Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City 9781478022268

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Terror Capitalism

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Terror Capitalism Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City Darren Byler

Duke University Press  Durham and London 2022

© 2022 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Courtney Leigh Richardson Typeset in Portrait and Univers by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Byler, Darren, author. Title: Terror capitalism: Uyghur dispossession and masculinity in a Chinese city / Darren Byler. Description: Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2021012914 (print) lccn 2021012915 (ebook) isbn 9781478015024 (hardcover) isbn 9781478017646 (paperback) isbn 9781478022268 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Uighur (Turkic ­people)—­China—­Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu—­Social conditions. | Detention of persons—­China—­Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu. | ­Human rights—­China—­Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu. | Mineral industries—­Corrupt practices—­China. | Men—­China—­Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu—­Identity. | Masculinity—­China—­Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu. | Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu (China)—­Ethnic relations. | bisac: social science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social | social science / Privacy & Surveillance (see also po­l iti­c al science / Privacy & Surveillance) | lcgft: Legislative hearings. Classification: lcc ds731. u4 b95 2021 (print) | lcc ds731. u4 (ebook) | ddc  951/.6—­dc23 lc rec­ord available at https: //­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021012914 lc ebook rec­ord available at https: //­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021012915 Cover art: Maxime Matthys, 2091: The Ministry of Privacy, 2019. © Maxime Matthys. Courtesy of the artist.

Contents



Note on Language  vii



Note on Pseudonyms  ix

Preface xi Acknowl­ edgments xix Introduction. What Is Terror Capitalism?  1 1 Enclosure 31 2 Devaluation  61 3 Dispossession  95 4 Friendship  133 5 Minor Politics  163 6 Subtraction  189 Conclusion 221 Notes  231  References 243  Index 261

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Note on Language

This book is based on ethnographic research conducted in both Uyghur and Chinese. I have tried to be careful to render the terms used in the language of origin throughout this text. All first mentions of Uyghur and Chinese terms are italicized. In parenthetical glosses of words I translated into En­glish, I identify the language of origin with an abbreviation before the word: “Uy” for Uyghur words and “Ch” for Chinese words. I repeat this procedure if the term has not been used for an extended space in the text. For Uyghur, I use the standard Uyghur Latinization, and for Chinese, I use the standard pinyin transliteration minus the tone markers. In general, I provide only the Chinese for Chinese origin terms, and the Uyghur for Uyghur origin terms. Occasionally, I include both the Uyghur and the Chinese for terms that are directly derived from each other and where I think it ­will be useful for the reader to understand the term in both languages. The syllable Uy in the term Uyghur should be pronounced like the French oui. The consonant gh should be pronounced like the ch in the German surname Bach. The Xin in Xinjiang should be pronounced tsin. If that is too difficult, shin is pretty close as well. The jiang should be pronounced gee-­yang.

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Note on Pseudonyms

Throughout this book, the names of most of my friends and in­for­mants have been disguised to protect their identities. Only the names of the following public figures have been included: Eset Emet, Perhat Tursun, and Tahir Hamut. I mention ­these names in relation to interviews I conducted with them regarding their publicly available work. The names of state officials have also been given in relation to their freely available publications.

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Preface

Over the course of writing this book, the impetus of social life in Ürümchi moved from competing ideas of global Chinese and Islamic contemporaneity to an investment in the so-­called Global War on Terror and an economy structured explic­itly around ethno-­racialized theft of Uyghur ­labor and ­sociality. Between 2009 and 2020, Uyghur life was enclosed. The freedoms, desires, and openings that ­were fostered by Uyghur urban mi­grant sociality and social media ­were subtracted. The flourishing of Uyghur cosmopolitan ­Islamic piety and self-­ fashioning was used as justification for a new state-­funded frontier of global capitalism, a po­liti­cal and economic configuration I call “terror capitalism.” As I built relationships with dozens of young Uyghur and Han mi­grants to the city, I became more and more aware of how what began as a developmental state proj­ect to draw Uyghurs into the multicultural Chinese nation had been transformed at least in part into a profit-­making security proj­ect funded by state capital and used as a space for techno-­political experimentation in surveillance. As state and private institutions intensified their efforts to reeducate Uyghurs during the so-­called ­People’s War on Terror beginning in 2014,1 I came to see firsthand the fear and anxiety that came from regular home invasions and large-­scale detentions of suspected reformist Muslims. Some readers may question w ­ hether capitalism is the correct frame for this system and instead expect an analy­sis that centers on Chinese state terror and authoritarian governance. While ­these expressions of state power are impor­ tant aspects of Uyghur reeducation, this book shows that such framings do not fully explain the power of transnational economic and po­liti­cal forces, the autonomy of technology companies and reeducation factories, or the lived experience of settlers who are engineering and profiting from this system.2

As anthropologists of the state have shown (T. Mitchell 1999; Gupta 2012), states produce power­ful effects, but they are always made up, in the end, by public and private institutions and ultimately individuals who are motivated by a range of discursive and economic interests. While the cap­i­tal­ist system I discuss is certainly supported by state capital and mandated by central state authorities such as Xi Jinping and Chen Quanguo, the forms of terror it produces are largely carried out by private technology companies, coupled with privately contracted policing technicians, Aid Xinjiang “volunteers,” and other Han settlers. T ­ hese institutionalized agents act on behalf of the state and their own economic interests in dispossessing Uyghurs and building and maintaining the security systems that restrict Uyghur freedom to move and live. Many of the security and intelligence workers in this space are employees of state-­owned enterprises or private technology or security companies and are motivated in large part by economic incentives, not directly by state power. Although strict loyalty and discipline is enforced through the threat of prosecutions, demotions, and criticism, many of what Primo Levi (2015) might have referred to as the “swarm of functionaries” in the Xinjiang reeducation system are making banal choices to join the campaign to dehumanize and dispossess Uyghurs. As I discuss in chapters 2 and 5, ­these state proxies are often primarily interested in creating a better life for themselves and their families rather than strictly po­liti­cal motivations. Uyghurs and other Muslims who join the security forces as low-­level workers are often confronted with a choice between protecting themselves and their own detention. Institutionalized ethno-­racism and settler colonialism found in both private and public enterprises are major aspects of this frontier in capital accumulation. The po­liti­cal framing of counterterrorism functions in large part as a way of securing funding, claiming resources, and acting with impunity ­toward Uyghurs and other Muslim p ­ eoples. This is not to deny that state-­ mandated policies of “rounding up ­those who need to be rounded up,” showing “absolutely no mercy,” and prosecutions of state authorities who do not follow ­these policies, are not central guiding ­factors in the full establishment of the system.3 Nor does it deny the way older Maoist-­era campaigns to reengineer so-­called class enemies inform some of the tactics and orga­nizational shape of the surveillance system (Grose 2019; Leibold 2019; Smith Finley 2019). It is simply showing that, in addition to a more normative reading of po­liti­cal power that places Chinese state authorities at the center of historical change, con­ temporary configurations of power are also ­shaped by global capitalism and the colonial relation it carries in frontier locations. Framing the po­liti­cal and economic stakes of Uyghur colonization as a frontier of global capitalism rather xii Preface

than as a manifestation of tyrannical state communism or Asian despotism, as it is often framed by xenophobic North American politicians, also works to refuse a revival of Cold War binarisms. Instead, it shows how the rhe­toric of the Global War on Terror and the force of global capitalism come together to create forms of dispossession in new locations. What was an ethnographer to do in the face of this structural vio­lence? The task of telling the stories of young Uyghur friends who anticipated their arrest and ­were then dis­appeared by state contractors into the reeducation system as “extremist-­separatist-­terrorists” became a means of holding on to social life even as it began to break apart. As in Audra Simpson’s work on Indigenous sovereignty in North Amer­i­ca (2014), it meant attempting to refuse to turn their stories into a kind of pornography or objectification of settler-­colonial oppression while at the same time acknowledging its totalizing presence. Simpson argues that one way to avoid participating in the vio­lence of the colonial gaze is by writing the po­liti­cal and economic ethnographically. For me, this meant focusing on the way forms of dispossession ­were lived. Writing the economic ethnographically meant thinking with Uyghurs, and Han settlers, and trying to understand how a confluence of state capital and private technology–­enabled forms of ethno-­racialization began to subtract social relations and sociality itself. In other words, it meant attempting to understand how the capitalization of information (R. Benjamin 2019; Wark 2019; Zuboff 2019) has begun to enclose the lives of ­people. Thinking from this vantage point allowed me to consider how counterterrorism both feeds more normative forms of surveillance capitalism and intensifies forms of expropriation—­the legalized theft of land and l­abor permitted by a lack of civil and h ­ uman protections for ethno-­ racialized populations—­that are par­tic­u­lar to the current global moment. Terror capitalism, a distinct configuration of state capital, techno-­political surveillance, and unfree ­labor, might begin with targeted groups like the Uyghurs, but it might also find similar expression among Muslim populations in Kashmir or with watch-­listed Latinx asylum seekers in Texas.4 As a scholar committed to decolonial and feminist critiques of global capitalism, I focus less on the work of technology and security workers and more on the lives the system dispossesses and expropriates. In this context, the ­human data of the surveilled, including their cultural production or digital content, and the very existence of Uyghur life have become the primary ­drivers of a con­ temporary techno-­political cap­i­tal­ist system. In order to demonstrate this, I focus on the coerced “user experience” of this system. Uyghurs have become an unfree class of laborers, a position that Mackenzie Wark (2019) refers to as the “con­temporary subaltern,” who have no choice but to feed the system by Preface xiii

producing data and coerced economic activity. The Uyghur reeducation camp system is now being described by regional authorities as a “carrier of economy stability,” and by private technology industry leaders as a space with “unlimited market potential,” on par with older coal, oil, and natu­ral gas industries that ­shaped the first wave of Uyghur colonization.5 The economic value of the reeducation system comes from the way it acts as an experimental space for the research and development of predictive policing products, provides thousands upon thousands of security-­and education-­related jobs, and produces hundreds of thousands of unfree Uyghur laborers who can be forced to work for low wages in the textile industry and ser­vice sector. The Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) is located in con­temporary far Northwest China (see map 1).6 It borders eight nations ranging from Mongolia to India. The largest group of ­people native to this large Alaska-­sized region are the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim minority of around 12 million that shares a mutually intelligible Turkic language with a population of 15,000 Uzbeks and, to a lesser degree, with the population of 1.5 million Kazakhs and 200,000 Kyrgyz who also call parts of the region their homelands. Like the Uzbeks, Uyghurs have practiced small-­scale irrigated farming for centuries in the desert oases of Central Asia. At the founding of the ­People’s Republic of China in 1949, the population of Han-­identified inhabitants of the region was around 6 ­percent, with Uyghurs comprising roughly 80 ­percent of the population. ­Today Uyghurs make up less than 50 ­percent of the total population and Han more than 40 ­percent. This shift in demographics began in the 1950s when state authorities moved several million former soldiers into the region to work as farmers in military colonies in the northern part of the province. ­These settlers, members of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Ch: bingtuan), ­were pulled into the borderlands through a combination of economic incentives and ideological persuasion. Initially, the primary goal of this proj­ect was not to assimilate Muslim populations but rather to transform Kazakh pastureland into irrigated farming colonies, redistribute the population of former soldiers, and secure the territorial integrity of the nation. Although Uyghur lifeways w ­ ere deeply affected by the Maoist reforms of this era, Uyghurs continued to live in Uyghur-­majority areas in Southern Xinjiang. This began to shift in the 1990s when private and public investment brought new infrastructure to the Uyghur homeland. Since t­ hese proj­ects began, millions of Han settlers have moved into Uyghur lands to turn deserts and farmland into oil and natu­ral gas fields and transform Uyghur oasis cities into centers of transnational commerce. This more recent enclosure of the Uyghur commons has had a strong effect on local autonomy, as it has significantly increased the xiv Preface

Altay MONGOLIA KAZAKHSTAN Karamay

Dushanzi Ghulja (Yining)

Tagh TenganriMountains)

Sh (Tian

KYRGYZSTAN

Shihezi ÜRÜMCHI

Kumul (Hami)

Kucha To S

Korla

Aqsu

han

XINJIANG UYGHUR AUTONOMOUS REGION

Kashgar Yeken (Shache)

Turpan

gh

ai

GANSU

Taklamakan Desert

QINGHAI

Khotan PAKISTAN TIBET

0 mi

INDIA

HIGHWAYS

GAS PIPELINES

RAILWAYS

OIL PIPELINES

Built or improved since the 1990s Built since the 1990s

21% of China’s proven reserves 17% of China’s proven reserves

map 1. A map of infrastructure developments prior to 2009 in Chinese Central Asia demonstrates how the Uyghur homeland in Southern Xinjiang has become a major site of resource exploitation as a result of state cap­i­tal­ist “Opening up the West” development. Since the 1990s, the region has become the source of nearly 85 ­percent of Chinese domestic cotton. Map by author. Data source: National Geographic (2009); Gro Intelligence (2019).

100 mi

cost of living for Uyghurs while at the same time largely excluding them from new development proj­ects. In an attempt to come to terms with this history and the racialized vio­ lence I observed, I read through the scholarship on Eu­ro­pean and American settler relationships with Indigenous o­ thers. I also found inspiration in feminist, decolonial scholarship on the co-­construction of racialized capitalism and settler colonialism as an institutionalized social system. Reading ­these bodies of scholarship in concert with the ethnographic evidence I gathered through years of fieldwork in Northwest China gave me an understanding of the way systems that w ­ ere implemented in China ­were linked to similar proj­ects that emerged from Eu­rope, Japan, India, North Amer­i­ca, and the Soviet Union. I began to see the way that linkages between t­hese ­earlier and, in some cases ongoing, pro­cesses tie a par­tic­u­lar form of socialist original accumulation to settler cap­i­tal­ist expansion in the Uyghur region and a new sequence of racialization. Although this sequence in racialization was largely disconnected from North American and Eu­ro­pean histories of slavery, it was very closely linked to Western pro­cesses of settler colonialism and the new racism of Western ­Islamophobia and wars on terror. The implementation of a passbook system, the building of internment camps, and the infrastructure of a police grid system of control mirrored attempts in Apartheid South Africa, Israel-­occupied Palestine, US-­occupied Iraq, and India-­occupied Kashmir to systematically control colonized populations (Byler 2019; Kaul 2020). As in settler colonial contexts elsewhere, in Northwest China the pro­cess centered on the systematic elimination and replacement of the Native, or, in Uyghur, the yerlik. This term refers to an instantiation of indigeneity that emerges from Uyghur epistemology and, as I w ­ ill explain in the book, is connected to transnational Islamic and place-­based identifications. This conceptualization of the yerlik, which means “­people of the land,” carries with it a feeling of indigeneity or rootedness in the sacred landscapes of Southern Xinjiang.7 In this context Native elimination is premised on a pro­cess of replacement with settler bodies, institutions, and epistemes—­a pro­cess I describe in chapter 6 as “subtraction” (Uy: kımeytish) in which social life is si­mul­ta­neously disappearing yet ongoing. As in the North American context, this pro­cess is justified by positioning the colonizers as benevolent liberators of the Natives—­a colonial variation of “repressive assistance,” which Chinese authorities use to target “problematic” (Ch: wenti) populations across the state (Pan 2020). In the Uyghur region, such assistance promised to ware­house unsalvageable Uyghurs in a drastically expanded prison and camp system while saving the majority of the Uyghurs from themselves by putting them to work as unfree laborers monitored by xvi Preface

biometric surveillance systems, and expropriating Uyghur lands for the Chinese fossil fuel industry and industrial agriculture. It used a number of euphemisms to refer to this structural vio­lence. First it was a pro­cess of “Opening up the West,” which led to the P ­ eople’s War on Terror, and fi­nally a pro­cess of “reeducation” (Ch: zai jiaoyu) and coercive “poverty alleviation” (Ch: fupin), which masked new forms of domination and control. This book develops a theoretical model for understanding how Uyghur young men use homosocial friendships to protect themselves from the development of this new economic formation and accompanying forms of gendered, ethno-­racial vio­lence. It also shows how a small minority of Han mi­grants to the city actively witness Uyghur suffering and develop an interethnic anticolonial politics. Ultimately, however, it argues that the vio­lence of state-­directed cap­i­tal­ist dispossession is co-­constructed with a colonial relation of domination. Together, ­these forces subtract the spirit and vitality of Uyghur social reproduction through camps and surveillance, while linking Han life paths to this form of domination and expropriation. B ­ ecause of the range of material and digital enclosure and near absolute absence of institutional forms of direct re­sis­tance, the dispossession confronting Uyghurs is perhaps more totalizing and rapid than in other instances of colonization. At the same time, the proliferation of media forms allows them to bring their stories into the global pre­ sent. Terror Capitalism is made up of stories of vio­lence. 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

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Acknowl­edgments

Writing this book has taken me in many unexpected directions. It started at a time when smartphones ­were just being in­ven­ted and when reeducation camps were rare. I learned as I wrote that ideals such as h ­ uman liberation cannot be broken by suppression. As Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Dispossessed, “You can only crush (ideals) by ignoring them. By refusing to think.” The p ­ eople who taught me to think beyond the banality of digital and material enclosure in Northwest China are my Uyghur and Han friends. This book is dedicated to them and the narrative figures they became: Ablikim, Alim, Aziz, Batur, Chen Ye, Emir, Hasan, Mahmud, and Yusup. ­These men showed me how gendered, ethno-­racial vio­lence can affect all aspects of social life. They taught me how to be a friend by welcoming me into relationships of friendship even when d ­ oing so made their lives even more difficult. I am honored that they shared their stories with me. Although this book moves into the abstract ideas of global social systems, it is their life stories and experiences that make ­those ideas breathe. I have been privileged to be surrounded by a North American community of Uyghur, Kazakh, and Han scholars from Ürümchi who are committed to decolonial politics. This chosen f­ amily—­those whose names I cannot mention in this text—­have affected this proj­ect and my life in profound ways. They have been my first and closest readers. During and since my gradu­ate studies at the University of Washington, Sasha Su-­Ling Welland has been a consistent source of encouragement, generous reading, and gentle nudges. I ­can’t thank her enough for being so patient as I figured out how masculinity ­shaped ­Uyghur lives. Stevan Harrell has been tireless in his reading and support as both a scholar and a friend. My intellectual mentors at the University of Washington, Ann Anagnost, Daniel Hoffman, Yomi Braester, Sareeta Amrute, Luke Bergmann, Jean Dennison, Radhika Govindrajan, Jenna Grant, Talant

Mawkanuli, Michael Perez, Chandan Reddy, and Susan Whiting—­have taught me to think in new ways and shown me how to honor the stories I heard. My writing group at the University of Washington—­Roneva Keel, Caleb Knapp, Samantha Simon, Jiwoon Yu-­Lee, and Kathryn Zyskowski—­read many drafts of ­these chapters and gave me invaluable feedback that sharpened the craft and contribution of this proj­ect. My friends Stephanie Cruz, Joshua “Griff ” Griffin, Nathan Loggins, Juan Luo, Sarala Puthuval, Leyla Savloff, Lily Shapiro, Alec Sugar, Yiyu Tian, Yingyi Wang, Xiaoshun Zeng, and Shuxuan Zhou gave the long pro­cess of reading and writing a place to develop my ideas. My work was given an institutional home at uw through the support of Kathleen Woodward and Madeleine Yue Dong. Funding from the Social Science Research Council, the China Studies Program at the University of Washington, the Society of Scholars at the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Chiang Ching-­Kuo Foundation gave me the time and space I needed to research and write. At the University of Colorado, I received support from the China Made Proj­ect and scholars at the Center for Asian Studies and Departments of Geography and Anthropology. Tim Oakes has shown me how to think carefully about the role of materiality in infrastructure systems and the specificities of Chinese development. Emily Yeh has pushed me to think about capital and frontier economies in new ways. Shae Frydenlund, Phurwa Gurung, Carole McGranahan, Sarah Tynen, Xi Wang, and ­others helped build an intellectual home for me on campus. The Wilson Center, the University of Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Con­temporary China, and the journal SupChina have also supported this proj­ect and welcomed me into communities of scholars who are engaging with global China. Since 2017 when the mass internment of Uyghurs and Kazakhs began, scholars from across the world have been extremely generous with their attention and support. Aspects of this book have been supported by conferences, invited pre­sen­ta­tions, and lectures at dozens of universities around the world. I would like to especially thank ­those who served as readers, discussants, and editors of early drafts of parts of this book over the years: Anne Allison, Alex Blasdel, Carolina Sanchez Boe, Chuang Collective, Lily Chumley, Ivan Franceschini, Akhil Gupta, Rachel Harris, Michael Herzfeld, Brian Jordan Jefferson, Ralph Litzinger, Nicholas Loubere, David Montgomery, Andrea Muehlebach, Laura Murphy, Tim Pringle, Alessandro Rippa, Louisa Schein, Eric Schluessel, Anthony Tao, Rian Thum, Jeff Wasserstrom, and Sophia Woodman. I would also like to thank the following scholars for inviting me to conferences, organ­izing talks, or supporting my work in other ways (my apologies xx Acknowledgments

if I missed anyone): Nick Admussen, Zack Al-­Witri, “Amy Anderson,” Elise Anderson, “Michael Anderson,” Sam Bass, Jessica Batke, Franck Billé, Gardner Bovingdon, David Brophy, Gene Bunin, Hanna Burdorf, Sandrine Catris, Timothy Cheek, Yangyang Cheng, Jenny Chio, Donald Clarke, Michael Clarke, Maura Cunningham, Jeanne Féaux de la Croix, Joanne Smith Finley, Magnus Fiskesjö, Allison Formanack, Vanessa Frangville, Joshua Freeman, Eli Friedman, Julian Gewirtz, Timothy Grose, Guangtian Ha, Michael Hathaway, Lilly Irani, Susan Jakes, Agnieszka Joniak-­Lüthi, Hayden Kantor, Nitasha Kaul, E. Tammy Kim, Ondřej Klimeš, Marcel LaFlamme, Tong Lam, Tanya Lee, James Leibold, Sam Liao, Andrew B. Liu, Neysun Mahboubi, Charlene Makley, James Millward, Sara Newland, David Palumbo-­Liu, Anand Pandian, Kavita Philip, Winifred Poster, Jarmila Ptackova, Ed Pulford, Madeleine Reeves, Lauren Restrepo, Molly Roberts, Sean Roberts, Guldana Salimjan, Asma Sayeed, Sara Schneiderman, Peter Shapinsky, Jenny Shaw, Victor Shih, Scott Simon, Christian Sorace, Rune Steenberg, David Stroup, David Tobin, Mark Turin, Moira Weigel, Vincent Wong, Max Woodworth, Ruslan Yusupov, and Leah Zani. My editor at Duke University Press, Elizabeth Ault, has given me ­great support as I worked to find my voice in this proj­ect. I am grateful to her and Ken Wissoker for seeing the potential of the book and their role in recruiting two absolutely outstanding anonymous reviewers for the manuscript. Both reviewers provided me with complementary ways of making it more cohesive as a book, sharper in its interventions, and more evocative in its storytelling. They pushed me to clarify my positioning in feminist and decolonial theory and the anthropological scholarship of con­temporary China. The manuscript I gave them is much improved through their patient, sympathetic reading. Benjamin Kossak has kept the publishing pro­cess on schedule with gentle prodding. My friend Nicola Zolin provided his images. My partner, Jennifer, has been with me in this proj­ect from the beginning. She has always been my final editor. Her sacrifices have kept me g­ oing across the years. I cannot imagine life without her. This book was sustained by the two baby girls who helped me write it. The stories of Simone and Hazel ­will forever be a part of this story. ­ fter the youthful days of the first-­floor sky A ­there arose beside ­those carefree trees a sad, uneven city where a baby girl passed from hand to hand —­From “Lumberjacks” by Tahir Hamut, March 3, 2018, Seattle (Trans. Joshua Freeman) Acknowledgments xxi

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,‫ئانا يۇرتۇڭ ئامان بولسا‬ .‫رەڭگى روھىڭ سۇنغۇن بولماس‬ If your ­mother’s home is at peace, Your color and spirit ­will not be broken.

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Introduction.  What Is Terror Capitalism?

The man was sitting three t­ ables away from us. Dressed in a black jacket and a striped polo shirt, he looked like an average middle-­aged Uyghur man. He seemed to be talking intently on his smartphone. Over small glasses of Turkish tea, I was reading and discussing a Uyghur novel, called The Backstreets, with a friend named Ablikim. We had been meeting this way each morning for several weeks. The prob­lem was that the same man had been sitting three t­ ables away from us the day before. Two days in a row seemed like too much. I whispered to Ablikim, who had his back to the man, “I think that guy might be following us.” I nodded at the man with a tilt of my head. “He was in the same spot yesterday. I might just be paranoid, but I think he might be taking pictures while he pretends to talk on his phone.” Ablikim’s face went white. He lurched to his feet.

