This one was not for me.
Thank you NetGalley for providing a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

An essential and very important read, for people to be interested and to understand the presence of surveillance system affects our lives and civil liberties which is ever emerging a overall global issue.
With the acual accounts of and stories of Uyghurs and Kazakhs who have been sent to reeducation camps set in Northwest China in recent years.
The surveillance state in China and the horrors of it are a heartbreaking reality which everyone should care about.
This was a brilliantly written account to serve the plight of the people in the camps.
Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for giving the eARC in exchange of an honest feedback.

I received this (months ago) from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was excellently written. It’s more focused on individuals than the big (horrifying) picture as written in The Perfect Police State by Geoffrey Cain, and that’s not a bad thing.

From the very beginning with the introduction of Vera Zhou, we know we’re in for trouble. All she did was walk a little too far beyond her neighborhood, and now she’s in a reeducation camp.

“The guards told her that she was not in jail, but rather at a “centralized controlled education training center.” The term they used for centralized (jizhong), can also mean “concentrated,” a connection that was not lost on Vera. She told me, “I learned almost right away that it was a kind of concentration camp.””

Here, she and millions of other minorities - Kazakhs, Huis, Uyghurs, among others - are held. Packed in tightly into cells too small to hold them all. Bright lights 24 hours a day. Not enough food or water, and required to sit on hard plastic stools all day, without moving. Their classes consist of learning Chinese, and Chinese national songs (which they are required to sing in order to “earn” their food). Beatings are normal. Showers are sparing. Cameras cover every inch of the facility.

None of this is particularly new information to me - some of the particulars of what happened in the camps were brand new and horrifying - but it didn’t really break new ground for me after reading Perfect Police State. However, this was still a riveting read, because as opposed to Cain’s more technical book, In the Camps really focused on the people. We even get an interview with one of the reeducation teachers, which is very fascinating.

We always say “never again” in reference to the Holocaust, but here it’s happening again, right under our noses. Byler makes the people of this genocide real, instead of nameless, faceless statistics.

The emergence of new technology is almost always met with skepticism mixed with a sense of precaution. Humanity has gained exponential amounts of progress and benefits from innovative individuals, but it’s become all too easy for the technology to be turned on the people most vulnerable to groups in power. This collection of experiences shared on the incarceration of religious and faith-positive people in China shows just how awful these technologies can be when used to enforce an agenda based on fear and prejudice.

I have put off writing this review for a while because I’m not even really sure how to start it. There is a lot I could say, and a lot I want to say, and I know I won’t be able to say any of it here. This book left me with some very heavy thoughts, and it’s taken some time to process it. It’s horrifying, thought provoking, and uncomfortable, but also really important.

What amazed me, perhaps more than almost anything else, is just how much information Darren Byler packed into 150 pages. Perhaps it is because I am an editor of speculative fiction books, which are known for being absolutely massive, but 150 pages is almost nothing to me these days. I was honestly a little disappointed by the size of the book until I started reading it and realized that the small page count in no way means a lack of content, or an overview (my two concerns with shorter nonfiction books). What is included here has been carefully chosen for maximum impact and the substantial information it provides. 150 pages doesn’t leave a lot of room for extrapolation or navel-gazing on the author’s part. Here, we get a book with all the fat trimmed off.

In the Camps starts with a bang. A student from the University of Washington went home to visit family, and ended up accidentally straying outside of the zone she was allowed to be in. She was caught on camera, and subsequently arrested by a host of police officers, and then sent to the camps where primarily Uyghers, Hui, and Kazakhs are taken for “re-education”. From this point, Byler takes readers on a whirlwind journey of these camps, where many people are arrested under the shadowy umbrella of “pre-crimes”, and shows readers how technology is used to target certain populations.

Byler has interviewed numerous people to write this book, all of them free and safe when he interviews them. Through their eye-witness accounts, slowly the picture of the police state, the technological overlords, and life in the camps becomes painfully clear. While there are obvious advantages to technology, for those in the ethnic and cultural groups being suppressed, technology is a weapon, and I felt the slice of that blade keenly as I read this book.

It starts, as most things do, with surveillance. In Xinjiang, all individuals who belong to suspect ethnic groups are brought in for a “health check”. At this health check, pictures, iris scans, DNA samples, fingerprints and the like are taken by authorities. But it doesn’t stop there. Cell phones are procured, and information on them downloaded, including pictures and address books, social media interactions are monitored and the like. It all goes into a massive database where all this information is kept and can be extracted by those with access in less than a second. If, for example, someone is caught on camera straying from their neighborhood, and their face is pinged in the database, they will, like the woman at the start of this review, be arrested on the grounds of “pre-criminal activity.”

