ABSTRACT
A new system of control, made up of a multi-billion dollar industry of computer-vision technologies, militarized policing, and the mass mobilization of Chinese civil servants and Han industrialists, is attempting to transform Uyghur and other Turkic minority societies in Northwest China.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Uyghur Autonomous Region, this talk describes the history which produced these forms of surveillance and detention, and demonstrates the quotidian experience of their effects in Uyghur and Kazakh societies. It argues that this system of “reeducation” is, in fact, a social engineering system that works in concert with a Chinese form of illiberal capitalism.
As it was implemented, it has the effect of partitioning and radically disempowering those already marginalized within national and global economic systems. It shows that these new automated forms of surveillance, coercive Han-centric education systems, as well as new modes of state-enforced capitalist discipline amplify the power of those who engineer and implement these systems while rapidly disintegrating minority social systems.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Darren Byler is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Asian Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder where he studies the effects of Chinese infrastructure and security technology. His book project titled Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculine Violence in a Chinese City focuses on the effects of digital cultural production, surveillance industries and mass internment in the lives of Uyghur and Han male migrants in the city of Ürümchi, the capital of Chinese Central Asia (Xinjiang). He has published research articles in the Asia-Pacific Journal, Contemporary Islam, Central Asian Survey, the Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art and contributed essays to volumes on ethnography of Islam in China, transnational Chinese cinema and travel and representation. In addition he has provided expert testimony on Uyghur human rights issues before the Canadian Parliament and writes a regular column on Turkic Muslim colonization for the journal SupChina. He also edits the art and politics repository The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which is hosted at livingotherwise.com.