We took off, walking in dif­fer­ent directions, trying to see if anyone was following us. Back in 2014, facial recognition cameras and checkpoints had not yet been installed across the city so tracking ­people in space required ­human intelligence. We deleted WeChat from our phones in case we w ­ ere detained and forced to show the Ministry of State Security (mss) agents our contacts and chat histories, but t­ here was not much we could do to delete the text messaging on our smartphones. We knew that Tencent and China Mobile could always share our information with the mss. Several hours ­later, I texted Ablikim to see if he had spotted anything unusual. Nothing. A ­ fter waiting a day, we started meeting again, relieved that it must have been a coincidence. We smoked our cheap Hong He cigarettes, laughed at our paranoia, and went back to our tea and novel. Ablikim said: You never know who is working for the police. And if you talk about politics, it w ­ ill inevitably turn into a discussion about oppression within two or three minutes. A few minutes l­ater, the police w ­ ill arrive and ­people w ­ ill be arrested. When I was a kid, no one ever dis­appeared without a trace only to resurface several months ­later. Now this is common. It happens all the time. In 2014 the reeducation system of internment camps was just beginning, and it primarily targeted young Uyghur men in rural areas. Ablikim never ­imagined that, just three years ­later, he and 1.5 million ­others would be deemed untrustworthy and sent to camps. We w ­ ere usually the first ­people in the tea shop right as it opened at 9 a.m. Sometimes, if I was a few minutes late, I would see Ablikim across the street muttering ­under his breath, cursing me for wasting his time. But still, when I got to our t­ able, I would see that he had already bought me a two-­yuan tea and the tahini pastry that he knew I liked. As an underemployed young man, he ­really did not have much to do other than apply for jobs and meet his closest friend, Batur, or me, and talk about lit­er­a­ture and politics. We became close. If I did not meet him for a day or two, he would call me asking where I had been. He protected our friendship. He did not want me spending too much time with other Uyghur men who ­were outside his friendship network. At noon, Batur and another friend would often join us and we would eat hand-­pulled noodles or a rice pilaf called polu together. In the eve­ning, we often made elaborate plans regarding what and where we would eat. We would argue about ­whether we would eat sunflower seeds in the park or play pool. We stayed out late, talking about philosophy, romantic love, suicide, and ­music. 2 Introduction

We talked about the disappearances of ­people in the countryside, about protests and revenge killings, about police shooting indiscriminately into crowds, surveillance systems, po­liti­cal education camps, and the way state policies allowed Han settlers to get wealthy while preventing most Uyghurs from owning businesses, finding jobs, or even having a secure right to the city. We talked about the way police contractors had started scanning the phones and passbooks of young Uyghurs at spot checks, how they inspected Uyghur apartments on a regular basis, scanning qr codes that ­were pasted to the front door, checking the inhabitants off a digital list. In the dark, in the park, with a plastic bag of Kashgar-­style white sunflower seeds and surrounded by close friends, it felt as though we ­were outside the ­People’s War on Terror and it was safe to talk about ­these ­things. In February 2015, this began to change. Back in his home village in Southern Xinjiang, Ablikim’s b­ rother was detained ­after a religious text showed up in a scan of his smartphone. Ablikim started having trou­ble sleeping at night. He cried while his ­mother described how his younger ­brother was taken. He argued with his f­ ather about why he did not want to return to the countryside to support his f­ amily. He said that now his heart began to pound whenever someone called from an unknown number. For several weeks, he s­ topped meeting me and instead paced around his minimally decorated concrete apartment, thinking, worrying about the ­future. The campaign to reeducate Uyghurs ate into the basic fabric of his social life. In order for Ablikim’s ­brother to avoid a five-­year prison term for “religious extremism,” Ablikim and his f­ amily paid the police 10,000 yuan. His ­brother was sent to a reeducation camp instead. In a very short amount of time, the surveillance system moved from phantom police in­for­mants to smartphone scans that targeted immediate f­ amily members to reeducation camps and facial recognition cameras. Yet, despite all of this, Batur and other friends forced Ablikim to leave his apartment. We made him join us for dinner again. Despite the surveillance systems and the disappearance of loved ones, anticolonial friendships made them try and fail and try again to keep on living autonomously as young men alone in the city. This book is about continuing to live despite systems of enclosure, devaluation, and, ultimately, dispossession. Although this tightening system of social control may appear to be unique to Northwest China, the confluence of forces that closed in on Ablikim is s­ haped in part by recent global developments in cap­i­tal­ist frontier making. As theorists of con­temporary capitalism (Berardi 2015; R. Benjamin 2019; Wark 2019; Introduction 3

Zuboff 2019) have shown, between 2010 and 2020 smartphones have become tracking devices that claim life experience and be­hav­ior as surplus data that can be turned into prediction products which shape social life. Terror Capitalism places that body of theory, what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) calls “surveillance capitalism,” in conversation with recent feminist and decolonial examinations of the global co-­construction of con­temporary capitalism and colonialism (Coulthard 2014; Bear et al. 2015; Byrd et al. 2018; Rofel and Yanagisako 2018). In ­doing so, it explores how a state-­funded, privately built surveillance system produced Ablikim and millions of other Muslims in Northwest China as objects of terror capitalism. Drawing on more than twenty-­four months of ethnographic research in the Uyghur region in Northwest China between 2011 and 2018, I examine government documents and reports from tech workers in China as well as internal Chinese police reports since that time. Based on this body of evidence, Terror Capitalism shows that the social life of Muslims, particularly young Uyghur men, has been radically transformed by systems designed and implemented by tech workers and police contractors in China. It considers the rise of state-­ directed private technology development in China to make a broader argument about a global turn ­toward techno-­political systems of cap­i­tal­ist accumulation more generally. Specifically, it considers the roles that digital media surveillance play in po­liti­cal control and economic growth. This system resonates with pro­cesses of po­liti­cal regime change, as in other counterterrorism campaigns, but in this case it is attempting to produce an epistemic transformation through surveillance and unfree l­abor. Knowledge production, and the social life it supports, is the ultimate object of this con­temporary cap­i­tal­ ist and colonial proj­ect. At the center of this is an examination of what happens when a techno-­ political system—­thought of ­here as state-­funded technical programming mapped onto Uyghur social reproduction—is used to generate capital by asking three interconnected questions. 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? In exploring t­ hese questions, I argue that terror capitalism is manifested through digital enclosure, ethno-­racialized devaluation, and material dispossession. I show the way the technological life of the city pulled Uyghurs into the market economy and 4 Introduction

the task of making one’s self legible in urban society, while, on the other hand, the same technological life pulled them t­oward new forms of Islamic orthopraxis and identification. ­These forces of dispossession and re­orientation produced competing forms of self-­fashioning, ways of making the self sensible, which pulled them in competing directions. I also argue that it is impor­tant to think beyond economistic framings to understand capitalism as an ever-­expanding institutionalized global social system. By extending my analy­sis beyond normative discussions of economy that are disengaged from feminist and decolonial analytics, I show that Uyghur social reproduction itself—­all the uncompensated forms of work and care that support market activities—is a primary domain of this system. Uyghur f­ amily and homosocial relations, Native modes of instruction, religious and cultural activities, and land-­based relations are the targets of digital enclosure and devaluation, resulting in new forms of technological possession and capital accumulation for ­those who benefit from the system. Utilizing a biopo­liti­cal reading of con­temporary security systems, I demonstrate that what is being built in this space is more complex than internment camps, which have been the focus of most scholarly and media attention. In fact, the entire population of Muslims in the region, including many Kazakhs and Hui Muslims in addition to the much larger population of Uyghurs, are subject to general technologies of social transformation. Focusing primarily on the lived experience of systems that made the camps pos­si­ble, I show how Uyghur social life was subjected to general forms of dispossession in the years leading up to Muslim mass detention. This introduction first situates the book in broader discussions of racialized capitalism and settler colonialism. It begins by arguing that the term terrorism initiates new sequences of ethno-­racialization and how this promotes pro­cesses of colonial dispossession. By situating the formation of the state in China in colonial discourses, it sketches out the way Maoist multiculturalism has given way to techno-­capitalist frontier making, and then places the techno-­politics of this system in recent scholarship on surveillance capitalism and decolonial feminist analy­sis of economy. Fi­nally, it introduces the book’s proposal that examining ­these systems from the standpoint and practices of Uyghur young men sheds light on the role of gender in new forms of racialization and anticolonial survival. It suggests that active interethnic witnessing can be a method that produces a minor politics of refusal.

Introduction 5

Situating Terror Capitalism in Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonialism Scholarship In order to understand the workings of terror capitalism, it is impor­tant to first understand the significance of the term terror as a conjunctive term operationalized to produce ethno-­racial categorization and state capital deployment. As I describe in chapter 1, in 2014 the Xi Jinping administration declared the ­People’s War on Terror in response to a series of violent incidents involving Uyghurs and rising forms of Islamic piety among the Uyghur population. Since September 11, 2001, authorities of states at the core of global capitalism have used the terms terrorist and extremist to denote an ethno-­racialized “bad Muslim” other that must be ­either eliminated or transformed (Mamdani 2002; Asad 2007; M. Anderson 2017; Brophy 2019; Byler 2019). In China, the introduction of global terrorism discourses and digital surveillance catalyzed a new sequence in the racialization of ethnicity, making the bodies and possessions of non-­Sino Muslims susceptible to intensified forms of expropriation that range from land occupation and displacement, to mass detention and data harvesting, to reconfigured social reproduction ­under conditions of automated surveillance. For Cedric Robinson (1983) and numerous other scholars of decolonization and antiracism,1 ethno-­racial capitalism in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca is 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. That is to say, racial capitalism and settler colonialism have been co-­created through state-­enabled forms of dispossession (Coulthard 2014; Pasternak 2015; Day 2016). Racial capitalism and settler colonialism are distinctive frontiers of expropriative capital accumulation; the former focuses on enslaved or dependent ­labor of ethno-­racialized ­others, while the latter centers on enclosure, and the dispossession of land and institutions of ethno-­racialized ­others. Yet, central to both forms is an ethno-­racial hierarchy that remains a cofoundational ele­ment of both historical and con­temporary forms of economy. As Alyosha Goldstein argues, “Racial, colonial, gendered, and generational making of property and the capacity for possession are both a consequence of par­tic­u­lar historical conditions of dispossession and continue to be reproduced in new ways in the pre­sent” (2017, 42). In this book, I argue that the co-­construction of cap­i­tal­ist and colonial relations should not be ­limited to Eu­ro­pean and North American contexts. ­Here, I 6 Introduction

am building on arguments from Christopher Chen (2013) and ­others who posit that ethno-­racial hierarchies are continuously generated in the ongoing pro­ cess of capital accumulation.2 “ ‘Race’ is not extrinsic to capitalism or simply the product of specific historical formations to proj­ects of industrialization. Instead they are reproduced through the creation of caste-­like formations such as South African Apartheid or Jim Crow Amer­i­ca. Likewise, capitalism does not simply incorporate racial domination as an incidental part of its operations, but from its origins systematically begins producing and reproducing ‘race’ as global surplus humanity” (Chen 2013, 214). The “global surplus humanity” of disposable workers that is produced through the creation of “caste-­like formations” allows a cap­i­tal­ist social order to continue to create value even as markets reach their saturation point.3 This also means that racialization is not ­limited to settler–Native and White–Black binaries, rather capitalist-­colonial development continually produces nested forms of antagonism centered on ethno-­racial difference.4 As social institutions and market forces build structures of power over life, what might other­wise be characterized as ethnic difference in non-­Euro-­American contexts comes to take on the symbolic and material vio­lence of racialization. ­Under the sign of terrorism, the pro­cess of racializing Muslim populations has been given new and increasing vitality. As Chen argues: The continuation of open-­ended security operations across the Muslim world, reveal how “race” remains not only a probabilistic assignment of relative economic value but also an index of differential vulnerability to state vio­lence. . . . ​At play ­here are not only unwaged, coerced or dependent forms of l­abour, but also, crucially, the management of ­those populations which have become redundant in relation to capital. Such populations are expendable but nonetheless trapped within the capital relation, ­because their existence is defined by a generalised commodity economy which does not recognise their capacity to l­abour. (Chen 2013, 210, 212) That is to say, in numerous contexts the bodies of Muslims marked as “terrorist” or “extremist” are simply read as disposable, or worthless, with regard to their ability to produce economic value, and are thus not deserving of ­human and civil rights protections. Importantly, in Northwest China, Uyghur male bodies are often read si­mul­ta­neously as potentially disposable “bad Muslims” and productive “good Muslims.” If the “disease” of their “bad Muslim” identification can be eliminated (Roberts 2018; Grose 2019), they can be made eco­nom­ically productive as dependent laborers who, u ­ nder conditions of digital enclosure, Introduction 7

can be put to work. In any case, a state-­authorized and state-­enforced demonization in media and everyday discourse of “backward” (Ch: luohou) Muslims allows the theft of their lands, the erosion of their social institutions, and, ultimately, the exposure of their bodies to vio­lence from state proxies (see Dawson 2016). In Northwest China, state capital incentivizes and obligates private companies to develop new security products and forms of ­labor while at the same time clearing space for new forms of investment and, to some extent, profit. The state terror that terror capitalism justifies in the Uyghur homeland is part of the pro­cess of establishing dominance and exploiting that dominance through an accumulation of wealth. The “terror” aspect of terror capitalism allows Chinese authorities to justify both the funding of this new development and the means with which state proxies are carry­ing it out. Terrorism, in the context of the post-9/11 United States and China, signifies a universal, yet invisible, global threat of Muslim insurgency. In Northwest China, it rationalizes investment in policing and security infrastructure and justifies the mass subtraction of hundreds of thousands of Uyghur young men and ­others. Si­mul­ta­neously, the state and private corporations based in par­tic­u­lar localities in Eastern China are able to consistently frame the geographies inhabited by Uyghurs as crucial sites for investment of surplus capacity. Thinking about the pro­cess of exploitation and dispossession in the Uyghur homeland as terror capitalism shows how new sequences in racialization take on valences that are dif­fer­ent from older, ongoing forms of racialized capitalism in other places.5 In locations around the world, the Global War on Terror has allowed governments from China to India, the Palestinian Territories, and the United States to mark domestic populations of religious minority citizens as terrorists and systematically subject them to experiments in policing, watch lists, mass internment, and indoctrination pro­cesses, often without recourse to ­legal protections (Kaul 2020). Importantly, unlike in other cases, where targeted populations are simply banished to sites of h ­ uman warehousing such as prisons or ghettos, state capital ­here is invested in an ­imagined ­future of Chinese cultural homogeneity and economic individuation. By eating into Uyghur social reproduction through comprehensive surveillance systems, mass detention, a­ nd family separation, Uyghur ­women and men are pushed ­toward a lumpen form of proletarianization that centers on a reified form of Han cultural values defined as “Chinese.” ­There are significant parallels between Uyghur mass detention and the mass detention of Black Americans in that both systems of mass incarceration create profits and jobs while at the same time deeply damaging both Uyghur and 8 Introduction

Black American social reproduction.6 ­These pro­cesses, in turn, place a much greater strain on Uyghur and Black American ­women—­pushing them into subservient roles in the broader society and producing greater forms of fracture in minoritized families. A major difference in the Black American and Uyghur experiences of mass incarceration is that Uyghurs are being made the target of economistic transformation as unfree workers b­ ehind checkpoints, ­under cameras and satellites while si­mul­ta­neously being targeted with epistemic retraining. In the United States, the enormous numbers of Black Americans incarcerated since the civil rights movement is a way for lawmakers and invested citizens to maintain racial hierarchy and racial dispossession (Gilmore 2007). This was the motivating interest that led to the current profit-­making American prison industry. In China ­there is a derivation of this pro­cess. ­There, the detention system is a means rather than an end in itself of transforming an ethnic other into an unfree but eco­nom­ically productive workforce. It is also impor­tant to note that, in the American context, systems of deeply flawed due pro­cess, representative democracy, a f­ ree press, and civil protest allow for the formal contestation of institutionalized racism. In the context of Northwest China, authoritarian governance prevents formal decolonial and antiracist movements. As a result, Uyghurs are overtly produced by state authorities and in everyday settler discourse as subhuman u ­ nder the sign of terror. They must be saved from themselves, much like Native “savage” populations in Eu­ro­ pean and North American settler colonialism. Situating Terror Capitalism in a Chinese Colonial Legacy The lexicon and practices of colonization around the world have been s­ haped by the way French colonists looked to the Rus­sian Empire as a model of conquest and, in turn, the way Rus­sian imperialists looked to the American conquest of Native American lands as a model for their own colonial efforts in the steppes and deserts of Siberia and Central Asia (Stoler and McGranahan 2007). The reason why it is impor­tant to turn to this genealogy of Rus­sian colonial thinking is to question the dominance of Western Eu­rope as the sole progenitor of colonial empire and cap­i­tal­ist expansion. Instead, I argue that it is impor­tant to look more carefully at routes through which colonial thinking and practices are generated.7 Understanding t­ hese relations problematizes the idea that colonial empires are an exclusively Eu­ro­pean domain.8 Since the founding of the ­People’s Republic of China, China’s past semicolonization has functioned as a foundational myth of colonial wounding (Anand 2019). This moral wound shapes the aspirations of the nation. By promising a Introduction 9

return to precolonial civilizational purity, as in other former colonies, it pushes state authorities and their proxies to reach for “a f­ uture where the healing of the colonial wound can only be complete by achieving a level of consumption and lifestyle ‘like the West’ ” (Kaul 2019, 11). At the same time, the wounding attempts to mask Chinese colonization of Uyghurs and o­ thers, 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.9 ­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.10 Terror Capitalism suggests that a framing of colonial pro­cesses as domestic disputes or ethnic conflicts—as they are often framed in broader China Studies lit­er­a­ture and popu­lar media—­that are disengaged with the standpoint of the colonized obfuscates the structures of power that are at work in ­these locations across Asia.11 What such accounts often 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 (Chen 2013; Kaul 2020). 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 (Coulthard 2014; S. Shih 2016; Kaul 2020). In building on this argument, Terror Capitalism resonates with Patrick Wolfe’s (2006) and Tuck and Yang’s (2012) reframing of settler colonialism not as an event-­based pro­cess of exploitation, assimilation, or acculturation, but rather as a structural relationship of po­liti­cal domination, occupation, and dispossession. It suggests that settler colonialism as manifested in the Uyghur homeland follows a logic of cultural and social elimination centered on ethno-­racial difference. Unlike in former franchise colonies such as India, in settler colonial contexts where the colonizer never leaves, postcolonialism is never fully pos­si­ble.12 Instead, in settler colonial socie­ties, Native populations are subjected to 10 Introduction

ongoing pro­cesses of elimination e­ ither through programs of physical extermination or pro­cesses of removal and reeducation. ­These pro­cesses of elimination and replacement are never complete or total, instead they are an epistemic boundary strug­g le where Native social reproduction strives to continue even as colonial and cap­i­tal­ist systems attempt to steal as much capital as pos­si­ble from Native lands and ­people. In much the same way, the settlement proj­ects of the ­People’s Republic of China in Central Asia w ­ ere characterized by relationships of domination and proj­ects of ­human engineering and elimination directed t­oward the ­peoples of t­ hose lands (see Bovingdon 2010; Finley 2013; and McGranahan 2019). Beginning in the 1950s, the state used Han patron–­Uyghur client relations, the capture of social institutions, and settler occupation to establish sociocultural reengineering pro­cesses ­under the guise of eliminating counterrevolutionary threats. Of course, accusations of counterrevolutionary “local nationalism” ­were in many cases simply a euphemism for attachment to ethnic or Native difference (Bulag 2012; Brophy 2017). The overall goal of a settler nation is access to land and resources and the elimination of all obstacles that stand in its way. In Northwest China, the fact of Uyghur existence was thus one of the primary obstacles to this proj­ect. This challenge produced multiple outcomes. On the one hand, the state strove to capture the religious and cultural institutions of Uyghur society while, on the other, it sought to create a new market-­oriented society on yerlik lands. In order to accomplish ­these objectives, settler colonial proj­ects—­the Chinese ethnic minority paradigm included—­often produce forms of “permitted difference” in ethnic minority or Native socie­ties (Schein 2000; McCarthy 2009). As other scholars have argued regarding the Chinese case, this form of minority recognition serves the purpose of asking minority and Native groups to participate in the reproduction of Maoist multiculturalism (see Litzinger 2000; Schein 2000; and Makley 2007). It allows them some latitude to develop their own institutions but also asks them to fit into a slot that promotes a narrative of Chinese liberation, and, in an era of marketization, to sell their own culture for the gaze of tourists who accompany the arrival of settler society. In some cases, ethnic practices supported by the state through funding and policy became a source of yerlik pride and valorization. For instance, in the past some Uyghur artists defended per­for­mances of culture in the tourism industry as preferable to factory or ser­vice ­labor in Han spaces. The overlap between top-­down control over state-­supported “permitted difference” and minority-­ supported autonomous land-­based work resulted in forms of commodified Introduction 11

cultural practices that some Uyghurs found empowering at times, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s, and disempowering at other times, particularly in the 2010s (“You ­Shall Sing and Dance” 2021). More importantly, however, for most Uyghurs, Maoist multiculturalism defined improper forms of difference, opening the colonized to further state control.13 Between 2010 and 2020, this last facet of the discourse, the ability to define who is a “bad minority,” has become the dominant form of Chinese multiculturalism for Uyghurs (M. Anderson 2017; Brophy 2019). As noted in the epigraph to this book, for young Uyghur men, the overall impulse in this relation of control and elimination is one of “breaking the spirit” (Uy: rohi sulghun) of a minority person while saving the individual as a productive, submissive Chinese subject. This spirit is rooted in land-­based forms of knowledge that prefigure a Uyghur person’s experience with the modern state in China. In the logic of the reeducation system, once this spirit of epistemic difference is broken, the docile subject w ­ ill be forced to accept subjectification. Through this pro­cess, the effect of state power (T. Mitchell 1999) and the techno-­security industry it fosters, emerges as a Leviathan—­able to crush an individual, a ­family, or a ­whole community with impunity. This state power became particularly apparent ­after the beginning of the US Global War on Terror in 2001, when, for the first time, nearly all forms of re­sis­tance by Uyghurs began to be described as terrorism by state media, permitted popu­lar culture, and surveillance systems. As Gardner Bovingdon (2010) has documented, even the smallest offense carried out by Uyghurs ­toward Han citizens or state authorities could be classified as terrorism. Emily Yeh (2012) notes that, in the Chinese application of a capacious post-9/11 counterterrorism, “any perceived threat to state territorial sovereignty, regardless of its ­actual methods or effects vis-­à-­vis harm to ­others,” can be deemed terrorism. Importantly, this threat can only be produced by minoritized bodies, particularly Muslim male bodies, since mass murder carried out by Han civilians is not seen as a threat to Chinese self-­determination. Since 2000 the “dark” (Ch: hei) bodies of Uyghur men infected with the ideological virus of Islam became synonymous with “wild” (Ch: yexing) virility and, at times, dehumanized danger (M. Anderson 2017). Many officials and Chinese terrorism experts I interviewed described Uyghur young men explic­itly in ­these terms. State authorities placed posters throughout the Uyghur districts of Ürümchi in 2014 that depicted and labeled the appearance of rural-­origin Uyghur young men and w ­ omen who had begun practicing new forms of Islamic piety as evidence of terrorism (see figure I.1). The system prescribed gender per­for­ mance, pathologizing the appearance of young Uyghur men and making the 12 Introduction

figure i.1. Posters that depict the appearance of “good Muslims,” upper right, and “bad Muslims,” lower right, that w ­ ere posted throughout the Uyghur districts of Ürümchi in September 2014. On the left side of the posters, rewards ­were offered to ­those who informed on Uyghurs who practiced illegalized forms of Islam. T ­ hose who appeared or w ­ ere reported to be “bad Muslims” ­were subject to immediate arrest. Image by Nicola Zolin, used with permission.

appearance of Uyghur ­women the grounds of competing forms of state patriarchy and yerlik Islamic patriarchy. In both cases, Uyghur w ­ omen often became an abstract object “to be saved.” Perhaps more significantly, the institutionalization of power over the bodies of Uyghurs defined Uyghur masculinity and femininity through an expansive pro­cess of racialization. In the minds of state authorities and Han settlers who ­were moving into Uyghur-­majority areas, the perceived wild virulence of Uyghur masculinity was ­imagined as a constant, if often abstract, threat to state and settler claims to land possession (Tynen 2020; see also Moreton-­Robinson 2015). Yet, despite t­hese fears of Native retaliation, the “lucrative chaos” (Cliff 2016a; see also Schumpeter 1942) of rapid development and dispossession produced tremendous opportunities that outweighed settler fears. Real estate speculation, natu­ral resources, and international trade associated with the development proj­ect permitted many Han settlers to find better standards of living for themselves. They also saw state institutions aligning with and protecting their interests even as development increased indebtedness among Introduction 13

Uyghurs, who ­were systematically blocked from low-­interest lines of credit by nationalized banks that placed restrictions on loans to Uyghurs due to their assumed disposition ­toward terrorism. Uyghur mi­grants told me that Han landlords or bankers increasingly found ways of evicting Uyghur business o­ wners or homeowners and replacing them with Han settler tenants (see also Tynen 2019b). Many Uyghur mi­grants I interviewed said they encountered prejudice when seeking loans or authorizations of sales and purchases—­a form of exclusion common in other iterations of racialized capitalism (Dawson 2016). Banks and landlords ­were often quite e­ ager, on the other hand, to provide Han settlers with loans for purchases of real estate or discounts on business investments (Cliff 2016a). Uyghurs, unlike Han settlers, ­were often seen by Han lenders as not possessing the discipline necessary for wage ­labor. As the Xinjiang state economic advisor Tang Lijiu put it, “­Because of their lifestyle, asking (Uyghurs) to go into big industrial production, onto the production line: ­they’re prob­ably not suited to that.”14 That is to say, in Tang’s view, Uyghurs w ­ ere seen as not yet disciplined enough, and thus not deserving to even be included in the wage l­ abor market where their work could be exploited for its surplus value. Instead, the majority of them w ­ ere only worth using in devalued forms of social reproductive work such as food ser­vice and waste management or as p ­ eople whose work 15 or data could simply be expropriated without any pay. For many Han businessmen, dealing with Uyghurs was just too much “trou­ ble” (Ch: mafan). It was for the same reason that Uyghurs w ­ ere told they need not apply for high-­skilled jobs in natu­ral resource development, which was universally controlled by Han settlers. B ­ ecause of the supposed threat that Uyghurs posed as potential terrorists the state also refused to issue ­legal documents to the vast majority of Uyghurs who applied to travel and trade domestically and internationally. As a result, minoritized ­peoples frequently found themselves caught in a downward spiral of poverty even as the Han society that was growing around them was increasingly affluent. In another iteration of the “disempowered development” that Andrew Fischer has found in Tibet (2013), they ­were si­mul­ta­neously excluded from entering the cap­i­tal­ist system as members of the proletariat, or civil rights–­bearing classes, exploited as disposable ser­vice workers, and blamed for not finding their way in the new economy. The ethno-­racism that is being produced in the Uyghur homeland through con­temporary pro­cesses of racialization is unique to this par­tic­u­lar moment and this par­tic­u­lar place. It is nonetheless impor­tant to name such pro­cesses as ethno-­racial rather than simply ethnic or cultural b­ ecause it enables us to see how state capital and private industries sediment differences among groups (Reddy 2011). Naming this a pro­cess of ethno-­racialization centers the way 14 Introduction

cap­i­tal­ist frontiers and colonial domination are embodied by accentuating difference. Individual workers’ inner characteristics are framed by ­legal, economic, and educational institutions “through their skin color, dress, language, smell, accent, hairstyle, way of walking, facial expressions, and be­hav­ior” (Amrute 2016, 14). While Amrute is writing about a culturalist form of new racism directed ­toward Indian tech workers in Germany, her argument for why difference should be read as racial rather than simply or only ethnic, holds for Uyghurs as well. The bodies of Uyghurs—­the way they dress, their intimate relations, personal hygiene, their accent, their diet, facial expressions, physical and virtual be­hav­ior, and language use—­are the primary object of ­human face-­to-­face ethnic profiling and the pseudoscientific pre­sen­ta­tion of techno-­political surveillance. In the context of the Chinese frontier, their ethnic and Native difference has come to act as a kind of racialized difference: an institutionalized system of domination and exclusion. In fact, as in other con­temporary colonial contexts (TallBear 2013), the techno-­political aspects of this system are an attempt to produce a postgenomic race science. In algorithmic assessments of the terrorist body at face scan checkpoints and in social media analytics, Uyghur skin color, eye shape, nose structure, and hairstyles become primary markers of precriminality.16 As such, Uyghurs are subject to a par­tic­u­lar form of racialization, driven by state capital, the “black box” of algorithmic assessment tools, and the Han settlers who are protected by the colonial relation. The racialization provides an a priori justification for expansive techno-­political systems of control, even while t­ hese systems are constantly producing and reinforcing the pro­cess of racialization in the form of direct ethno-­racial domination of the Uyghur population. This dynamic has produced an enclosure pro­cess through which Uyghurs are forced to work on their selves, to transform themselves into acceptable objects of surveillance. The Role of Technology in Capitalist-­Colonial Frontier Making in China Specific technologies have been central to the modern history of systems of enclosure, ranging from the barbed wire and automatic weapons of North American internment camps to the passbooks and checkpoints of Apartheid South Africa and Palestine. As Ann Stoler (2010) has shown, in con­temporary colonial contexts, techniques for classifying the intimate details and be­hav­iors of a targeted population are po­liti­cally charged not ­because they reveal the inner truths of ­people’s lives but ­because they attempt to weaponize sociocultural knowledge in order to subordinate t­ hose who carry that knowledge. As this Introduction 15

form of intimacy moves ­toward the techno-­political, it is made even more potent ­because of its scalability. The technology used in Chinese proj­ects to contain and transform Uyghur populations takes t­ hese systems of control to new levels of intensity. The web of surveillance has moved from cameras on the wall to the chips inside their pockets, to their very physiognomy. Terror capitalism uses the exceptional space of the P ­ eople’s War on Terror to partition their space and produce a new sequence in cap­i­tal­ist expropriation, freely extracting data from bodies marked as dif­fer­ent and thus suspicious. T ­ hese techno-­political pro­cesses began by harvesting Muslim social life—­ranging from the objects they possessed to their social relations—­and converting it into data. In a 2015 feminist manifesto, Laura Bear, Karen Ho, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Sylvia Yanagisako argue for a study of capitalism that centers on the social relations it generates in daily life. Rather than accepting abstract economic logics and formal models as normative, they strive to understand how biopo­liti­cal and financial conversion devices mediate, but do not fully determine, social life. This approach helps feminist and decolonial economics scholars understand how cap­i­tal­ist frontiers are made and what effects they have on social ­futures (Bhattacharya 2017). Analy­sis of capitalism as an institutionalized global social system must take into account the way the work of w ­ omen and minoritized ­people—­often framed as “unproductive” ­labor in dominant discourses—­are essential to capital accumulation and the way the division of ­labor itself shapes gender and ethno-­racial roles (Weeks 2011; Chen 2013; Dawson 2016; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). It means examining the way the care of ­children and the el­derly is off-­loaded and considering the role of social networks and intersubjective friendships in maintaining and transforming social class, ethno-­racial hierarchies, and personal well-­being (Scott 1999; Federici 2004; Stoler 2010). This approach shows how the vio­lence and possibilities of cap­i­tal­ist power relations spread throughout a society and the way state institutions, ­legal regimes, and techno-­political systems structure this vio­lence and potential as a pro­cess. In a recent examination of the Eu­ro­pean and American technology industries, the theorist Shoshana Zuboff (2019) uses the term surveillance capitalism to describe the digital economy of social media, smartphones, the Internet of ­Things, information harvesting, and data analytics. This matrix of ai-­enabled communication tools have come to claim life experience and be­hav­ior as surplus data that can be turned into prediction products through machine learning. ­These prediction products are in turn sold to advertisers or, in some cases, policing agencies in order to predict and shape the be­hav­ior of targeted populations (Jefferson 2020). This new frontier in cap­i­tal­ist accumulation, or what Wark 16 Introduction