Chinese state authorities have circulated lists detailing signs of “Islamic extremism” with things on them as mundane as having religious content on their phone or downloading WhatsApp. These lists function as a sort of vague umbrella which can be used to justify almost any arrest of any individual. The ultimate goal here is, of course, to break these ethnic groups free from their identities and make them truly Chinese.

Then, they are brought to the camps, where they are forced to share beds, sit in re-education classes where they learn patriotic songs, and must speak in Mandarin Chinese, a language many do not know. Numerous cameras in each cell records their every movement. Beatings happen regularly and often without reason. They are allowed to shower once a week. Food is given, but the amounts of it are small, so hunger is rampant. The lights in the cells never turn off, which makes sleeping difficult. If prisoners are released, they are sent to their own neighborhood, where neighbors spy on them and monitor their activity. Added to that, anyone can be re-arrested at any time for any reason, so while they might be free from the camps, they are never truly "free" again.

From this point, Byler goes up the chain a bit, and by doing this, it quickly becomes clear that everyone is operating on fear, an epidemic of it. If the minders of these prisoners aren’t appropriately enthusiastic about their duties, then they will be forced to undergo the same treatment as the prisoners they are overseeing, a fate none of them want. Furthermore, they can’t quit, because if they do, they will end up in re-education camps as well. That fear doesn’t stop there. Up the chain it goes, with everyone required to show proper enthusiasm and patriotic zeal, lest they end up in the camps as well. Added to that, everyone is watching and reporting on everyone else, so trust is low, and anxiety is both toxic and high.

This is not the first communist system I've read about that functions on an epidemic of fear, where everyone is suspect, and everyone also functions as both spy and informer when needed.

Factories have been set up to take advantage of the labor provided by those in the camps. When journalists ask questions or ask to tour the area, the prisoners are told what to say and how to act. Thus, the journalists and human rights workers are shown, basically, the best side of things that the government can put forward. In some ways, it reminded me a bit of the North Korean border towns. Empty, save for the people assigned to work in them, keeping them clean and well-maintained, so everyone looking in can see how idealistic life is there.

Byler talks to a lot of people, all of whom have been part of the camp system and were either released or escaped. He also talks to authorities and chases the roots of this system down to 2014, in a campaign to end terrorism, and shows how things have evolved from that point.

In the Camps was haunting intersection of technology and politics. Reading this felt like was stepping into an Orwellian nightmare. Part horrifying, part futuristic hellscape, this book, while short, is mighty.

I received an advance reader copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

In the Camps should be required reading for anyone interested in technology’s ever-expanding encroachment into our daily lives or global issues. The book is very readable and recounts stories of Uyghurs and Kazakhs who have been sent to reeducation camps in Northwest China in recent years. The dehumanizing effects of the camps and the surveillance state in Xinjiang are amply presented here and the implications beyond China’s borders are briefly discussed. The stories are heartbreaking, but they return to the victims their humanity and should help the rest of us take seriously their plight.

Read this book.

With lots of help from Silicon Valley, China now runs the most extensive, intensive and exhaustive surveillance system in the world and in history. In its northwest, it has registered every ethnic person, right down to DNA samples and iris scans, operates police checkpoints every few hundred feet, and takes in at least hundreds of thousands and likely millions for “re-education”, according to race and religion. In Darren Byler’s In The Camps, the worst of Hollywood B movies and pulp fiction are excruciatingly real and revolting. This is another in the excellent series of books from Columbia Global Reports. I have yet to read one that is even just weak.

Xi Jinping is forever putting down protests. China is a multiethnic, multicultural and multilanguage country that has been impossible to pacify totally for as long as it has been China. Xi however, long ago decided to tackle it head on by breaking ethnic Kazakhs, Uyghurs and Hui of their identities. He has been flooding their homeland, the northwestern province Xingjiang, with Han Chinese from the Pacific coastal areas, with a clear goal of making these ethnics a minority in their own lands. Ethnic women are forced to have birth control IUD implants, and are often required to show they are in place. To ensure success, he has also empowered the Han to hate the ethnics, disparage them, beat them, refuse to work among them, and in this book, imprison them for re-education.

