Darren Byler's In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony is a vivid, disturbing account of the surveillance and high-tech policing system in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang – where an estimated one million or more Uyghur, Kazakh and Hui Muslim minority citizens have been detained in a network of “re-education” facilities. Byler's task is a difficult one; he is attempting to render visible the human stakes of a social engineering project whose scale is big enough to confound comprehension: the largest internment of an ethno-religious minority since the Second World War, which two successive American administrations have deemed genocide, and which the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHCR) said in late summer 2022 “may constitute crimes against humanity.”

In the Camps describes the internment system and its technological foundations, but its focus is narrative and human, interweaving the stories of detainees and camp workers. The book opens with the story of Vera, a college student at the University of Washington and young Hui Muslim woman detained on a trip home as part of the party-state's directive to “round up everyone who should be rounded up” (p. 26). It shows us Qeyser, a young Uyghur man whose curiosity led him to social media and who escapes abroad after “phone disasters” led those with WhatsApp or other social media content on their devices to be imprisoned; and two other detainees, Kazakh farmer Adilbek and truck driver Erbaqyt, whose experiences of violence and deprivation over months inside Xinjiang's detention facilities reveal the hollowness of the party-state's “re-education” discourse.

The book also powerfully traces stories from individuals who have become complicit and participant in these newly constructed systems of repression – Baimurat, a young Kazakh man who signed on as one of thousands of police contractors hired during the region's security ramp-up, and Qelbinur, a primary school teacher of Uyghur and Uzbek heritage assigned to become an instructor at one of the region's “centralized controlled education/training centers.” The marginal status of these individuals, whose identification marks them as non-Uyghur in a campaign that primarily targets Uyghurs, but who are also not members of the politically trustworthy ethno-political classification scheme, allows them to function as a lens on the dehumanization and violence of the camp system; it shows how the threat of being deemed “two-faced” or disloyal (p. 80) collapses the victim–perpetrator binary, as such citizens are forced to participate in the dehumanization of others to prove a political “trustworthiness” that nonetheless cannot be anything other than precarious.

The strength of In the Camps is in the stories it tells of those who have been pulled into, and made a part of, this repressive architecture in Xinjiang. In a series of unfolding, carefully contextualized narratives, Byler's book focuses primarily – troublingly and powerfully – on the effects that process has had on individuals and their families. It provides detail on the unfolding changes in repressive policy and massive accumulation of technological procurement by which the surveillance state grew up around these individuals, enclosing and ultimately trapping them under the party-state's high-tech gaze, but it embeds that information in and around the narratives of the individuals whose lives are “transformed” by the system's creation. The book compellingly documents the pernicious effects of technological legibility, as the Chinese party-state has used its increased visibility into Uyghur society to penetrate and atomize Uyghur families, villages, and culture more broadly.

Byler also writes about the ways in which “the dehumanization [inmates] experienced was created at least in part in computer labs from Seattle to Beijing” (p. 25). The final chapter focuses on the web of connections that link institutions like the University of Washington, established American tech companies like Microsoft and Oracle, and newer Chinese tech companies like Megvii, who are heavily enmeshed with the Chinese surveillance and policing state through procurement contracts and other “partnerships.” There is a bit of a trade-off here – by waiting until then to fully explain the post-2001 evolution of “counterterrorism” discourse in China, the reader has to wait for the important topline that “in China, terrorism came to mean any activity by ethnoracial others that is perceived as resisting the sovereignty of the state” (p. 129).

As a result, even though the chapter effectively illustrates how transnational flows of knowledge, capital and technology circulate the surveillance capabilities upon which this racialized and repressive camp system is constructed, the powerful stories of human impact that Byler recounts have already unfolded without a full understanding of their global context and global culpability. The ethnographic sensibility of the people who participate in these transnational flows, which makes Byler's accounts of events on the ground inside Xinjiang so powerful, is absent from this larger picture he sketches around the camp system at the end of the book. This is not altogether surprising; it is unrealistic to expect an author to do both in any one volume, let alone one that has already done what Byler accomplishes with skill and intellectual empathy in this short volume. In that sense, In the Camps is both a powerful testament on its own to one of the most disturbing developments in contemporary world politics, and a call for the kind of further scholarship that is needed to fulfil the charge this work clearly illuminates.