(2019) refers to as a new information-­centered mode of production, is fostering a new form of power over ­human experience. Around the world, ­there are emergent divisions or “digital enclosures” (Andrejevic 2007) of social learning that empower technocratic elites, smoothing out their ability to profit from and control this system while binding t­hose who serve the system through both tacit consumerist consent from protected populations and the involuntary surveillance of ­those who are denied civil rights. The system Zuboff and ­others describe can be thought of as centering on a new range of digital “conversion devices” that utilize digital enclosures to produce new value regimes and data and ­labor theft (Bear et al. 2015). In financial capitalism, such devices are economic models or systems of accreditation that derive their power through their ability to “erase and sever objects, ­people, and resources from their contexts” (Bear et al. 2015). This book starts from the assumption that smartphones, search engines, and algorithmic data assessments must also be identified as conversion devices. In contrast to devices in other domains of capitalism, they derive their power from recording the particularity and social contexts of users in order to quantify and exploit them. It is only then that life experience is harvested as data, analyzed, and sent to users as attention-­grabbing nudges and to a range of state and corporate buyers in the form of prediction products. That is to say, smartphones and search engines are power­ful not only ­because of their precise knowledge of the par­tic­u­lar but also ­because of their predictive capacities regarding the aggregate. On the one hand, ­these conversion devices draw users’ attention ­because they know what users want—­this is what drives consumers to consent to having them operate in the most intimate spaces of their lives. On the other hand, however, t­ hese conversion devices turn ­human be­hav­ior into digital code, parse it with algorithms, and allow it to be weaponized by tech workers, employers, and the state police and their contractors.17 It is the dual-­edged conversion from the par­tic­u­lar to the aggregate that makes algorithmic surveillance systems especially power­ful in eating into and reshaping social life. No other conversion device transcends scale in such a rapid and intimate way from the personal to the level of the economy and the state.18 The surveillance capacities of cell phones and search engines produce new levels of theft from minoritized, ethno-­racialized ­others deemed undeserving of civil protections. This latter class of unfree o­ thers—­who are not even privileged enough to be exploited as “­free” workers or consumers within an autonomously chosen l­abor contract—is what Wark (2017) refers to as the con­temporary subaltern. The enclosure of such minoritized p ­ eople in Northwest China is at the heart of what this book aims to examine. Introduction 17

With the exception of a handful of scholars, theorists of surveillance capitalism have largely centered their studies in Eu­ro­pean and North American contexts and the way they confront unmarked subjects that, in effect, often appear to be middle-­class, heteronormative, and white.19 What would it mean to study the role of surveillance in Chinese society among minoritized Muslim populations? This book explores what a feminist anthropological approach might offer in developing an analytic of cap­i­tal­ist surveillance that foregrounds gendered, Native social relations and discrete histories in China. In entering the discussion from this ­angle, it builds on Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Yanagisako’s (2018) ethnography of the Chinese and Italian garment industry, by transposing their approach to a dif­fer­ent industry, location, and population. Rofel and Yanagisako identify a number of key sociohistorical pro­cesses at work in the con­temporary economy in China, ranging from ­labor value negotiations to in­ equality outsourcing (2018, 8). While similar processes—­particularly pro­cesses of revaluation and social rearrangement—­are central to the dynamics at work in the surveillant society in Northwest China, for the purposes of this introduction, I w ­ ill focus h ­ ere on the privatization of public industries and ser­vices. In the development of global capitalism, economic systems frequently eat into po­liti­cal institutions and begin to shape their function. Increasingly, in both liberal and illiberal systems of government, po­liti­cal power is used to protect the accumulation of capital. As Fraser notes, this is another site of the “boundary strug­g le” of capitalism as a social system (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). China, as a paradigmatic example of con­temporary global capitalism, is no exception to this (Friedman 2020). As Chinese authorities began a pro­cess of transition away from Maoism to the current cap­i­tal­ist orientation, it has been difficult to distinguish between state managed institutions and private enterprise. In fact, even if an enterprise meets the l­ egal definition of ­either a state or a private institution, it is often impossible to disentangle which aspect of the corporation is “public” and which aspect is “private” (Rofel and Yanagisako 2018, 9, 133). Often this is a result not of deliberate obfuscation by the state or the enterprise but ­because what private-­public means is contingent on the positioning of individuals within ­these industries and state institutions. However, Rofel argues, what unites individuals on e­ ither side of the private-­public dialectic is a commitment to “profitizing practices” ­whether on behalf of individuals, local communities, or the state more generally (Rofel and Yanagisako 2018, 134). Often ­these commitments are multiple—­building state power, national pride, personal wealth, and ­family protections. The difference between public and private commitments is often a ­matter of stress rather than of kind. 18 Introduction

The sociologist Ching Kwan Lee (2018) also examines private and public obligations in her study of Chinese investment in mining and construction in Zambia by theorizing the role of state capital itself. Chinese state capital, she shows, is often deployed to meet par­tic­u­lar strategic ends. She argues that private capital differs from Chinese state capital in that the former is largely driven by shareholder demands, while the latter—­acting in more of a Fordist model of economic development—­moves at a longer temporal scale and is less dependent on immediate profits, thus affording ­those who are employed by it more stability. This state-­capital driven usage of infrastructure development as a way of off-­loading and building further capacities in par­tic­u­lar regional localities across China is central to what some scholars refer to as a Chinese “Model of Development” (Oakes 2019). Lee (2018) shows that, in the context of global China, state capital deployment is driven less by profitization than by Chinese domestic market saturation, or overcapacity, and long-­term strategic interests in resources and standards setting (which, perhaps, are less operative in the transnational textile industry). Lee’s argument, concerning the private and state segmentation of capital in the mining sectors of the Chinese transnational economy, stands in contrast to Rofel and Yanagisako’s argument that ­there is no clear distinction between private and public Chinese corporations in the textile industry and that both are united by profitization. This book suggests that the Chinese technology industry stands in distinction to both mining and textile sectors of the Chinese economy examined in ­those two studies. Not only are private Chinese technology companies driven by state capital and forms of speculative venture capital—­a form not examined by Lee, Rofel, or Yanagisako—­but they are also not often driven by immediate profitization. Instead, like other technology companies that are part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca, Chinese tech firms strive to expand quickly by reinvesting earnings in the rapid prototyping of product development, accruing intellectual property, and market expansion. Yet, despite t­ hese differences, the integration of state interests in private industry provides a central similarity across ­these three domains of the Chinese economy. The leading fifteen private Chinese technology firms, most of which have deep investments in Xinjiang counterterrorism, have been granted “national champion” (Ch: guojiadui) status by the Ministry of Science and Technology. This means that they qualify for lucrative state contracts but they are also obligated to achieve certain objectives on behalf of the nation. In the 2010s state authorities began to shift the Chinese model of development to achieving what Xi Jinping described as the “China Dream” of a prosperous urban life and a greater presence along a re­imagined “Silk Road” Introduction 19

in Southeast Asia, the ­Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. To accomplish ­these new goals, the state accelerated the pro­cess of subcontracting public works proj­ects to private companies. ­These Private Public Partnerships (ppp), which ­were thought to be more nimble and responsive to economic and po­liti­ cal challenges than Maoist-­legacy State Owned Enterprises (soe), ­were funded by the Chinese central and regional governments using state capital in much the same manner as described by Lee (2018) in Zambia. By 2017 the Chinese state had invested over $2.6 trillion in ppps across the country (Tan and Zhao 2019). While much of this investment centered on the construction of roads, dams, electric grids, pipelines, airports, and urban housing between 2010 and 2020, it was extended further into social life through the construction of digital infrastructures, surveillance and media systems, transportation platforms, and logistics systems. This shift t­ oward privatization of development coincided with the growing venture capital orientation of the technology industry. As I explain in detail in chapter 1, it also coincided with an opening up of a space of exceptional investment in relation to China’s Muslim minorities. To summarize how and why t­ hese privately built surveillance technologies work as a type of conversion device—­transcribing social life as digital code, which can then be analyzed by algorithms and monetized by companies—it is instructive to think with Michel Foucault regarding the general technology of biopo­liti­cal security (Foucault 2007). Such a technology, for Foucault, is si­mul­ ta­neously productive in the way it produces new kinds of dependent subjects, symbolic in the way it produces new regimes of truth or evaluation, and power­ful in the way it is dispersed to mediate and enclose, but not fully determine, the conduct and discipline of individuals within populations (Samimian-­Darash 2016). Thinking of t­hese terms in an anthropological framework shows the way distinctive technological activities shape social reproduction itself. Such sociotechnical or techno-­political systems produce par­tic­u­lar scripts of action for t­ hose in dif­fer­ent racial, class, gender, and sexual orientation categories (F. Bray 2007; R. Benjamin 2019; Wark 2019). In the context of surveillance systems, ­these scripts shape social life by modeling, simulating, and calculating be­hav­ior, producing a regime of actionable truth while at the same time attempting to turn individuals into a standing reserve of data and workers in ser­vice to the system. As Timothy Mitchell puts it, techno-­politics always produces a “technical body,” by which he means “a par­tic­u­lar form of manufacturing, a certain way of organ­izing the amalgam of h ­ uman and nonhuman, t­ hings and ideas” (T. Mitchell 2002, 34). Techno-­political systems promise a feeling of control to ­those who own and operate them against the threat of what are deemed to be the sources of social ills or economic hindrances (Joyce 2003). 20 Introduction

figure i.2. In August 2017, a four-­year-­old Uyghur child kisses an image of her ­father six months ­after he was taken to a reeducation camp for praying at a local mosque in rural Southern Xinjiang. Image used with permission from the photographer.

They strive to make social life predictable by maintaining relations of power at a technical remove. Importantly though, at the level of social reproduction, the par­ameters of micropo­liti­cal devices become more than simply a conduit for power over life; they can become a space for po­liti­cal contestation and reversal (Von Schnitzler 2016). H ­ ere, power—­defined in its fullest sense in the Foucauldian tradition as the ability to affect and be affected—­can be opened up through the mediating effect of technological conversion (Foucault 2007). Native Masculinity and Minor Politics as Method In his work, Cedric Robinson (1983) pre­sents a groundbreaking account of the way economic growth is linked to racialization. Equally impor­tant to this is the way he rejects Marxist accounts that center exclusively on white male industrial workers as unmarked subjects with revolutionary potential—­erasing the work of w ­ omen and minoritized o­ thers. In fact, drawing on Robinson, Robin D. G. Kelley (2017, quoted in Goldstein 2017) notes: “Race and gender Introduction 21

are not incidental or accidental features of the global cap­i­tal­ist order, they are constitutive. Capitalism emerged as a racial and gendered regime. . . . ​The secret to capitalism’s survival is racism, and the racial and patriarchal state. Capitalism developed and operates within a racial system or racial regime. Racism is fundamental for the production and reproduction of capitalism, and that vio­lence is necessary for creating and maintaining capitalism.” The key to the survival of cap­i­tal­ist systems is social reproduction, the care work necessary to support monetarily valued forms of production, and the violent expansion of capitalism and colonialism into the domain of the home and intersubjective care. Forms of care that exist even partially outside the purview of the colonial state and cap­i­tal­ist gaze are sources of friction in the expansion of this system. Over the period of this study, I focused my attention on everyday forms of care that both provided the grounding of terror capitalism and resisted it. I developed close friendships with dozens of Uyghur and Han rural-­to-­urban male mi­grants while living near Uyghur informal settlements in Ürümchi. We met frequently, sharing meals, ­going to mosques and prayer room spaces, art studios, tea­houses, and coffee shops while I learned about the stories of their lives and they learned about mine. I observed how they cared for each other despite underemployment and racialized policing. In addition, I gathered Uyghur-­and Chinese-­language cultural artifacts such as films and novels concerning the con­temporary development of the city, the implementation of systems of control, and the economies that motivated forced relocation of Uyghur mi­grants in and out of the city. Many of t­ hese texts became objects that centered conversations I had with differently positioned Han and Uyghur friends. Bringing the same publicly staged repre­sen­ta­tions into conversation with dif­fer­ent ­people allowed me to structure this book around personal storytelling. It also allowed me to recognize the valence and power of mediation and the way ­these cultural objects ­were ­shaped by gendered, ethno-­racial state discourses, modes of capital production, and technologies of the colonial relation. This methodological approach pushed me to consider the way young Uyghur men construct and embody their masculinity through their social relations and sensory per­for­mance. Building on the work of numerous anthropologists who have examined gender construction in Muslim socie­ties and Uyghur society in par­tic­u­lar, I strove to view Uyghur male voices and experiences not as nongendered and normative expressions of Uyghur identity, but as sites of emotional care.20 Throughout the text, I have attempted to make explicit the stakes in focusing on male voices. Their voices are not representative of the w ­ hole of social experiences in Chinese Central Asia, but they play 22 Introduction

a central role in the sequence of dispossession and ethno-­racialization that is analyzed in this book. Uyghur young men w ­ ere made the primary target of the ­People’s War on Terror and Han men w ­ ere the primary population sent to build the global city and support terror-­capitalist expansion. In Ürümchi, the co-­constructed valorization of Han masculinity and state authority—­and the resulting disposability of Uyghur masculinity—is a central part of the emergent pro­cess of racialization. ­Because of this, and ­because of my positionality as a male researcher invested in decolonial strug­g les, male voices emerged as a dominant source of narration. As young Uyghur men ­were dis­appeared by the techno-­political surveillance system and sent into indefinite detention, the weight of life making, of social reproduction, was carried by t­hose who remained: Uyghur male friends and relatives but also, to a greater extent, Uyghur ­mothers, wives, ­sisters, and ­daughters.21 Likewise, as Han male mi­grants found new lives in the global city, they pulled their wives and ­daughters into a proj­ect of dispossessing Native ­peoples by occupying their land and turning Uyghur life into an object of expropriation. The story of Uyghur and Han men was not theirs alone; it implicated the ­whole of society in Northwest China. Uyghur masculine gender identifications are historically contingent, s­ haped by the social forces that give them meaning and force. As Lisa Rofel (2007) notes in her discussion of the social formation of gender elsewhere in China, the pioneering work of feminist anthropologists such as Esther Newton (1979) and ­others have led to a widespread understanding of gender identifications as performed.22 Gender identities are not simply a product of biology nor do they naturally appear in a given habitus. Rather, they are ­shaped by historically determined norms and structures of power. As Judith Butler (1997) has shown, gender identifications are built discursively through juridical and religious traditions and in daily practices that “cite” ­these norms. The reference of gender practice to idealized models of gender norms, combined with entrenched forms of power and subordination in gender relations, builds a coercive, disciplinary mechanism into gender practice that results in limits to the spectrum of what counts as proper gender be­hav­ior (E. Y. Zhang 2015). ­These iterative norming practices are what naturalize binary gender separation. As in many Muslim socie­ties, sociohistorial-­derived gender norms in Uyghur society have resulted in forms of gender segregation. As other scholars have noted (Dautcher 2009; Smith Finley 2015), t­hese forms of segregation result in divisions of l­abor and experiences of ritual and religious practice. W ­ omen are largely excluded from public religious spaces, and are pressured to do the unpaid ­labor of caring for c­ hildren and d ­ oing ­house­work, while men provide for the ­family through farming and, more recently, wage l­abor (Huang 2012). Introduction 23

As forms of dispossession push land-­based Uyghurs into the market economy and urban environments, t­hese divisions in l­abor have begun to shift, often resulting in ­women taking on the added burden of wage ­labor while also maintaining a ­house­hold. At the same time, the reeducation campaign has begun to mediate the Uyghur experience of gender. As in other colonial contexts, Uyghur men have experienced forms of emasculation from state authorities and their proxies (see Swarr 2012). The state, along with its surveillance systems, often deemed Uyghur men to be pathologically dangerous, as always potentially terrorists, and saw its work in removing c­ hildren from their homes or forcing their wives and ­mothers to remove their veils as an act of liberation from Uyghur Islamic patriarchy. As in wars on terror elsewhere (Abu-­Lughod 2013), this impulse was demonstrated by the way the state mobilized an imperialist and fundamentally false form of feminism to reeducate Uyghur men in the saving of their wives from Islam and Uyghur gender relations (Yi 2019). For example, on March 8, 2018, in a cele­bration of International W ­ omen’s Day, Uyghur men in towns across the Uyghur homeland w ­ ere asked to wash the feet of their wives as a way of demonstrating their submission to the state’s definition of feminist gender relationships in their domestic life. This sign of gender equality was of course heavi­ly freighted with Han cultural symbolism and in fact antithetical to Uyghur practices of Islamic purity. In Uyghur cultural per­for­mance, it is considered deeply unclean to wash one’s feet, or the feet of another, in a bowl rather than pouring ­water from a vessel. It is also a violation of the purity of Islamic ablutions in which the hands and feet are washed prior to prayer, something that state authorities w ­ ere explic­itly attempting to violate. Uyghurs, both men and ­women, experienced this activity as deeply degrading and shameful.23 As a result of the assault on their masculinity, Uyghur men often felt it was their duty to protect Uyghur ­women and ­children from the vio­lence of enclosure and devaluation, but in this pro­cess they also often further dispossessed Uyghur w ­ omen by failing to recognize their agency (Huang 2012). They understood the vio­lence associated with Uyghur ­women first as an attack on male agency as protectors of Uyghur dignity—­a paternalist impulse that was often framed as the work of a model “young male leader” (Uy: yigit beshi). At times, Uyghur men claimed to use such traditions as a way to justify lashing out at Uyghur ­women who they saw as violating Uyghur gender norms. For instance, one young mi­grant I spent time with spat at the feet of Uyghur w ­ omen who he felt w ­ ere dressed immodestly. This young man said that, as long as he had his freedom, it was his duty to teach o­ thers. While ­others felt differently about this form of misogyny, they often felt that such admonishment was appropriate 24 Introduction

for husbands and ­fathers to guide their wives and ­daughters, but not when it came to relations between strangers.24 In both the public and private spheres, such actions spoke to the way Uyghur masculinity came to be situated in a par­tic­u­lar nexus of pious forms of Islam and the increasing vulnerability of Uyghur male authority. As a result, a hypervigilance on issues of modesty and Islamic appearance emerged among pious Uyghurs. Many of my in­for­mants noted that, prior to pro­cesses of material and digital enclosure, it was highly unusual for Uyghur men to act in this way ­toward Uyghur ­women they met on the street. Yet, at the same time that some young Uyghur men ­were using claims to land-­based traditions to extend forms of patriarchy, other young Uyghur men ­were developing forms of masculinity that ­were more directly anticolonial and liberatory. This book suggests that Uyghur young men in the city have come to define masculinity less in terms of domination of w ­ omen, or even in competition with each other, than as a way of protecting each other from police vio­lence and broader discrimination. As I show in chapter 4, the resulting anticolonial homosocial friendships they established are similar to the tactics of Indigenous men in other contexts. As urban mi­grants, Uyghur young men ­were isolated from their rural families and forced to delay marriage; they ­were often compelled to rely on each other for support. By drawing on the capaciousness of Uyghur yerlik traditions, they turned to each other to share their pain and develop palliative forms of protection. As I developed anticolonial friendships with Ablikim and many other young men, the relations of care demonstrated by ­these young men began to inform my own ethnographic practice. This leads me to make the claim, as I explain in detail in chapter 4, that, in some contexts, the work of anthropology itself should be framed as anticolonial friendship. As this book developed further, it became clear to me that one of the central methods of life making and self-­protection for young men, both Han and Uyghur, was storytelling, self-­representation, and media repre­sen­ta­tions of their lives. Not only did they use media forms as modes of expression and ways of understanding and staging larger experiences of social life but many of our conversations also focused on their own stories in relation to media objects. In order to stay faithful to this ethnographic grounding and evoke the affective ­labor of my friends and in­for­mants, the mode of analy­sis used in this book centers on the storytelling form as well. In many of the chapters, I show that the stories of single figures and their relationship to cultural objects—­photo proj­ ects, novels, digital media—­enable an analytic that holds in tension the contradictions between the politics of the capitalist-­colonial economy, the vio­lence of ethno-­racialization, and the minor decolonial politics it demands. Telling Introduction 25

t­ hese stories from the vantage point of repre­sen­ta­tional figures and representative cultural objects enables a demonstration of the ways in which larger social forces and identities are lived, mediated, and refused by individuals. By developing this theory, what I call a “minor politics of refusal,” the book suggests that constructing narrative portraits of repre­sen­ta­tional figures in tension with cultural objects allows the book to reach a new level of nuance in a sociohistorical pro­cess that was difficult to narrate. For example, the main figure of chapter 4, Chen Ye, is exceptional not only b­ ecause he deviates from the norms of Xinjiang life but also b­ ecause he has consciously expanded his sense of self to include a multiplicity of narratives. As a Han mi­grant artist in the social fabric of Xinjiang, Chen Ye functioned as a point of convergence between the ideals of state capital, private-­public techno-­politics, digital cultural production, and the material realities of settler colonial vio­lence. In this sense, the figure of Chen Ye becomes the location from which to examine ­these broader systems of social life at play in articulation. Thinking about him in this way, as opposed to a unique individual person exclusively, addresses the tension between claims of the individual and the collectivity that is raised by the ethnographic method. More importantly, thinking about an individual self in this way, particularly an unusual figure such as Chen Ye, helps explore the possibilities of decolonial interethnic politics in action. In many cases, the individual figures represented in this book—­Mahmud, Ablikim, Chen Ye, Emir, Hasan, and Yusup—­were ­people I was drawn to ­because of their social positions in pro­cesses of dispossession and racialization in the city and the ways they ­were attempting to represent ­these experiences. Often, if our relationship turned into a deep and lasting friendship, it was b­ ecause I was drawn to their po­liti­cal and ethical stance. For example, in the context of Ürümchi, it was extremely rare to encounter Han settlers such as Chen Ye who had committed to sacrificing aspects of their lives to living with and learning from ethno-­racial minorities. As with most other figures featured in this book, it was his life practice that I was drawn to rather than the cultural products of his work. Instead, his photography—­like the novels, short stories, and documentary films I describe in other chapters—­was more useful, in relation to the analytic of the book, as an indication of how dispossession was happening and how differently positioned mi­grant men ­were trying to support each other and live in spite of it. In this sense, the work of social reproduction itself became the source of new forms of politics and ethics rather than aesthetic objects. I found that making art or performing their selves gave mi­grants a vital way of making sense of their situation as persons, even while it offered ­little hope as a means of impacting or solving the deeper structural prob­lems. Friendships, 26 Introduction

both between Uyghur men and across ethnic barriers, held out a promise of a more expansive form of social reproduction in which the work of sharing grief and rage through acts of storytelling and active witnessing was valued as a practice in and of itself. Regardless of w ­ hether ­these minor forms of refusal of the colonial-­capitalist relation resulted in lasting change, they offered alternative ways of being together in Northwest China. As Bhrigupati Singh has noted, “Once upon a time in anthropology, it would have been an unlikely research quest to write about just a life” (B. Singh 2015, 222). He goes on to write that Durkheim and Levi-­Strauss taught anthropologists to search for “elementary forms” of life, while Geertz pushed anthropologists to examine “local cultures” rather than ontological conditions. In more recent de­cades, anthropologists have focused on individual subjectivity and its interplay with sovereignty and control, value making, and disposability (Crapanzano 1985; Behar 1993; Desjarlais 2003; Biehl 2005). Since social life in Xinjiang is filled with feelings of dispossession and racialization, friends like Mahmud, Ablikim, Chen Ye, Emir, Hasan, and Yusup offered me ways of plotting how pro­cesses of enclosure, devaluation, and dispossession ­were exerted on individual lives and how they could be refused. Spending time with my friends and sharing their pain drew me to them further. As in Singh’s case with po­liti­cal figures in Rajasthan (2015, 223), this was not a question of logic or social facts but rather one of ethics: What kind of life am I attracted to? As Neferti Tadiar (2016) notes, drawing on her research into state-­sanctioned mass killings in the Philippines, at our current historical moment in the spread of global capitalism it is impor­tant to think about “life-­sustaining forms and practices of personhood and sociality that . . . ​persist” (151). As a friend and accomplice in the Uyghur strug­g le to survive it is imperative to note that, despite practices of urban cleansing, disappearances into prison systems, and death, disenfranchised social groups find practices of living and life making. T ­ hese ethical questions, the friendships and the ethnographic portraits they inspired, opened up further questions of antiracist, decolonial politics as method. I found that Ablikim, Chen Ye, Emir, and Hasan, in par­tic­u­lar, ­were calling me to a minor politics, a mode of decolonial engagement that results in, and arises out of, an ethics of friendship and being-­with the other. Book Contents The first three chapters of this book analyze the way terror capitalism is expressed through a colonial relation of domination. This precedes through pro­ cesses of enclosure, devalorization and, ultimately, dispossession. Chapter 1 Introduction 27

