Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City

by Darren Byler

In Terror Capitalism anthropologist Darren Byler theorizes the contemporary Chinese colonization of the Uyghur Muslim minority group in the northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang. He shows that the mass detention of over one million Uyghurs in “reeducation camps” is part of processes of resource extraction in Uyghur lands that have led to what he calls terror capitalism—a configuration of ethnoracialization, surveillance, and mass detention that in this case promotes settler colonialism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the regional capital Ürümchi, Byler shows how media infrastructures, the state’s enforcement of “Chinese” cultural values, and the influx of Han Chinese settlers contribute to Uyghur dispossession and their expulsion from the city. He particularly attends to the experiences of young Uyghur men—who are the primary target of state violence—and how they develop masculinities and homosocial friendships to protect themselves against gendered, ethnoracial, and economic violence. By tracing the political and economic stakes of Uyghur colonization, Byler demonstrates that state-directed capitalist dispossession is coconstructed with a colonial relation of domination.

Genres: China, Politics, Nonfiction, Asia, Society, Anthropology, Islam

280 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 2, 2021

About the author

Darren Byler is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. He writes a regular column for SupChina and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Noema Magazine, Prospect Magazine, Guernica, ChinaFile, as well as many academic journals. He received his PhD in anthropology at the University of Washington.

Reviews

[Kayli · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best academic books I have ever read. I truly recommend it to everyone even outside of non-academic contexts, for its content is that important for everyone to grasp an informed understanding of the dispossession of the Uyghurs in Northwest China. I tabbed this book with dozens of colour-coded stickies, wrote notes in the margins, and underlined my favourite parts. I'm not going to attempt to summarize the book or else this would turn into a long essay--I just highly encourage you to read it yourself!

I have read a great amount of literature related to Xinjiang and the Uyghurs, but this by far was the most accessible and interdisciplinary. Dr. Darren Byler is a social anthropologist who has conducted over twenty-four months of ethnographic research in the Uyghur region in Northwest China between 2011 and 2018, and is a scholar committed to decolonial and feminist critiques of global capitalism. Through his work, he tells the stories of his Uyghur friends to shed light upon the violence of colonialism they are currently facing--and more specifically how this feeds into the a "contemporary techno-political capitalist system" under the CCP's (Chinese Communist Party's) People's War on Terror.

He looks also at how the extensive digital surveillance systems enacted in Xinjiang serve also as a system of "digital enclosure" in conjunction with unfree labour. You may wonder now--'What is terror capitalism, exactly? Is it similar to racial neoliberalism?
Very similar logics.

For some background, many Muslim or Turkic-speaking minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) (or Northwest China) such as Uyghurs and Kazakhs have been historically subjected to oppressive practices enacted by the Chinese state. While assimilatory in nature, these securitization measures and policies the state seeks to justify via labels of 'de-radicalization' or 'counter-terrorism' have stemmed from an Islamophobic ideology co-opted from the 'Global War on Terror' in the aftermath of 9/11. This narrative permeates beyond Western nations' criminalization of those appearing 'Muslim' and informs a logic employed by other nations--in this case, the CCP--that normalizes oppressive and racist policies in the name of 'national security'. The eradication of Uyghur culture is motivated through a narrative of counter-terrorism and abolishing 'extremist ideology' that the state claims has infected the culture. (See Sean Roberts: The War on the Uyghurs).

"What happens to the value of Uyghur lives as lucrative state contracts are given to settler corporations to build and deploy technologies that surveil and manage Uyghur men and other populations? How can the implementation of this system be thought of as a broader process of dispossession? Finally, how does terror capitalism use systems of material and digital enclosure to hold targeted groups in place and produce new forms of self-discipline and labor for private manufacturers?"

Dr. Byler's coinage of "terror capitalism" stems from the Black Marxist scholar Cedric Robinson's term of "racial capitalism". It's difficult to pin a short one-sentence definition of terror capitalism, but it could be defined as a system produced through "digital enclosure, ethno-racialized devaluation, and material possession". Uyghurs have become objects of terror capitalism through a state-funded surveillance system that rationalizes this investment in policing and securitization through the 'justification' of countering terrorism. Through the disposession of Uyghur land and their bodies, and the incarceration of millions--the CCP is attempting to transform the ethno-racial Other into a controlled and productive work.

Dr. Byler draws attention to how Cedric Robinson and other scholars specializing in decolonization view ethno-racial capitalism, or racial neoliberalism, in the 'liberal' West as:

"...an ongoing process through which capital accumulation naturalizes the production of difference, threat, and danger. They argue that, throughout the history of capitalism, ethno-racial differences have been used to justify the dispossession, domination, and elimination of minorities through a variety of racialized forms of enclosure and control ranging from property laws and education systems to criminal justice and war…racial capitalism and settler colonialism have been co-created through state-enabled forms of dispossession."

