Imagine, for example, that your household is one of 10 supervised by a local snitch whose observations could send you, your spouse or one of your children to an internment centre. The snitch, an official, might live only 20 metres away - and might be helped by your next-door neighbour, an undercover informant.

What are they watching for? Basically, you being too immersed in your own culture, and not that of people you might regard as foreigners. In Australia, it would be like rounding up people for taking too much interest in cricket and lacking keenness to learn a language completely unlike English - such as Chinese.

But your friendly snitch also has other tasks, such as assigning you to work and haranguing everyone in the 10 households with propaganda lectures - perhaps about how you should love these aliens and love their culture, government and benevolent leader. "Our benevolent leader!"

With enough repetition, week after week, it's supposed to sink into your brain. And maybe it does.

This is part of a picture we can imagine from research published this week by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

We've known a lot about the results of China's campaign to control Uighurs that began in 2014 - especially detention for "re-education" of those who cling to their traditional culture. But ASPI researchers Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, James Leibold and Daria Impiombato have uncovered more about Beijing's mechanism of oppression.

They did this mainly by analysing a mass of documents leaked from the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau in 2019.

What most of us think of as Chinese ethnicity is in fact Han. More than 90 per cent of the population of China is Han, but there are 55 other officially recognised groups in the country, several of which, including the 12 million Uighurs, are Muslim.

Honestly worried about terrorism and separatism, the Chinese Communist Party is willing to inflict misery on Uighurs generally, not just probable extremists among them, to achieve stability. As a Leninist organisation, it hardly understands that there should be limits on its control of people's lives.

It has an unstated aim of eliminating Uighurs' ethnicity, of turning them into Han. If it keeps this up for two generations, it will surely succeed.

The local snitch is not the only person whom a Uighur must worry about. At the next level up, the village or residential district is controlled by co-ordinated action of local CCP officials, the cops, and a bunch of people who barge into Uighurs' homes.

These intruders are generally Han, and therefore regarded by Uighurs as outsiders. One of them may arrive at a home just to give a lecture or to chat for a while, gauging whether the occupants are satisfactorily docile. But this official visitor may stay for a few days, and must be treated as a relative.

Think of the humiliation this inflicts on a family.

The police have stations, substations and checkpoints everywhere. Surveillance cameras are always watching.

An overarching co-ordination system manages all this, looking for little irregularities that hint at someone leaving the straight and narrow. According to the researchers, signs could be "someone having an unexpected visitor at home, driving a car that does not belong to them, receiving an overseas phone call or using file-sharing apps such as Zapya. In police reports, these often innocuous acts are described as 'enemy movements' or 'important intelligence'."

The result for the wrongdoer could be time in detention - deeper brainwashing and supervision, plus unwanted vocational training, all behind barbed wire.

This is monstrous. If a smaller country were guilty of such racial oppression, it would be an international outcast, subject to any number of trade sanctions. But the world is still too fascinated with doing business with China. The international response has been noisy but, in practical effect, mild.

And what do people elsewhere in China think of all this? The answer, coming from my own experience, is depressing.

MORE AGE OF THE DRAGON:

First, most Chinese people are not much aware of the crackdown, or at least are unaware that it amounts to anything like oppression. Those who follow foreign media (a small minority) typically think the reports about Xinjiang are fabricated.

To the extent that they know Uighurs are under the thumb, they think that's justified - or they just don't care. In all the time I was in China, I didn't once hear a Han raise concerns about the suffering of Uighurs.

I hate to say it, but Han Chinese generally regard Uighurs basically as troublesome pets - as people who, like pets, are part of the national household but must be managed.

In making a generalised statement like that, one should hasten to add something like "of course, not everyone has that attitude". But I really never saw an exception.

Attitudes to other ethnicities in the country are also often condescending. Propaganda tells everyone that the country is one happy family - but I don't think that has much more effect than avoiding inter-ethnic tension.

Still, that's important. And we should note that Chinese people are rightly annoyed at the lack of foreign interest in Islamic terrorism in their country, much of it in Xinjiang.

Many readers of this column will remember the 2005 bomb attacks in London, in which extremists killed 52 people. But do they remember the 2014 mass stabbings in Kunming, south-western China, in which 31 died?

This and other attacks have been shocking. But they don't justify the oppression of 12 million people and the elimination of their culture.