Xinjiang Year Zero

by Darren Byler (Editor), Ivan Franceschini (Editor), Nicholas Loubere (Editor)

Since 2017, the Chinese authorities have detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in ‘reeducation camps’ in China’s northwestern Xinjiang autonomous region. While the official reason for this mass detention was to prevent terrorism, the campaign has since become a wholesale attempt to remould the ways of life of these peoples—an experiment in social engineering aimed at erasing their cultures and traditions in order to transform them into ‘civilised’ citizens as construed by the Chinese state. Through a collection of essays penned by scholars who have conducted extensive research in the region, this volume sets itself three goals: first, to document the reality of the emerging surveillance state and coercive assimilation unfolding in Xinjiang in recent years and continuing today; second, to describe the workings and analyse the causes of these policies, highlighting how these developments insert themselves not only in domestic Chinese trends, but also in broader global dynamics; and, third, to propose action, to heed the progressive Left’s call since Marx to change the world and not just analyse it.

Genres: China, Politics, Political Science

338 pages, Paperback

First published January 25, 2022

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

[Ben]

I Discovered A Favorite Author

This was a very good book on the Uyghurs.

Byler is an exceptional writer, from the outstanding In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony to the chilling Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City, this book was another knockout by this star author.

Would highly recommend checking out his books.

4.3/5

[Jenny Wang]

A prime example of western perspectives on Xinjiang and the treatment of Uyghur people. It's easy to sift out many biases in the writing, including words like "concentration camp" and "ethnic cleansing". In my opinion, the evidence provided by the Australian authors are not ample enough to declare the nature of the situation as genocide, as many Western scholars believe. But of course, the heavy connotation that comes with the word means that it will inevitably be wielded as a political weapon, whether we like it or not.