analyzes the way a techno-­political system produced a digital enclosure that resulted in a new form of original accumulation. In d ­ oing so, it pre­sents an overview of the current setting of the system and a brief history of its evolution. It shows how the new forms of digital media seemed to promise forms of Chinese and Islamic contemporaneity to young Uyghurs, but how ­these same tools of self-­fashioning ­were also used to enclose their bodies and be­hav­iors. The chapter demonstrates that, in a colonial context, digital enclosure converts the sociality of targeted populations into data while at the same time expropriating their ­labor—­producing a permanent underclass of dependent laborers. Chapter 2 uses an analytic of devaluation to examine how Uyghur and Han forms of quality or cultural capital w ­ ere evaluated differently by state authorities, technology systems, and across class and ethno-­racial divides. It demonstrates how Uyghur social reproduction was often rejected in the Chinese city, and thus resulted in a failure to achieve the success the city appeared to promise. The chapter shows that the techno-­political surveillance system which was put in place in the city came to be structured around par­tic­u­lar cultural values deemed to be Chinese, state capital, and settler colonialism. This resulted in the broadscale suspension of Uyghur mi­grant life-­narratives as self-­fashioning subjects as they ­were banished from the city and detained. Chapter 3 fits the digital enclosure and devaluation analytics of the previous two chapters into a broader and older pro­cess of dispossession. It shows how the emergence of industrial farming and resource extraction industries in the Uyghur homeland, coupled with the structural oppression of the P ­ eople’s War on Terror and the cosmopolitan Islamic and Western desires incited by new forms of media—­television advertising and social media networks—­created conditions of tremendous pressure on young Uyghur men and their families. This chapter demonstrates that media infrastructure si­mul­ta­neously provided a means of escape from forms of material and social dispossession and incited new forms of dispossession by forcing Uyghurs to use new media infrastructures that recorded their po­liti­cal subjectivity. The second part of the book focuses on anticolonial responses to the pro­ cesses described in the first part of the book. Chapter 4 examines the rise in anticolonial friendships among Uyghur young men. I look at the experiences of a single mi­grant named Ablikim and how his dreams ­were rerouted by imposed vulnerability. Rather than focusing solely on the trauma of his experience of ethno-­racial policing, I demonstrate how his story is symptomatic of an emerging ethics of friendship among young Uyghur mi­grant men. By sharing the story of his dispossession with his closest friend, a jan-­jiger dost or “life and liver friend,” Ablikim found a way to keep living on the margins of the city. Drawing 28 Introduction

on ­these stories in tension with an emerging body of Uyghur fiction on alienation in the city, I argue that tight-­knit friendship networks among young men fostered an emerging mode of social reproduction that responded to pro­cesses of enclosure, devaluation, and dispossession. Chapter 5 explores how this anticolonial impulse is manifested across ethnic lines by considering the life practice of one of Xinjiang’s most influential photog­raphers, a Han settler-­migrant named Chen Ye. The chapter shows that Chen Ye’s life work involved producing an anticolonial “minor politics” (Lionnet and Shih, 2005) that Uyghur mi­grants viewed as “almost good enough.” In his role as a “blind wanderer,” a “long-­term Xinjiang resident” (Ch: mangliu; lao Xinjiang), and a Uyghur “accomplice” or “kin” relation (Uy: egeshküchi; qarandash), Chen Ye demonstrates that active interethnic witnessing can foster decolonial politics that refuse the colonial relation. The final chapter, “Subtraction,” turns to the failure of Uyghur mi­grants to achieve protection from the colonial proj­ect of terror capitalism. By focusing on a tumultuous year in the life of a Uyghur f­ amily that inhabited a “nail ­house” (Ch: dingzihu) and a young man who is “dis­appeared” (Uy: yok) in an Uyghur informal settlement, I show that mi­grant life was often comingled with Reformist Islamic practice. I examine how they prepared themselves for the inevitable de­mo­li­tion of their homes or their disappearance into the reeducation camp system by drawing on the musapir or “traveler” Uyghur tradition. In ­doing so, I argue that they ­were forced to choose ­legal and repre­sen­ta­tional invisibility as a way of maintaining existential stability. By examining the changing role of the musapir in Uyghur social life, I consider how traditional itinerancy and Sufi religious practice became a source of Reformist Islamic social organ­ization and fragile, temporary forms of survival even as friendships and refusal fail to protect them from subtraction. This book revolves around the interpenetration of the simultaneous rise of new forms of techno-­political dispossession and new media forms. ­These forms are worldwide and con­temporary: global Islam, global new media, global computer vision. They w ­ ere also quite specific in the ways they w ­ ere experienced in local contexts. For Uyghurs, t­ hese global forms ­were entwined with “Native” (Uy: yerlik) knowledge and practice, but also Chinese, Western, and Islamic systems. They ­were also locally expressed through new sequences of racialization and policing that w ­ ere more than simply relational and psychic burdens; they w ­ ere built out in space and materially experienced. The chapters that follow show that Uyghurs now live in an emergent colonial frontier of global capitalism. Introduction 29

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1 Enclosure

In mid-2017 a Uyghur man in his twenties, whom I w ­ ill call Alim, went to meet a friend for lunch at a mall in his home city in the Uyghur Region. At a security checkpoint at the entrance, Alim scanned the photo on his government-­issued identification card and presented himself before a security camera equipped with facial recognition software. An alarm sounded. The security guards let him pass, but within a few minutes he was approached by officers from the local “­People’s Con­ve­nience Police Station” (Ch: bianmin jingwuzhan), one of more than 7,000 rapid-­response police stations that have been built e­ very 200 or 300 meters in the Turkic Muslim areas of the region.1 The police contractors took him into custody.2 Alim’s heart was racing. Several weeks ­earlier, he had returned to China from studying abroad. As soon as he landed, he was pulled off the plane by

police officers responding to a nationwide warrant for his arrest. He was told his trip abroad meant that he was now u ­ nder suspicion of being “untrustworthy” (Ch: bufangxin). Policing contractors and health workers then administered what they call an “all p ­ eople’s health check” (Ch: quanmin tijian), which involves collecting several types of biometric data, including dna, blood type, fingerprints, voice signature, and face or iris scan—­a pro­cess that all adults in Xinjiang are expected to undergo. Then they transported him to one of the hundreds of “detention centers” (Ch: kanshousuo) that dot Northwest China. Since 2017 as many as 1.5 million Turkic Muslims have moved through hundreds of ­these centers on their way to long prison sentences or internment in a growing network of massive reeducation camps that Chinese state media has described as “transformation through education” (Ch: jiaoyu zhuanhua peixun) facilities. ­These fortified “smart” camps center on training Uyghurs and Kazakhs to disavow their Islamic identity and embrace secular allegiance to the state in China (Zhu 2017). They forbid the use of the Turkic language and instead offer coercive instruction in Mandarin, which is now referred to as “the national language” (Ch: guoyu) instead of “the language of the Han” (Ch: hanyu) (Smith Finley 2019). ­These goals are enforced and facilitated by technology. Much of the training is delivered via tv monitors in cells and classrooms. The cells where detainees are held are monitored by cameras and sound-­recording equipment, which prevents the use of the Uyghur language and other forms of autonomy. Sleeping at the wrong time, getting up from small plastic stools without permission, not participating in language study, or speaking Uyghur is often met with spoken commands from the speaker system mounted on the walls of the cell. If a detainee wants to make a request, the detainee must speak into an intercom and camera mounted on a wall. Alim was relatively lucky: he had been let out of the detention center ­after only two weeks. He ­later learned that a relative had intervened in his case, which was why he was not sent on to a camp. But what he did not know ­until police contractors arrested him at the mall was that he had been placed on a blacklist maintained by the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (ijop, or yiti hua lianhe zuozhan pingtai), a regional data system that collects data from tens of thousands of checkpoints throughout the region. Attempts to enter public institutions such as hospitals, banks, parks, or shopping centers, or to cross beyond the checkpoints of the dozen city blocks that ­were ­under the jurisdiction of the contractors in his section of the “urban grid” (Ch: gexian), could register as a “micro-­clue” (Ch: wei xiansuo) of deviant be­hav­ior. The system had profiled him and predicted that he was a potential terrorist. The contractors told Alim he should “just stay at home” if he wanted to avoid detention again. Although 32  Chapter One

he was officially ­free, his biometrics and his digital history ­were being used to bind him in place. “I’m so angry and afraid at the same time,” he told me. Alim and nearly fifteen million other Muslims in the region w ­ ere confronted by a system of overlapping enclosures. The enclosure system was premised on forms of devaluation that ­shaped the programmatic language of the system. It mobilized digital information drawn from ubiquitous digital interactivity and surveillance in the built environment. Taken together, this system produced a “digital enclosure” (Andrejevic 2007) of minoritized ­people that controlled their daily activity both inside and outside of the camp and prison system. To a certain extent, this model of enclosure resembles models of carceral urbanism and banishment of ethno-­racial minorities around the world. What makes the case in Northwest China unique, beyond its shear scale, is that the digital enclosure of Uyghur and Kazakh space also harnesses state power and private textile manufacturers to hold Muslims in place in factories—­producing a permanent underclass of ethno-­racial minority industrial workers. Rather than banishing populations to h ­ uman warehousing spaces such as peripheral ghettos or prisons, in this context terror capitalism works to explic­itly reeducate the population as industrial workers and implement a forced ­labor regime. In this version of digital enclosure, state authorities and Chinese corporations want not just Turkic Muslim natu­ral resources and the biometric data of their bodies; they want their disciplined, laboring bodies as well. This chapter uses the conceptual framing of a digital enclosure to consider the way Turkic Muslim society has been enveloped by a surveillance system. This allows me to consider the way novel enclosures are produced and, in turn, construct frontiers in capital accumulation and state power.3 This system began with the construction of 3g cellular wireless networks that produced expanding digital overlays which endowed the Turkic Muslim world with interactive capabilities across time and space. As Mark Andrejevic notes, “Such networks might be described as physical enclosures to the extent that they define a par­tic­u­lar space and are able to both provide functionality and gather information within the confines of the geo­graph­i­cally delimited area they cover” (Andrejevic 2007, 300). Yet, importantly, the system is not exclusive to the pinging tower of a cellular network. Instead, as gps tracking capacity is built into smartphones and automated biometric systems begin to assess patterns of movement, digital enclosures become multidimensional. They become a complex matrix of overlaid enclosures with a wide range of spatial scales and information analytics. Only very long sentences with multiple clauses can show how the system enveloped and enclosed Turkic Muslim society: China Mobile cellular networks overlapped Huawei Wi-­Fi networks; the Enclosure 33

social network of Tencent WeChat groups could be compared with keyword assessments of qq email; gps movement analy­sis of Baidu mapping systems combined with the jurisdictional boundary checkpoint face scans, id checks, mac address identification of China Electronic Technology Com­pany data doors, and the real-­time license and face tracking of Sensetime-­enabled camera systems, the Yitu pattern analy­sis of video streams collected from across the network made individual locations searchable in real time (“China’s Algorithms” 2019; Byler 2020a). ­These passive interactive surveillance systems ­were supplemented by forcible data collection through Meiya Pico and Fiberhome plug-in automated assessments of smartphone software and content history by police contractors; metal detector manual scans for unauthorized electronic devices in Turkic Muslim homes; and biographical assessments that drew on banking histories, medical histories, and ­house­hold registration data. Taken together, all of ­these vari­ous forms of information produced a digital enclosure of unpre­ce­dented scale and depth. This chapter directs a conceptual framing of “original accumulation” (Marx [1846] 1978; Byrd et al. 2018) as seen in “digital enclosures” t­ oward an analy­sis of colonial-­capitalist frontier making.4 In ­doing so, it turns a frame that has been used primarily to understand majoritarian consumerist populations in Eu­ro­ pean and American contexts, to their effects among minoritized populations in China. It shows how this cap­i­tal­ist conversion device produced a regime of truth with which to transform the existing social order. In what follows, I first define digital enclosures as an ongoing pro­cess of original accumulation, then describe the way the digital enclosure developed over time in the Uyghur region before turning to ethnographic accounts of its implementation and effects. Ultimately, I argue that digital enclosures have s­ haped the conditions of Turkic Muslim social life, opening them up to an unfree ­labor regime. Enclosure as Pro­cess Land enclosure is central to the history of capitalism ­because it marks a shift to expropriation of land and ­labor from marginalized, often Indigenous or ethno-­ racialized, populations, through the imposition of a new contract-­based ­legal regime of property possession and wage l­abor. In a classical Marxist account, this is described as an enforced separation of laborers from their land and autonomous subsistence and thus a removal from the “means of production” (Marx [1846] 1978). This pro­cess of “original accumulation” is something Marx described as a threshold moment in the history of Eu­ro­pean and American capitalism. Yet, as numerous other scholars have noted (Robinson 1983; D. Harvey 34  Chapter One

2005; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018), this pro­cess must be regarded as a continuously expanding frontier. Original accumulation did not stop with bounded historical moments at the beginning of colonization. Instead, expropriation of land and ­labor, outside of freely agreed-­upon contracts, is a continuing feature of capitalism itself. As an institutionalized social order it continues to expand through the dispossession of ethno-­racial ­others in order to reproduce this order (D. Harvey 2005; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). In fact, though differently expressed in vari­ous historical moments and situations, colonialism is always a feature of the cap­i­tal­ist social order (Coulthard 2014; Byrd et al. 2018). This means that minoritized ­people, their way of life, and their ancestral lands are continually and more fully enclosed in ser­vice to resource extraction and new ­labor regimes (Robinson 1983). In order for this to happen, minoritized ­people must e­ ither be removed or immobilized, making their land and l­abor available to be claimed and regulated. With their land placed in ser­vice to natu­ ral resource extraction, industrial farming, real estate speculation, and other modes of privatization, such laborers are made dependent on the wage ­labor market. In this way, enclosure produces frontiers of cap­i­tal­ist accumulation. Importantly, land enclosure is but one example of the more general form of “original accumulation,” understood as an accumulation of claims over existing forms of life and material that previously have not been put to work in the expansion of capital and empire (Andrejevic 2007; Byrd et al. 2018). This pro­cess of expropriation can move into any domain seen as potentially productive. A speculative gaze produces forms of separation from the means to autonomous social life in the domains it encloses. It seeks to normalize this separation through ­legal regimes, state authority, or opaque surveillance and prediction systems, which are structured on economic growth. One of the integral achievements of cap­i­tal­ist systems has been the ability of ­those who benefit from the system to normalize enclosures and the distribution of property, knowledge, and power that is created by it (Andrejevic 2007, 303). The same can be said of the ethos of enclosure in the emerging terror-­capitalist economy in Northwest China. The harvesting of Turkic Muslim social networks and biometrics in ser­vice to a counterterrorism surveillance economy places state contractors and police in control of the means of their social interaction, individual information, and, ultimately, economic productivity and social reproduction. Terror capitalism mobilizes a pro­cess of digital enclosure in the ser­vice of capitalist-­colonial expropriation. The arrival of digital surveillance extends the logic of the prison, work­house, and factory “to encompass spaces of leisure, consumption, domesticity, and perhaps all of t­ hese together” (Andrejevic Enclosure 35

2007, 301). For populations that are undesired, and underemployed—­primarily Black and Brown people in Eu­ro­pean and North American contexts—­the digital enclosure results in a pro­cess of digitizing and punishing bodies coded as deviant (Fassin 2013; Roy 2019; Jefferson 2020). This pro­cess, described by Ananya Roy (2019) as “racial banishment,” si­mul­ta­neously produces a “possessive investment” in valued, eco­nom­ically productive populations whose lives are deemed deserving of state protections (Lipsitz 1998, quoted in Roy 2019, 228). Continuing, Roy writes: “Banishment as exile is dispossession and in turn such dispossession secures sovereign possession” (2019, 228). Systems of ethno-­racial supremacy inherent in capitalist-­colonial frontier making rely on l­egal protections to secure possession of protected populations and expropriation from ­those who are devalued. ­These forms of entitlement and banishment produce colonial dispossession, which in turn produces openings for expropriation and capital expansion. In the context of Chinese terror capitalism, the “second enclosure” movement of digital expropriation—­defined by James Boyle as an “enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind” (2003, 37)—­produces a systemic extraction of social data from minoritized “bad Muslim” populations who have been deemed outside of civil rights protections. State capital is used to mobilize an army of police contractors who act as low-­level data technicians in ser­ vice to the data-­harvesting mission of private companies. Up to this point, the model of enclosure resembles models of carceral urbanism and banishment of ethno-­racial minorities—­described by Roy (2019) and Jefferson (2020)—­around the world. What makes the case in Northwest China unique is that, t­ here, the enclosure produces an unfree proletarianization of Muslim populations and at the same time institutionalizes a new social order. The digital enclosure intensified the goals of biopo­liti­cal security that center around assuring the movement of goods, ser­vices, and biometric data while blocking the movement of objects, bodies, and data that could disrupt this circulation. Using the example of a seventeenth-­century town in France, Foucault (2007) argues that biopo­liti­cal security attempts to increase the circulation of what is deemed “good” within a market economy while decreasing the circulation of that which is deemed “bad,” such as disease, crime, and unassimilable bodies. The shaping power of this technology is used to regulate the population in hopes of producing lower rates of fear, higher rates of economic growth, and greater power among the protected population. From the perspective of ­those in control of the apparatus, security is a positive proj­ect that emphasizes protection of essential life pro­cesses rather than a negative 36  Chapter One

pro­cess of excluding objects and expropriating the l­ abor of ­people deemed undeserving of civil rights. In the Chinese context, leading technology companies have been mandated by state capital to control the social environment while at the same time achieving global advantage in par­tic­u­lar domains of technological and economic development. Most importantly though, their task is to build a social management surveillance system with no blank spots. They are to move from being able to visualize the haze of the world to being able to “truly see” (Ch: xueliang) and “clear” (Ch: qinglang) the social world. That is, they are to scale-up their ability to recognize the patterns of the social world by increasing image fidelity and deep learning capacity (Yi Ou Intelligence 2017). As in Brian Larkin’s framing of related systems (2008), unintelligible noise must become decoded signals. Taken together, the mandates of state capital, the rapid prototyping and development of techno-­political systems, and a subject Muslim population in China produce terror capitalism as an expropriation of minoritized Muslim social life through the conversion devices of a private technology industry. The Uyghur Digital World The Uyghur digital world has not always been experienced only as a space of enclosure. When I began my first year of fieldwork in 2011, the region had just been wired with 3g networks and social media was just beginning to be used in urban locations. When I returned for a second year in 2014, it seemed as though nearly all adults had smartphones. Based on figures associated with Uyghur-­language app downloads, approximately 45 ­percent of the Uyghur population of twelve million ­were using smartphones (Byler 2016). Many had begun to use the app WeChat to share recorded oral speech and video on a daily basis to connect with friends and ­family in rural villages. They also used their phones to buy and sell products, read about what was happening in the world, and network with Uyghurs throughout the country and around the globe. Social media allowed young Uyghur mi­grants to develop a sophisticated urban persona within tightknit yet dispersed social networks and begin to influence the world around them through forms of mass circulation. “I liked WeChat a lot,” a young Uyghur named Mahmud told me, “You could see the ‘moments’ of other p ­ eople and you could chat as a group. You could send videos, or have a video call with anyone you wanted wherever they ­were, as long as they ­were also on the internet.” Mahmud, whose story of dispossession I tell in chapter 3, began to spend as much as 200 yuan ($30) per month on his Enclosure 37

lg smartphone data plan—­much more than he spent on food or clothes. Like many young Uyghurs, he came to view WeChat as an indispensable part of his social role in the Uyghur world. It also allowed for forms of media virality and audience impact. Uyghur filmmakers could now share short films and ­music videos instantly with hundreds of thousands of followers. Overnight, Uyghur En­glish teachers such as Kasim Abdurehim and pop stars such as Ablajan, non-­state-­sponsored cultural figures who w ­ ere subsequently labeled “untrustworthy,” developed followings that numbered in the millions. Most unsettlingly, from the perspective of the state, unsanctioned Uyghur religious teachers based in China and Turkey developed a deep influence. ­Islamic faith and the Uyghur language have always been seen by state authorities, and some Han settlers, as sources of civilizational “backwardness” and re­sis­tance to Chinese cultural norms since the modern Chinese colonization of the region began in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Schluessel 2020). Indeed, land-­based traditions, Islamic faith, and modernist Turkic identity formed the basis of the in­de­pen­dent East Turkestan republics that predated the founding of the ­People’s Republic of China and the de­cades of settler colonization that followed (Thum 2014; Brophy 2016). ­These three ele­ments, combined with a deep-­seated attachment to the built environment of Uyghur civilization—­ courtyard h ­ ouses, mosque communities, and Sufi shrines—­produced knowledge systems that resulted in Uyghur forms of distinction and difference from the Han population that had arrived in waves since 1949. They had always been Muslim but, ­because of the way the state in China had ­limited their access to Islamic knowledge and other Muslim communities, many young Uyghurs had ­little opportunity to actively explore this side of their history and knowledge system. ­There ­were virtually no Islamic schools outside of state control, no permitted imams who ­were not approved by the state. ­Children ­under the age of eigh­teen ­were forbidden to enter the mosque. Even lyrical oral epics, known as dastans, that told Uyghur origin stories w ­ ere increasingly regulated by the state (A. Anderson and Byler 2019). Social media opened up a virtual public–­private space to explore what it meant to embody a Native and Muslim contemporaneity (Harris and Isa 2019). It confirmed that the first sources of their identity had always been their faith, their claim to a “Native” (Uy: yerlik) way of life, the closest En­glish approximation of the way Uyghurs commonly refer to themselves. Social media gave Uyghurs a way of developing their sociality in both economistic and noneconomistic ways. Seemingly overnight, it became common for mi­grants to the city to advertise their commodities on WeChat, in other internet forums, 38  Chapter One

or in markets and stores. In 2014, as I was walking through street bazaars, I often saw hand-­stenciled signs advertising honey, cooking oil, rice, wheat, and other commodities with the inscription yerlik. By advertising their goods as yerlik, or “of the land,” they intended to signify several ­things. First, they ­were conveying a sense of authenticity, that the commodities w ­ ere made by hand, building on traditions that had been carried forward by generations of craftspeople. Second, they w ­ ere making a claim to belonging and building the ­future of a par­tic­u­lar Native community and sacred landscape. Yerlik medicine, for instance, was often associated with par­tic­u­lar locations in Khotan Prefecture, a region on the border with Pakistan that was famous for medicine. The Uyghur homeland is im­mense, covering a land area equal to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada combined, so ­there is a good deal of variation within Native identifications. Third, yerlik goods ­were also a way of staking a position within a larger ­imagined community of Uyghurs and the global Muslim community. Yerlik commodities ­were by definition halal and had the added benefit of strengthening the economy and social reproduction of the con­temporary Uyghur nationality. Through their exposure to the outside world and the efflorescence of online culture, millions of Uyghurs felt called to think in new ways about the piety of their Islamic practice and the ­future of Native traditions while at the same time they learned about self-­help strategies, entrepreneurship, and new ­music styles. They began to imagine escaping an oppressive policing and economic system that restricted many of their basic freedoms, by banning the open discussion and practice of Islam and Uyghur history, restricting access to passports, and openly promoting systematic job discrimination and land seizures. Social media allowed them to realize that they ­were part of the global Islamic world and the broader Turkic community. As prac­ti­tion­ers of Sunni Islam inflected by Sufi traditions and speakers of Uyghur, a Turkic language, they began to appreciate alternative modernities, fully formed Turkic and Islamic socie­ties with rich histories of culture and aesthetics, where they ­were seen as full members. ­These alternative contemporaneities could stand in opposition to the modernity that centered on reified forms of Han cultural values that the Chinese policing and economic system was forcing on them. Rather than being seen as perpetually lacking Han cultural fluency and appearance, ­these systems of value allowed them to be seen as cosmopolitan and con­temporary. They could embrace the halal standards of the Muslim world, wear the latest styles from Istanbul, and keep Chinese society at arm’s length. Imported food, movies, ­music, and clothing from Turkey and Dubai became markers of distinction. Enclosure 39

­ omen began to veil themselves. Men began to pray five times per day. They W ­stopped drinking and smoking. Some began to view m ­ usic, dancing, and state tv as influences to be avoided. The Han officials I met during my fieldwork in 2015 referred to this rise in religious piety and ethnic pride as the “Talibanization” of the Uyghur population. Along with Han settlers, they felt increasingly unsafe traveling to the region’s Uyghur-­majority areas or encountering pious Turkic Muslims. They cited the first alleged Uyghur-­led act of po­liti­cal vio­lence that was reported outside of the Uyghur region in October 2014, when a f­ amily of three Uyghurs drove a truck into a crowd in Beijing’s Tian­anmen Square, killing themselves, two civilians, and injuring 42 ­others. They followed this with graphic descriptions of a horrific knife attack in the railway station of Kunming, in which a group of Uyghur young ­people killed 31 civilians and injured over 140 more. Then, a suicide bombing in Ürümchi in April 2014 left three Uyghur perpetrators dead and 79 civilians injured. Another attack occurred one month ­later, when two Uyghurs used suvs armed with improvised explosives to kill 43 civilians and wound more than 90. The officials cited ­these incidents and other localized protests and conflicts with police and Han civilians, as a sign that the entire Uyghur population was falling ­under the sway of terrorist ideologies that they correlated with religious piety and ethnic pride. The Rise of the Digital Enclosure In fact, the beginnings of the enclosure, and the turn to religious piety it precipitated, began as early as 2009. In the summer of that year, Uyghur university and high school students took to the streets of Ürümchi demanding justice as Uyghur-­Chinese citizens for the mob-­instigated lynching of two mi­grant Uyghur workers and the wounding of sixty more who had been sent to a factory in Southern China. The way this incident of perceived sexual harassment was able to escalate so quickly remains a mystery. Perhaps the Han mi­grant workers felt disadvantaged due to the government aid the Uyghur workers had received in getting jobs at the factory. Perhaps ­there ­were other racially charged incidents that led up to this vio­lence. As Huang Cuilian, the “Han girl” whose alleged harassment triggered the vio­lence put it, “I was lost and entered the wrong dormitory and screamed when I saw ­those Uyghur young men in the room. . . . ​I just felt they w ­ ere unfriendly so I turned and ran.”5 She then recalled how one of them stood up and stamped his feet as if to chase her, “I ­later realized that he was just making fun of me.” 40  Chapter One

In response, Uyghur high school and college students used Facebook, Renren, and Uyghur-­language blog sites in urban internet cafés to or­ga­nize a protest demanding justice for Uyghur workers who w ­ ere killed by Han workers in the lynching. Videos of the mob killing featured jeering crowds urging the Han workers to kill the Uyghurs. In order to demand state protection from such lynchings, Uyghurs marched through the streets waving Chinese flags and demanding that the government respond to the deaths of their Uyghur comrades. The protestors w ­ ere violently confronted by armed police. Thousands of Uyghurs responded, turning over buses and beating Han passersby. In the end, over 190 ­people w ­ ere reported killed, more than two-­thirds of them ­were Han. During the weeks that followed, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young Uyghurs w ­ ere dis­appeared by the police (“Enforced Disappearances” 2019). In response to the incident, the internet was shut down in the region for over nine months. Over time, state authorities realized that, as power­ful as the rise of Uyghur social media was in organ­izing social life, it also presented them with a new means of control. Soon ­after the internet came back online in 2010—­now with the notable absence of Facebook, Twitter, and other non-­Chinese social media applications—­state security, research institutes, and private industry collaborations began a series of proj­ects to break Uyghur internet autonomy. One of the most troubling aspects of the internet regime, from the perspective of state authorities and the technologists they funded, was the audio and image sharing function of the new Chinese app WeChat. Since WeChat allows for oral speech to be recorded and images of text to be uploaded and rapidly circulated through social networks, up u ­ ntil 2014 Uyghurs had used this virtual social space as a semiautonomous public sphere in which to discuss Islam and politics—­something that deeply worried state authorities. In response to t­ hese concerns, state authorities mandated a counterterrorism proj­ect that offered many private companies a novel space to rapidly prototype predictive policing tools and experiment with biometric surveillance systems. For instance, the ai Champion iflytek developed tools to automate the transcription and translation of Uyghur-­language audio into Chinese where it could then be analyzed for precriminal and criminal content (Li and Cadell 2018). The computer-­vision analytics com­pany Sensetime worked on a joint venture with a subsidiary called Sensenets to track the movements and be­hav­iors of over 2.5 million inhabitants of the Uyghur region using face surveillance technologies (Cimpanau 2018). A rival computer-­vision com­pany, Megvii, developed tools to support surveillance-­video analytics (“Niaokan” 2017), while another computer-­vision com­pany Yitu, using a proj­ect called Enclosure 41

