Human Rights Concerns Abound Over China’s ‘State Secrets’ Regulation in the Uyghur Region

This story written by Asiye Uyghur originally appeared on Global Voices on May 18, 2026.

The “Regulations on the Protection of State Secrets in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” (新疆维吾尔自治区保守国家秘密条例), which took effect on March 1, 2026, is a de facto local extension of China’s national state secrecy framework. In a region characterized by high levels of security governance and information control, the legal adjustments have significant consequences on the normalization and codification of political repression in the region.

The Uyghurs are a native people of the Uyghur region in northwestern China, or Xinjiang. They have a distinct language, ethnicity, and culture that differ from those of the Han people, who represent over 91 percent of China’s population. Following the July 2009 protests in Urumqi, the Chinese government implemented strict control in the region in the name of counterterrorism, while international human rights organizations criticized China for its crackdown and repressive measures, including reports of mass detention, forced disappearances, extensive surveillance systems, and restrictions on religious and cultural life.

Many countries have codified the protection of state secrets. However, particularly in Western democracies, such legislation generally aims to prevent the leaking of sensitive information about government and military institutions that could harm national security. By contrast, China’s state secrecy framework, updated in 2024, extends the definition of “state secrets” to political, economic, technological, and social information considered relevant to national stability. In the Uyghur region, this expansive approach to secrecy becomes especially significant because issues connected to everyday life — including religious practices, cultural expression, communication patterns, and other forms of social behavior — increasingly fall within the scope of security governance and information control.

The Uyghur extension of Chinese national law would, therefore, be detrimental, as it has embedded information control within its pre-existing social governance system, thereby bringing surveillance into the everyday life of the Uyghur region. 

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The Uyghur extension of China's national secrecy law 

While the national law provides an overarching legal framework for protecting state secrets, the Uyghur version details enforcement, technological surveillance, and geographic controls tailored to the region’s unique security priorities.

In terms of objectives, the local version places maintaining social stability in Xinjiang as a national security issue and adds a specific mandate to “forge a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation” (Article 3). This implies that local policies that undermine Uyghurs’ ethnic identity, cultural, and religious rights could be justified under the regional secrecy law. 

The law introduces the new legal concept of “work secrets” (Article 64), which requires government and work units to formulate their own “work secret list” (Article 43) and introduce internal systems to prevent leakage. This further extends the realm of secrecy. 

As for the law’s enforcement, the Uyghur region’s regulation places a heavier emphasis on mobilizing grassroots organizations, work units, and community-level actors to protect state secrets (Article 8). Grassroots party branches are required to designate liaison officers to handle matters related to secrecy, including public reports of suspicious activities, such as espionage, theft of state secrets, and the disclosure of secrets through books, social media posts, and other channels (Article 39). This creates a more socially embedded system of information control, as the identification, monitoring, and reporting of “sensitive” information are integrated into everyday social management.

The technological scale of control over sensitive information is also expanded, as the regional law explicitly promotes the use of AI and big data to monitor information flows and protect state secrets (Article 10).  Moreover, it mandates a “prevention and control” system maintained through collaboration among the local government, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and the military (Article 12). This strengthens the unique militarized governance structure’s power to control information flow in the region.

Politicization of information

Under the current stability control system, governance in the Uyghur region relies heavily on digital surveillance and data integration, including large-scale data collection, algorithmic risk assessment, and real-time monitoring systems, as much research has highlighted.

The extensive definition of “state secrets” and “work secrets,” coupled with a grassroots reporting mechanism and an AI-powered monitoring system, makes information dissemination and interpersonal communication subject to security evaluation and thus risky. External information flows, such as speaking with overseas media outlets or foreigners, are even more precarious.

Rather than responding to illegal acts, the information-based security governance increasingly focuses on identifying and managing perceived future risks. 

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This strengthens the pre-existing preventive control system in the name of counter-terrorism that legitimizes state intervention, such as the so-called “re-education camps” or “vocational trainings,” targeting Uyghur communities’ cultural behaviors, associations, religious practices, communication patterns, and other acts considered potentially sensitive.

As information management and monitoring are embedded in the core of Uyghur security governance, individuals become uncertain about what information can be safely shared, resulting in self-censorship as a social norm. 

These dynamics contribute to what some researchers describe as a “structure of silence,” in which information becomes progressively harder to access — not only because it is restricted, but also because it is never publicly expressed in the first place.

Impact on human rights debates

International debates about the situation in the Uyghur region often focus on detention policies, religious restrictions, demographic changes, and systems of surveillance. Some governments and researchers alleged that the Chinese repressive policy targeting the Uyghur communities had amounted to “crimes against humanity” or “genocide,” while others reject these descriptions.

However, these debates depend heavily on the availability of information, and the newly enacted regional state secrecy law makes it more difficult to access or share related information. Claims presented by human rights organizations or international media outlets will become harder to verify as the space for investigation has shrunk. Human rights debates and disagreements will thus become more politically entrenched. 

In this sense, secrecy laws do not only regulate information — they shape the conditions under which international human rights discussions take place.

The significance of the Uyghur region’s “state secrets” regulation lies not only in its legal wording but in how it functions within a broader governance system, i.e., how secrecy functions within a highly securitized political environment. In such a context, the boundaries between information management, surveillance, and social control become increasingly blurred.

Ultimately, the regulation raises broader questions about the relationship between information, governance, and human rights. When access to information becomes more restricted, the space for transparency, independent verification, and public accountability becomes narrower as well.

[VP]

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