"Mass Surveillance Beyond Borders: Implications for the EU as China's Mass Control Policies Hit European Uighurs"

Since spring 2017, China is known to have launched a crackdown on religious extremism in Xinjiang, as major incidents took place starting from 2014. What China defines as a ‘de-extremification’ policy to prevent religious extremism has however been found to be a policy of political re-education of the Uighur population. This paper argues that the EU could be in the position to bend China’s ‘de-extremification’ policy and protect European Uighurs by siding with the United States (US) and engaging with third state actors such as Muslim countries. However, this would be dependent on the US’s future stance in its trade war with China and the EU’s capacity to resist China’s ‘divide et impera’ design.