Dragonfly Eye, drew on a dataset of over 1.5 billion ­faces to automate the detection of Uyghur ­faces.6 Another ai Champion HikVision, a market-­oriented subsidiary of the soe military supplier China Electronics Technology Com­ pany, received nearly $300 million in Private Public Partnership contracts to develop “Safe City” surveillance systems with “zero blank spaces” throughout Uyghur-­majority areas, from mosques to the interiors of reeducation camps (Rollet 2018). As the leaders of ­these firms noted,7 in a post-9/11 world Chinese tech firms are not alone in using surveillance technology to automate policing of populations deemed dangerous. However, ­because of the state capital they ­were given and the mandate that came with it, firms in Xinjiang have tremendous latitude to experiment with ­these technologies without fear of ­legal or civil re­sis­tance. China’s counterterrorism and cybersecurity laws obligate Chinese social media and technology companies to provide policing agencies with complete access to user data and to host internal Communist Party committees who provide com­pany oversight. As Ryan et al. (2019) have shown, technology companies have one of the highest proportions of such committees in the private sector. Furthermore, the widespread private contracting of public ser­vices throughout the Chinese economy has produced a market structure in the technology sector in which the majority of profits and com­pany growth come not from consumer products and ser­vices, as in the current Western contexts described by Zuboff (2019), but from state-­driven techno-­political proj­ects that assure the productivity of social bodies. While many Eu­ro­pean and North American technology firms have their origin in a post-­WWII military-­industrial complex, in the post-­Cold War context most firms are now privatized and, in fact, in some ways beyond the full control of the state (Masco 2014; Jefferson 2020). This is less the case in China where state-­managed technology companies are increasingly placed in ser­vice to state power. In 2016 approximately $52 billion of the security technology market in China was structured around state-­ managed proj­ects, while $32 billion came from security products and $6.8 billion came from alarm systems (Yi Ou Intelligence 2017). As the scholars Martin Beraja, David Y. Yang, and Noam Yuchtman have shown through a large-­scale study of private technologies used in public policing in China (2020), state capital investment in data-­intensive technologies is essential for the success of ­these private computer-­vision companies. They show that public policing systems, particularly in Xinjiang, generate far more data than similar systems in closed or private environments. This is precisely why Chinese ai Champions have been able to surpass many firms based in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca 42  Chapter One

when it comes to facial recognition technologies. In their work, ­Beraja, Yang, and Yuchtman (2020) demonstrate a causal effect of access to more government data on new commercial software production and, in turn, the economic effects of this market structure. Ultimately, they show that the Chinese technology industry is s­ haped via state capital used in surveillance proj­ects. In effect, Ürümchi and the rest of the Uyghur homeland have become an experimental space for the Chinese techno-­security industry and the authoritarian statecraft it supports. In 2016 and 2017, the state invested an estimated $7.2 billion specifically in the Xinjiang information security industry as part of an increase of public security spending of over 90 p ­ ercent.8 Over t­ hose same years the state awarded an estimated $65 billion in private contracts to build infrastructure and $160 billion more to government entities in the region— an increase of nearly 50 ­percent. The majority of this increase in construction spending was centered on the building of detention facilities and related systems.9 As a report from the leading Chinese tech journal Leiphone noted in 2017, “The current security industry in Xinjiang is positioned exactly right in terms of market opportunity.”10 As a spokesperson for the Xinjiang policing com­pany called Leon Technology put it, 60 ­percent of the world’s Muslim-­ majority nations are part of China’s premier international development proj­ect, the B ­ elt and Road Initiative, so ­there is “unlimited market potential” for the type of population-­control technology they are developing in Xinjiang.11 The ­People’s War on Terror offered an opportunity to experiment with and develop computer-­aided policing and computer-­vision and sound recognition. As part of this techno-­political and economic development, broadly defined antiterrorism laws w ­ ere introduced by Chinese authorities, turning nearly all Uyghur crimes—­from stealing a Han neighbor’s sheep to protesting land seizures—­ into forms of terrorism and conflating religious piety, which the new laws referred to as “extremism,” with religious vio­lence (Bovingdon 2010; Roberts 2020). As the laws w ­ ere implemented, the Xinjiang security industry mushroomed from a handful of private companies to over one thousand companies that utilized hundreds of thousands of workers ranging from low-­level Uyghur security guards, to Han camera and telecommunications technicians, to coders and designers, to intelligence workers.12 Drawing directly on lessons learned in the war in Iraq and the role of Silicon Valley companies in monitoring Muslim populations as part of US Countering Violent Extremism programs, local Chinese authorities in the Uyghur region began outsourcing their policing responsibilities to private and state-­owned technology companies in order to enhance their surveillance capacities (Byler 2020a). For example, Alibaba and Enclosure 43

iflytek, two of the most power­ful companies in China, took on new roles in countering the threat of Turkic Muslim vio­lence through assessments of calls, traffic, shopping, dating, email, chat rec­ords, videos, language, and voiceprint detection (Xin­hua 2014). The Uyghur region led the country in contracts given to private technology firms to develop surveillance and analytics tools as part of Safe City proj­ects that supported the system of Turkic Muslim reeducation (Essence Securities 2017). As ­these infrastructures ­were designed and implemented, signs of Islamic be­hav­ior ranging from wearing a beard or veil to one’s internet activity became evidence of latent insurgent tendencies. An ethno-­ racialized Islamophobia was institutionalized through the digital enclosure. In a prelude of what was to come as the po­liti­cal and economic system gained momentum, state authorities worked with technology firms to introduce a passbook system that forced hundreds of thousands of rural-­origin Uyghur mi­grants to return to their villages. This digitized instantiation of ethno-­racial banishment (Roy 2019) or urban cleansing (Appadurai 2000), used a new card system, referred to as a P ­ eople’s Con­ve­nience Card (Ch: bianminka). It required Uyghur mi­grants to petition local police for what they referred to as a “green card.” This card, which was equipped with a qr code, allowed police officers to scan and pull up the personal data of the individual during spot checks. Based on in­for­mant interviews with both mi­grants and state police, only around 10 ­percent of approximately 300 thousand Uyghurs who ­were living in Ürümchi at that time w ­ ere able to obtain the card. Without it they ­were not permitted to travel beyond the checkpoints of their home counties. According to a report published by a government official in 2013, the total number of around 412,000 internal Muslim mi­grants in Xinjiang needed to be “transformed” (Ch: zhuanbian) through compulsory ­legal education and training (Wu 2013).13 The Uyghur countryside became what many referred to as an “open air” prison. As one aspect of this “transformation” approach, state authorities detained thousands of the most pious Uyghurs among both returning mi­grant populations and populations already in rural areas, and sent them to newly established reeducation camps. They also dispatched hundreds of thousands of police and government officials to monitor the families of ­those who had been taken and conducted regular inspections of homes looking for signs of religiosity (Byler 2018b). In 2017 state authorities and technology companies intensified this strategy. Rather than doubling down simply on security, banishment, and selective detention—­what was referred to as a “hard strike” (Ch: yanda) policy—­a new regional party secretary named Chen Quanguo mainstreamed the approach of “reeducating” (Ch: zai jiaoyu) the hearts and minds of Uyghurs. As Chinese 44  Chapter One

policing theory documents show (Byler 2019), this approach drew in part on a version of what the US general David Petraeus (Petraeus, Amos, and McClure 2009) described as “winning the hearts and minds” of ­those whose society had been destroyed. This transformation was to be achieved by detaining untrustworthy segments of the population and training them in Chinese and po­liti­cal ideology while si­mul­ta­neously forcibly assigning the remaining population to low-­wage factory jobs. In an ethno-­racialized and colonial form of “repressive assistance” used elsewhere in China (Pan 2020), t­ hese “de-­extremification” (Ch: qu jiduanhua) efforts and “poverty alleviation” (Ch: fupin) proj­ects attempted to enclose the population, eliminating unwanted religious and cultural ele­ ments in their social life. At the same time, the system introduced forms of de­ pen­dency by forcing many Uyghurs to ­either sign work contracts or face camp internment. In Petraeus’s infamous field manual, counterinsurgency is framed as a primarily po­liti­cal transformation, or regime change, that accompanies full-­ spectrum intelligence and systematic detentions, and, at times, assassinations. For Chen, the Petraeus proj­ect was made significantly easier by the fact that ­there was no statistically significant armed insurgency among the supposed insurgents, Uyghurs, and he had a standing reserve of millions of Han settlers and Uyghurs that state and corporate proxies could mobilize as intelligence workers and reeducators. Importantly, Chinese state authorities and policing theorists i­magined that counterinsurgency could be taken much farther in this context (Brophy 2019; Byler 2019). It could produce not just a change in po­liti­cal loyalty but an epistemic transformation of Uyghur sociality itself. State authorities and contractors continually referred to Uyghurs as “separatists, extremists, terrorists,” and demanded that state workers and community members provide “­enemy intelligence” (Ch: diren qingbao) about the Uyghurs they encountered. Yet, unlike the US War on Terror, in China the ­enemy had no weapons, they had no formal organ­ization, and they had ­little international support. In large part Uyghurs ­were the ­enemy simply ­because of their unassimilable difference—­ their allegiance to Islam, their attachment to land-­based Turkic identifications, the otherness of their physiognomy—­and the fear all of this inspired. In Xinjiang, the officials used public health euphemisms to attempt to accomplish their transformational purposes. Local authorities began to describe separatism, extremism, and terrorism as three interrelated ideological diseases in need of a cure (Roberts 2018). In order to detect the spread of the disease and excise the cancerous cells, they said they needed surgical precision (Grose 2019). ­Because the viral spread of Turkic Islam was so deep and entrenched, they realized they needed a system of purpose-­built digital enEnclosure 45

closures to detect the growth of Uyghur Islam and po­liti­cal identity and diagnose the needed level of treatment, which ranged from imprisonment to reeducation. Rather than just monitoring and preventing potential terrorism, authorities attempted to transform Uyghurs themselves by cutting out what government workers have referred to as the “tumors” of “untrustworthy” (Ch: bu fangxin) ele­ments through a pro­cess of retraining and reeducation.14 This turn t­ oward transformation coincided with the rise of Chinese technology breakthroughs in ai-­assisted computer vision systems. Drawing on state-­supported research, the Chinese startup com­pany Meiya Pico began to market programs and equipment that could detect Uyghur-­language text and Islamic symbols embedded in images to local and regional governments. They also developed programs to automate the transcription and translation of Uyghur voice messaging. Other companies—­such as Dahua, Hikvision, Yitu, Sensetime, and Cloudwalk—­advertised software programs and equipment to government and security firms that attempted to automate the identification of Uyghur ­faces based on physiological phenotypes. The ai-­assisted technology that was introduced in 2017 aimed to both intensify the digital enclosure system and ­free up security ­labor for other tasks: the work of transformation. According to a Leon Technology spokesperson, such ai systems would, “on the scale of seconds,” automatically flag suspicious be­hav­ior such as illegal Islamic dress or individuals who w ­ ere on special surveillance watchlists.15 ­These systems allowed searches of Uyghur internet histories looking for flagged materials such as the word Allah, images of someone praying, or messages sent to someone who had a ­family member living abroad. They matched this personal be­hav­ior data to banking and school rec­ords, job histories, medical histories, and ­family planning histories, looking for predictors of aberrant be­hav­ior that ranged from having too many ­children, to leaving one’s ­house through the back door (“China’s Algorithms” 2019). It looked for unusual patterns in electricity usage, or driving a car registered to someone ­else. The platform fed on personal be­hav­ior and archives of individual lives, turning them into biometric data and digital code, in order to continue to learn the patterns and variations of Uyghur life and become more robust as a universal security system that operated at the level of the social life of an entire population. Police Contractors as “Data Janitors” As the ethnographer Lilly Irani (2015, 2019) has noted, cutting-­edge technology systems everywhere in the world are nearly always trained by low-­wage technicians. In Eu­ro­pean and North American contexts, much of this work is done 46  Chapter One

through platforms like the Amazon-­hosted contractor network Mechanical Turk. Many of ­these “data janitors,” as Irani refers to them, are tasked with training ai algorithms to recognize and digitize material objects, be­hav­iors, and ­people. Often they are forced by class, race, gender devaluation, and citizenship status into t­ hese jobs (Amrute 2016). Once in ­these positions it is often difficult to opt out or demand better work conditions. As anthropologists of policing and prisons in Western contexts have shown (Rhodes 2004; Fassin 2013), the same holds true for low-­level prison and policing work. Often ­those who enforce state vio­lence come from ethno-­racial minority and lower-­class positions. They are in fact placed in ser­vice to what Chandan Reddy (2011) describes as practices of subjectification, or subject making, in which ethno-­racially heterogeneous workers are mobilized through pro­cesses of disidentification with their own interests to build new frontiers of capital accumulation and state power. In Northwest China, Turkic Muslim young men, the most deeply vulnerable population in the reeducation proj­ect, are coerced through economic and policing pressure into “freely” contracting with surveillance system employers who enact the general enclosure system over their own socie­ties. The integration of ­these vari­ous platforms was ser­viced by the state-­owned Fortune Global 500 com­pany China Electronics Technology Group with support from many leading Chinese tech firms. Building the dataset and setting its par­ameters required a ­great deal of l­abor and technical training (“China’s Algorithms” 2019). Nearly ninety thousand police contractors and other state workers ­were hired (Greitens et al. 2019). The lowest-­level police contractors (Ch: xiejing), who ­were hired primarily from Muslim minority populations themselves, worked to perform spot checks, which centered on actively profiling passersby, stopping Turkic young ­people and demanding that they provide their state-­issued id and open their phone for automated inspection via spyware apps and external scanning devices (Byler 2020b). Policing contractors ­were also responsible for monitoring face scanners and metal detectors at fixed checkpoints. Turkic Muslims w ­ ere required to carry a smartphone if they had registered a sim card in the past. At checkpoints the phone was matched to the id of the carrier, allowing systems to perform a hard reset of individual movement in real time and space multiple times per day. All t­ hese activities ensured that Uyghurs continued to build the dataset, making extremism-­assessment algorithms more and more precise. One of the police contractors who conducted t­hese checks was a young Kazakh man named Baimurat. He was in one of the first groups of contractors who ­were hired from across the region. In an interview he said that ­because he was a college gradu­ate he was “considered very well qualified.” As a result he Enclosure 47

was given the highest level salary available to contractors, around 6,000 yuan per month ($1,000), which is far above the minimum wage of around 1,800 yuan. O ­ thers in his cohort, who w ­ ere considered less qualified b­ ecause of their educational background, ­were paid closer to 2,500 yuan. For Baimurat, who had strug­g led to find work for which he was qualified in the past, taking the job was a choice he felt he could not refuse. Not only would he be able to provide for his ­family but he would also be able to protect them from the reeducation system. “We ­were given uniforms,” he said. “Then we started ­doing dif­f er­ent kinds of training. It was ­really strict, as if we ­were planning for a war.” Around this time, he said the local authorities started building P ­ eople’s Con­ve­nience Police Stations, the type of surveillance hub where Alim, the young man whose story frames this chapter, was interrogated. Then the county officials who had hired them divided the contractors up and stationed them at one of the ninety-­two stations that ­were built in the county. He said: Inside that station t­ here ­were screens. We sat facing the screens, and you could see the places where the cameras ­were pointed. We had to sit ­there monitoring them all the time. If we failed to notice an alert or ­stopped looking, we would be punished. But still we thought it was a good job just sitting ­there. Over time, the kind of surveillance ­labor they did began to shift. First, the contractors w ­ ere sorted based on their Chinese-­language ability and other proofs of their loyalty and knowledge of the extremism par­ameters of the reeducation system. Baimurat said: They made us do other exercises like reciting rules about participating in the camp system. We had to recite ­things related to law. ­There ­were quotes from Xi Jinping on the walls of the station. We had to learn ­these by heart. We w ­ ere not allowed to go outside for the patrol ­until we successfully recited the quotes from Xi Jinping. It is impor­tant to note ­here that, although they ­were ostensibly private security contractors, data janitors such as Baimurat w ­ ere obligated to articulate themselves to Xi Jinping and the language of the state in order to carry out their work as police technicians. Interestingly, when questioned about Baimurat’s role in the system, a state spokesperson described Baimurat as a security officer employed by a shopping center rather than the state police.16 This flexible use of private-­public positioning recalls the slippage described by Rofel and Yanagisako (2018) in the way the state is often inscribed in ostensibly private industries. Baimurat’s contractor status meant that he could be denied state 48  Chapter One

authorization at a moment’s notice. Yet, at the same time, he was not f­ ree to quit. “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 w ­ ill end up in the ‘reeducation camps’ too.” Interviews with another Muslim minority police contractor and the relatives of other police contractors I interviewed in the region in 2018 confirmed this policy. Around the m ­ iddle of 2017, police contractors began to actively fine-tune the programming of the system using assessment tools which scanned through files that ­were hidden on Muslim smartphones. Baimurat continued: I worked ­there for six months. Then they handed out devices to check pedestrians and car ­drivers. When we scanned their id card (and phone) with it, we got information about w ­ hether or not the person had worn a veil, had installed Whatsapp, had traveled to Kazakhstan, all sorts of ­things like that. We could stop ­every car on the street and check them. When we ­stopped them, we asked the ­people inside to show their phones and id cards. If ­there was something suspicious like I mentioned before, we needed to inform [the leaders]. Higher-­level officers and “older ­brother and ­sister volunteers,” most of whom ­were Han, ­were given the job of conducting qualitative assessments of the Muslim population as a whole—­providing the more complex interview-­based survey data for the deep-­learning system of the integrated platform (Byler 2018b). Neighborhood police officers, contractors, and “relative” assistants assessed the Muslim-­minority ­people to determine ­whether they should be given a rating of “trustworthy,” “average,” or “untrustworthy” (Smith Finley 2019). They determined this by categorizing the person using ten or more categories: ­whether or not the person was of military age, if they w ­ ere Uyghur, if they w ­ ere underemployed, if they prayed regularly, if they possessed unauthorized religious knowledge, if they had a passport, if they had traveled to one of twenty-­ six Muslim-­majority countries, if they had overstayed their visa, if they had an immediate relative living abroad, or if they had taught their c­ hildren about Islam in their home. ­Those who ­were determined to be untrustworthy ­were then sent to detention centers where they w ­ ere interrogated, asked to confess their precrime violations such as teaching their c­ hildren about Islam or fellow Uyghurs how to pray or read the Qur­an, and name ­others who ­were also untrustworthy. In this manner, and with the help of tech-­enabled cyber-­violation detections, the par­ameters of the techno-­political system determined which individuals should be slotted for the “transformation through education” internment camps. Enclosure 49

­ hese assessments w T ­ ere an iterative pro­cess. Many Muslims who passed their first assessment w ­ ere subsequently detained ­because someone ­else who had been detained had named them as untrustworthy or b­ ecause automated systems or police contractors detected micro-­clues of aberrant be­hav­ior. Years of WeChat history made freely available to government agencies was used as evidence of the need for Uyghur suspects to be transformed. Over one million Han and Uyghur “volunteers” ­were forced, through threats of demotion and prosecution, to adopt rural Uyghur and Kazakh families to conduct a series of weeklong assessments as uninvited guests in Uyghur and Kazakh homes (Byler 2018b). As a way of enforcing this “no mercy” policy, in 2017 state authorities “opened more than 12,000 investigations into party members in Xinjiang for infractions in the ‘fight against separatism,’ more than 20 times the figure in the previous year.”17 Over the course of t­ hese weeks, the state workers tested the trustworthiness of the Turkic Muslim population that remained outside of the camp system, by forcing them to participate in haram activities such as drinking, smoking, and dancing. As a test, they brought their Uyghur hosts food without telling them ­whether the meat used in the dishes was halal or not. T ­ hese “big ­sisters and ­brothers” specifically targeted the families of ­those who had been shot or taken away by the police over the past de­cade. They looked for any sign of resentment or lack of enthusiasm in Chinese patriotic activities. They gave the ­children candy so that they would tell them the truth about what their parents thought. The qualitative data they gleaned was added to their biometric profile in the region-­wide integrated database. This data allowed intelligence workers and the surveillance system a way of tracking, reporting, and analyzing their pro­gress in reeducation. Scanning Uyghur ­faces and phones for reasons to subtract them became a numbers-­ based calculus. The more data, the better for subtracting. For instance, in one neighborhood in Ürümchi in early 2019, the ijop reported that, up to that point, sixty “wild imams” had been detained out of a total of 669 detainees (Byler 2021; Grauer 2021). Of ­these detainees, 348 ­were being held in interrogation centers while 184 had been sent to the camps. Over the course of one week, 1,585 ­people who ­were relatives of the “Three Category” detainees had received daily visits from intelligence workers and 326 elementary students who had a parent in detention had been monitored by their teachers. In addition, intelligence workers and police contractors reported that, over that same week, the ids of 256 ­people had been manually scanned using “investigation tools” and 367 smartphones had been scanned using “counter-­terrorism swords” (Byler 2020b). The result of all t­ hese investigations and micro-­clues they had received from the ijop was that four ­people ­were detained for joining 50  Chapter One

a “Qur’an Alphabet” WeChat group in 2017. Thousands of ijop police reports from other nearby communities—­which I reviewed for The Intercept—­revealed similar week-­to-­week assessments in the growth and implementation of terror capitalism across the region. Throughout the system, exhortations to meet intelligence quotas ­were reiterated. Caught in the Digital Enclosure At the center to which he was sent, Alim—­whose story I began in the introduction to this chapter—­was deprived of sleep and food, and subjected to hours of interrogation and verbal abuse. “I was so weakened through this pro­cess that at one point during my interrogation I began to laugh hysterically,” he said when we spoke. Other detainees report being placed in stress positions, tortured with electric shocks, and submitted to long periods of isolation. When he ­wasn’t being interrogated, Alim was kept in a fourteen-­square-­meter cell with twenty other Uyghur men, though cells in some detention centers ­house more than sixty ­people. Former detainees have said they had to sleep in shifts ­because ­there was not enough space for every­one to stretch out at once. “They never turn out the lights,” Mihrigul Tursun, a Uyghur ­woman who spent several months in detention, told me. The religious and po­liti­cal transgressions of t­ hese detainees ­were frequently discovered through social media apps on their smartphones. Perhaps their contact number had been in the list of WeChat followers in another detainee’s phone. Maybe they had posted, on their WeChat wall, an image of a Muslim in prayer. It could be that in years past they had sent or received recordings of Islamic teachings that matched indicators of up to 53,000 specific signs of extremism that algorithms attempted to detect (Byler 2020b). Maybe they had a relative who had moved to Turkey or another Muslim-­majority country and had added them to their WeChat account using a foreign number. The mere fact of having a f­ amily member abroad, or of traveling outside China, as Alim had, often resulted in detention. Another one of t­hese former detainees, an ethnic Uyghur cross-­border shut­tle trader from Kazakhstan named Gulbahar Jelilova, said in a series of interviews that, in the cells where she was held in the capital of the Uyghur region, Ürümchi, the w ­ omen ranged between the ages of fourteen and seventy-­eight (Byler 2018c). While the middle-­aged ­women in her cell, such as herself, ­were often said to be guilty of having their WeChat numbers listed in the phones of other detainees, the younger w ­ omen ­were often said to be guilty of sharing images of Islamic practice or Quranic verses via social media. One Enclosure 51

young ­woman told Gulbahar that she was detained ­because she had posted a picture of a person praying. She told her, “I just liked this picture and put it on my WeChat.” A twenty-­five-­year-­old said that her interrogators had shown her that they had found four extremist images in her WeChat account. She told Gulbahar, “I deleted them a long time ago, but somehow they restored them. They ­were just pictures of ­women in veils. In one of them a ­little girl is holding her hands up in prayer.” Now the w ­ oman was in the detention center for her association with images that she thought she had deleted years before ai-­assisted tracking of religious imagery was a possibility. Gulbahar’s own detention was connected to her digital social network and digital payment history. Sometimes simply knowing the wrong person and having an international travel history ­were enough to warrant an investigation. She explained: At 8 a.m. the police knocked on my door. They showed me their badges and then said they had a few questions to ask me. I thought they ­really would just ask a few questions, so I went along with them [without any attempt to resist]. As soon as we arrived at the police station they checked my phone. When they c­ ouldn’t find anything, they showed me the picture of my friend and asked if I knew her. Then I realized they had already detained my friend. They found my phone number in her cell phone and pressured her ­daughter to call me. Then they accused me of wiring 17,000 yuan to Turkey. I said, Why would I do that? They said, take your time, think it over. Over the next year, Gulbahar’s interrogators tried many dif­fer­ent approaches to force her to confess to a crime. She said she understood that she was only deemed guilty through inference and association, so she refused. Although the par­ameters of the system, recovered through both digital and h ­ uman surveillance, seemed to indicate a probability of extremism, in the end, ­because she refused and her international connections, the enclosure lost its hold. Eventually, due to pressure placed on state authorities by her relatives in Kazakhstan, she was released. Simply not using a smartphone and social media was also something that was flagged through assessments at checkpoints. So was attempting to destroy a sim card, or not carry­ing a smartphone. In desperation, some Uyghurs buried their phones in the desert; o­ thers tied ­little baggies of sim cards for phones they had used in the past high up in trees and put sd cards that had Islamic texts and teachings on them in dumplings and froze them, hoping they would not be found and that eventually they could be recovered. ­Others gave up on preserving Islamic 52  Chapter One