Therefore, the relationship between racial capitalism and settler colonialism is acknowledged in scholarly literature, and China's turn to its own imperial-colonial project is no different. Readers of decolonial scholars may also be familiar with Glen Coulthard's work. Some contemporary scholarship has generally viewed dispossession as referring solely to the loss of property, but decolonial scholars such as Coulthard and Byler view disposession in colonial contexts as also encompassing the the relationship of domination that dispossesses the autonomy and self-determination of a Native people's way of life.

Dr. Byler articulates what this means in the context of the Uyghurs' homeland:

"...[it] involves forcing them into a new social order, transforming their land into a commodity, their traditional labour into wage labour, their consumption into a new regime of value, and their thoughts into imposed ideological frameworks. It means that their lives must be integrated with the market; their desires must be routed through the cultured thought of the metropole.."

What is notable especially about this book are the integrated real-life stories and testimonies of the Uyghur friends Dr. Byler has met and befriended. His book and research has an intentional focus upon young Uyghur men as their shape their masculinity amid ongoing dispossession and their resulting anticolonial homosocial friendships they rely upon. My heart broke repeatedly reading their anguish and frustrations, especially knowing that most of them have 'disappeared' into the internment centres.

Overall, I highly recommend this for anyone holding interests in decolonial work, labour, surveillance capitalism and state surveillance, & Islamophobic policies of incarceration--and of course for anyone that wants to gain a better understanding of Uyghur life in Northwest China.

Darren Byler: "My hope is that reading these stories will allow the reader to sit with my friends and share their grief and rage if only for a moment." (Preface, xvii).

If you're reading this, Dr. Byler, we are so fortunate to have you at SFU and for your ongoing work and advocacy.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a powerful read.

Byler is an excellent writer and fascinating journalist.

The book is deeply unsettling but very important.

Would recommend.

I look forward to reading Darren's other book In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony, very soon.

4.8/5

[Kaleb Wulf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China. China's past semicolonization has functioned as a foundational myth of colonial wounding. This moral wound shapes the aspirations of the nation. By promising a return to precolonial civilizational purity, as in other former colonies, it pushes state authorities and their proxies to reach for "a future where the healing of the colonial wound can only be complete by achieving a level of consumption and lifestyle 'like the West'". At the same time, the wounding attempts to mask Chinese colonization of Uyghurs and others, and obscure the way the rhetoric of terrorism allows ethnic difference to be racialized, by offering a patina of anti-imperialist purity. Because China was partially colonized in the past, this rhetoric suggests, it is impossible for China to colonize others in the future. Instead, in a manner similar to Japanese justifications for their colonization of parts of China and Taiwan, the colonization of Uyghurs is presented as an act of rescue.

These foundational myths continue to be crucial to understanding the way structural violence has been couched as domestic or internal national policies by China in Tibet and Xinjiang, Russia in Chechnya, Israel in Palestine, and elsewhere. A framing of colonial processes as domestic disputes or ethnic conflicts that are disengaged with the standpoint of the colonized obfuscates the structures of power that are at work in these locations across Asia. What such accounts ignore is the possibility of new sequences of capitalist ethno-racialization that are not generated directly by Western powers in places like Kashmir and Xinjiang, yet are comparable to the institution of Apartheid in South Africa or the violent segregation of Palestine. Since Han citizens themselves have been the subject of European and American racism, many scholars are reluctant to describe the process of Uyghur dispossession as a product of ethno-racialization. Yet the Chinese discourse of colonial humiliation directed at China by the West has also become a technology of self-valorization and a way of masking state capital-directed social violence toward a minority other

Finally, a left critique of China that doesn't immediately devolve into denial or apologia. Great read, paints Han Chinese and the CCP as more complicated than what mainstream sources would have you believe, but more complicit than what your average twitter communist would counter.

[Weiling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foreword: In late November 2022, the Chinese public shocked the world with intense street protests nationwide that had not been seen since 1989. Triggered by the tragic loss of 10 lives in an apartment fire in Urumqi and the fact that the tragedy could have been avoided had the country's zero-Covid policy left open a slim but vital evacuation pathway, the protestors directed their anger not only at the reality of lockdown, but at the state leadership that thirstily took advantage of the public health crisis to intensify biopolical monitoring over the population. The technological sophistication of movement tracking, facial recognition, biometric collection, and the algorithms-aided prediction of everyday behavior connects the Han Chinese areas to the hinterland labor camps in Xinjiang, from which arose a capitalist economy through the ethno-racialization of Uyghurs and the "War on Terror" rhetoric imported from post-9/11 US.

