How China spies on Uyghurs in Turkey

SPYING ON UYGHURS. Illustration by Gogi Kamushadze for Coda Story.

The messages kept coming every few days, and soon their tone changed. “You are a smart man,” one said. “You need to think about your family. You are there, but they are here, and if you refuse to do this, you could put them in a very dangerous situation.” When Nur came to Istanbul to study in 2011, he spoke with his family every three or four days, either via phone or the Chinese messaging and social media app WeChat — WhatsApp and Facebook are banned in China. WeChat is monitored by the state, but Nur’s family were secular and supported the party, so they talked freely for hours. If he went much longer than a week without calling, his parents would chide him for being distant.

Then they told Nur not to call them at all. They added that a Chinese man would sometimes help connect them from now on, so he should accept the man’s request on WeChat. Mehmet, who has been in the city since 2010 and has a number of close relatives in Xinjiang who have been taken to internment camps, said that even his immediate family stopped replying to messages. His WeChat history with his sister is now just a series of unanswered pictures of his newborn daughter.

Once Nur answered a WhatsApp video call facilitated by the Chinese man and saw only his mother. He asked where his father was.Then Nur heard another voice, a man he did not recognize, speaking Uighur.On another occasion, Nur received a photograph of his parents via the Chinese man’s WhatsApp account. The image was strange, he thought. There were multiple people in the room but only his father and his mother’s faces were visible; the others were cropped out.

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