‘I’m Free’: Former Chinese Muslim official who helped build surveillance speaks out

Ma Ruilin, a former midlevel Chinese Communist Party official who managed Muslim affairs in Gansu Province, has moved to New York and is publicly recounting his role in building systems used to track and control Muslims in China, according to interviews with The New York Times published Feb.

1, 2026. He arrived in New York in February 2024 after his wife and daughters moved there in 2023. For about two decades Mr. Ma said he lived two lives: by day a party cadre implementing religious policy, and by night a praying Muslim who sometimes hid his face behind a motorcycle helmet to avoid mosque surveillance cameras.

He said he helped design a 2008 database to record mosque locations, clerics’ names and congregation sizes and later led government hajj delegations, including a 2018 trip of some 3,000 pilgrims. Mr. Ma said a spiritual turning point came on a 2015 hajj trip, after which he began praying regularly and found it harder to reconcile his work with his faith.

He described how systems he had helped create were later weaponized, saying, “I had handed a demon’s whip to the state to use against my own community,” according to the interviews. The New York Times account says authorities installed cameras at mosque entrances by 2020 that used facial recognition to log who came, how often and with whom; those records, Mr.

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