Byler has interviewed several survivors/escapees from the Chinese camps, safely back in Kazakhstan or the US. Their stories are identical to those I have read elsewhere, with added details and horrors normally considered torture. There is no longer any doubt about their authenticity. Now on the outside again, they feel broken and can never return to a normal life. And obviously, they will never forget their treatment at the hands of Xi Jinping. Interestingly, many Han Chinese who participate in the system are feeling the same way.

It begins with surveillance. All ethnics in Xinjiang must come in for a “health check” where authorities take DNA samples, iris scans, fingerprints and facial photographs from every angle. Police download all the contents of phones, copying contact lists, social media posts and files received. It all goes into a gigantic database for instant (less than a second) retrieval, thanks in large part to US firms like Palantir. If facial recognition software says someone is strolling down the street outside their own neighborhood, the ubiquitous police forces pick them up and haul them in. They are automatically guilty of “pre-criminal” activity, and are shipped out to re-education centers, where their lives are ruined.

And who are the suspects? Byler says “Chinese state authorities began to circulate a list of twenty-five official signs of Islamic extremism. Things like possession of digital files with religious content, using a VPN or installing WhatsApp…. were categorized as ‘pre-crimes’ that could lead to detention.”

In communal cells of up to 60 people, with one bucket at the back that can only be used for a maximum of 60 seconds per person, and bunks that must be shared, inmates find out the hard way they cannot speak to anyone, can only answer authorities in Mandarin Chinese (which many do not speak), and when not in indoctrination classes, must sit straight and still on low plastic stools all day without moving. Ten cameras per cell monitor their every movement and word, and guards scream at them over a public address system. Beatings take place for every little infraction, or none at all. Showering is granted once a week, for all 60 inmates of the cell - in just ten minutes under five or six shower spigots – ie. only the fastest get clean. The cells therefore reek. At one center, they brought in fresh underwear after several months because the staff couldn’t stand the stench any longer.

In “classes”, inmates “learn” Mandarin Chinese, memorize patriotic songs and the sayings of Xi Jinping, and must respond and act with sufficient enthusiasm so as to avoid beatings. There is no socializing at any point, no recreation, and food – a couple of steamed dumplings and soup – means painful hunger on top of everything else.

Anywhere inmates must go, they are manacled and hooded, including hospital visits. Lights are never turned off in their cell, and anyone who tries to pull the covers over their eyes or raises a hand to block the light is screamed at over the pa, and beaten. Same goes for moving around in bunks, crammed as they are with multiple inmates positioned head to toe. Every cell has a compromised inmate, charged with reporting on defective behavior in everyone else, to provide for additional beatings.

If they get out, they are released to their neighborhood, where they are spied on by neighborhood watchers for their every movement. They must report constantly, show up for Monday flag raising and boisterous singing the praises of Xi Jinping and the Communist Party – or find themselves back inside for another year or two of re-education.

The police manage their whole lives. Anyone can be hauled in again at any time and sent to the camps. I have read in other books that while they were away, police installed cameras in their homes so they can see and hear everything at all times. And yell at them for wrong behavior, even just for the language they speak at home or secretly praying. Not smoking and not drinking alcohol are suspicious activities. So is attempting to have a private conversation.

This brings up another difference in this book. Byler goes up the chain a little (but not far enough). He finds that Han Chinese minders are grievously offended by what they have to do to these people, who have committed no crime other than being non-Han. They too are required to be boisterous supporters of Xi Jinping and the Party. They must be enthusiastic beaters. They must harass and scream at detainees all the time, with sufficient ferocity to impress their own minders. They are equipped with foot and a half long truncheons, and must use them all day. They make inmates squat and then beat their rear ends to a pulp, making it all but impossible to sit perfectly still on their stools all day, resulting in further beatings.

And they can’t quit. If they dare to complain, protest or try to leave, they will be considered just as bad as the inmates, and suffer the same fate. One low level guard thought he had found a great job, with sufficient pay to raise his family, but he soon found it to be a horror he could not escape either. He told Byler “If we were tired and wanted to quit, they would tell us: If you are exhausted, you can take a rest, but then you must come back. If you quit the job, then you will end up in ‘re-education camps’ too.” And he now had firsthand knowledge of what that meant.

