. Alibaba Cloud had developed a facial recognition algorithm that could identify whether a person is 'Uyghur' and offered 'Uighur-detection-as-a-service.' IPVM found 12 government projects from recent years that mandate Uighur analytics across China, showing the persecution extends beyond the Xinjiang region. A security breach revealed that a 'smart city' surveillance system hosted on Alibaba Cloud could detect people's ethnicity or label them as Uyghur Muslim. The companies responded by saying the ethnic detection capabilities violated their policies, with Huawei stating it 'should never have become part of the patent application' and Megvii saying it would 'withdraw' the patent. These AI systems are part of China's broader surveillance apparatus targeting Muslim minorities including Uyghurs, Kazakhs and others in what the government calls counterterrorism efforts.