In the Camps

“While structural racism in the context of Chinese settler colonialism in Xinjiang evokes similar racisms in different parts of the world, Byler documents and analyzes how the new, digitized racialization of China’s Muslim minorities—an ‘automated racialization’ in a vast system of internment camps—has taken the meaning of dehumanization to a completely different level. Stark and devastating, and yet filled with empathetic detail for the victims, this book is required reading for anyone interested in racial justice across the world. Byler’s book shows us that this is not just China’s reality, but a global reality where the violence of one colonial regime cannot be disaggregated from global complicity.” —Shu-mei Shih, President, American Comparative Literature Association, and Edward W. Said Professor of Comparative Literature, UCLA

“While the central contributions of the book are the interviews with Uyghurs impacted by Xinjiang’s security state, Byler carefully underlines the foundational role Silicon Valley companies—particularly Microsoft—played in its construction.” —Jack Poulson, Executive Director, Tech Inquiry

“In the Camps offers an urgent and deeply humane intervention in a discourse often clouded with nationalism and Sinophobia. While presenting an unflinching picture of the Islamophobic human rights abuses perpetrated against Muslim populations in Xinjiang by the Chinese state, Byler highlights the ways in which these practices draw from familiar settler colonial logics, which work to construct racialized ‘others’ against whom exploitation and harm is made permissible.” —Meredith Whittaker, Minderoo Research Professor at NYU and Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute

“It's true, no matter how much the Chinese government denies it—in this richly sourced book, Darren Byler describes not only how members of Muslim ethnic groups in China are thrown into re-education camps just for practicing their religion, but also how those outside the camps are deprived of their freedom by a web of electronic and human surveillance. Built around true personal stories, the book is a riveting—and terrifying—account of one of the worst human rights abuses being perpetrated in the world today. —Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, Columbia University

“Byler’s concise book is a vital read because it foregrounds the experiences of people detained in the camps, stories that overlap and cohere into a raw portrait of systematic brutality and dehumanising routines.” —Nick Holdstock, author of China’s Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State

“Is it fair that the pairing of ‘Chinese government’ and ‘surveillance’ has become contemporary shorthand for the atrocity of technologically tainted dehumanizing authoritarianism? Darren Byler’s brave and meticulously researched book, In the Camps, presents such a chilling account, even historically informed, cynical readers will be shocked by the scale, intensity, and soul-crushing brutality of the systems of control that he portrays, in painstaking detail, as normalized in Xinjiang while forgotten about by the rest of the world.” —Evan Selinger, professor of philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology