How China built a network of surveillance to detain over a million
people and produce a system of control previously unknown in human
history
A
cruel and high-tech form of colonization has been unfolding over the
past decade in China’s vast northwestern region of Xinjiang, where
as many as a million and a half Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Hui have
vanished into high-security camps and associated factories. It is the
largest internment of a religious minority since World War II.
Darren
Byler, one of the world's leading experts on Uyghur society and
Chinese surveillance, draws on a decade of research on the region,
examining thousands of government documents and conducting many hours
of interviews with both detainees and camp workers. Byler tells the
stories of people like U.S. college student Vera, police contractor
Baimurat, camp instructor Qelbinur, Kazakh farmer Adilbek, and truck
driver Erbakyt, who show how a sophisticated network of facial
surveillance, voice recognition, and smartphone tracking technology,
built by private corporations, enabled authorities to blacklist
Muslims for “pre-crimes” that sometimes consist only of having
installed social media apps. Their stories narrate a process of
surveillance overwhelming life, and push Byler to examine how
technological tools that are being built in locations from Seattle to
Beijing are being adapted to create forms of unfreedom for vulnerable
people around the world.
