以上列出的三份報告中，有足夠的證據顯示，中國政府在新疆的暴行，包括集中營、監禁、毆打、強暴維族女性、強迫節育、強迫維族孩童與父母分離等等，三份報告也都提及中國政府除了移民漢人稀釋維族之外，還將維族人民強迫移轉至外省勞動。
對於最後這點所引發著名的韶關事件，《牆國誌》中有清楚的敘述：
「2009年5月，一群新工人抵達工廠，他們跟其他員工格格不入，不但穿著不一樣，膚色比較深，許多人還蓄鬍。他們大多數都不諳普通話，而且沒有一個是漢人。這群近800名的男女是維吾爾人，從喀什市和塔吉克邊界附近的疏附縣跋涉3800公里，來工廠製作玩具以出口到海外。這是政府計畫的一環，也就是把移民送到沿海省分，賺取比疏附縣〔當地的工作〕高七倍的年薪，以發展他們的家鄉地區。
打從一開始，〔廠方〕就把疏附來的工人跟新同事拉開距離，讓前者住在分離的宿舍，且分派到的工組全是維吾爾人。一名官員辯稱隔離的理由是維吾爾人的起居和飲食習慣不同於漢族工人。 隔離的做法徒然加深漢族工人對新同事的猜疑。
不出數週，謠言不脛而走，說維吾爾人都是小偷和強姦犯。「年輕的新疆小伙子涉及多起搶案」，這是某個漢族工人的描述，說法再典型不過。
「他們很壞。你知道，他們不會講中文，我們不懂他們的語言。我們言語不通。」 謠言在食堂和網路布告欄上層層疊加，有些人開始主張管理階層漠視縱容、或是掩蓋新來者的犯罪行為。「第一起強姦發生在工廠後面的樹林裡，行兇的是三個維族男性工人。」這是在線上張貼的一種說法。「一週後，另一個女孩出門買宵夜，被拖進維族人的宿舍並輪姦。保安把她帶出來的時候，她全身一絲不掛，工廠塞給她一萬元人民幣〔約新臺幣四萬三千元〕當封口費。」
雖然中國工廠裡的性騷擾和性侵犯是真實存在而且浮濫的問題，一區之內有七成之多的女人申訴男同事對她們提出性邀約或以其他方式騷擾，但實在沒什麼證據能支持維族男人襲擊漢族同事的說法。一篇廣傳的布告欄貼文說有六個維族男人強姦兩個漢人女孩，作者後來承認，他怪罪新來者端走他的飯碗，才偽造強姦的說法。
6月25日，夜有點深了，韶關泡在暑溽裡，濕熱不堪。19歲的見習女工黃翠蓮跟朋友出去玩了一晚，正在回宿舍的路上。黃翠蓮進廠才沒幾週，在黑暗中錯過了她的那棟宿舍，誤闖一模一樣的另一棟樓。她走進她以為是自己的房間，發現幾個年輕的維吾爾男人坐在他們的床上，興許是被強姦的謠言動搖，抑或是赫然發現自己一個人身處全是陌生男人的房間而遭驚嚇，她尖叫著奪門而出。
工廠勞動力的大宗不外是睪固酮滿溢的年輕漢族男人，對這些男人而言，那〔聲尖叫〕是最後一根稻草。黃翠蓮後來說她沒有告訴任何人她走錯房間，但那無濟於事，整個廠區都聽見她尖叫。晚上11點左右，一群暴民成形，帶著刀械和從床架拆下來的金屬管，數百個漢族男人擁進維吾爾人的宿舍，搗爛窗戶，朝破口裡扔擲垃圾。建物裡，維吾爾和漢族工人在走廊上扭打，其他人則試圖堵住門口，把自己封在房間裡，或是逃向廠區後方的丘陵。不幸在宿舍外被逮到的維族人，全都被毒打後拋下等死。「人們太惡毒，連屍體都痛打不停。」一名目擊者事後表示。
根據官方報告，兩名維族男子——阿希木姜・艾瑪依提(Aximujiang Aimaiti)和薩迪克江・卡(Sadikejiang Kaze)——被毆打至死， 至少百人在暴亂中受傷，動員了逾四百名鎮暴警察，花了五個小時才制止。沒進醫院也沒進停屍間的維族工人，都被遷往鄰近工廠的一棟空宿舍。許多人逕自離開，放棄尚未償付的工資回疏附。2009年10月，據稱帶頭引發暴亂的肖建華因其涉案程度遭判死刑，另外五人的刑期從七年到無期徒刑不等。三名維吾爾男子也因「參與群體鬥毆」而入獄。
《韶關事件》的導火線，是民族間的敵意和大部分在網路上散播、乃至於失控的謠言，然而，人們將會知道，這只是2009年夏天一系列事件的第一起而已。這些事件將徹底改變所有新疆住民的生活，進而毀壞維吾爾人和居多數的漢人之間的關係。
示威平和地開始了。2009年7月5日過午不久，數百名維吾爾族大學生聚集在烏魯木齊市中心的人民廣場，他們帶著寫上漢字的旗幟:「我們是中國公民」。
韶關的公安在動武邊緣搖擺不定了幾個小時才終於介入，反觀人民廣場的抗議，公安幾乎是立刻回擊。鎮暴警察撲上示威人士，當場逮捕了多達70名示威者，並將其他人趕離廣場，逼往南邊的龍泉街和和平南路交叉口，那裡已經聚集了另一大群抗爭者。目擊者告訴《自由亞洲電臺》(由美國政府資助的廣播公司)，鎮暴警察清場時追打他們。
7月6日塵埃落定，數百名軍人和裝甲車在街上巡邏；據《新華社》報導，暴動中有129人喪生，傷者更多於此數。死亡人數後來還會再調高到156人。 數日後，電視轉播白克力發言：火災損壞了數百臺車輛和店鋪，十幾輛警車被破壞。」
然後中國政府對於維族人民的大規模報復就開始了。
延伸閱讀：《牆國誌：中國如何控制網路》
An eye-opening historical picture shows how China’s online strategy takes aim at the solidarity of its citizens – aided by US tech companies
A few years ago, Facebook started encouraging users to give it their phone numbers. This, it said, was only for security purposes: a way to confirm one’s login credentials. Now, as a result, anyone can look up a user’s profile via their phone number, Facebook “shares” phone numbers with its other apps (such as Instagram), and advertisers can target those numbers too. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he had developed a new “vision” for social networking that would be “privacy-focused”, and if you believe that then I have a forecast on the economic benefits of Brexit to sell you. And yet, in certain quarters of tech-savvy international relations , it’s always China that is blamed for betraying the promise of a free and open internet.
As James Griffiths’s excellent book on China’s online strategy acknowledges, that promise – the 1990s cyber-utopian vision of an anarchist, autonomous electronic frontier without borders – hardly needed an authoritarian quasi-communist state to betray it. Western corporations did perfectly well on their own. But Griffiths perhaps gives too much credence to that idealistic picture in the first place: the internet was, after all, born from military technology in the first place – the Arpanet, funded by the US Defense Department – and it’s not quite accurate to say, as he does, that it was designed without reference to geography. (The decentralised nature of the military network was precisely a geographical strategy to prevent an enemy from taking it down by destroying any particular node.)