knowledge and burned data cards in secret. Simply throwing digital devices away was not an option. They might be found and traced back to the user. Detainees ­were often forced to point out names of extremists listed in their phones and reveal the locations of hidden sd cards or smartphones. As in the rendition pro­cesses of the US War on Terror, the goal of this phase in the pro­ cess was not so much about determining the guilt of the detainee as much as isolating individuals, fracturing all remaining forms of support, and capturing as much information as pos­si­ble about the detainee’s social network. Many simply dis­appeared, or w ­ ere psychologically broken, during this phase of the pro­cess. Young men of military age ­were particularly susceptible to disappearance. Based on the gendered segregation in the camps themselves, it is clear that more than two-­thirds of ­those taken ­were men. The enclosure that targeted Mihrigul, Gulbahar, Alim, and the many so-­called terrorism suspects they met in the detention centers, removed them and Muslim contractors who enacted the system from freely chosen forms of social relations. Digital Enclosure and Capital Accumulation In order to understand how t­hese surveillance technologies work as a type of digital enclosure—­transcribing social life as digital code that can then be monetized by companies, it is instructive to think with Foucault regarding the general technology of biopo­liti­cal security (Foucault 2007). As I noted in the introduction, such a technology, for Foucault, is si­mul­ta­neously productive in the way it produces new self-­disciplined subjects, symbolic in the way it produces new regimes of truth, and power­ful in the way it is dispersed to mediate, but not fully determine, the conduct and discipline of individuals within populations (Samimian-­Darash 2016). The reeducation enclosure proj­ect attempts to produce Uyghurs who are subject, or bound, to a Chinese system of control in all aspects of their lives while si­mul­ta­neously maintaining the power of Han inhabitants to move through the “green lanes” that w ­ ere opened at checkpoints just for them. One of the most power­ful aspects of the system is that, from the perspective of security workers, they smooth out access and make their lives more efficient. They work. The systems track Han movements as well, but in this context the tracking is experienced as largely frictionless. At most, the brief slow-­down at checkpoints is experienced by non-­Muslims as a hassle. Non-­Muslims move through preapproved lanes, their ­faces acting as a code that unlocks gates, the technology extending their power and privilege as protected citizens. The overlaid and precise programming of the system combined with the profiling gaze of ­human surveillance technicians aimed to ensure the Enclosure 53

smooth capture of data and the movement and security of ­those whose lives ­were valued by the system. In the broader technology community, t­ here is some skepticism regarding the viability of ai-­assisted computer-­vision technologies in China. Some experts point to an article titled “Potempkin ai” (Sadowski 2018), which highlights the failures of Chinese security technology to deliver what it promises without ­human assistance. They frequently bring up the way a system in Shenzhen meant to identify the ­faces of jaywalkers and flash them on jumbotrons next to busy intersections cannot keep up with the ­faces of all the jaywalkers and, as a result, the data used for public shaming is at times input manually. ­These experts claim that much of what looks like ai-­assisted real-­time policing may actually be human-­assisted policing. They point out that Chinese tech firms and government agencies have hired hundreds of thousands of cheaply paid police contractors to act as “data janitors” and watch banks of video monitors (Irani 2015). Aspects of the ijop act in quite blunt ways and are supported by the manual data imports (Leibold 2020). As with the theater of airport security in the United States, to a certain extent it is the threat of surveillance, rather than surveillance itself, that ­causes ­people to modify their be­hav­ior. Yet, despite the role of ­human ­labor in installing and debugging the system, in general the digital enclosure worked to convert Turkic Muslim populations into parsed data streams, making them available for assessment, subtraction, and further de­pen­dency. It turned Uyghurs and Kazakhs against themselves, making them ­human intelligence, the translators and janitors, of a system of signals intelligence meant to transform and expropriate. ­Because of the ethno-­ racial devaluation of his social position, Baimurat felt he had no choice but to work in ser­vice to the system of enclosure even as it foreclosed other life paths for him. Furthermore, the venture capital orientation of technology development in general created marketing conditions where technology firms frequently oversold their capabilities. This was frequently combined with the “black box” effect of advanced technologies, where obfuscation of pro­cess and programming mask the errors and probabilities of algorithms, creating a smooth interface that appears endlessly precise (Albro 2018). In the Chinese context, ­because of the way technology firms funded by state capital act as proxies for state intervention, this overselling and black box ethos nevertheless translates into power­ful forms of self-­policing on the part of the surveilled. A middle-­aged Uyghur businessman from Khotan who I ­will call Dawut told me that this new system has turned Uyghur communities into hollowed-­out worlds ­behind the checkpoints, the cameras, and the apps on their phones. Within the reeducation security system, every­thing Uyghurs do is recorded 54  Chapter One

and, through this, controlled. In this system the only kind of Uyghur life that is recognized by the state authorities and contractors is the one that the computer sees. The government officials, civil servants, and police contractors who have come to build, implement, and monitor the system do not r­ eally see them as possessing in­de­pen­dent autonomy outside of what is permitted by the system. This makes Uyghurs like Dawut feel as though their lives only m ­ atter as data—­code on a screen, numbers in camps—­and they are adapting their be­hav­ ior, even their thoughts, to this system as well. “Uyghurs are alive,” Dawut said softly, with a sad smile. “But it is like they are ghosts living in another world.” Although the enclosure system does not fully determine or control their lives, it does eat into the basic forms of social care that constitute Uyghur land-­based social life. Systems of devaluation and dispossession have been codified and extended through the digital enclosure. On November 3, 2018, Erzhan Qurban, a middle-­aged Kazakh man from a small village fifty kilo­meters from the city of Ghulja near the Xinjiang border with Kazakhstan, was released from the reeducation camp ­after nine months. He had been held without charge as a precriminal who had exhibited signs of religious extremism. Speaking in 2019, Erzhan said he still does not know why he was taken.18 Like o­ thers detained in Ghulja, the micro-­clues of his preterrorism ­were likely the fact that he possessed a passport and had traveled to Kazakhstan, one of twenty-­six Muslim-­majority countries on a Chinese state watch list (see “China’s Algorithms” 2019). He thought that perhaps now he would be f­ ree to return to his former life as an immigrant in Kazakhstan. Yet, ­later that week, he was sent to work in a glove factory in an industrial park back in Ghulja city. For the next fifty-­three days, he experienced life in a reeducation garment factory that was built to “raise the quality” (Ch: tigao suzhi) of Turkic Muslim-­minority forced laborers. Erzhan had been detained soon ­after he came back to China to seek medical treatment for his ­daughter and care for his ailing ­mother in early 2018. In a 2019 interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit, he said: On the eve­ning of February 8, 2018, they picked me up in a minibus. It was already dark and they put black plastic sacks over our heads and handcuffs on our hands. ­There ­were five young men from my village with me in the minibus. The room in which I had to stay for the next nine months was 5 meters by 5 meters and located on the third floor. On the door, a sign said “No. 12.” Our floor alone accommodated 260 men. In my room, we ­were twelve. ­Later I heard that ­there had been more than 10,000 men detained in our camp.19 Enclosure 55

Erzhan was unsure exactly where the camp was located. It may have been the one that was built in the fields on the outskirts of the city, just seven kilo­meters from the industrial park. As has often been reported by former detainees, conditions in the camp where appalling. Describing the circumstances of his detention, Erzhan said: The toilet was a bucket by the win­dow, ­there was no ­running ­water. In the daytime, we w ­ ere sitting in rows on our plastic stools. The food was handed to us through an opening in the door. At 7 a.m., we had to sing the Chinese national anthem and then we had three minutes for breakfast. Afterward, we studied Chinese u ­ ntil 9 p.m. Our teachers w ­ ere Kazakhs or Uyghurs. We ­were watched by four cameras in our room which ensured that we d ­ idn’t talk to each other. ­Those who spoke anyway ­were handcuffed and had to stand by the wall. “You ­don’t have the right to talk, b­ ecause you are not h ­ umans,” said the guards, “If you w ­ ere ­humans, you ­wouldn’t be ­here.”20 Over time the grueling routine began to change his ­mental state. He said: “The first two months, I thought of my wife Maynur and my three ­children. Sometime ­later, I only thought about food.”21 In May 2018, about the time that Erzhan began to detach from his social relations and think about his bodily survival, Pan Daojin, the front commander and party secretary of Yili Prefecture, arrived to inspect a newly built industrial park on the other side of town.22 He came with an “Aid Xinjiang” del­e­ga­tion from Jiangsu that was tasked with providing jobs to reeducated workers. Pan, who was also from Jiangsu, had been appointed to his position in December 2016 just as the mass detentions of the reeducation system began. During the inspection of the new industrial park, he “fully affirmed the achievements” of the business leaders from Nantong City in Jiangsu who had funded the industrial park. The del­e­ga­tion showed off the new factory of the Jiangsu-­based Solamoda Garment Group—­a com­pany that partners with Forever 21 and other international brands. They also ­stopped by the highly productive glove factory where Erzhan would eventually be assigned. This factory was managed by employees of the Luye Shuozidao Trading Com­pany, a manufacturer based in Baoding city in Hebei Province. According to the general man­ag­er of the glove factory, Wang Xinghua, speaking in a state tv interview released in December 2018, “With the support of the government, we have already ‘recruited’ more than 600 ­people” (Ili Tele­vi­sion 2018). One of ­these 600 government recruits was Erzhan, who had arrived from the camp less than a month before. Continuing, General Man­ag­er Wang said 56  Chapter One

that since the founding of the new factory in 2017, “we have generated more than 6 million US dollars in sales. We plan to reach 1,000 workers by the end of this year. We plan to provide jobs to 1,500 p­ eople by the end of 2019.” In fact, the glove factory in Ghulja has now far surpassed the capacity of its parent factory. Back in Hebei, the com­pany employed less than 200 employees (“Lixian Huawei Gloves Factory” 2019). Moving manufacturing to Xinjiang made sense for the com­pany, which sold 96 ­percent of its leather gloves across the border in Rus­sia and Eastern Eu­rope. But t­ here ­were other reasons for this exponential growth. Since 2018 the state has provided subsidies to build factories and ship goods from Xinjiang. Construction of the factories was often funded by local governments in Eastern China as part of a “pairing assistance” program. Up to 4 ­percent of new factory sales volume was subsidized in order to cover shipping expenses from the new location.23 A state program gave reeducation system employers five thousand yuan for each coerced worker they trained. Most importantly, as in e­ very county in Xinjiang, ­there ­were tens of thousands of desperate, traumatized detainees like Erzhan in nearby camps. As a document from the Development and Reform Commission of Xinjiang mandates, local authorities are to “establish a development mechanism linkage between the industrial management of rural collective economic organ­izations and the industry of education and training centers”—­the euphemism used for reeducation camps and associated factories (Yuan 2019; my emphasis). Since 2017 factories have flocked to Xinjiang to take advantage of the newly built industrial parks of the reeducation camp system and the cheap ­labor and subsidies that accompany them. In fact, as described in the preface, in late 2018 the primary development ministry for the region circulated a statement saying that the camps or “vocational skills education and training centers” had become a “carrier” (Ch: zaiti) of economic stability (Xinjiang Reform and Development Commission 2018). ­Because of this system, Xinjiang had attracted “significant investment and construction from coast-­based Chinese companies.” This was particularly the case in Chinese textile and garment-­related industries, since China sources more than 80 ­percent of its cotton in Xinjiang (Gro Intelligence 2019). In an effort motivated at least in part by rising l­abor costs among Han mi­grant workers on the east coast, by 2023 the state plans to move over one million textile and garment industry jobs to the region.24 If they succeed, it w ­ ill mean that as many as one in ­every eleven textile and garment industry jobs in China ­will be in Xinjiang (“Wages and Working Hours” 2014). Nearly all the gloves that are made by detainees in the satellite factory of the Luye Shuozidao Trading Com­pany are sold abroad. The com­pany’s Alibaba distribution site sells the gloves at ­wholesale prices ranging from $1.50 to $24.00 Enclosure 57

per pair. Some are distributed by the upscale Hong Kong–­based boutique Bread n Butter, which has outlets across East Asia where they are sold for far more. In any case, the price at which t­ hese gloves are sold is more than, at a minimum, ten times higher than the wages workers are paid per pair. In an essay written in adulation of the factory complex, a Ghulja County official wrote that, when the Turkic Muslim farmers and herders arrived at the factory, they “took off their grass shoes, put on leather shoes, and became industrial workers” (Yining County Zero Distance 2018). The counterfactual imagery of “backward” (Ch: luohou) minority ­people, being given the “gift” of factory discipline through enclosure precisely captures the pro­cess of removing workers from the means of production, making them fully dependent on carceral factories. In a video produced for state tv, a reporter repeatedly noted that the Turkic Muslim workers did not even pause to look up at the camera during the filming (Ili Tele­vi­sion 2018). The reporter interpreted this as a sign of their excellent work ethic as newly trained “high quality” (Ch: suzhi gao) workers. By extracting surplus value from the reeducated workers in the form of cheaply produced commodities and skilled laborers, the factory was also investing in the value of the Turkic Muslim workers. Erzhan noted that his man­ag­er emphasized that the gloves they w ­ ere making w ­ ere for export so the quality of their sewing had to be very high. The training they received in “achieved quality,” had to be reflected in the quality of the gloves they mass-­produced. Another Kazakh worker I interviewed in January 2020, Gulzira Auehlkhan, told me that, a­ fter her release from the camp, she was also forced by officials in her village to work in the same factory as Erzhan. At night she was held in a walled dormitory and not permitted to leave. ­There ­were checkpoints at the entrance of the dormitory and factory where her id and face ­were scanned. She said, “We would have our bodies and phones checked when we arrived, in the m ­ iddle of the day. When we w ­ ere leaving for the dormitory at the end of the day, they would check again b­ ecause they ­were worried we might take a needle. ­After we got to know them [the police contractors], we asked, ‘Why are you still ­here watching us?’ ” She said she knew that the answer to this question was that they w ­ ere monitoring ­whether or not they ­were acting like submissive reeducated industrial workers. This suggests that Muslims like Gulzira and Erzhan must adopt proletarian be­hav­ior and basic “achieved quality” (Ch: suzhi). The implied promise is that accruing such value might in turn be exchanged for positions and practices that hold greater exchange value. However, as I w ­ ill show in the following chapter, this promised success is often blocked by the ethno-­racial slot that bound them in the enclosure to begin with. 58  Chapter One

It appears instead that the goal of the reeducation industrial parks, and broader digital enclosure system, is to turn Kazakhs and Uyghurs into a deeply controlled proletariat, a docile yet productive unfree class—­those without the social welfare afforded to the formally recognized rights-­bearing working class. Another former detainee and worker named Erbaqyt Otarbai told me that in the eyes of the man­ag­ers they “­were like pets,” trained to work on command. By turning a population of p ­ eople regarded as not deserving of l­egal protections into productive workers, state authorities and private industrialists are si­mul­ta­neously extending the market expansion of the Chinese garment industry and technology development. This system of controlled l­abor is “carried” forward by the reeducation system. A complex digital enclosure that held workers in place and monitored their productivity ensured that this new class of interned laborers remained a permanent ethno-­racial underclass. In fact, b­ ecause of this extralegal system, the only t­ hing that protects Turkic Muslim workers from exploitation, vio­lence, and detention, is the goodwill of their Han man­ag­ers. As indicated by the be­hav­ior of the management of the glove factory, worker protections often appeared as an ethos similar to other capitalist-­colonial frontier contexts—­they care about their investment in the quality of Turkic worker productivity, while their bodies, social relationships, and social reproduction are viewed as disposable. In December 2018, man­ag­ers at the factory ordered Gulzira to sign a one-­year work contract. She was told, “If you do not sign, you would be sent back to the camp.” Conclusion Thinking of the digital enclosure as a new frontier in capitalist-­colonial expansion is a point of departure for understanding broader forms of devaluation and dispossession at work in Northwest China. This understanding of digital expropriation through data harvesting and ethno-­racialized forms of population control extends Brian Jordan Jefferson’s conceptualization of digitized “geographies of carcerality” (Jefferson 2020) and “digital enclosures” (Andrejevic 2007) beyond North American contexts to the way minoritized populations elsewhere are codified and criminalized ­because of their land-­ based attachments. It also extends analytics of “racial banishment” (Roy 2019) beyond dispossession as it relates to land and urban belonging, to ongoing epistemic dispossession, and new forced l­abor regimes in a con­temporary capitalist-­colonial context in Northwest China. This framing, in turn, opens up a more expansive analytic regarding the way enclosure bends the ­future of Enclosure 59

minoritized populations in ser­vice to capital accumulation, state power, and the security of settler populations. The management of the Uyghur region through digital enclosure proceeds as an expropriative gaze, turning the “terrorist” bodies of Turkic Muslims into data points to be sorted and assigned values based on compliance and productivity. Ultimately, this enclosure attempts to dispossess by “digitizing and punishing” (Jefferson 2020), and through this pro­cess harvest data, and subtract and reeducate resistant bodies removed from the landscape, making them productive but si­mul­ta­neously dispossessed, unfree, and dependent laborers. As such, the digital enclosure that overlays the Uyghur region extends a new sequence in racialization in both geographic space and digital capture. The P ­ eople’s War on Terror and the techno-­political terror capitalism it inspired has created its own regime of truth and economic objectives.25 The bodies, first of Uyghur men but also w ­ omen and ­children, have become the objects of state capital and venture investment in data harvesting and social transformation. Muslim male bodies, as the loci of terrorism, became the reason why millions of p ­ eople found jobs as Chinese-­language teachers, police officers, prison guards, construction workers, ser­vice sector employees, public health workers, police contractors, computer engineers, and artificial intelligence developers. Uyghur bodies and productive l­abor became a site of state capital investment. The counterterror digital enclosure became a growth industry at a frontier of global capitalism. As I w ­ ill show in the following chapters, this con­ temporary colonial system was built on older and broader systems of valuation and dispossession.

60  Chapter One

2 Devaluation

In 2014 in the center of the neighborhood at the southern edge of Ürümchi, t­ here was a restaurant with a big red sign. In Chinese, the six-­foot-­tall characters read “pork” (Ch: da rou). The sign was an anti-­Islamic po­liti­cal and economic statement; it told every­one in the neighborhood that Han migrant-­settlers had arrived and that they would not re­spect the Native knowledge and values of the Muslims who called this space their homeland. This Uyghur-­majority neighborhood, known as Dawan, was one of the centers of vio­lence during the protests on July 5, 2009. A large number of the Han settlers who w ­ ere killed or injured during the vio­lence came from this neighborhood. In the years that followed, many Han settlers moved from this neighborhood to Han-­dominated districts of the city to the north (Tynen 2019b). ­Those who remained ­were often defiantly anti-­Uyghur. They territorialized their space with Han markers,

signaling that they w ­ ere ­there to stay. The six-­foot-­tall sign was a statement regarding the type of “quality” or “cultural capital” (Ch: suzhi; Uy: sapa) that was protected by the surveillance system which overlaid the city. In Ürümchi, Han rural-­to-­urban mi­grants received more institutional support than even affluent and highly educated Uyghurs in the city. As the evaluative pro­cess of terror capitalism swung into motion, state authorities and surveillance companies began to support low-­income Han mi­grants’ productive and reproductive work by imposing more comprehensive material and digital enclosures around Uyghur mi­grants. In this neighborhood, if Uyghurs entered Han shops they w ­ ere often e­ ither ignored or ordered to leave. At times Han proprietors would hold out their right hands, palm down, fin­gers pointed to the ground, and flick their wrists upward while barking “Out! Out!” (Ch: Chu! Chu!) in staccato bursts.1 Or they would simply look past Uyghur customers, ignoring their questions, refusing to take their money. One Uyghur inhabitant of the community recalled a dispute he had with a Han gas-­station attendant in the neighborhood. While he was waiting to have his id checked so he could drive his car into the gas station, a Han taxi driver cut in line in front of him. When he protested, the Han gas-­station attendant threatened to call the nearby police contractors. He told the Uyghur customer, “I’m not afraid of you. You should be afraid of me! I could have you arrested whenever I want.” In the mind of this Uyghur rural-­ to-­urban mi­grant, this encounter drove home the point that, in this city, Han lives ­were valued. Han desires took pre­ce­dence. The police, the schools, the hospitals, the banks, the stores, all catered to Han desires and needs. At the same time, over the course of the ­People’s War on Terror, the same techno-­political system prevented Uyghurs from advertising their products as halal. It used digital media surveillance par­ameters and in­for­mants to prevent Uyghur c­ hildren from studying their m ­ other tongue. U ­ nder threat of detention, they enforced ­family planning rules for Uyghurs while encouraging growth in the Han population (Cliff 2016a). As part of the counterterrorism strategy, they prevented Uyghurs from selling imported goods from Muslim-­ majority countries and instead emphasized Chinese domestic products. ­These institutions assured that pork could be consumed without reprisal, and that low-­income Han mi­grants could use their f­aces and social connections to pass through checkpoints at the entrances of gated communities and institutions while unauthorized Uyghurs could not. The P ­ eople’s War on Terror became a euphemism for Han inclusion as “the p ­ eople” conducting “the war” and Uyghur exclusion as the objects of terror. The war, combined with pro­ cesses of Uyghur enclosure and dispossession, produced a power­ful “state effect” 62  Chapter Two

(T. Mitchell 1999; Yeh 2013) in which state power was ceded to Han settlers and implemented through the private and public institutions that supported them. Through a pro­cess of reevaluation, the work of low-­income Han mi­grants accrued value on behalf of the nation while Uyghur mi­grants ­were evaluated as precriminals. In the first half of this chapter, I examined how low-­income Han male and female mi­grants cultivated value in the city. In the second half, I consider how Uyghur male mi­grants attempted to perform similar kinds of social reproduction and economic ­labor. Comparing ­these two populations of recent Han and Uyghur mi­grants is impor­tant ­because it shows how social reproduction was evaluated and racialized to produce divergent forms of enclosure and opening. The experiences and perspectives of t­ hese two groups—­whose ­house­hold registration was located outside of the city—­are shown in relief through comparison to a small minority of wealthy Uyghur bureaucrats, an emerging class of Han who ­were employed by state ministries and large corporations, and Han “Xinjiang locals” who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s (whose perspectives are reflected in chapter 5). While low-­income Uyghurs often found themselves enclosed and subtracted from urban society, recent, low-­income Han mi­grants often described their life paths as opening in new directions. Chinese-­language and Han cultural forms of achieved personal quality w ­ ere valued by the techno-­ political system, while land-­based Uyghur forms of achieved quality w ­ ere often framed as “backward” (Ch: luohou) or “dangerous” (Ch: weixian). This chapter shows that the privileging of Han and Chinese values was often obfuscated by the state, which contributed to the institutionalization of bias and a lack of interethnic empathy among recent Han mi­grants that older generations of Han mi­grants saw as impor­tant. This pro­cess further accelerated as the society moved deeper into a mode of terror capitalism through the deep penetration of surveillance technologies. The privileging of Han values and desires also contributed to a widespread disruption in Uyghur social reproduction. Yet, while their autonomous presence was diminished by the mid-2010s, Uyghur lives continued to m ­ atter when they could be used in the ser­vice of Han desires and security in the city. Uyghur bodies w ­ ere useful in fulfilling the desires of the tourist gaze for happy, dancing exotic ­others in the safety of large Han-­owned banquet halls in the Uyghur districts. They ­were even useful as exploitable low-­wage employees in the Han-­owned tourist bazaar spaces as examples of subordinated “interethnic harmony” (Ch: minzu hexie) created by the reeducation system. They w ­ ere useful as embodied sources of data for the state capital–­funded surveillance and security companies of the city; their Devaluation 63

presence provided jobs for police contractors, po­liti­cal teachers, construction workers, and bureaucrats of all types. They provided justification for the mass internment camps that w ­ ere built around the city. In general though, Uyghurs, particularly low-­income, rural-­origin mi­grant men, ­were unwanted in the city except for their utility as the objects of terror capitalism and as low-­level policing contractors and in­for­mants. Through this evaluative pro­cess, the l­ abor of reproducing Native foodways, commodities, and styles was also devalued as low-­skill or backward forms of work by urban authorities and upper-­class Uyghurs and Han mi­grants. As described ­later in this book, the work of performing Islamic contemporaneity by participating in religious economies was outlawed by the state. Instead, many mi­grants ­were forced to return to their rural villages and towns hoping to work as contingent wage laborers in state-­funded infrastructure and industrial agriculture proj­ects and escape the internment camp system that targeted out-­of-­place young Uyghur men. Han mi­grants with similar levels of formal education, on the other hand, found numerous ways to stay and flourish in the city. Uyghurs responded to this ethno-­racial exclusion in a variety of ways. They saw Han settlers as inhabiting an obvious, but often unacknowledged, social privilege. In their minds, Han settlers acted as proxies for a colonial state that wanted to take all they could from Uyghurs; they w ­ ere always watching Uyghurs with suspicion. Uyghurs felt as though they constantly had to prove their loyalty to the state by acting in ingratiating ways t­oward their Han neighbors. Even more affluent Uyghurs, who w ­ ere trained in Chinese-­language schools and ­were able to find jobs in government institutions, felt pressured to demonstrate their loyalty to the state and publicly agree with their Han colleagues when they discussed the “backwardness” of Uyghur mi­grants. Yet, no ­matter how “open” (Ch: kaifang) or sycophantic they acted in relation to their Han neighbors, they ­were rarely able to pass as Han. On the other hand, recent Han mi­grants often said it was their patriotic duty to report Uyghurs they deemed suspicious. They naturalized their privilege as a product of their appearance, language ability, and social connections. It became a normative expression of their Han citizenship in the Chinese nation. By participating in the social enclosure of Uyghurs who they saw as “low quality” (Ch: suzhi di), they positioned themselves as “high quality” (Ch: suzhi gao), valued members of society. Unlike in cities in Eastern China, recent rural-­to-­ urban Han mi­grants enjoyed a sense of prestige and distinction relative to the Native inhabitants of the city they had come to occupy. As Zang Xiaowei (2011, 155) notes, Han nonstate workers in Ürümchi earned on average 52 ­percent more than Uyghurs in the city. Across the region as a 64  Chapter Two

