Fighting for survival in China’s high-tech penal colony

A forensic examination of China’s bid to subjugate citizens it regards as ‘disease-carrying insects’ reveals the drive for profit at its core.

In its obsessional quest to separate Xinjiang’s Muslim minorities from the broader Han population, the Chinese state has employed pernicious sophisticated technological systems.

This month sees China making sporting history, as Beijing becomes the first city ever to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games. Many western governments are focusing the world’s attention on a more urgent political matter though: China’s human rights abuses.

The United States, Britain, Australia, and Canada all announced diplomatic boycotts of the Winter Olympics, which kicked off on February 4, and end this weekend. In late January the French parliament adopted anon-binding resolution “officially [recognising] the violence perpetrated by the People’s Republic of China against the Uighurs as constituting crimes against humanity and genocide”. In February 2021 the Dutch and Canadian parliaments made similar declarations.

The international community accuses the Chinese government of detaining over a million Muslims in re-education camps. Some detainees come from Kazakh and Hui ethnic minorities. But most are Uighur, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group of 12 million people residing in China’s autonomous northwestern region of Xinjiang. China categorically refutes these allegations, claiming it’s carrying out a “vocational training program”.

In the Campstells a less sanguine story. Darren Byler begins with a basic historical oversight.

Bing Dwen Dwen, the official mascot of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, strives to present a cute and cuddly Chinese face to the world.

During the early decades of the People’s Republic, Han citizens (the largest ethnic group in China) remained largely isolated from Uighurs in Xinjiang. But during the 1990s, when China shifted towards an export-driven market economy, cultural and political privileges the Uighur population previously enjoyed in Xinjiang gradually dissolved. Cotton and tomatoes became the pillars of the Xinjiang economy. The search for these commodities drew millions of Han settlers into the Uighur-majority areas of the region. The Han settler population received preferential treatment in the Uighur majority areas. Widespread job discrimination, land seizures, and increased government control of religious practice followed. So too did violent protests from Uighurs. In late 2013 and early 2014, suicide attacks carried out by a small group of Uighur extremists targeted Han civilians in cites like Beijing, Kunming, and Ürümchi. By 2017 China's President, Xi Jinping, publicly declared a so-called “People’s War on Terror” against 15 million Chinese Muslims in Xinjiang. The entire Uighur, Kazakh and Hui population were suddenly being described by Chinese state media as “disease-carrying insects who needed to be exterminated”.

Byler points to over 300 camps that are presently in operation across the Xinjiang region, where detainees are deprived of fundamental human rights, such as freedom of speech, and basic human dignity. The author backs up those claims with factual evidence: government bid contracts, satellite imagery, and a whole host of interviews from camp survivors. Ironically, most of the low-level guards in these camps are Kazakhs and Uighurs, who are supervised by their Han counterparts.

“They [never] treated us as though we are real human beings, and called us animals and beat us,” one camp survivor recalls. These interviews make for distressing reading. But they also add significant weight to the book’s central argument: persecuting China’s Muslims is driven by profit and ideology.

Chinese flags on a road leading to a facility believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. Picture: AFP

Pace 2017, the Chinese state awarded an estimated $65bn in private contracts, and a further $160bn to government entities in Xinjiang. Most of that money has been invested in building detention facilities, backed up by state of the art digital security.

Byler’s writing lacks the flare and flamboyance that, say, a seasoned foreign correspondent might bring to the narrative. But he’s no snooty academic either. He speaks fluent Uighur, has visited the region several times, and some of his close friends have even gone missing in the camps.

The author clearly has an emotional connection to his subject matter. But he doesn’t allow his judgment to be clouded by bias subjectivity. His attention to detail is excellent. The book draws on nine years of ethnographic research. This includes verified text messages from internal government officials in China, leaked reports from the Chinese police, and testimonies from whistleblowers across the Chinese tech industry. The findings are shocking and harrowing.

State documents the author cites verify how 10 per cent of prisoners were sent to camps in Xinjiang because they allegedly broke “violations of family planning regulations”. Women of child-bearing age who refuse to submit to “surgical sterilisation” are told by Chinese state officials they will not be added to the list of “trustworthy” citizens. Those reproductive restrictions have seen birthrates among Uighurs drop by 80 per cent in some areas of Southern Xinjiang. Technically, this qualifies as both crimes against humanity, and, genocide – according to their definitions in the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is legally bound by the Rome Statute. But since Chinais not a member, the ICC say they cannot investigate alleged accusations of genocide and human rights abuses committed by China.

A screengrab of a video showing blindfolded and shackled Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang Province. Picture: YouTube

Byler does not focus much on the international legal implications of the camps in Xinjiang.

The assistant professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada,defines China’s ideological-based correctional political system as “the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II”.

Interestingly, the book carefully avoids using the terms crimes against humanity, and, genocide, although China’s persecution of its Muslim minority does share many similarities with Nazi Germany’s treatment of Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust, the author stresses. Namely: a state-sponsored totalitarian system of prison camps and workhouses that intentionally seeks to demonise and subjugate one specific ethnic group.

In the Campscontinually turns to the poignant words of Italian Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi, for wisdom and empathy. Byler is keen to emphasise, however, why the Xinjiang camps are a historical anomaly.

A Uighur woman protests before a group of paramilitary police in Urumqi, Xinjiang.

In its obsessional quest to separate Xinjiang’s Muslim minorities from the broader Han population, the Chinese state has employed pernicious sophisticated technological systems – such as algorithm tinkerers, face recognition designers, DNA mappers, and smartphone tracking systems.

“While comprehensive totalitarian systems have targeted ethnic minorities in the previous century, this is the first [large scale effort] of a camp system to emerge in the era of digital surveillance,” the sociocultural anthropologist concludes.

JP O’Malley is a freelance book critic and journalist 

In the Camps: Life in China’s High-tech Penal Colony 

By Darren Byler

Atlantic, Global Politics

160pp, $21.10