Darren Byler is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University, where his teaching and research focus is on the technology and politics of urban life in Northwest China and Southeast Asia. His writing has appeared in Logic, Guardian, and ChinaFile, among other publications.
The camp system in Xinjiang — the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II — is the first to employ a comprehensive digital surveillance system across an entire population, a "super panoptic" that uses automated, real-time assessments of massive amounts of data to sort populations based on their racial phenotypes and digital records.
This essay is adapted from Darren Byler’s forthcoming book, Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City, published by Duke University Press (December 2021).
State policies in education are forcing Uyghur children to grow up in non-Muslim, Mandarin-speaking environments. Uyghur culture is being lost as a result.
Nurali, after memorizing the Quran, brought immense pride to his family. But back home in Xinjiang, his mother, who financed his studies, was accused of abetting "terrorism," and sentenced to 16.5 years in prison.
For 16 hours, people in a Clubhouse room called “Is there a concentration camp in Xinjiang?” spoke freely, centering the discussion on those most harmed by state violence. Even while it was happening, the conversation felt historic — and worth preserving.
“They said there was a document sent from above, from the administrative center, and that they were acting based on that document. They said no one can change the document since it was sent from the Central Committee. They said that the current system would not change until all Muslim nationalities would be extinct.”
Dawut disappeared in December 2017 after being detained by state authorities as she planned to travel to Beijing for a conference. She has not been publicly charged with a crime.
Around 9.5 million Han Chinese live in Xinjiang, making up about 40% of the region's population. How do they view Beijing's policies of surveillance and Uyghur reeducation?
In Uyghur society, lending money is more than capital exchange, it's part of a practice that social theorist AbdouMaliq Simone refers to as “taking care.” In Xinjiang, as China's "People's War on Terror" accelerated, money transfers across international boundaries were seen as a possible sign of extremism — just another way that Uyghurs were cut off from their support networks and isolated from one another.
Life in the big city can be hard for Chinese migrant workers, but in Urumqi, economic incentives give them more opportunities than they'd get elsewhere. Provided that they are ethnically Han, that is.