All up the line, everyone works in fear. Everyone must show sufficient nationalism, pride and enthusiastic violence towards those below, be they other officers or inmates. Managers fear their bosses just as much, bur Byler doesn’t pursue this stunning structure of institutional paranoia. Clearly, the whole system works by it. Xi has built a society in which everyone is suspect, everyone is under surveillance, everyone must toe the Xi line, where the slightest infraction is a fatal weakness, and everyone is kept off balance and alone. This dystopian society is a worthy successor to Nazi Germany. And a model for future aspirants.

Another aspect that differentiates Byler’s book from others I have read is his references to Primo Levi, an Italian philosopher and Auschwitz survivor. Byler uses him to compare life in Chinese re-education camps to life in Nazi concentration camps. The Chinese camps are not killing machines as such, but life in them is at least as horrific, as inmates cite the same stresses, routines, restrictions, fears and coping strategies.

Byler says “Alienation, removing the individual from the ownership of their labor as workers and, in this case, from their autonomy as Turkic Muslim individuals, is in fact a primary feature of the re-education factory. The goal of the re-education industrial parks is to turn Kazakhs and Uyghurs into a deeply controlled, docile, yet productive lumpen class – those without social welfare afforded to the formally recognized rights-bearing working class.” In other words, the entire system is transparently farcical, even to the Chinese.

Byler’s profiles include a young woman studying urban planning In the US, who came home for a long weekend and foolishly thought she was immune. Another was a herder in Kazakhstan who was just trying to settle his affairs in China before leaving again. Another was a teacher who was offered a job at a center – an offer that could not be refused – and found herself as restricted as her “students”. They are the lucky ones because they lived to tell the tale.

Many others get “job offers” working in the new factories Xi has set up to take advantage of all the slave labor his policies produce. When journalists or human rights workers come through, the workers are directed what to say and how to say it. And always smile and be enthusiastic over the opportunity the Party and Chairman Xi have given them for a new life. When officials visit, they even get their hair dyed black to hide the scabs and scars of being beaten about the head.

It all began in 2014, when Xi Jinping declared a “war on terror”. It has of course turned out that Xi Jinping is the real terrorist, and the Chinese are his victims. In The Camps goes a long way towards proving it.

David Wineberg

One cannot truly envision the horrors of a Chinese camp without visiting or seeing one through the eyes of another person. This book accomplishes the latter.
This book details what goes on in the Chinese camps (termed centralized controlled education training centers) where more than a million people (primarily Uyghers and Kazakhs) have been sent away for “reeducation,” many of them arrested for things they never committed but guilty under a shadowy net of “pre-crimes.” Author Darren Byler informs readers of these camps and their inhabitants through the eyes of people who have been residents of one of these camps. They all have a trial (of sorts) and you can imagine their chances when Chinese courts have a 99+ per cent conviction rate.

There are many scary aspects included, one of the worst being the use of facial recognition technologies. Coupled with information about behaviors that are considered to be illegal (or potentially illegal in the future), the entire situation seems like the movie “Minority Report” come to life. Once people are arrested, they are physically and mentally tortured and may eventually find themselves in a camp where they are nothing more than slave labor.

Anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philip Bourgois offer a telling description: “Violence can never be understood solely in terms of its physicality – force, assault, or the infliction of pain – alone. The social and cultural dimensions of violence are what gives violence its power and meaning.” This book will flesh out exactly what that description can mean. Five stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and Columbia Global Reports for a complimewntary electronic copy of this book.

This book contains essential information. Darren Byler describes the horrific treatment minorities receive in the detention camps where they are imprisoned. Surveillance is high-tech. Cameras are everywhere in Xinjiang (northwest China) and are designed to focus on the features of minority citizens such as the Uighurs. Criminal offenses include wearing a veil, worshipping at a mosque, or having religious apps on one's phone.

One bucket in the middle of a cell serves as a restroom for a large group of people. Meals consist of broth and a bun or two. Prisoners are instructed to say, "Thank you, Uncle Xi" when they receive it. Women are given pills to stop menstruation so that the camp doesn't have to supply related hygiene products.

This is the second book I've read recently about the atrocities that occur in these camps. The first was Made in China by Amelia Pang. Her interviewees describe the horrendous living conditions and physical abuse they received while imprisoned. Not everyone survives.

I highly recommend reading In the Camps and Made in China. The first step to addressing this dreadful problem is to inform the world of its existence. Byler's interviews with former prisoners and/or their families were well-organized and illustrative.

