"China's efforts to snuff out a violent separatist movement by some members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic group have turned the autonomous region of Xinjiang ... into a laboratory for high-tech social controls that civil-liberties activists say the government wants to roll out across the country," The Wall Street Journal's Josh Chin and Clément Bürge write.

Why it matters: Zhu Shengwu, a Chinese human-rights lawyer who has worked on surveillance cases: "They constantly take lessons from the high-pressure rule they apply in Xinjiang and implement them in the east ... What happens in Xinjiang has bearing on the fate of all Chinese people."