While western media scrambled to report on the rare eruption of Chinese protests -- many critics struggled to find the right tone and focus as empathizing with an anti-lockdown campaign would risk lending anti-vaccine right-wingers a convenient source to attack liberalism -- the connection between the street scene and what Darren Byler calls the "recent global developments in capitalist frontier making" is completely lost. The obsession with the "China crisis" once again evades the foundational problem of capitalism: the construction of race in frontier-making agendas. Seen in this light, what was even more sensational (if on a lesser scale) of the protests than reinvigorating the memory of 1989 was the connection drawn by a minority of the Han protestors between themselves and the imprisoned Uyghurs, a grave connection conditioned in the colonial-capitalist violence of the penal state and its necroeconomy (the economy of death).

Review -

In the short-lived moments (1990s-early 2000s) of limited autonomy of self-fashioning, the Uyghur and Kazakh homeland in Northwest China teemed with renewed desires for cosmopolitanism. One such desire, looking east to China's Pacific coast, was to find ways to join the mainstream Han-Chinese middle class through education. Another, looking west to Central Asia and the Middle East, sought connections with the global Islamic contemporaneity. This narrow window of "relaxed" governing was sandwiched between the sweeping socialist revolution and Maoist multiculturalism from the 1950s to the 70s, and a tightening labor and affective expropriation on the ground of killing "religious extremism" in its cradle starting from the 2010s. Darren Byler's Terror Capitalism focuses on the contemporary wing of Han settlement in Xinjiang. It analyzes the high-tech-aided devaluation and expropriation of the land-based Uyghur Muslim social reproduction with an empathetic focus on the main target of the "People's War on Terror" circa 2014: the rural male Uyghur body.

Roughly the size of Alaska, Xinjiang -- literally "new territory" -- stands at the pivotal location between China, Russia, and Central Asia and is historically regarded as a key passage of trade between Asia and Europe known from the Chinese end as the Silk Road. With trade came the orbits of multiple religions, but it was Islam that stayed and prospered the most. Xinjiang's religious and economic connectedness with the Middle East and Turkey remains to be a threat to the totalizing governance of Han-dominated China, with the potential of destabilizing the Eurasian trade pipeline on which a significant part of contemporary Chinese economy is built. Following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, the independence of the Central Asian republics both posed greater challenges of political stability from the "rising tensions regarding Uyghur desires for greater self-determination" and opened "new zones for building Chinese influence" with a significantly undermined rivalry from the Soviet empire that no longer exists. Having a thorough and undisrupted control of the Uyghur population, not to physically terminate, but to transform it through social engineering into a human warehouse of disposable but highly disciplined and productive workforce that some Han officials call "the carrier of economic stability," could secure for the Chinese state an advantageous access to the Eurasian trade corridor and rich natural resources.

What is immensely disturbing about the penal island that Xinjiang has become in comparison to other multi- and cross-national expropriation of racialized labor a nation-state has committed is the ways in which state capital and private interests are combined to form and popularize a nationalist settler mindset. In what may seem a paradox, the private Chinese tech enterprises involved in producing speculative venture capital are simultaneously driven by state capital to expand their market and not always pursuing immediate profitization. In other words, the personalization of ethnocentric statism, consisting of lowest-level migrant police contractors equipped with "smart" surveillance apparatuses, extends Maoist mobilization of class struggle to techno-capitalist frontier-making that eats into Uyghur social reproduction. This scheme, euphemized by the title of "Aid Xinjiang," is to draw near an "imagined future of Chinese cultural homogeneity," in which all economic individualization, Han or otherwise, melts into state capital.

The "user experience" -- as Byler bitterly calls it -- of the multi-scalar Chinese capitalist-colonial system ranges from forced dining of non-halal food and the ban of Uyghur language to property laws and education systems, from ban on religious activity and outfits to police brutality and mass incarceration. Practicing varied forms of carceral urbanism and banishment, the Han Chinese settler colonial agenda has managed to pack the centuries-long sufferings of Native Americans and African slaves into a short decade or two. With ostensible infrastructure and cheap and redundant human labor of surveillance, the material and digital enclosure has created "an unfree proletarianization of Muslim populations and at the same time institutionalizes a new social order." What is hellish and apocalyptic to the minority inmates is built to be a haven for lower-level Han migrant entrepreneurs to leave behind the class-based discrimination they experience in the coastal metropolises.

