Nicholas Bequelin, the East Asia director for Amnesty International, said the requirement to install the navigation system was consistent<br />with Xinjiang’s “important role as a trial ground” for China’s ambition to create a “world-class, high-tech counterterrorism force.”<br />“While preventing terrorist attacks is a legitimate concern for the government,” Mr. Bequelin said, “the kind of indiscriminate, quasi-totalitarian policies rolled out in Xinjiang” under Mr. Chen “are bound to create a deep pool of resentment<br />that will indeed turn into a real time bomb for China.”<br />In 2014, a series of bomb blasts in the prefecture killed six people, according to an official report.<br />Western China Region Aims to Track People by Requiring Car Navigation -<br />Officials in China’s largest prefecture, in the far-western region of Xinjiang, are requiring all drivers there to install<br />a Chinese-made satellite navigation system in their vehicles, according to an official news report this week.<br />The most notable burst of violence occurred in 2009, when ethnic rioting convulsed Urumqi, the regional<br />capital, resulting in about 200 deaths, most of them ethnic Han, according to official reports.<br />The prefecture’s population is 32 percent Uighur and 59 percent Han, according to official statistics,<br />even though the prefecture’s name implies that Mongolians are a significant population.<br />News of the navigation system requirement first appeared in a post on the official microblog of the Bayingol traffic police department on Feb. 4.<br />Parts of Xinjiang are home to ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who mostly practice Sunni Islam<br />and often resent policies made by the ethnic Han, the dominant group in China.