Because of the horrific subject matter, this was a tough read, and I also find it harder to rate and review. But I think Darren Byler does a good job of explaining the different ways in which China has been dehumanizing and oppressing the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities such as Kazakhs and the Hui. The combination of research-based writing and narration from personal experiences worked very well. Byler highlighted the ways in which 9/11 and subsequent 'counter-terrorist' action and islamophobia fed this system of oppression: “The system is premised on a rhetoric of a war on Muslim “terrorism” that the Chinese state has imported from the US and its allies post-September 11, 2001. …The logics of counter-terrorism have been used to grossly supersede concerns with human and civil rights, creating an immense high-tech penal colony.” (22-23) Though some of the technological stuff went a bit over my head, he explained everything well. What's happening in Xinjiang is absolutely horrifying, but I'm glad I read this book because it's made me aware of what's going on and I hope it does the same for many more.

*Full review to be posted at later date closer to publication*

In the Camps is an enlightening and horrifying look at an issue going on in China that I previously knew only the bare bones about. Darren Byler is clearly an expert on this topic, and I'm appreciative of how well he managed to convey his knowledge into such an accessible book so that readers like me can better understand what's going on. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the topic and/or current world issues.

As I write this, it is about six weeks before the scheduled publication date of this book, which I received a free advance review copy of. So far, the only reviews here on Goodreads are serious evaluations written by people who also got advance copies. However, eventually this book will receive a wider distribution and more publicity.

When it does, I will be interested to see if this Goodreads page is visited by “wumao”, who will post critical reviews of this book. If you've been paying attention to Chinese affairs, or have Chinese heritage yourself, you probably know what a wumao is already, and you may skip over the next bit. However, I hope that this book will attract the attention of some people who are not otherwise regular consumers of news and analysis about China, and so may not be aware of the existence of wumao and their activities on the Internet. If this is you, here is a few paragraphs about them.

“Wumao” is Chinese for “fifty cents”, and is allegedly the price that an army of Chinese flacks and trolls receive for each posting they make in defense of the Chinese Communist Party. Both the quality and tactics of wumao vary greatly – a lot are simply lazy and bad at what they do, some of them launch sophisticated and aggressive attacks. Wumao writing in English is sometimes (not always) identifiable by stilted phrasing, outdated idioms, and comically bad grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

In my opinion, the appearance, or lack of appearance, of wumao on this page may be something of a barometer of the importance of Goodreads in the world at the intersection of geopolitics and social media. If they fail to appear, it may indicate that the time has past when a mere book could alter a conversation or harm a great power. If a rash of poorly-written one-star reviews of this book appear, clearly written by people who have not actually read it, Goodreads (and those responsible for writing and publishing this book) can take heart in the fact that a book with solid research and good writing can still comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

This year, the wumao army has been busy advancing the absurd accusation that the COVID virus was created at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Read about it here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/chinas-covid-19-conspiracy-theories/609772/

If you are interested in knowing a “wumao” posting when you see it, there's a good 2015 article from Foreign Policy here: https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/17/how-to-spot-a-state-funded-chinese-internet-troll/

About the book itself:

If the newspaper is (as the cliché has it) the first rough draft of history, then this book is an excellent attempt at a second draft. It attempts to collate recent book-length and specialized-journal scholarship on China's mass incarceration of ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities with first-hand testimony of the few individuals who were first unfortunate enough to be scooped up and then chewed up by the berserk totalitarian penal bureaucracy, strong enough to live through the experience, and finally lucky enough to escape or be set free to tell the tale.

Many of those who found themselves ensnared in this lunatic nightmare were jailed as “pre-criminals”, a concept that only a few short years ago seemed only to belong in particularly unbelievable science fiction movies. Using certain popular apps of foreign origin (like Whatsapp) might get you branded a pre-criminal. Using a Virtual Private Network likewise. Visiting a mosque or taking an interest in Muslim spirituality also might put you into the pre-criminal class, as might wandering out of the neighborhood where the Public Security Bureau has confined you (and tracks your movements using AI, biometric, and facial recognition technology).

In these camps, pre-criminals and others are forbidden for hours to speak or clean up the communal bucket in which they and their cellmates relieve themselves. They must sit in a single position for hours on end, sing songs in praise of the Chinese Communist Party without ceasing, and repeatedly “confess” their own failings in sessions of “self-criticism”. If you are co-operative and fortunate enough, you may be chosen for the relative comfort of factory work at slave wages, perhaps making gloves for the export market. This will at least get you out of the re-education camp and, maybe, even allow you, on your day off, to visit your family in the place where you used to live. But of course the visit is likely to be stressed and unrelaxing, as everyone in attendance will be afraid of saying or doing something that will get more members of the family delivered into the nightmare of re-education.

