Darren Byler has become one of the world's leading experts on Uyghur society, producing books, articles and reports at a prodigious rate. His first monograph, In the Camps, published in late 2021 by Columbia Public Reports, draws on several interviews with former detainees, workers and technicians from the hundreds of internment camps spread across the Uyghur region. Each personal story recounts the process through which surveillance technology impacted Uyghurs’ everyday lives and dignity, reaching its height with the internment programmes that led to the disappearance of at least one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs or Uzbeks.
In this second monograph, Byler also follows individual figures to expose the techno-political systems that dehumanized Uyghurs and other native Turkic people, and empowered private contractors and state workers from inner China. In this book, Byler's argument is more tightly wrapped around the concept of “terror capitalism,” depicted as the result of the global post-9/11 “war on terror” discourse merging with China's colonial relation to the region. By creating new frontiers or processes of racialization that brand all Uyghurs as potential threats, the Chinese state justifies investment in social engineering systems and the coerced use of a Uyghur labour capital, otherwise considered as “unfit” or “unassimilable” by existing standards.
A substantial 30-page introduction, followed by six chapters and a short conclusion, starts with an overview of the concept of terror capitalism. It lays out the book's main concepts, such as (state-enabled) processes of dispossession, the production of “race” as a capitalist operation to exploit disposable workers while allowing capital accumulation for others, and the structural violence embedded in Han–Uyghur colonial relationship. Byler clearly demonstrates how private and state-owned corporations cooperate and benefit from what he describes as the emasculation of the Uyghurs.
Chapter one develops the concept of “expropriation” or the immobilization of Uyghurs in a “digital enclosure” enabled by surveillance technologies. Social media and other digital technologies that once opened a space for Uyghurs to create a native community soon became, after the 2009 Ürümchi riots, major tools of surveillance supervised by a complex network of private and public actors, including Uyghurs and Han.
Chapter two is a balanced and insightful immersion in the colonialist discourse and behaviour developed by many Han migrants who see themselves as long-term settlers in a safe and particularly profitable environment, dissociating themselves from the Uyghur fate. This colonial relationship results in a devaluation of local, native work or yerlik culture, considered as “backward,” while most Hans’ lives are significantly upgraded.
Chapter three focuses on “processes of dispossession” through the cases of two Uyghur migrants in the city of Ürümchi. It looks at their trajectories, their search for autonomy and their failure, in a highly hostile environment dominated by Han-centrism and Islamophobia that not only dispossessed them but also instilled fear and a strong feeling of powerlessness.
The following chapter turns to forms of resistance and “anticolonial responses” among Uyghur men. It introduces the concept of homosocial friendship among Uyghur migrant men as a safe space to share personal stories of sadness and exclusion. This friendship is depicted as “anticolonial” as it allowed these young men, at least until massive numbers of arrests started and friends were forcefully separated, to maintain “a sense of existential well-being” (p. 140) and to survive in the city.
Chapter five changes the focus again to Han migrants in the region and reminds the reader that this community is far from being homogeneous: divides between lao Xinjiang (those living in the region for decades and often born there), also discriminated because of their hukou, and new migrants are highlighted. Byler sees the case of a lao Xinjiang photographer, who spent his life documenting Uyghur migrants in the suburb areas of Ürümchi, as representative of a “minor politics” in the Deleuzian sense: by placing himself in between two worlds or by defining himself as “placeless,” as Uyghur migrants define themselves, the artist opens a space to see behind the scenes of the Great Development of the West, thus resisting to produce a mainstream vision of happy multiculturalism.
The last chapter is built around the trajectories of two other Uyghur migrants and develops the concept of musapir or traveller (migrants, here) in Uyghur culture. It argues that religious practices among migrants created temporary spaces for survival, as friendships did, and turned against them when arrests and internments for “extremism” became more systematic after 2017.
Terror Capitalism is based on doctoral research carried out in the Uyghur region over 24 months between 2011 and 2018. This much-awaited book was originally scheduled for publication in 2020; however, because of Byler's commitment to documenting the extent of the crisis since his last visit to the region, and the accumulation of new data calling for urgent attention (from satellite images to Chinese official documents to testimonies of camp survivors), an updated and refined version of the manuscript was necessary. Yet, combining on-site ethnography during fieldwork in the 2010s and testimonies of people who fled recently and have been through the camp system (either as detainees or workers) can sometimes blur the readers’ understanding of events and is somehow methodologically confusing.
The book also fails to address the basic ideological tenets of Beijing's policy in this bordering region. Labour and internment camps in China, beyond the Uyghur region, are rooted in the Communist ideology that those deemed to be dangerous or serious political opponents can be “reformed” or suppressed through re-education and coerced labour. How does this totalitarian dogma inform the surveillance and internment system developed in the Uyghur region? Similarly, how do ethnic policies in China over the past seven decades operate in the colonialist discourse? Byler's arguments on capitalism and colonialism are rather convincing but may seem incomplete without an analysis of the party-state's interpretation of Marxist-Leninist theories and the subsequent implementation of hard-line policies.
Finally, the concepts developed throughout the book are useful to support Byler's argument about terror capitalism, but technical jargon may at times submerge the reader and obscure or overshadow the ethnographic details.
Notwithstanding these reservations, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in the Uyghur issue: scholars, students, activists and any concerned reader. Darren Byler's ethnography is an invaluable contribution, as he provides a rare micro, ground-level view of events and Uyghur social life in the past decade. His storytelling brilliantly plugs the reader into his characters’ internal life and offers a remarkable insight into the Uyghur experience. He is also successful in his attempt to provide a refined, balanced and thorough scholarly analysis of the current crisis – with carefully chosen words and ethnographic vignettes. Byler's book is therefore a powerful tribute to his informants, Han or Uyghur, and to all those who suffer from Beijing's oppressive policies in the region.
