China waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation directed at a UK university to get it to shut down sensitive research into alleged human rights abuses, documents seen by the BBC show. Sheffield Hallam University staff in China were threatened by individuals described by them as being from China's National Security Service who demanded the research being done in Sheffield be halted. And access to the university's websites from China was blocked, impeding its ability to recruit Chinese students, in a campaign of threats and intimidation lasting more than two years. In an internal email from July 2024, university officials said attempting to retain the business in China and publication of the research are now untenable bedfellows. When the UK government learned of the case, the then Foreign Secretary David Lammy issued a warning to his Chinese counterpart that it would not tolerate attempts to suppress academic freedoms at UK universities, the BBC understands.

Republican presidential candidate Francis Suarez appeared to admit during a Tuesday morning radio interview about national security that he does not know what a Uyghur is. The admission from Suarez came during an appearance on The Hugh Hewitt Show, where Hewitt asked Suarez, "Will you be talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?" "The what," Suarez, the current mayor of Miami, responded. Republican presidential candidate and Mayor of Miami Francis Suarez delivers remarks at the Faith and Freedom Road to Majority conference on June 23, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images) "What's a Uyghur," Suarez inquired further. Moving on from the question due to Suarez's inability to identify what a Uyghur is, Hewitt told the mayor, "You've got to get smart on that."

At a location he keeps secret, John Honovich was on his laptop, methodically scouring every link on a website for a conference half a world away. Hikvision, the world's largest security camera manufacturer, was hosting the event--the 2018 AI Cloud World Summit--in its hometown of Hangzhou, a city of about 10 million people not far from Shanghai. Honovich, the founder of a small trade publication that covered video surveillance technology, wanted to find out what the latest Hikvision gear could do. He zeroed in on one section of the conference agenda titled "Eco-Friendly, Peaceful, Relaxed" and found a description of an AI-powered system installed around Mount Tai, a historically sacred mountain in Shandong. A video showed Hikvision cameras pointed at tourists climbing the thousands of stone steps leading to the famous peak.

Chinese regulators have reportedly clamped down on access to ChatGPT, as Chinese tech firms and universities push forward with developing domestic artificial intelligence bots. ChatGPT, the popular discussion bot created by US-based OpenAI, is not officially available in China, where the government operates a comprehensive firewall and strict internet censorship. But many had been accessing it via VPNs, and some third-party developers had produced programs that gave some access to the service. Those programs have disappeared from WeChat accounts. Multiple reports have said that major tech firms including WeChat's parent company, Tencent, and Ant Group, have been ordered to cut access to the programs.

Journalist Alison Killing explains her investigation in Xinjiang, China, where the government has used facial recognition cameras to track Uyghurs and detain them in camps across the region. Alison Killing is an architect and investigative journalist. In 2021, she and her co-journalists won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for their work investigating a network of detention camps in Xinjiang, China using satellite imagery and architectural techniques. Her other investigations have included: understanding how social media can be used to track user's movements and migrant journeys. This segment of the TED Radio Hour was produced by Katie Monteleone and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour.

MPs have called for a ban on two Chinese CCTV systems that are used by councils, schools, and police forces across the UK. A group of 67 MPs and Lords including Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey and four ex-Conservative ministers is urging the government to ban the sale and use of Hikvision and Dahua cameras. The calls come amid concerns the CCTV cameras can recognise faces, eavesdrop on conversations, and judge people's moods. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, are the majority population in Xinjiang. More than a million Uyghurs and other minorities are estimated to have been detained at camps in Xinjiang, where allegations of torture, forced labour and sexual abuse have emerged.

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up SenseTime said Monday it will press ahead with its Hong Kong listing, a week after it was blacklisted by the United States over accusations of genocide in Xinjiang. An initial listing earlier this month was pulled when the US Treasury announced new sanctions, saying SenseTime's facial recognition programmes were designed in part to be used against Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. On Monday, the company filed a revised listing with the Hong Kong stock exchange with trading expected to start December 30. "Due to the dynamic and evolving nature of the relevant US regulations, we have required to exclude US investors," the company wrote. Bloomberg News reported that SenseTime had secured about $512 million from nine cornerstone investors, including state-backed Mixed-Ownership Reform Fund and Shanghai Xuhui Capital Investment Company. The company is still planning to hit the pre-blacklisting $767 million target with 1.5 billion shares at HK$3.85 to HK$3.99 per share.

The United States on Thursday unleashed a volley of actions to censure China's treatment of the Uyghur minority, with lawmakers voting to curb trade and new sanctions slapped on the world's top consumer drone maker. The United States has been ramping up pressure on China amid a crop of disputes, with President Joe Biden's administration a day earlier targeting producers of painkillers that have contributed to America's addiction crisis. The U.S. Senate unanimously voted to make the United States the first country to ban virtually all imports from China's northwestern Xinjiang region over concerns of the prevalence of forced labor. "We know it's happening at an alarming, horrific rate with the genocide that we now witness being carried out," said Senator Marco Rubio, a driver behind the act, which already passed the House of Representatives and which the White House says Biden will sign. After prolonged negotiations to secure its passage, Rubio lifted objections and the Senate confirmed veteran diplomat Nicholas Burns as ambassador to China.

Huawei has helped Chinese authorities create surveillance technology that targets the country's Uyghur minority population, an investigation has alleged. A series of marketing presentation slides reviewed by the Washington Post found Huawei had a role in developing surveillance projects created in a partnership with other Chinese companies. They included analysis of voice recordings, monitoring detention centres, tracking locations of political individuals of interest, police surveillance in the western Xinjiang region, and corporate tracking of employees and customers. While the slides did not specify who the presentations were for, the report said some of them showcased surveillance functions specific to police or government agencies, which suggests Chinese government authorities may have been the intended audience. Huawei said it had no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report.

The US government will place eight Chinese companies including drone manufacturer DJI on an investment blocklist for alleged involvement in surveillance of Uyghur Muslims, the Financial Times has reported. The firms will reportedly be put on the Treasure department's "Chinese military-industrial complex companies" list on Tuesday, meaning US citizens will be barred from making any investments. DJI is already on the Department of Commerce's Entity list, meaning American companies can't sell it components unless they have a license. At the time, the government said it was among companies that "enabled wide-scale human rights abuses within China through abusive genetic collection and analysis or high-technology surveillance." However, unlike products from Huawei and others, DJI drones are have not been banned for sale in the US. The latest moves are part of an effort by US President Joe Biden to sanction China for repression of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.