Every evening after getting back from his studies, Alip Erkin sits at home in Sydney, Australia, and opens up the video-sharing app TikTok on his Android phone. He’s looking for something in particular: videos from Xinjiang in northwest China, which he left for the last time in 2012. Since then, Xinjiang has been rapidly transformed into a vast police state, where Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic group native to the region, are systematically targeted and surveilled, with more than a million held in concentration camps and detention centers.

Scrolling videos of home from thousands of miles away is strange, nostalgic, and bittersweet for anyone. But for Erkin, 41, it is a glimpse of a place the Chinese government doesn’t want him to see. 

Upon opening the TikTok app, Erkin is greeted by walls of auto-playing videos, most of which mean nothing to him: surreal comedy bits, cheery musical singalongs. “I get a cup of coffee and browse,” he said. “Most of the videos are worthless in terms of the political situation.”

But every so often, Erkin comes across a video that reveals something about the realities of  China’s mass surveillance crackdown and brainwashing policy in Xinjiang: a video of a propaganda rally, with Uyghurs singing songs praising the Communist Party of China; footage from inside a Uyghur orphanage for children with parents in detention; crowds of Uyghurs chanting in Mandarin rather than their native Uyghur language; a mosque being demolished. Often he’ll find shots of the deserted streets of once-bustling Kashgar, his now empty home city.