Darren Byler theorizes the contemporary Chinese colonization of the Uyghur Muslim minority group in the northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, showing how it has led to what he calls terror capitalism-a configuration of ethno- racialization, surveillance, and mass detention that in this case promotes settler colonialism.
A shocking insight into what is really happening to China's Uyghurs
How China used a network of surveillance to intern over a million people and produce a system of control previously unknown in human history Novel forms of state violence and colonization have been unfolding for years in China's vast northwestern region, where more than a million and a half Uyghurs and others have vanished into internment camps and associated factories. Based on hours of interviews with camp survivors and workers, thousands of government documents, and over a decade of research, Darren Byler, one of the leading experts on Uyghur society and Chinese surveillance systems, uncovers how 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. Charged with "pre-crimes" that sometimes consist only of installing social media apps, detainees were put in camps to "study"--forced to praise the Chinese government, renounce Islam, disavow families, and labor 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 book explores the contemporary colonization of the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, focusing on the mass detention of over one million Uyghurs in "reeducation camps" as part of a broader system termed "terror capitalism." Through ethnographic research in Ürümchi, Byler examines how media, state-imposed cultural values, and Han Chinese settlement contribute to Uyghur dispossession. He highlights the experiences of young Uyghur men facing state violence and their strategies for resilience, revealing the intertwined nature of capitalism and colonial domination in this context.