THE BIG STORYLIVING
IN A
GHOST
WORLD
T
he Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking,
Muslim ethnic group who are native
to Xinjiang, northwest China. In 2016,
the Communist Party Secretary in Tibet,
Chen Quanguo, was moved to the role of
governor of Xinjiang, where he launched
a mass persecution campaign against
the Uyghurs, seemingly in response to a
handful of terror attacks.
Amnesty International reports that up
to a million Uyghurs have been through
re-education camps, where many are
forced to renounce Islam and sing nation-
alistic songs. In July 2019, the government
claimed, without evidence, that most
detainees from these camps had been
released. Many of these ‘graduates’ have
been transferred into a network of fac-
tories to perform forced labour. Outside
the factories, a high-tech surveillance
state ensures that Uyghur life is ruthlessly
controlled.Yohann Koshy: When did the mass deten-
tion – in what the government calls ‘voca-
tional training centres’ – begin?
Darren Byler: The detention of a million
people has happened over the last three
years. The state decided that they were
going to move from what they called a
‘hard-strike campaign’ against Uyghur
‘separatism, terrorism and extremism’ to
a ‘re-education campaign’. They deter-
mined that around 10 per cent of the
Uyghur population – the total population
is around 12 million – were pre-terrorists
or pre-criminals.
The Chinese authorities think of what
they’re doing as something similar to what
the UK calls Prevent, which is counter-
ing violent extremism before it happens.
Beijing saw Uyghurs turning towards
more pious forms of Islamic practice and
was afraid that this would lead to violent
struggle, although there was little evidenceSince 2016, at least a
million people have been
sent to re-education camps
as part of the Chinese
government’s persecution
of the Uyghur people.
Yohann Koshy speaks to
anthropologist Darren
Byler to find out what
is going on in China’s
northwest province.26 NEW INTERNATIONALIST