Tech-enabled 'terror capitalism' is spreading worldwide. The surveillance regimes must be stopped

When Gulzira Aeulkhan finally fled China for Kazakhstan early last year, she still suffered debilitating headaches and nausea. She didn't know if this was a result of the guards at an internment camp hitting her in the head with an electric baton for spending more than two minutes on the toilet, or from the enforced starvation diet. Maybe it was simply the horror she had witnessed – the sounds of women screaming when they were beaten, their silence when they returned to the cell. Like an estimated 1.5 million other Turkic Muslims, Gulzira had been interned in a "re-education camp" in north-west China. After discovering that she had watched a Turkish TV show in which some of the actors wore hijabs, Chinese police had accused her of "extremism" and said she was "infected by the virus" of Islamism.