China’s high-tech penal colony

One of the leading experts on Uyghur society and Chinese surveillance systems, and anthropologist at the University of Washington, Darren Byler’s study of China’s camps in Xinjiang evokes past evils with a definite technological edge, reveals how China used a vast network of technology provided by private companies – facial surveillance, voice recognition, smartphone data, enabled the state and corporations to blacklist millions of Uyghurs because of their religious and cultural practice starting in 2017. They made surveillance to intern over a million people and produce a system of control previously unknown to human history. Novel forms of state violence and colonisation have been unfolding for years in China’s vast north-western region, where more than a million and a half Uyghurs and others have vanished into internment camps and associated factories.

Charged with pre-crimes sometimes consisting of only installing social media apps, detainees were put in camps to study forced to praise the Chinese government, renounce Islam, disavow families, and labour in factories.  Byler travels back to Xinjiang to reveal how the convenience of smartphones have doomed the Uyghurs to catastrophe and makes the case that the technology is being used all over the world, sold by tech companies from Beijing to Seattle producing new forms of unfreedom for vulnerable people around the world.

The tragedies of Boer war, Nazi Germany and the Soviet are partial analogue. Byler writes that he had these continuities and raptures  in mind when describing Xinjiang’s system of mass internment in his book,  In the Camps. In this damning account of the forces that led China to intern  and re-educate more than 1million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other mostly Muslim people in Xinjiang, Byler argues the camp system is at minimum a scale and degree of cruelty beyond all obvious contemporary parallels. China, however, maintains, that the facilities’ Chinese lessons and courses on CCP ideology were form of “vocational training” provided to pre-emptively combat a rising tide of extremists thought. In September 2020, the Xinjiang government said these programmes were ending.

Among his interviewees  are former Uyghur detainees, a contact law enforcement officer, a camp teacher and a Kazakh farmer.

They were subjected to cruel and occasionally bizarre rituals in the name of ridding them of incorrect thoughts, such as singing renditions of “Patriotic” songs before being fed. “Over the past three decades Xinjiang has come to serve as a classic peripheral colony – catering to the needs of the metropoles in Shanghai and Shenzhen”, Byler writes.

All this China has done resulted in inflicting deep wounds on the psyche of the people who call the region home.

In the Campus: Life in China’s High-Tech Penal Colony by Darren Byler, Columbia Global Reports, $16.99, Atlantic Books £12.99, 160 pages.