It is worth noting that the new (post-1980s) arrivals of the fortune-driven Han settlers form a new socioeconomic norm that excludes the older generation of Han migrants, pejoratively called the "blind wanderers," who followed the Maoist People’s Construction and Production Corps to Xinjiang in the 1950s. While the latter cared to learn the Uyghur language and culture and foster genuine inter-ethnic friendship in the absence of class difference, the former is mainly incentivized by the original accumulation of capital. But even the most Uyghur-friendly blind wanderers of Han origin can only come close to, but never reach, the epistemic gist of Uyghur musapir (traveler). Nonetheless, a decolonial friendship can still be cultivated between the blind wanderers and the musapirs to form what Byler calls a "minor politics": an intimate solidarity in everyday life between the colonized subjects and the minority within the ethno-racial majority who drift away from the ideology of supremacy.

Rarely is an academic writing so full of compassion, but Byler did it, and in an intentional gesture of decolonizing institutionalized knowledge production, of ways of being human. As he later reflected on the time he, a white male, built friendship over the years with the Uyghur men he interviewed and helplessly watched them disappeared one after another into the reeducation camps, Byler resonated with the sentiment that "anthropology is the work of mourning." Inspired by decolonial Native and feminist scholarship, his research does not overlook the toxic patriarchy and masculinity Uyghur men impose on Uyghur women. But neither does he let his interpretation of the gendered social reproduction of Uyghur lifeways be overriden by the universalist liberal feminism that makes abstract all historical contexts and, as a result, reinforces the colonial agenda of knowledge production. Any future study of Uyghur women in the camps or the larger unfree enclosure cannot achieve the necessary contextualization of Uyghur femininities without a historically specific interpretation of the critically important homosocial bonding between Uyghur men that saves at least some of them from losing the last bit of sanity and dignity. Before asking "what happened to Uyghur/Muslim (here fill in any "disposable/replaceable" ethnicity) women?" one should repeat after Lila Abu-Lughod, "Do Muslim Women Need Saving?" The masterminds and common "soldiers" of the Global/People's War on Terror have confirmed.

[Tre · Rating 2 out of 5]

hasbara 🤡

[Xun Che · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciate books like this which bring alternative narratives other than the two mainstreams voices- 1. Western media accusing Chinese government's dealing within the framework of a capitalism value and 2. Chinese state-run media defending the government they represent. As a Han Chinese, I was taught with Marxism ideology at school since I was in preliminary school but reading this book gave me the opportunity to learn how to explain what is happening in my own country from a Marxist perspective for the first time.

[FluffyNyctea]

I was supposed to write a review for this book but ended up not being able to write a single word about anything for months. I can’t write without hope, and for a few months, this book made me feel hopeless. I couldn’t even touch it — its smooth cover somehow felt so heavy, so bottomless. When your time and space are subtracted, when the very possibility of social reproduction is taken away from you, when a terrifying frontier becomes the condition of your existence…. Where is hope?

Byler writes of homosocial care — ‘life and liver’ friendships between Uyghur men that offer an alternative version of subjectivation, one beyond state violence and economic productivity. When grief and rage become stories shared between friends, and when they become the fleshiness of storytelling — after all, ‘[i]t’s about rhythm and breadth control (pp. 155)’, they form an intersubjective framing of trust, they perform fragments of decolonial masculinities.

Byler also contrasts this ethical and experiential intracorporeality - this sliver of hope - with the sheer scale of dispossession, domination, and occupation. How could you insist on the radical alterity of anticolonial friendships when your friends, or yourself, are literally disappeared, tortured, killed?

I couldn’t imagine a way out. I couldn’t think of a way to cheat death. But now, half a year later, I can’t stop thinking about Byler’s ethnographic method. He read books with his Uyghur friends. They felt the textures of those books, and shared their feelings. That’s where anticolonial friendships are made. What if dispossession, domination, and occupation simply can’t imagine, and thus can’t touch, differently scripted modalities? What if the worlds that books create inhabit a fugitive modality beyond colonialism? And how do we connect fugitivity back to the reclamation of land?

[Sense Hofstede · Rating 5 out of 5]

A moving act of academic witnessing.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

這本書斷斷續續看了大半年。偏學術型，很多珍貴的視角，有助於理解維吾爾的問題。

[L · Rating 3 out of 5]

引言部分甚長，譯得也差，很晦澀。人物故事或奇遇吸引，但大丟理論書包令人反胃，忍著才讀得下去。譯筆生硬，不算自然，作者丟的學術詞彙太多太深，譯者沒有加註，影響閱讀感覺。現在是六分理論三四分故事，調整做八分故事兩分理論就可。
簡言之，很有空才好看。