­ hole, in­equality in income was at around 28 ­percent (Liu and Peters 2017, w 270). This produced more pronounced overall rates of in­equality “than anywhere ­else in the P ­ eople’s Republic of China” (Millward 2021, 366), more even than other sites of ethnic diversity and extreme poverty in China—­such as Tibet, Yunnan, Guizhou, Qinghai, and Gansu—­where Han in-­migration rates ­were lower. The income gap between the rural population of mostly Uyghurs and the urban population dominated by Han mi­grants was a staggering 30 percentage points higher than the national average (Cao 2010, 968). Nowhere in the country was in­equality so closely tied to ethno-­racial difference. Ultimately, though, despite the impossibility of achieving value as “high quality” urban citizens, in the early stages of this evaluative pro­cess many young Uyghur mi­grants still strove to find ways to perform their contemporaneity. Like their Han neighbors, they too wanted to achieve a quality of life that resonated with desires that had been elicited through pro­cesses of dispossession. The desire to achieve qualities of contemporaneity gave this structure and propulsion. T ­ hese qualities, which they referred to in Uyghur as sapa, in some ways resonated with understandings of modernist, cultivated distinction or achieved quality that Han urbanites referred to in Chinese as suzhi. As described in chapter 3, they too attempted to buy forms of distinction by dressing in certain ways and adopting urbane styles. Nearly every­one I spoke with wanted to find a life path that helped them achieve a higher quality of life, by which they meant a life without poverty and a life that promised ­future autonomy. They had dreams that involved cultivating themselves as success stories. Yet, despite ­these resonances across ethno-­racial divides, what counted as quality was often pointed ­toward dif­fer­ent sources—­one ­toward a “Native” (Uy: yerlik) and Islamic contemporaneity, the other ­toward a Chinese contemporaneity. ­Because of this, their distinctive qualities ­were valued differently by both state authorities and mi­grants. The main way that ­these two forms of quality differed was in the degree to which low-­income young Uyghur mi­ grants saw their traditional knowledge as having a ­great deal of value; recent Han mi­grants, on the other hand, saw nonurban and Uyghur forms of knowledge as having ­little value. Discourses of Quality in Con­temporary China Like cities in other parts of China, in 2014 Ürümchi had an emerging ­middle class. Much of the wealth of the city was centered around Han state and corporate employees, along with a small minority of Chinese-­trained (Ch: minkaohan) state-­affiliated Uyghurs—­less than 10 ­percent of the total population, who Devaluation 65

worked in natu­ral resource development and the securitization of Uyghur society (Smith Finley 2007, 2018; Grose 2014; Tobin 2015). Built into this Chinese pursuit of the middle-­class good life was the industrial exploitation of a reserve army of millions of Han mi­grant laborers needed to build it. The anthropologist Pun Ngai (2005) argues that the “floating population” (Ch: liudong renkou) of dagongmei and dagongzai (working girls [­little ­sisters] and working boys [­little fellows]), names the contours of a yet unformed working class that is emerging in China’s economic reforms. In Ürümchi, ­these laboring Han bodies whose raw energy was building China’s New Silk Road ­were young, rural-­to-­urban mi­grant settlers. This new ­labor subject emerged from what Pun Ngai (2005) refers to as a “­triple displacement”: (1) the erasure of socialist class discourse; (2) the introduction of wage ­labor in the ser­vice of the ever-­expanding “race to the bottom” of ­labor and cost efficiency that accompanies global capitalism; and (3) the maintenance of patriarchal systems. This displacement produces a “boundary strug­g le” between the work of social reproduction on the part of Chinese ­women and men and market forces that enclose them as individual workers apart from their families (see Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). Working in dynamic relation to the legacy of social-­class structures, institutions, and infrastructures of Maoist China, ­these social strata profoundly transformed the spacing of social landscapes in urban China. The operative function of this pro­cess, combined with the intransigence of Maoist-­legacy rural-­urban apartheid and the erasure of class discourse, had the effect of eating into f­amily and community life—­ forcing young rural Han ­people to move into contingent work in the city. The securitization of Xinjiang introduced an additional new ele­ment into this equation of negative evaluation, exploitation, and expropriation: rural, Turkic Muslim bodies as the object of devaluation and control at the hands of Han migrant-­settlers and state institutions. In Ürümchi, new social strata such as the emerging ­middle class and a flexible mi­grant Han working class ­were in effect being formed around the enclosure of Uyghurs. One of the conversion devices that naturalized this ethno-­racial antagonism was the life narrative of Han suzhi as a form of individually achieved cultural capital. As Andrew Kipnis (2011) has shown, suzhi (achieved quality) first emerged as a replacement for the word zhiliang (ascribed quality) in state assessments of populations in the early 1980s. This device as used by schools, health care providers, and employers transformed ­people into populations of individualized “­human resource investments” (2011, 65).2 As Ann Anagnost has argued, this turn t­ oward a discourse of suzhi “marks a significant departure from ­earlier forms of subjectivity in the sense that the worker is understood as an entrepreneur 66  Chapter Two

who invests in his or her own self-­development” (2013, 26n11). This implies that individuals must adopt practices recognized as holding value that in turn can be exchanged for positions and practices that hold ever greater exchange value within the market economy (see also Yan 2008).3 As Li Zhang has noted, since the mass migration from the countryside to the city began in the early 1980s, Han mi­grants have often been denied formal po­liti­cal recognition as “an amorphous flow of undifferentiated laborers without histories” (2001, 31). In contrast to ­earlier waves of urban-­to-­rural mi­grants who ­were directed to strategic locations by the state during the first thirty years of the state, the Chinese state media often represent market-­ oriented mi­grants “not as living individuals with their own desires, dreams and intentions, but as flocks of raw ­labor that can be used or expelled at any time” (31). Yet, as Anagnost explains, evaluating the bodies, perceptions, and affects of mi­grants as “low quality” “justifies the extraction of surplus value” while at the same time legitimating “new regimes of social differentiation” (2004, 193). As a result, young mi­grants pursue life proj­ects hoping to accrue suzhi and associated social value by participating in the cap­i­tal­ist economy of production and consumption. Furthermore, as Yan Hairong (2008) has shown, relationships between mi­grants and urbanites that appear to be durable can be made disposable with sudden, arbitrary attachments of “low suzhi” to the bodies of mi­grants. For example, low-­income Han mi­grant nannies in Beijing often feel bonded to the affluent families who employ them, yet a small misstep can result in an immediate severing of a deep relationship. B ­ ecause mi­grant workers are seen as having l­ittle quality, in mainstream Chinese contexts they can be treated as disposable. In the context of Ürümchi, however, Han mi­grant status is much more secure b­ ecause, as shown in previous chapters, Han bodies and metrics are needed to “clear the social atmosphere” as part of the techno-­ political dispossession of Uyghurs. In their study of the Chinese and Italian transnational garment industry, Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Yanagisako (2018) find that studying transnational capitalism through a feminist analytic reveals a dynamic pro­cess of revaluation. Drawing on their case study of Italian and Han negotiations of ­labor power and value in the Chinese manufacturing of commodities infused with Italianness, their research points out that the production of cap­i­tal­ist value is “always a pro­cess of negotiation” (2018, 15). At the colonial frontier of the nation, this pro­cess of negotiation veers away from the dynamism of evaluation within an asymmetrical yet “unstable field of power” (2018, 38) within a recognized l­abor market, ­toward forms of domination and expropriation ­shaped by state capital, state power, and ethno-­racialization. Unlike in Han-­majority areas, the location of Devaluation 67

most studies of ­labor value in China,4 in the Uyghur region the most extreme forms of exploitation are associated not with Han mi­grants but with rural-­ origin Uyghurs. At this ethno-­racial frontier of cap­i­tal­ist accumulation, the field of power hardens in an ongoing evaluative pro­cess that naturalizes Han cultural values and state authority. This economic and social reproductive formation centers less on a dynamic reevaluative pro­cess where multisited power relations are leveraged in negotiation, than a pro­cess in which Uyghur social quality and l­abor power is devalued, while the value of Han migrant-­settler ­labor and social reproduction appreciates. The perceptions and affects of achieved value or quality can be mea­sured only relative to the positions of o­ thers within a field of power. Suzhi within the po­liti­cal frame of a village is not the same ­thing as suzhi in an urban setting; neither is the experience of suzhi in rural Sichuan Province the same as that of a person from Sichuan living in Tibet. As Emily Yeh has demonstrated in her account of the construction of a “­Little Sichuan” by Han mi­grant vegetable farmers on the outskirts of Lhasa, it is “essential to see status and value as determined not only by ethnicity and the rural/urban spatial divide, but also by the suzhi coding of the territory of the nation-­state in relation to development” (2013, 116). Following Yan Hairong’s 2008 argument of the tautology of development indexed to suzhi (low quality is the result of low development / low development is the result of low quality), Yeh shows that the national topography of Chinese value is oriented ­toward the eastern seaboard as the site of sophistication while the western frontier is evaluated as lacking the infrastructure, style, and distinction of modernity. Han migrant-­settlers in Ürümchi likewise recognize the sophistication of eastern Chinese cities, but they also recognize the relative ease with which they find a good life in Ürümchi. Migration to the west rather than the east follows dif­fer­ent lines of capital accumulation. Yeh makes clear that mi­grants from Sichuan to Tibet feel as though they “accumulate no suzhi” (2013, 117) which they can bring back with them to their village settings. In fact, they feel ­there is an inherent danger in “suffering” too long in underdeveloped and minority-­populated areas. It is as if the extreme lack of suzhi might rub off on them: darkening their skin, damaging their ability to affect o­ thers. In this instance, ­there is a sharp disconnect between achieved quality and monetary value, since frontier migration to Tibet brings a good deal of wealth and prestige to rural areas in Sichuan through remittances. Unlike mi­grants to eastern cities, mi­grants to the west have high success rates in earning significant incomes. In both Xinjiang and Tibet, this migration was in fact motivated by both the sending communities and national state subsidies for western frontier development.5 As Yeh notes, 68  Chapter Two

“The material force and consequence of the national discourse of quality and development means that the ‘marginal and precarious ­legal status’ of mi­grants does not have the same effect in Lhasa as in other provinces” (2013, 120). Mi­grants to the frontier instead see themselves as agents of development, or in the case of Xinjiang, as “constructors” (Ch: jianshezhe) of the nation (Cliff 2016b). As they told Yeh, “What we did ­there was a huge benefit for Tibet” (Yeh 2013, 122). They saw their work as si­mul­ta­neously actualizing the vision of the state that had been communicated to them discursively and through economic incentives. By slipping suzhi and development into a framework of national pro­ gress, patriotic duty, and a sacrificial life-­project among low-­suzhi minorities, mi­grants thus come to see the benefits they accrue as justified even as they resent the “misallocation” of resources that drew them away from their homes ­toward low-­suzhi frontier settlements in the first place (Yeh 2013, 118). They may feel that the resources of the nation would have been better spent in improving living conditions in rural Eastern China, yet despite t­ hese feelings of ambivalence ­toward the priorities of the nation, many of them are proud of their sacrifice for the nation. The bounded solidity of “the effect of the state” was channeled through public and private institutions, ranging from banks to police, and manifested through their l­ abor and ethos (T. Mitchell 1999; Fischer 2013; Yeh 2013). As Tom Cliff (2016b) has argued, drawing on fieldwork in the smaller Xinjiang oil city of Korla, the main goals of the current administration in Xinjiang are to integrate the frontier with the rest of China and placate the Han population of Xinjiang. Unlike Tibet, the majority of Han in Xinjiang are long-­term settlers in the Maoist-­legacy ­People’s Construction and Production Corps or state-­subsidized small-­business entrepreneurs. Since the 1990s millions of additional vegetable farmers, cotton pickers, coal miners, and road builders have arrived, and ­because of the scale of resource extraction industries and infrastructures in Xinjiang many of them have also become long-­term settlers. ­These two populations—­the Corps, who came in the 1950s and 1960s, and economic mi­grants, who came in the 1990s and 2000s—­form the dual core of the Xinjiang Han population. As the Han migration continues its capillary spread across Xinjiang, a pro­cess of devaluing Uyghurs has resulted in a considerable amount of leverage for Han migrant-­settlers, particularly from the second wave of market-­oriented settlers. This is especially the case for Han settlers who have found a place for themselves in Ürümchi. In an emerging city that is actively cleansing large populations of unwanted Uyghurs, employment opportunities abound. In fact, for urban migrant-­settlers, the rhe­toric of sacrifice or building the nation that Cliff and Yeh noted among Han mi­grants in smaller Devaluation 69

frontier cities such as Korla and Lhasa seemed to slip out of view. The construction of the effective real­ity of state power dis­appeared from view, even as, for Uyghurs, it appeared as a privately contracted colonial Leviathan. Low-­Income Han Mi­grant Quality and Social Reproduction No one typified the achieved quality of low-­income Han settler-migrants more than the Sichuan mi­grant singer Luo Lin. Through his outlaw folk-­rock persona, and his claim to the stage name Dao Lang, the Chinese transliteration of a Uyghur Sufi tradition and community near Kashgar, he channeled an aspirational pioneer ethos of many mi­grant workers in Northwest China (see Smith Finley 2015). An im­mensely talented performer, he has proven himself to be very ­adept at evaluating an alien environment inhabited by dispossessed ­people. Since a majority of his fans, like himself, are hardworking mi­grants from elsewhere—­Anhui, Gansu, Sichuan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Hebei, and Shandong, just to name a few common natal homes—­Luo Lin centers his songs on stories of hard-­earned economic success inscribed over Xinjiang’s landscape. Mi­grant workers in the oil fields, coal mining, and booming construction industries w ­ ere represented as “constructors” of the nation (Cliff 2016b). Luo Lin’s songs often produced an evaluation of this work from a par­tic­u­lar Han male a­ ngle: offering mi­grant workers numerous pathways for claiming the Xinjiang atmosphere and si­mul­ta­neously accruing greater social value. As he sings in the m ­ usic video of one of his Xinjiang mi­grant anthems of discovery and declaration, “­Under the Northern Sky” (Ch: beifang de tiankong xia) while standing in front of a ­giant “Open up the West” windfarm south of Ürümchi: “I’m standing u ­ nder the northern sky / I think of you, far away at the ends of the earth / The world seems bigger than I thought / But h ­ ere ­will always be our home.”6 The Dao Lang persona he constructed was widely seen by recent Han mi­grants from both wealthy and impoverished economic classes as a heroic example of a patriotic cultural entrepreneur, surveying the social field and transforming it into a legible, enclosed object. Over the past two de­ cades as he has risen to iconic status in Xinjiang, his song lyr­ics have been suffused with images of a landscape rich in resources, exotic Muslim w ­ omen, and subjugated Uyghur men. Many of the low-­income Han migrant-­settlers I interviewed demonstrated a similar sense of the po­liti­cal and cultural leverage they possessed as patriotic Han subjects. The ability to exploit this leverage—­using a kind of location-­ specific Han privilege, Chinese language, and social connections to find economic opportunities—­was often experienced as a kind of ease. By simply showing up, 70  Chapter Two

they w ­ ere able to participate in the economy of the city as self-­fashioning subjects. As one Han mi­grant, Du Jie, who owned a small shop near the g­ iant “pork” sign in the Dawan neighborhood told me: I can definitely imagine living ­here for the rest of my life and just g­ oing back to my hometown now and then. It is so much easier to find jobs and they pay way better than in Anhui. It ­wasn’t a big adjustment at all when I moved h ­ ere. I have several businesses that I am d ­ oing at the same time. It would be impossible to do that if I was back in Anhui. She came to Ürümchi with her husband when he was hired to work on a construction proj­ect along with other p ­ eople from her home village in Anhui. ­After that contract was completed, they used the money he had earned to stay and open a shop that catered to Han mi­grant construction workers in nearby housing and security infrastructure proj­ects. Once the shop was up and ­running, it was easy to hire other mi­grants to run it, and they soon opened another shop. ­Because it was in a Uyghur-­majority neighborhood, Du Jie said the police and local neighborhood watch unit (Ch: shequ) ­were supportive and made the pro­cess of leasing space seem ­simple. Du Jie admitted that ­there ­were minor incon­ve­niences that came from the security systems such as having to register a new phone or id and attending po­liti­cal education meetings. But she said, “All of that i­sn’t for us. It is for them [Uyghurs]. The neighborhood unit asks us to report any suspicious activity, so they can track it with the cameras. If they do anything to us, the police ­will respond right away. Most of the time they ­don’t bother us and ask for id cards or phones on the street, like they do for the Uyghurs.” Although most of the dozens of Han mi­grants I spoke with still had affinities with their home provinces, they said that in some ways it was easier for them to perform regional variations of Hanness in Ürümchi than in their home villages. In Ürümchi they had more wealth, and t­ here ­were fewer class distinctions in groupings of mi­grants from other provinces. For example, according to Du Jie and her coworkers, in Ürümchi, Anhui p­ eople ­were often inclined to help other Anhui ­people find jobs and resources even if they ­were strangers. Their shared place of origin was enough to link them in a common cause. According to them, this sort of comradery was quite rare in Anhui itself. In the frontier city, many of the ­things they needed to perform their identities was available to them and the differences in status they experienced back in their hometown w ­ ere flattened out. They also found themselves exposed to new variations of Han cuisine and style and their tastes began to reflect this diversity. Most of the Han ­people ­were from somewhere ­else, so they cast Devaluation 71

less judgment on other Han. Of course, often unstated was the way they w ­ ere unified in opposition to the threat of Uyghur resentment of their possessions (Tynen 2019b). As in colonial experiments elsewhere, the frontier was a space of social mobility within a shared nationalist cause.7 Another ­woman from Henan, Lin Mingbai, exemplified the ease and contentment of Han mi­grant life in a city that supported Han mi­grants. In her experience when she and her husband came, along with other ­people in her village, in the early 2000s during the infrastructure construction boom that accompanied the “Open up the West” campaign, life in Xinjiang was already much better than life in Henan. She said: I’m from Henan. I came h ­ ere fifteen years ago. Back in Henan we had less than 5 mu [2.5 acres]. We raised wheat, but we barely made enough to eat. ­There are so many ­people in Henan.8 It is impossible to find any real opportunities ­there. That’s why we came ­here. But I still think like a Henan person. Sometimes we go back to Henan over the Spring Festival, but sometimes we ­can’t. It’s too far and sometimes we ­can’t afford it. When I asked her to compare her life in Ürümchi to her life in Henan, Lin Mingbai said: One of the biggest differences I found between life in the countryside in Henan and life ­here in the city in Xinjiang is that food is so much more con­ve­nient. I ­don’t miss cultivating at all. It took so much time to prepare anything in Henan. ­Here, every­thing is con­ve­nient. You can just buy what you need and make food right away. We can find every­thing we need to make Henan food. We had three kids a­ fter we came h ­ ere; they all have jobs. My husband also works as a home repairman. Wulumuqi [Uy: Ürümchi] is developing so fast that we can always find work. I’ve never had a job myself, but I always find a way to make money. For the past two years, I’ve been selling small supplies of t­ hings in the market. Lately I’ve been making around fifty yuan per day. Our place is small and costs too much [500 yuan], but it is enough for us. As scholarship on rural poverty in Henan has shown (Anagnost 2006), many Han farmers in the province strug­g le with basic food security in the context of state-­directed capitalism. Since extreme poverty was the baseline for many of ­these Han mi­grants, the work that this ­woman was able to find in Ürümchi seemed to her to be more than adequate. Lin Mingbai also said that since her relatives in Henan had WeChat like she did she could stay in touch with them on a regular basis. Furthermore, her social reproduction was valued by the po­ 72  Chapter Two

liti­cal system. Unlike the challenges mi­grants face in other urban locations in China (L. Zhang 2010), she said her ­children had been accepted by good schools that w ­ ere subsidized by the government. This social reproductive support is even more remarkable ­because she and her husband had flouted the relevant ­family planning laws, which had demanded they have only one child instead of three. She said, “They ­will have a much better life than we had. I never regret coming to Xinjiang for one minute.” Another young man from Henan, Zhu Maodun, who was working as a real estate agent for a commodity housing development in the Han-­majority New City district of Ürümchi, told me something similar. For him and his wife, coming to Xinjiang was the best t­hing they had ever done in their lives. It allowed Zhu Maodun entrée to a neighborhood that would have been impossible to enter in Henan and it allowed him to imagine achieving a high-­quality standard of living despite only having a high school degree. He said: Every­one who lives ­here in this housing development works for state-­ owned enterprises [or large corporations]. Their “quality” [Ch: suzhi] is ­really high. This place is built for con­ve­nience. It is only fifteen minutes to the high-­speed rail station. We have the largest Carrefour in Wulumuqi [Uy: Ürümchi]. It is only five minutes away and we are connected to all of the major roads. In a year or two we w ­ ill also be connected with the subway. ­Every housing district in the development has its own English-­Chinese kindergarten. Also, ­there are nearby parks for you to relax and exercise. You can go fishing. Every­thing is very con­ve­nient. It is a young community with access to all of the best schools. Continuing, he discussed the way the security system in the housing development was state of the art. Each resident could use a card to open the perimeter gate. Eventually, in 2017, all neighborhoods throughout the city would rely on face scans in order to enter housing complexes, fully segmenting unwanted mi­grants away from vast areas of the city. At this point though, Zhu Maodun already felt fully protected by the policing contractor checkpoints and camera systems. ­Because of the ease with which the Ürümchi economy supported Han social reproduction, he too felt that his son would receive a better education and life opportunities if he grew up as a Xinjiang person. He said: I came h ­ ere in 2012 with my wife. Both of us are just making money for our families. We have a one-­year-­old son who is at home with my parents. Eventually we ­will bring him to live with us ­here. We have no land back in Henan so ­there is no work for us ­there. Devaluation 73

Zhu Maodun felt that if his son grew up in this atmosphere, he would understand that anything is pos­si­ble if he just worked hard enough. “He may,” he added, “even have an opportunity to travel to the United States someday.” This perspective of Ürümchi as a space of economic opportunity at the frontier of the nation that in turn could lead to an even better life abroad was echoed not only by other lower-­income Han mi­grants but also by many upper-­class Han ­people in the city. Zhu Maodun said that ­because he was good at navigating the Chinese-­ language internet and using WeChat, it was easy for him to find work immediately a­ fter he came to the city. He quickly built an online social network through other mi­grants from Henan and his work as a real estate agent. ­Every day he collected contacts through online advertising. His ease in finding a job and a position as a formally recognized productive worker made the further work of cultivating his “achieved” quality through leisure per­for­mance and consumption a possibility. He bought new clothes and an iPhone to fit his new persona as a real estate agent. The state capital, which both directly and indirectly funded the housing development and associated security infrastructure, provided him with a feeling of security. In this location at the frontier of the nation, it empowered him and made him productive. Zhu Maodun said that succeeding as a knowledge worker was much easier than in the metropoles in Eastern China: Xinjiang is better than Beijing and Shanghai b­ ecause the income levels are high but the rent is still low. So in the end we can make more ­here than in the east. I’m also not willing to do construction, b­ ecause it is such hard work. I’m good at using the internet and cell phones so I would rather work in that market selling t­ hings. I’ve only been d ­ oing this job for two months, but I ­really like it. They give us a base salary of 2,000 and then if we sell a h ­ ouse they w ­ ill give us a commission of .5 ­percent. I know it is too low but this is China. So I can do this job and then do other jobs on the side as well. My wife also works in real estate but as a waitress for a big real estate office. I like Wulumuqi [Uy: Ürümchi]. The atmosphere ­really suits me. Every­one in the city comes from somewhere e­ lse, so it is easy to be accepted. If I had a chance I would definitely ­settle ­here; ­there are so many more opportunities for us h ­ ere than in Henan. Of course, I miss my ­family in Henan, but this is a place where I feel like I could ­really begin to live. (my emphasis) The “atmosphere” that was cleared by the techno-­political system and made available to Han mi­grant self-­fashioning in technology-­enabled work, 74  Chapter Two

resonated with Zhu Maodun’s naturalized social standing. Ürümchi, u ­ nder the sign of terror capitalism, marked a location where he could “begin to live.” He could find multiple jobs in the knowledge economy and through hard work move into a better social position. What is remarkable in what he said was his lack of awareness of how his success in the city was mediated by his Han identification and knowledge. As in nearly all conversations I had with Han mi­grants, ­there was no acknowl­edgment that their “good life” was contingent on Uyghur dispossession in general and the enclosure of Uyghur mi­grants. Instead, they saw their success as a deserved product of their hard work, self-­cultivation, and sacrifice. Although numerous Han low-­income mi­grants I interviewed recognized that the type of quality they w ­ ere accruing in Ürümchi was less valuable than what might be pos­si­ble in bigger cities such as Beijing or Shanghai, they saw their lives in Xinjiang as radically better than the lives of their relatives in rural Eastern China. This perspective stands in contrast to the Han mi­grants from Sichuan that Emily Yeh (2013) interviewed in Tibet. In many ways, low-­income Han mi­grants in Ürümchi saw their identities being disaggregated from their place of origin into a more general Chinese national ­future. They ­were pioneers at the frontier of the “Chinese nation” (Ch: zhonghua minzu) proj­ect. For them, the difference in quality between bigger cities and Ürümchi was largely one of perception. Mi­grants—­particularly ­those who, like Zhu Maodun, lived in Han-majority areas in the city—­said the ­actual threat of Uyghur “terror” (Ch: kongbu) was wildly exaggerated. They felt safe ­because the state police and police contractor presence was so strong. Many of them noted that the security apparatus also offered Han workers secure employment regardless of their educational background. Furthermore, they could live their lives without interacting with a single Uyghur. A mi­grant from Hunan who worked as a cook in a Hunanese restaurant said: All of my f­amily is from a town near Changsha so I r­eally do need to go back periodically. I ­don’t see the differences between Changsha and Ürümchi as purely quality issues. Changsha is a bit bigger, but it is also a bit more closed. ­Here, every­one is from somewhere ­else and the government has put a lot of money into developing the area. The ­future is very bright ­here. While in mainstream Chinese discourse outside of the region, Xinjiang was represented as “backward” (Ch: luohou) and “dangerous” (Ch: weixian) and therefore lacking the quality of eastern cities, Han mi­grants said they rarely experienced this. In fact, many noted that the general sense of lack that was associated Devaluation 75

with Ürümchi was beneficial, ­because underdeveloped and dangerous locations could be made the recipients of massive injections of state capital. Although mi­grant settlers in Xinjiang may be evaluated as having low suzhi from the perspective of middle-­class urbanites in the east, at the frontier of the nation mi­grants often came to feel as though they had power to control their own ­futures and, by extension, the ­futures of ­others. In the context of Xinjiang, the attitudes and cultural artifacts of low-­ income recent mi­grants had an effect on corporate and state workers who came to build out resource extraction and the techno-­political system as well. For instance, wealthy Han p ­ eople I met who worked in t­ hose industries told me that Dao Lang was their favorite musician too. In fact, I first heard of him from an economist on the way to a fancy dinner at a four-­star ­hotel on the northwest corner of the ­People’s Square in downtown Ürümchi. We had been discussing our taste in cars. The economist, who worked in Private Public Partnership development in the infrastructure sector, said she found the Hummer to be the best car b­ ecause it was so power­ful and in a place like Xinjiang power was impor­tant. Then, as though the army vehicle reminded her of mi­grant attitudes, she asked me if I had ever heard of Dao Lang. She said she thought he was the best Xinjiang singer. “He ­really expresses the Xinjiang atmosphere,” she said. ­Later, during the dinner with an investment banker who commuted between Ürümchi and Beijing, she brought him up again. The banker too attested to his fondness of Dao Lang’s musical stylings. He said that, ­after coming to Xinjiang, listening to Dao Lang just made sense. He liked his “flavor” (Ch: weidao). For him, Xinjiang, as a social atmosphere cleared for the expression of Han-­centric suzhi, was best expressed through Dao Lang’s staging of a Han mi­ grant expropriation of Uyghur symbolic, embodied, and material space. Uyghur Quality and Social Reproduction A discourse of market-­oriented achieved quality has also been taken up in Uyghur society. In a series of extended interviews I conducted with him in 2014 and 2015, the Uyghur public intellectual, poet, and filmmaker Tahir Hamut described Uyghur conceptualizations of achieved quality as follows: In many ways the idea of quality seems to be a h ­ uman universal. It is associated with education, ability, taste, and refinement. For Uyghurs, the role of ­these qualities has been valued for a long time, but we know the most about it from the 1920s onward when a kind of “achieved quality” [Uy: sapa] ­really became a highly coveted value. Although ­there 76  Chapter Two

