A group of Western publications, including the British newspaper Guardian and the New York Times have alleged that Chinese border agents have been installing spyware on phones from tourists.

The papers pointed out the tourists most vulnerable to this spyware were those seeking to enter China from Kyrgyzstan and wanting to travel to the autonomous Xinjiang region in the northwest. The Chinese authorities are believed to be conducting large scale surveillance and indoctrination of the mainly Muslim ethnic minority group in the region.

According to reports, border agents in the Xinjiang region have been requiring tourists to submit their phones and passcodes before entering. The agents then disappear with the phones in order to pry information out of the devices. For iPhones, that reportedly includes plugging them into a machine that scans through the phone’s contents. For Android phones, it goes further, with border agents installing a spyware app that scans the phone and collects data.

The app, named BXAQ or Fēng cǎi, collects phone contacts, text messages, call history, calendar entries, what apps are on a phone, and what usernames are used in some apps, then uploads that data to a server. The app also scans the phone for more than 73,000 files. Some of that includes extremist content, like an ISIS publication, but it also reportedly includes Quran excerpts and music from a Japanese metal band.

It appears that the app is meant to be deleted once inspection of the phone is finished. But border agents seem to have forgotten to do that on some occasions, leading to the discovery of the spyware app. On receiving phones infected with this app, the newspapers sent it to experts to determine what the spyware was capable of doing.

Reports over the past couple years have detailed China’s startling level of monitoring of the Xinjiang region, which is home to a number of ethnic minorities, including the Uighurs, a largely Muslim group of about 8 million people. It is also a resource-rich region that China fears losing control of and this has led to violent suppression of the Uighurs and close monitoring of the community and its activities, including through the use of facial recognition systems, apps that facilitate surveillance, and harsh internment camps.


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