The author makes a very good point at the end of the book: The newly-improved instruments of Chinese oppression used platforms developed at Microsoft tech incubators. Now, these instruments are returning to us in an “improved” fashion to help us respond to the coronavirus pandemic. We should remember that this benefit for us has been achieved in part through the oppression of others.

The book ends like this: “To counteract the increasing banality, the everydayness, of automatic racialization, the harms of biometric surveillance around the world must first be made apparent. The lives of the detainable must be made visible at the edge of power over life. Then the role of world-class engineers, investors, and public relations firms in the unthinking of human experience, in designing for human reeducation, must be made clear. The webs of interconnection – the way Xinjiang stands behind Seattle – must be made thinkable.”

Read a 2019 article by the author of this book about forced labor in China here: https://supchina.com/2019/09/04/how-companies-profit-from-forced-labor-in-xinjiang/ .Much of the information in the article appears in the book in a modified form.

I received a free advance electronic copy of this book from Colombia Global Reports via Netgalley.

A well-written, fascinating and chilling introduction to contemporary Chinese society and law enforcement. Specifically, the ongoing persecution of the Uyghurs - a subject that everyone in the West should know far more about.

A must read, and another excellent addition to the Columbia Global Reports series. (I've read quite a few of them, now, and they have all been excellent and informative.)

The title of this one made me do a double take; high tech penal colony? Many of the comparisons made throughout the book align with how Hitler’s Germany oppressed and dehumanized the Jewish people. It is disheartening to read that not only is this still happening on the same scale, if not bigger, but that it is still happening without any global intervention. Dare I say without even sufficient global acknowledgment. Overall this book was thoughtful and enlightening, however, could stand to undergo another round of editing. I enjoy the authors writing style, but at times the tone of the book reminded me of a statistical report and at times this pulled me from the stories. Thanks to the author for his hard work and for shining a light on this issue.

Thanks to net galley for this ARC in exchange for a honest and unbiased review.

In the Camps is a great book, detailing the persecution of Muslims in China. Through the use of smart technology, citizens are tracked, persecuted, and imprisoned in reeducation camps. Those that are allowed to transfer from the reeducation camps are sent to labor in factories with little to no pay. Author Darren Byler does a great job sharing the stories of survivors of the camps and slave labor, revealing how atrocious the humanitarian situation is in China in regards to Ayughar and other minorities. The media minimizes the case to the American public. How much of the same technology in social media and American smartphones are used to persecute Chinese-Kazaks?

In the Camps by Darren Byler
I recently retired after working for over 43 years. Beginning in 1981, I started going to China on business. In those 40 years, I must have gone to China over 50 times, as well as six times on holiday with my wife to China. China was an important part of my business and my wife and I enjoy Chinese art. I even lived in Taiwan for 3 years and became somewhat fluent in Chinese at least reading and writing. During those years, I was careful to avoid any discussion about Xinjiang region or the Uyghur people with Chinese friends over beers while I was in their country. This book; In the Camps by Darren Byler is an excellent primer for someone wanting to begin to learn about the terrible plight of the Uyghur people in their own land.
Mr. Byler has been able to speak to people who were interned in these “camps” and learn about the physical and mental torture they are put through. What I do not understand is what does the Chinese government expect the outcome of this “re-education” to be? Certainly, I would not expect anyone who survives to become a loyal “Han-like” Chinese citizen.
There was much that was new to me including the forced sterilization and abortions going on to reduce and perhaps eliminate the Uyghur population. Also, the Chinese are employing AI to an incredible extent to monitor Uyghurs threw their face, phones and even their blood.
The Han Chinese are arresting and imprisoning Uyghurs as “pre-criminals” because they have used a VPN or a social media app. Often these prison terms are for an indefinite time and now are reduced if a person is able and willing to work in new factories being built next to the prisons. In these factories the Uyghurs salaries are far less than standard wages.
Even worse, now the government is placing Uyghur children into special camps when their parents are taken away.
I highly recommend this book to anyone wishing to understand the plight of the Uyghurs. I am not sure how I or anyone can truly help other than to be informed.

