During my years living in Urumchi, I received more than a few warnings from Han acquaintances not to frequent the city's Uyghur neighborhoods. Those areas, they cautioned me, were luan (chaotic) and dangerous. In fact, I spent most of my time in precisely those neighborhoods, where Uyghur friends brought me into a welcoming and stimulating community. Darren Byler's Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City powerfully evokes the richness of this Uyghur social world, even as it details the dehumanizing discourses and the systems of repression that have torn it apart over the last decade.
Byler has in recent years emerged as one the most insightful and prolific chroniclers of the ongoing dispossession of the Uyghur community. In Terror Capitalism, he argues that the convergence of global capitalism, Chinese colonialism, and information technology have produced radical new frontiers of unfreedom in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Drawing on his fieldwork and a wide range of secondary sources, Byler links the Xinjiang crisis to developments reaching far beyond China: the rise of surveillance capitalism, extractive colonial and neocolonial regimes, transnational religious revivals, and Islamophobia.
At the core of what Byler terms “terror capitalism” is a symbiosis between a colonial state and its corporate sector. In the case of Xinjiang, this dynamic has seen the Chinese party-state increasingly reliant on technology firms and private contractors in its efforts to surveil and control Muslim citizens. This arrangement has proved highly lucrative for China's technology and textile sectors and devastating for Xinjiang's native peoples. In this integrated system of repression, state-run internment camps feed directly into forced labor at corporate-owned factories. As Byler points out, material motives are closely interwoven with ideology. Local forms of knowledge and culture in the Uyghur region are devalued and pathologized by the state, which works to replace them with Chinese cultural forms that it regards as modern and superior. Byler's extended discussion of “quality” (Ch. suzhi, Uy. sapa) is particularly insightful and represents a contribution to China studies generally as well as to the study of cultural capital.
One of many tragic elements of the Xinjiang crisis is the Chinese state's use of marginalized Han citizens to repress even more marginalized Uyghur citizens. Much as in Tibet, Han migrant workers in Xinjiang often find a rapid upward mobility denied them elsewhere. Building on the work of Tom Cliff and others, Byler shows how these migrants help staff the metastasizing police state in Xinjiang and often accept state narratives of Uyghurs as dangerous and lacking in “quality.” Byler's rural-urban Han migrants, having been socially and economically disadvantaged in inner China, feel pride in their Xinjiang careers: the rise in their personal stations and relative privilege is bound up with their contribution to a national project of “developing the west.”
Terror Capitalism examines how the repression of the last decade unfolded differently in urban and rural Xinjiang. In the villages, a passbook system confines most Uyghurs to the counties where they are registered, while state policy pushes farmers into debt and reorders their lives around endless political education sessions. Partly as a result of these conditions, many rural Uyghurs of the younger generation have been drawn to the city by the promise of greater freedom and a modern lifestyle of consumption. While the consumption has been real enough, the freedom has proved fleeting or illusory. The city was a trap for most Uyghur migrants, who found the political walls closing in on them over the course of the 2010s. Ever-intensifying discrimination and surveillance pushed Uyghur migrants to the edges of society, and often out of the cities—particularly the capital, Urumchi—altogether. Countless thousands were sent back to their villages; many disappeared into internment camps.
While the first three chapters of Terror Capitalism outline the efforts of the Chinese state, its corporate collaborators, and its civilian contractors to control and ultimately erase Uyghur communal life, the book's final three chapters bear eloquent witness to the ways in which that communal life resisted erasure and continued to offer Uyghur migrants support and meaning. With a keen eye for detail, Byler conveys the warp and weft of life in Urumchi's migrant communities. A significant contribution is his finely drawn portrait of religious life, both state-sanctioned and unsanctioned. As Byler shows, the rhythms of Islamic practice—Friday prayers at the mosque, daily prayers in the neighborhood, Quranic study sessions with friends—helped Uyghur migrants organize their individual and communal lives even when excluded from the urban mainstream.
Byler argues that the global Islamic revival, intensifying state repression in Xinjiang, and the spread of internet use in the region helped inspire a resurgence of piety in the Uyghur community. His fieldwork convincingly demonstrates how male Uyghur migrants used smartphones and social networking apps to deepen their Islamic practice, construct modern urban identities, and, in some cases, make a living. Byler does sometimes overstate the ideological impact of this technological shift, as in his assertion that social media enabled Uyghurs “to realize that they were part of the global Islamic world and the broader Turkic community” (p. 39); these ideas were commonplace well before social media became ubiquitous in Xinjiang.
Byler poignantly recounts the power of close friendships for Uyghur migrant men in Urumchi. Distant from their home villages and marginalized in the metropolis, these men found solace in the camaraderie of men from similar backgrounds who shared their ambitions, disappointments, and traumas. The friendships that Byler describes occasionally crossed ethnic lines, as with the Han photographer who employed his craft to bear witness to life in Urumchi's Uyghur shantytowns. By foregrounding the sustaining force of friendship in the face of precarity and oppression, Byler moves beyond familiar themes of persecution, suffering, and resistance in Xinjiang and helps reveal vistas of survival, healing, and solidarity.
The text would have been well served by a bit more historical contextualization. In particular, Byler dwells only briefly on the ways that decades of socialist rule in Xinjiang set the stage for contemporary ethnic relations in the region. Another notable lacuna is the book's lack of engagement with Uyghur-language scholarship and social criticism. Public intellectuals like Yalqun Rozi (now imprisoned) and Eset Sulayman (now in exile) have been influential among precisely the generation of young Uyghur men Byler focuses on, and their voices would have added to this volume's already rich discussion. The book would also have benefited from more careful attention to language. A number of Uyghur terms are translated idiosyncratically or incorrectly; in the epigraph, for example, ana yurtung (“your motherland”) is glossed as “your mother's home.” Other terms are haphazardly transcribed; I could not make heads or tails of baha berme yoq (p. 88), for instance.
None of these quibbles diminish Byler's remarkable contribution to our understanding of contemporary settler colonialism, the lifeways of Uyghur internal migrants, and the ongoing catastrophe in the Uyghur homeland. His richly theorized study provides readers access to a way of life largely invisible in Chinese state sources and infrequently represented in Uyghur official culture. In the years since Byler's initial fieldwork, this way of life has been all but extinguished by the Chinese state—Uyghur migrant neighborhoods bulldozed, Urumchi's social tapestry shredded by mass internments. Yet the party-state's radical efforts to disrupt Uyghur continuity will ultimately prove futile. As Byler has so effectively and movingly shown, no state can keep a community from constructing new forms of social meaning at the margins.
