![]() Though developed by Chinese companies, this technology, Byler points out, is similar to programs like Clearview AI, which is used by American police forces. Advanced algorithms first developed in Silicon Valley to monitor the purchasing behavior of American consumers now scrutinize Uyghur lives, along with geospatial data collected from smartphones and a province-wide matrix of high-definition cameras linked to facial recognition software. ![]() Meanwhile, intensive reeducation sessions, where inmates learn Mandarin, sing patriotic songs, and recite Party slogans, are China’s version of what the American General David Petraeus referred to as “winning hearts and minds.” The technology is brand new. Following official instructions to “round up those who should be rounded up,” intelligence agents now classify Uyghur “pre-criminals” as “trustworthy, average or untrustworthy.” The latter are detained in reeducation camps, where sleep deprivation, and sometimes even torture (the “tiger chair” replaces the waterboarding of Guantanamo) extract further intelligence. Localized protests, like the 2009 Ürümqi riot, which responded to the lynching of two Muslim workers accused of raping a Han woman - a sexual and racial trope with many parallels in the American South - became evidence of a global Islamist conspiracy. Suspect activities like growing beards or wearing veils, eating halal meat, or posting Quranic verses to WeChat, a popular Chinese social media platform that combines elements of Facebook and WhatsApp, are now treated as markers of violent extremism. Imagining its Central Asian hinterland to be a den of terrorists-in-hiding, and inspired by global specters of the dangerous and fanatical Muslim, Chinese officials have methodically criminalized quotidian aspects of Uyghur life, even as realistic prospects of armed insurgency by Uyghur separatists dwindle. One year later, prompted by the US’s limitless “War on Terror,” and following a mass stabbing at a train station in the city of Kunming - “China’s 9/11,” as some commentators immediately dubbed it - Xi Jinping declared the “People’s War on Terror.” In doing so, he subjected the Uyghur homeland to a devastating military counterinsurgency. Detained without evidence or trial, and eventually exonerated by US courts, they were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 2013, a group of Uyghur terror suspects was released from Guantanamo Bay. Though symbols of Chinese totalitarianism, Uyghur camps intersect, in troubling ways, with the colonial histories, capitalist economies, and security practices of the Anglo-American West. Together, Byler’s books bear witness, in moving and elegant fashion, to cultural genocide and economic exploitation to the menacing capacities of Big Data and biotech and above all, to the lives of those who have disappeared. In the Camps, meanwhile, is short, highly readable, and will appeal to anyone interested in violence and social justice. Terror Capitalism, a compelling though sometimes jargon-laden treatise, offers an important contribution for specialists and graduate students. Such is the subject of two remarkable books by Darren Byler, a talented anthropologist who has conducted years of challenging and courageous ethnographic research in China’s forbidding far Northwest. Here they enter what the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi described as the “gray zone,” where victims are stripped of their dignity and humanity, forced to walk like dogs, eat pork, and recite odes to the Chinese Communist Party’s leader Xi Jinping. Those deemed “suspect” are relegated to the 21st century’s largest system of reeducation camps, which extend across a vast territory more than twice the size of Texas. As skyscrapers rise above the arid steppes and oasis towns of Xinjiang, monuments to China’s modern prosperity, a dispossessed ethnic and religious underclass faces a density of surveillance that eclipses even the secret police of communist East Germany. CHINA’S DETENTION OF as many as 1.5 million Uyghurs, members of a predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic group, constitutes the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II.
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