Erbaqyt Otarbai, a middle aged Kazakh man who called Tacheng, a town six hours away from Urumchi, was unloading his truck in an ore yard. It was the 18th of August 2017. Chinese security guards pounced on him and before he could even fathom what was unraveling, they started interrogating Otarbai about the WhatsApp and Facebook applications on his mobile phone. Inspite of his fervent entreaties that all the supposedly ‘offending’ apps were downloaded while he was in Kazakhstan and was primarily for the purposes of communicating with his friends back home, Otarbai was dragged away by the cops and made to undergo a “physical.” Photos of his face from every conceivable angle were followed by blood samples, fingerprinting and voice recording. In the dead of the night, at around 2.00 A.M he was deposited in a ‘detention’ camp, upon entering which there was delivered a welcoming blow to the top of his head with an iron club. A bloodied Otarbai spent ninety eights in what can only be described as the Chamber of horrors. Hundreds of similar detainees occupied cramped and unhygienic cells. Shackled by manacles, the ‘prisoners’ were repeatedly whacked on their posteriors with clubs 1.5 metres long. The lights in the cells were never turned off and before every meal, the inmates were required to sing full throated patriotic songs in Chinese. “Thank You Uncle Xi (xiexie Xi dada)” was a common refrain.”

“In The Camps” by Darren Byler, a postdoctoral researcher in the ChinaMade project at the University of Colorado Boulder, and an authority on research focusing on Uighur dispossession, infrastructural power and “terror capitalism” in the Xinjiang province of Central Asia, is a harrowing collection of the repression and unimaginable torment experienced by the minority Uighurs as a result of their internment by the People’s Republic of China. Under the garb of “reeducation” and trumpeting a purging of “religious extremism” and “fundamentalism”, Xi Jinping’s China has established a sophisticated surveillance driven military-industry network in whose murky complexes more than 1.8 million helpless and hapless Uighurs, Kazhaks and Huis are imprisoned and brainwashed.

As Byler writes, post the 9-11 cataclysm, China embarked on a project titled ‘Golden Shield.’ Active state participation and encouragement combined with the aspirations of face and voice recognition technology companies, led to the creation of an extraordinarily complicated and convoluted structure of surveillance that discriminated people on the basis of their religious affinities. Xinjiang that became an epicentre of discrimination where the Uighurs inhabiting Urumchi and other provinces had their passports snatched before being subject to a round the clock intrusive surveillance. The camps themselves are euphemisms for monstrosity. Walls are plastered with slogans exhorting the camp inmates to abhor religious extremism. The detainees trudge into classrooms while they are still handcuffed and spend the entire day learning the hagiography of the Party and the Premier Xi Jinping. The ‘dehumanization’ processes are beyond the vilest of Orwellian imaginations even. Uighur women of childbearing age not submitting to either mandatory sterilization or Intra Uterine Device implantations are deemed “untrustworthy” and banished to these camps.

Within the cell, people young and old are required to sit absolutely ramrod straight for hours without moving a muscle. If they dare to move, which inevitably and eventually they indeed do, they are subject to severe beatings. As Baimurat, a former ‘camp enforcement’ personnel now taking refuge in North America recalls in an interview given to Byler, “They sat between these beds on plastic stools, reciting the rules. You had to recite, whether you knew Chinese or not. And because the people had to sit there for such long hours, there were many people whose intestines ‘fell down’.” Byler paraphrases a moving quote by the Auschwitz concentration camp survivor and best selling author Primo Levi, “some of them beat us from pure bestiality and violence, but others beat is when we are under a load almost lovingly, accompanying the blows with exhortations, as cart drivers do with willing horses.”

The Chinese also follow a dastardly practice of ‘family segregation’. Children are separated from their parents and are admitted to camps ridiculously named “Kindness Kindergartens.” As Byler writes close to 70 *percent of kids aged around five are held in these Kindergartens. Their mothers are detained at times only because of the fact that they wear a veil and upon taken to the camps, get their heads shaved.