What’s more, the filtering and censorship technology now used by China to keep its citizens behind the “great firewall” was, as he shows, eagerly supplied for years by US tech corporations, so to complain about what the Chinese have done with it – indeed, to call it, as Griffiths does rather melodramatically, “China’s war on the internet” – now is rather like selling bombs to Saudi Arabia and then wringing one’s hands when they drop them on people. Filtering and censorship capabilities were themselves built into internet hardware from the very early days. As one of the American engineers who helped network China in the 1990s tells Griffiths: “Nobody questions the authority and right of a corporation to very tightly manage and control and monitor the communications in and out of a company’s network. That tech had been built from the very beginning to serve the market of corporate customers. All China did was turn on those switches for the entire country.”
The detailed historical picture that he draws of the Chinese authorities’ approach to the online world over the last three decades is nonetheless fascinating and eye-opening. The “Great Firewall”, he explains, actually conflates two things: the filtering software installed in the three chokepoints that connect China to the rest of the internet that makes it very difficult for Chinese citizens to see forbidden websites, and the internal filtering and censorship software that automatically deletes suspicious references. It is the electronic perfection of Jeremy Bentham’s vision for a panopticon: a circular prison with a central guard-tower where, because they thought they might be watched at any time, inmates behaved well. One commentator describes China’s online thought-policing vividly as “the anaconda in the chandelier”: most of the time, it doesn’t move, but the last thing you want to do is provoke it.
Many of the stories Griffiths tells centre on dissidents and protesters such as the Falun Gong organisation and the Uighurs of Xinjiang province, and their faltering attempts to tunnel below the firewall. “China’s censors do not care about blocking content,” Griffiths asserts, “they care about blocking solidarity.” As a China specialist, he travels to Beijing, Hong Kong and elsewhere to interview brave individuals, and draws a compellingly atmospheric picture of modern arguments about control and self-determination, and even the dangerous politics of drop-down menus in web-forms. (Western companies who offer “Taiwan” as a separate residence option are bound, he shows, to incur China’s wrath.)
This is an exciting and sobering account of how freedom, which was never in the internet code in the first place, can be effectively curtailed with the tools that were supposed to liberate us. Towards the end of the book, Griffiths shows how China has in turn helped Russia with its own efforts at internet censorship, and is now exporting the same technologies to Africa. These are alarming developments, to be sure; yet at the same time western liberals increasingly demand that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al become censors themselves, removing certain kinds of content, and deleting the accounts of users. Griffiths quotes Xi Jinping as saying: “Cyberspace is not a domain beyond the rule of law. Greater effort should be made to strengthen ethical standards and promote civilised behaviour.” Well, it should, shouldn’t it?