92 The Economist October 30th 2021
Books & arts
HumanrightsinChinaXinjiang blues
B
etween the1870s and 1940s foreigners
published a glut of accounts of Xin
jiang, the vast territory that is at the centre
of Eurasia but perennially on the fringes of
China. Stories of sand and snow sold back
home because they were exotic, but they
were written because Xinjiang was
increasingly connected to the world, ex
plains James Millward, an eminent West
ern scholar of the region. The territory had
always been a melting pot for peoples and a
test for advancing empires.
Now Xinjiang has the world’s attention
once more, this time as a site of horrors. In
recent years the Chinese Communist Party
has detained more than 1m Uyghurs (an in
digenous group who make up 45% of Xin
jiang’s population), Kazakhs and other
mainly Muslim minorities in prison
camps. Party officials claim they are re
educating “extremists” and help Uyghurs
train for better jobs. Observers say they
preside over a crime against humanity. In
the West, the plight of the Uyghurs has
prompted an explosion of books and arti
cles—and many angry Chinese rebuttals.
Two books by Americans offer complementarywaysofunderstandingwhathas
been happening. “In the Camps” by Darren
Byler, an anthropologist, considers the de
tention of the Uyghurs through the eyes of
former inmates and camp workers. Mr
Millward’s weightier tome, a revised ver
sion of “Eurasian Crossroads”, first pub
lished in 2006, sets the developments
within 4,000 years of history.
Mr Byler’s book is more typical of the re
cent flood of material which documents
life inside the camps. Seeking to emulate
the work of the Italian writer and Holo
caust survivor Primo Levi, he narrows in
on the mundane details of internment
which, taken together, dehumanise the detainees. The inmates’ heads are shaved.
The women are forced to take the contra
ceptive pill because the “school” cannot
provide enough sanitary towels. They
perch on plastic stools for so long that
some detainees’ intestines fall down. In
their prison cells, tvs blare hours of foot
age from Xi Jinping’s tours. On occasion,
they tell the inmates to sing.
The voices of detainees filter through
the pages. Adilbek, a Kazakh farmer, recalls
being struck by guards, often as a punish
ment for not speaking Mandarin or for
stepping out of line. Yet sometimes the
beatings were random: “They called us
livestock. Animals.”
A broader ideology undergirds these
stories. Mr Byler shows how China uses the
rhetoric of the global “war on terror” to try
to justify the persecution. But his principal
focus is technology. The camps, though
shocking, are only the most extreme appli
cation of digital surveillance used by other
governments around the world, Mr Byler
argues. Similar technologies help America
hem migrants into camps on its southern
border and allow India to stage communi
cations blackouts in Kashmir. He suggests
that “nearly all major us tech firms...have
been entangled in Chinese surveillance
technology development.” They profit by
refining what traps people.
By contrast, Mr Millward writes of the
camps as the unhappy coda to a story of
jostling empires and dynasties. Readers
unfamiliar with Asian history may strug
gle to tell the Xiongnu from the TokhariTwo new books shed light on the plight of the Uyghurs→Alsointhissection
93 VanGogh’srejectedmasterpiece
94 Johnson:Theartofdeciphering
95 GeertMakonmodernEurope
95 Ferdinand Mount’s new novelIn the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal
Colony.By Darren Byler. Columbia Global
Reports; 159 pages; $15.99. To be published in
Britain in February by Atlantic Books; £12.99
Eurasian Crossroads: A History of
Xinjiang (Revised and Updated).By James
Millward. Hurst; 536 pages; £16.99. To be
published in America in December by
Columbia University Press; $35