Co-opting and co-operating with the Chinese Governments are the who’s who of the global technology conglomerates. The Intercept laid its hands on a 52 gigabyte dataset representing internal police documents from Xinjiang. Constructed using a software peddled by Oracle, Ken Glueck, the Executive Vice-President of Oracle, exclaimed that almost every major technology behemoth in the United States found themselves a firm part of the Chinese surveillance machinery. The list included IBM, Amazon and Google. The entire surveillance mechanism is a well-oiled machine lubricated by the sustained contributions of high end technology companies that are beholden to both the diktats and largesse of the Communist Party. Face recognition software and voice recognition software comprise the touchstone behind the success, or failure of any expansive and intrusive surveillance system. Beijing had both the components covered in the form of two high flying companies. Hikvision, a camera manufacturing giant in every sense, took care of the facial recognition software. Hikvision in fact is the world’s biggest manufacturer of surveillance cameras and the entity liberally exports its surveillance devices to likeminded regimes. iFlyTek, supplied twenty five voiceprint systems in the province of Kashgar to capture the unique signatures of a person’s voice in order to help identify and track people.

Another high flying technology company with their hands deep in the surveillance technology pie is Megvii. Pioneers of the ‘Face++’ algorithm. Using incredulously complex deep learning systems, Face ++ represented the intrusive and oppressive tool that found itself embedded in every smart phone held by a Uighur, Kazhak and Hui. However in October 2019, just when Megvii was preparing itself for a listing, the United States blacklisted Megvii along with Yitu, Sensetime, Hikvision and Dahua. The Public Relations machinery at Megvii worked overtime in a damage mitigation exercise. Hiring a public relations firm named Brunswick Group, the company tried to downplay its involvement in the activities at Xinjiang. In fact Byler himself wrote an indicting piece against the company for the Centre for Global Policy. Megvii immediately responded through Brunswick Director Matt Miller and a Hong Kong based partner at Brunswick, Ginny Wilderming. Megvii contended that they made meagre revenues of less than US$2 million in Xinjiang (a sum that represented < 1% of the total entity’s turnover). The company also denied any ethnic group centred ‘solutions.’

Byler has the last word in his poignant and conscience inducing book. He brings to the attention of his readers, historian Jason Moore’s immortal turn-of-phrase: “behind Manchester stands Mississippi.” As Nancy Fraser, the Henry and Louise A Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research explains, this turn of phrase means that “the highly profitable textile industry of Manchester that Engels wrote about would not have been profitable without the cheap cotton supplied through enslaved labour from the Americas. I’m tempted to add a third M for Mumbai by the way, to signal the important role played in Manchester’s rise by the calculated destruction by the British of Indian textile manufacturing. Here is a case where expropriation is a condition for the possibility of profitable exploitation. Capitalism plays a double game with people, assigning some to “mere” exploitation while condemning others to brutal expropriation, a distinction that has been associated historically with empire and race.”

In a similar vein, behind Seattle lies the Xinjiang and its ostracized, oppressed and subjugated populace.

(In The Camps" is published by Columbia Global Reports and will be published on the 12th of October 2021)

Thank You Net Galley for the Advanced Reviewer Copy

Deeply insightful and essential reading for every concerned citizen. Well written and ever so important, I cannot think of a non fiction book that has engaged me like this and I must say the themes were dealt with well. Unveils the true nature of authoritarianism and the danger of surveillance.

In The Camps is a chilling account of ethnic cleansing going on in China today. Through his interviews with ex-detainees, the author provides a glimpse of the systematic dehumanization propaganda currently in place in the fastest-growing country in the world. These ‘reeducation’ camps are gruesome and totalitarian. Designed to strip away every ounce of dignity, these camps single out the Uyghurs and the Kazhak population in Xinjiang.

In the past, China has been criticized for its actions towards the Muslim population. There have been reports, video clips, and horrifying accounts of the camps that manage to slip out of the stringent censorship method the country employs. The book brings it all together and also shares how unknowingly we are part of this inhumane system. Well-known technology giants have specifically created software that detects facial features to differentiate between Han (China's ethnic majority) and other minority groups. The author gives a lot of information to set the background of how these camps came to be and the role these tech giants continue to play.

I picked this book because I was intrigued by the description. While it seems that the book could do with another round of editing, I would highly recommend the book to every non-fiction reader. The kind of research that has gone behind in putting this novel together is commendable. We shudder when we speak about the Holocaust that happened 75 years ago. What is happening today in China, is no less than the camps under Hitler's rule.

Thank you Darren Byler for putting this together!

Overall, this book was extremely informative and relevant to current events. It gave me a lot of insight into this tragedy happening in China right now and how they were able to pull it off. While this book was informative, I had a hard time with the writing style and a lot of the time it felt like information was just being dumped on the readers. I did appreciate the information, but it was hard for me to get through because of the way it was given to readers.