­ ere actually very few intellectuals relative to the w w ­ hole population of ­Uyghurs, compared to other minorities and even Han, Uyghurs had quite a lot of quality. Tahir was referring to the period when the Jadid school of Islamic modernists from other parts of South and Central Asia and the ­Middle East began to introduce new forms of modernist, scientific learning in Uyghur society. As a result, ­there was an efflorescence in Uyghur-­language education. This new form of quality, achieved through education, produced an intellectual class and new forms of cultural knowledge. It also ­shaped the formation of the first Turkic Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (1933–34) centered around a nascent Islamic nationalism. In the 1940s, as Uyghurs began to learn about socialist experiments in nation building, ­these ­earlier forms of cultural knowledge w ­ ere put to work in ser­vice to the second East Turkestan Republic (1944–49). Tahir said, though, that since the arrival of the Communist Party in 1949, Uyghur cultural development had been largely blocked by Maoist multiculturalism and the propaganda state. He said, “During the Maoist years we ­really had very ­little control over what we produced [culturally]. We did not have the freedom to study or to cultivate ourselves.” This began to change during the 1980s when, as in spaces around the nation, ­there was a turn ­toward individual cultivation through market-­oriented production and a new fashioning of aspiring subjects through consumption, much as Anagnost (2013) and ­others have noted among Han populations. As a result, throughout the 1990s t­ here was a resurgence in Uyghur knowledge production by aspiring entrepreneurs that began to produce new forms of cultural quality, even though it lacked some of the market support to truly flourish as it did in Eastern China. Then, in the mid-2000s a new form of censorship and regulation began to block the more autonomous forms of yerlik culture work. As Tahir put it: Part of the issue is the way media production has been regulated over the past de­cades. From the early 1990s u ­ ntil 2004, we ­were able to produce a lot of media: films, ­music, comedies on very cheap vcds. In 2005 ­there was a sharp crackdown on selling Uyghur-­language media. ­After 2009 it became even more tightly controlled. The government wanted to prevent the circulation of anything that did not serve Han values. Now, it is hard to find non-state mass media, particularly in the south. Even previously approved Uyghur-­language tele­vi­sion and movies have been censored. ­There are no movie theaters in the south. Instead, we are fed state propaganda all the time. Devaluation 77

As he thought about this further, Tahir said that ­there ­were three main ­factors that made Uyghurs appear to lack achieved quality from the perspective of Han migrant-­settlers in the city. He said ­these ­factors centered around a generalized lack of media autonomy outside of the brief win­dow between 2012 and 2014 when WeChat enabled a flourishing of Uyghur culture. ­Because Uyghurs lack space to produce and stage repre­sen­ta­tions of the types of distinction they desire, negative ste­reo­types of Uyghurs as backward and potentially dangerous have pervaded Chinese popu­lar culture. To a greater extent than Han mi­ grants in the city, particularly a­ fter the P ­ eople’s War on Terror began, Uyghur mi­grants ­were prevented from pursuing their desires through the cultivation and per­for­mance of the self.9 Instead, Uyghur desires ­were often perceived by state authorities, corporate workers, and Han mi­grants as too Uyghur and too Islamic and not Chinese enough. This is why, in most cases, the only positive images of Uyghurs that ­were staged by local authorities for public consumption ­were ­those of happy, dancing, exotic ­others performing their permitted difference for the benefit of tourists. Tahir said that this lack of freedom, combined with traditional forms of knowledge, gave Uyghur ideas of quality a dif­fer­ent trajectory and expression. He said: ­ ecause of their traditions, rural-­origin Uyghurs are less interested in B [Chinese-­style] development than Han ­people. For them, the old ways of ­doing t­ hings, the courtyard h ­ ouses they grew up with, they see as having more quality than new apartments and urban living. Maybe they want to have modern con­ve­niences, but they want them to be set up in a traditional style. As an example of this, he described the way many Uyghur mi­grants found the quality of the aesthetics of the handful of Turkish-­themed Uyghur restaurants in the city tremendously appealing. He said this was ­because such restaurants re­imagined Uyghur cuisines and modes of comportment as urban and con­temporary, Islamic and Turkic—­rather than Chinese or Western and therefore non-­Islamic. Uyghurs could still sit on rugs around low ­tables in hierarchies of honor and re­spect, eating traditional Uyghur dishes and drinking Uyghur tea, but it was also worldly and cosmopolitan ­because of the attire of the white-­gloved waiters and the shape of the Turkish teacups. Native modes of comportment, surrounded by ornate plaster (Uy: kısek) niches, inlaid wood casings, and mosaics of yerlik craftwork, along with live traditional m ­ usic and ­free Wi-­Fi, created an atmosphere of urban contemporaneity that wealthy 78  Chapter Two

Uyghurs ­were willing to pay a ­great deal to enjoy and at which lower-­income Uyghurs marveled. ­These ­were spaces of comfort and ­people watching, not for tourist consumption. They created con­temporary Uyghur worlds for Uyghurs to consume. Tahir and other Uyghur-­ culture workers I interviewed identified the sources of Uyghur ideas of quality as coming from dif­fer­ent places, from rural traditions and aspiring ­toward Turkish, Islamic, and urban contemporaneity. But they also said that, in many ways, ideas of quality w ­ ere simply a function of the economy, which increasingly centered around the internet and smartphones. As Tahir noted, a consumer lifestyle was beginning to have a large effect on Uyghur mi­grant life. He said: Now, ­people are becoming more and more self-­centered. They feel like a high quality of life just means that every­thing should be con­ve­nient. If ­people have a nice h ­ ouse, car, and f­ amily then they feel content and feel like they have high quality. Although the structural inequalities of life in the city had a sharp effect on the ability of Uyghur mi­grants to achieve the quality of life they hoped for, WeChat and other online platforms gave them some means to display their distinction. Every­one could post images of themselves in the lobbies of opulent restaurants built for Uyghur bureaucrats or in glass-­enclosed shopping malls. Yet, despite the promise of online urban personas, over time their social media use and location in the city became the target of digital surveillance. From the perspective of the small minority of Uyghurs who w ­ ere able to obtain urban ­house­hold registration through their work in government institutions—­likely less than 5 ­percent of the Uyghur population (Tohti 2015)—­Uyghur mi­grants, particularly ­those without formal education, often appeared to have low levels of quality. Han settlers in the city and urban authorities often evaluated Uyghur mi­grants in similar ways, which resulted in widespread job discrimination. This pro­cess of devaluation came to a head in 2014 when the state began instituting the social enclosure I described in chapter 1. A list of “75 signs of religious extremism be­hav­iors” was circulated by regional po­liti­cal bureaus outlining what was deemed “normal” or “regular” (Ch: zhengchang) be­hav­ior and “abnormal” (Ch: yichang) be­hav­ior (United Front 2014). The “manifestations” (Ch: biaoxian) ranged from “preventing the circulation of ‘normal’ commodities on the grounds that they are not halal” to “defacing the ­great portraits” of famous Chinese po­liti­cal leaders and wearing “abnormal” clothes. Item 43 on the list was of par­tic­u­lar importance to the Devaluation 79

system of material and digital enclosure. It stated that, “resisting government propaganda and education by smashing tv sets, anything related to damaging broadcasting equipment or refusing to watch ‘normal’ movies and tv networks” w ­ ere a sign of precriminal extremism. Likewise, “attacking development and management measures”—­such as the Aid Xinjiang system, which was responsible for many of the monitored, unfree ­labor programs—­protests against the West–­East pipeline and infrastructure program that drove the extraction economy, or complaining about the rural h ­ ouse­hold registration and associated passbook system ­were also signs of extremism (United Front 2014). Number 48 on the list outlawed gathering in prayer rooms and “disturbing the public order.” Number 53 deemed international money transfers by Muslims illegal. Numbers 67–73 outlawed using Virtual Private Networks (vpns), data sharing devices, WeChat, and other social media to discuss religious topics—­ something that literally millions of Uyghurs w ­ ere ­doing when they w ­ ere deemed “abnormal” (Ch: yichang). ­Under ­those programmatic guidelines—­ the basis of the algorithms that would come to assess and control Uyghur life—­simply existing as a young, underdocumented, undereducated, underemployed male mi­grant placed a Uyghur in the category of suspicion. ­These forms of evaluation resulted in enclosure, not only of rural-­origin mi­grants but of Uyghur social reproduction itself. Devalued Native Work in the City ­ here are several The term Indigenous is a contested term in China (Elliott 2015). T interrelated reasons for this. The most general reason for this contestation is its rejection by state authorities as a concept that threatens the sovereignty of the state in China and, by extension, the right of the majority to possess minority land and l­abor. If minoritized, land-­based ­people—­such as Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Tibetans, who speak dif­fer­ent languages, have dif­fer­ent faith practices, and in most cases, possess non-­Han ethno-­racial phenotypes—­were permitted to identify themselves as Indigenous, it would be more difficult for Chinese authorities and Han settlers to justify their claims to their ancestral lands and control over their social reproduction. The second reason for this contestation comes from exiled communities, and some scholars, who view the term Indigenous as signifying a primitive “backwardness,” the antithesis of state modernity typified by claims to desired ethno-­states of Tibet and East Turkestan.10 It is impor­tant to note h ­ ere that although many diasporan Uyghurs, particularly from an older generation, do see the nation-­state form of East Turkestan as an ultimate po­liti­cal goal, some Uyghur scholars and community leaders both in 80  Chapter Two

China and the diaspora imagine more inclusive, less state-­centric resolutions to colonial domination. A third, and perhaps most nuanced, reason for rejecting the term Indigenous, comes from close examination of the way minoritized groups, particularly ­those in Southwest China, have embraced the permitted differences allowed by the state. In some cases, p ­ eoples like the Miao, Yi, and o­ thers have been able to use state funding of minority cultural production to drive their economies and shape their dance and ­music traditions, efforts that allow them to maintain a mea­sure of autonomy (Schein 2000; Wilcox 2018). In general, ­people from ­these groups have not sought to position themselves within internationalist Indigenous movements (Yeh 2007a; Roche and Wang 2021). For instance, the scholar Yu Luo (2017) has shown that regional elites in Guizhou have ­adopted a Chinese term yuanshengtai, which valorizes features similar to indigeneity to describe the “cultural distinctiveness and environmental stewardship of ethnic, rural p ­ eoples” of the region, but do not use the banned Chinese terms for the Indigenous (Ch: yuan zhumin) which is widely used by Indigenous ­peoples in Taiwan (Simon 2020). However, despite t­ hese reasons for not identifying as Indigenous, increasingly a younger generation of ethnic minority scholars have begun to take up indigeneity as a po­liti­cal identity that responds to global decolonial movements (Hathaway 2010). This is particularly the case among a new generation of Inner Asia scholars.11 Unlike most Southwest China minorities, who use Chinese as their first language and who can pass as Han, for ­these groups—­often described as “hard” (Ch: ying), “raw” (Ch: sheng) or “unopen” (Ch: bu kaifang) minorities in state and mainstream discourse—­ethnicity has been increasingly racialized (Harrell 2001; M. Hansen 2007; Oakes 2012). As their lands and difference become a site of increased strug­g le for economic control, state authorities and majority populations have come to recognize minority claims to difference as a deficit and threat, rather than an asset. Scholarship on indigeneity, decolonization, and antiracism has given t­ hese scholars new ways of understanding storytelling and oral tradition, sacred landscapes, and epistemic vio­lence. It has also given them ways of seeing both the utility and failure of state-­centered approaches to identity. Building on the work of this emergent generation of scholars—­Dawa Lokyitsang (Tibetan), Amy Anderson (Uyghur), Michael Anderson (Uyghur), Guldana Salimjan (Kazakh), Nurdoukht Khudonazarova Taghdumbashi (Sarikoli) and ­others—­and the way I saw Uyghurs in Ürümchi draw si­mul­ta­neously on yerlik identifications and global social movements, including their reading of antiracist and decolonial theory and methods (Anwar and Byler 2021), has pushed me to think about Uyghur Native identifications as a par­tic­u­lar expression of Devaluation 81

indigeneity that is both inside and outside internationalist decolonial movements. As I noted in the previous chapter, identifying as “of the land” is a self-­ consciously po­liti­cal act of claiming belonging to autonomous sacred traditions rooted in the land and routed through the global Muslim community. As I have shown elsewhere (Byler 2018d), singing and listening to Uyghur ­music and embodying traditional knowledge in general, provided Uyghur mi­ grants in the city a way of refusing structural vio­lence. It gave them a feeling of rootedness in “timeless” yet changing tradition (Byler 2018d, 20). In previous chapters and in what follows I use the term Native or yerlik to describe ­these traditions. In using this term, rather than Indigenous, I am signaling that Uyghur identifications, while not fully commensurable to Indigenous identifications as taken up in spaces where decolonial politics are formally recognized, should be seen as proximate to t­ hose of Indigenous p ­ eoples elsewhere. I am also following many of my ethnographic subjects and Native colleagues in refusing state-­centered definitions of Uyghur identity and instead engaging in a minor—­understood as informal and nonnormative—­internationalist decolonial politics. One of the most dominant forms of Uyghur Native knowledge was produced through heritage trades. Uyghurs from rural locations have a long tradition of cultivating skilled craftwork through “master–­apprentice” (Uy: ustaz–­shagirt) relationships between se­nior craftsmen and young men. For centuries, the trades of the metalsmith, wood-­carver, apothecary, barber, butcher, and baker have been cultivated in this manner. As I described in the previous chapter, ­these Native traditions are connected to par­tic­u­lar places and embodied knowledge traditions that are rooted in the landscape of the Uyghur region. Over the past few de­cades, ­these forms of social reproduction not only maintained a contemporaneity in Uyghur everyday Nativeness and a sharply gendered division of l­ abor but they also enabled families who w ­ ere not able to support their ­children’s formal education to guarantee a secure life path for their sons. A ­ fter years of unwaged l­abor, apprentices ­were often given opportunities to become masters of a trade and o­ wners of their own businesses. In the 1990s and 2000s, t­ hese businesses offered a point of entry into the broader market economy. The evaluation pro­cess that accompanied the formation of terror capitalism across the Uyghur homeland enacted a subtraction of this Native reproduction. One exemplary staging of this pro­cess of devaluation is the Uyghur short story “Iron ­Will . . .” (Uy: jeni tömür . . .) by Eset Emet. The 2006 story centers around the life narrative of a young Uyghur man who works as an unpaid apprentice to a butcher in the Uyghur district of Ürümchi. The story is told from 82  Chapter Two

the perspective of an urban Uyghur schoolteacher who encounters the young man on the street near his apartment building. The teacher sees the young man as representative of a large population of Uyghur teen­agers who work in a variety of traditional Uyghur trades ranging from baking to Uyghur medicine. As the teacher develops a relationship with the young man, he comes to understand that the young man’s parents had strug­g led to feed him and he had failed to thrive in school. In desperation his parents had sent him to the city to work as an apprentice to a butcher. In the city, the young “iron willed” man found himself in a series of abusive relationships with the master butcher who took him on as an apprentice and with gangs of other young men he was forced to rely on ­after he left the butcher shop. In the end, the young man was forced into a life of crime by other young men in the city. The story turns on a par­tic­u­lar encounter between the narrator and the young man in which the narrator attempts to give him a tip of 20 yuan ($3) for carry­ing half a sheep from the butcher shop to his apartment building. The young man refuses the money, which makes the narrator won­der: Why did this young man not take the money? Was it ­because his ­future had been destroyed by prob­lems with money? Or did he sense a trick ­behind the gift? Was it that he was trying to protect his dignity? As part of my research method, I discussed this fictive encounter and the protagonist’s questions with the Uyghur mi­grants I interviewed. They said that the perceptions and suspicions that w ­ ere staged in the short story revealed the way their social role was evaluated by o­ thers. Many apprentices saw their work as bakers, barbers, and cooks as an honorable form of ­labor but felt as though ­others in the city saw them as “backward” (Uy: qalaq) and prone to criminality. ­Because of the economic conditions in which they worked and the way their ­labor was devalued by Han mi­grants, urban elites, and state police, they w ­ ere often forced to find ways to live in the informal economy as hustlers and small-­ scale thieves. As shown in the final chapter of this book, many low-­income Uyghur mi­grants found a sense of belonging in mosque communities that, in turn, ­shaped their relationship to Islamic piety and the evaluative gaze of the techno-­political systems. When I told this story to young mi­grant apprentices, or asked them to read it with me during my interviews with them, they often said that the young protagonist in the story did not take the money ­because he wanted to be treated like an equal, not like a “no quality” (Uy: sapasi yok) beggar. They said the narrator could have offered him a loan, but giving him a gift was a sign of disrespect. The apprentices I spoke with said that the story gave them the impression Devaluation 83

that apprentices who work in Native trades are illiterate and poor. It made them feel as though they should be treated as objects of pity. Reading it gave them the sense that the author thought they had no agency over their life stories. This sounded wrong to them. They said that the story sounded like it was written by someone who did not know what it was like to actually be an apprentice. In fact, the author of the story, Eset Emet, was himself an upper-­class Uyghur intellectual who had a relatively secure position in a government institution. He, like many of the other Uyghur intellectuals I interviewed, had something of a negative view of the quality of Uyghur “travelers” (Uy: musapir) or low-­income mi­grants. He felt that young ­people like the butcher apprentice he wrote about in the story should be in school cultivating Chinese market valued qualities in the city by studying science, Chinese-­language, and technical skills. He felt that it was at least in part a lack of discipline and the lack of education of their parents that had led ­these young men to this life path. Eset also recognized that poverty was endemic in rural Uyghur communities, but he felt that his own life history as someone who came from a rural background proved that, despite all odds, Uyghur young ­people could succeed in the Chinese city. What he may have failed to realize is that he came of age during a period in which Uyghurs attaining higher education was quite rare and that his role in the state multiculturalism proj­ect was largely responsible for the relative security he was able to find. The slightly paternalistic tone of his short story reflected this unacknowledged relative privilege. Nevertheless, the attention he paid to low-­income mi­grants was admirable when compared to the outright hostility with which some Uyghur elites regarded low-­income Uyghur travelers. For instance, one Uyghur official, a member of a small wealthy elite who worked within the governance structure, told me: Uyghurs from the [rural] South think that ­things should just come to them without having to work for them. They think that they somehow deserve to be handed every­thing just ­because ­they’re Uyghur. Also, now many of them think that the traditional roles of the past should be done away with. They ­don’t have any re­spect for ­people in power. They think every­one’s opinion should just be considered as equal. But actually we Uyghurs are dif­fer­ent than the Americans or Turkish ­people they see [online] in the movies. We have a long tradition of respecting our parents and respecting ­those who are older and wiser. You have to earn the right to be successful. 84  Chapter Two

Continuing in this openly condescending manner, the official said that the new forms of religious piety that mi­grants ­were practicing were a fundamental threat to both the Uyghur way of life and all the success he had achieved by working within the Chinese system. He and a small number of other Uyghur officials I interviewed believed that it was their own intellect and hard work that had given them the power and security they enjoyed as Uyghur elites. They felt that the security of their lives was threatened by all the strangers who had arrived from the countryside since the early 2000s. Another Uyghur official told me: Among the Uyghurs in Ürümchi, only about 20 ­percent of us are locals [­people with urban ­house­hold registration].12 The rest come from other places. Some of them work hard and are trying to make a better life for their ­children. When I see p ­ eople ­doing that—­driving a black [unauthorized] cab or something like that—­I feel ­really happy. But a lot of them ­really ­don’t know what to do with themselves. They have no goals and no plans. They just d ­ on’t want to live in the countryside, so they come ­here. They d ­ on’t realize it, but they are the ones who give Uyghurs the reputation of having low suzhi. Although we had been talking in Uyghur, in the last sentence the official code-switched in an in­ter­est­ing way. Rather than using the Uyghur term for achieved quality, sapa, he used the Chinese term suzhi. For him, achieved quality was mea­sured in Chinese, not in Uyghur.13 The young Uyghur mi­grants who arrived in the city and worked as apprentices in Uyghur trades had a more nuanced view of colonization. They did not believe that they w ­ ere the sole cause of their own devaluation. They said they did have goals for their lives. Although they often saw their lack of Chinese training as a source of disadvantage, they did not believe that this meant they ­were low-­quality workers or that they lacked knowledge in other domains. Several told me that they had actually chosen their life work as the best option available to them. The prob­lem was not with their work but with the social enclosures and field of power around them. To their thinking, if the state would support their work and the knowledge they possessed in relation to their craft, the re­spect from broader society would follow. In order to demonstrate in more depth how t­ hese structural forces affect the life paths of young low-­income Uyghur mi­grants, I turn now to an account of a young apprentice named Yusup.

Devaluation 85

Choosing Native Work Yusup first came to the city when he was fourteen. He said his ­family sent him to the city ­because “life was very hard, and my ­family ­couldn’t afford to send me to school. My ­family has only eight mu (1.25 acres), which means we can hardly make enough to survive.” Yusup said that his older ­brother had also been sentenced in 2008 to twelve years in prison, which was part of the reason why his parents took him out of school and sent him to the city. ­After his ­brother was convicted for killing another Uyghur young man in a knife fight, his parents felt as though a new life in a distant city would help to guarantee Yusup’s ­future success. His parents sent him to Ürümchi to live with a baker who was originally from a nearby village. Initially, Yusup said he was excited to travel to the city; he did not like school and city life seemed exciting. But this changed very quickly. It was very hard work. I had to get up at three in the morning and start mixing the naan dough. Since I was just training, I only received ten yuan per month, a place to sleep, and just enough to eat. I was the only one being trained. The rest w ­ ere adults. I ­really had nothing. A ­ fter one year of this, I left. I felt like my work was not treated like a real job. It was a kind of slavery. I had no choice. If I ­didn’t work, they would beat me and I would be given nothing to eat. (my emphasis) The “real job” that Yusup wanted was a job that was valued in the wage market and gave him the time and space to cultivate his own sense of self. ­After he left his first apprenticeship, he found that the jobs available to him w ­ ere hard to hold on to. He first tried selling bread from a tray that he held over his head in the bazaar, but this job only paid around 20 yuan per day and meant that he had to sleep in an all-­night internet café. He then found a job as a dishwasher in a Uyghur restaurant. But this job only paid him 500 yuan per month and hardly covered his living expenses. Yusup said: Then my parents found me another bakery to work at—­but that was the same as the first one. They ­didn’t pay me. And when I demanded that I get paid, they beat me. All the other workers w ­ ere bigger than me so ­there was nothing I could do. Eventually, he found a job as a security guard, but once again he had a similar prob­lem. His boss refused to pay him. His employer said that room and board was enough for someone as lowskilled and “low quality” (Uy: sapasi töven) as Yusup. ­Later, Yusup found a bit of success working as a hustler or “hard worker” 86  Chapter Two

(Uy: ishlemchi) selling consumer goods such as ­belts and shoes. He said that this was the best job he had during his time in the city. “If the b­ elts sold well you could make money quickly. Once I made over 200 in one day. I sold all kinds of stuff in ­those years. ­There was nothing I ­wouldn’t try.” But his success was often short-­lived. On numerous occasions, he was cheated out of profits by suppliers or he simply ran out of products to sell. Yusup’s contingent l­abor was not enough. He felt as though every­one still saw him as an uneducated baker’s apprentice who had no real skills in the con­ temporary city. His position in life was a product of his f­ amily’s circumstances. He said: My b­ rother quit school when he was in the third or fourth grade too. He ­really c­ an’t read Uyghur well. My parents are the same. They d ­ idn’t have a chance to go to school e­ ither. It’s not that they d ­ on’t like school, it just ­wasn’t pos­si­ble. They needed to work in order to eat. In the countryside ­things are boring. T ­ here is no f­ uture. I want a good job, a wife, and ­children. It would be hard to find ­those ­things in the countryside. At the same time though, Yusup said: “You are invisible ­here.” He felt as though only other apprentices and “hard workers” (Uy: ishlemchiler) saw him as a person who had any value. The lack of opportunity in his home village, what he referred to as “boredom” combined with extreme poverty and the extreme intensity of rural policing, made returning to rural life seem like an impossibility. One after­noon he met a relative whose ­father owned a ­hotel in the city and had previously given him a job as a security guard. We went together in the relative’s car to a park to eat kebabs. In this context Yusup seemed to be in his ele­ ment. He was placed in charge of preparing the meat. The ­others in the group seemed to ­really re­spect his knowledge when it came to preparing food. But ­after we ate, he lapsed back into what was perceived as “backward” (Uy: qalaq) be­hav­ior by his relatives. He asked his cousin to let him see his new iPhone. He spent forty-­five minutes looking at pictures and videos stored on the phone, something that was not pos­si­ble on his own cheap Huawei phone. Eventually, the cousin asked for the phone back and said he was bored. It seemed as though the only reason he had invited Yusup to the picnic was so that he could cook for him and his guests. In many encounters with more affluent Uyghurs and Han mi­grants, Yusup was unacknowledged or treated as a secondary consideration. ­Others, even if they w ­ ere younger than he was, constantly overshadowed him. Often they treated him as though he was not ­there. When this happened he became more despondent and withdrawn, be­hav­ior that had the effect of further amplifying Devaluation 87

his lack of belonging, his illiteracy, and his lack of quality. More affluent Uyghurs told me that they thought Yusup might be “crazy” (Uy: sarang), ­because he was always hanging around when other p ­ eople ­were talking, listening in on their conversations. Yusup was aware of this rejection. He knew that ­others thought that he had “no quality” (Uy: sapasi yoq), but he did not know how to escape this perception. He felt as though the narrative of his life was stuck. He said that in the city every­one seemed to “evaluate” (Uy: baha berme yoq) each other based on their style, on the t­hings they owned or posted on WeChat, not on the knowledge they possessed when it came to baking bread or butchering a sheep. This perception was part of what contributed to the cycle of poverty that often further alienated apprentices. When I told him the story of “Iron ­Will . . . ,” he said immediately that the real issue at stake between the two main characters was that the author did not understand the true value of Native traditions. Yusup said: The story is wrong about the work the boy is ­doing. The boy does not hate his work itself, he hates his poverty and the disdain he feels from rich Uyghurs and police and the pity he feels from teachers. He just wants to be valued for the knowledge he has of his trade. In his own life though, the only way Yusup saw to climb out of the low-­quality position he found himself in was to attempt to achieve a marketable persona. Although he wished that his work in heritage trades was valued, he was forced instead to find a low-­wage job in the ser­vice sector. In order to proj­ect con­ temporary quality, Yusup and many other apprentices spent a high percentage of their income on clothes and smartphones. Yusup said: I spend between 200 and 300 yuan per month on clothes. Since I am a man, I d ­ on’t wash them myself. I just buy new ones. I know it is expensive, but I ­don’t have any choice. I have to look good. I also bought my Android [phone] one year ago for 500 yuan. It is impor­tant ­because I can use it to watch videos if I have Wi-­Fi. My parents have no idea about WeChat. They ­can’t even write a text message. All they can do is speak. Having traditional knowledge was not enough. To survive in the city, one had to look cosmopolitan and be able to access the knowledge economy. Not ­doing so was in fact often read by more affluent Uyghurs and Han mi­grants as a sign of not being con­temporary and as potentially suspicious. Everyday Native work was devalued, while performing quality as self-­fashioning consumerist subjects was seen as a way of performing a permitted Uyghur masculine contemporaneity. It also drew young mi­grants like Yusup into social 88  Chapter Two

networks with pious Uyghurs, implicating him by association in forms of religious extremism. Narratives like “Iron W ­ ill . . .” staged a sense of social identification and desire aggregation for the apprentices I interviewed in 2015. In a way that was similar to how recent Han mi­grants evaluated their suzhi in comparison to the singer Dao Lang, low-­income Uyghur mi­grants could identify which aspects of the narrative matched their experiences and where it failed to capture the under­lying structural prob­lems that ­shaped their own life paths. This interpenetration of repre­sen­ta­tion and experience was helpful in understanding the evaluative pro­cess that was happening to them. In correlation with the rise of terror capitalism, Uyghur mi­grants saw a sharp decrease in the value of their work in the city. While Native work had previously offered the existential security that came from the production of basic necessities, in the new economy and security regime their work was increasingly devalued. One day near the end of the year I spent getting to know Yusup in 2015, we met up with another apprentice who was Yusup’s closest friend, his “life and liver friend” (Uy: jan-­jiger dost), Ibrahim.14 Together we walked in the bazaar and ate samsa (baked dumplings stuffed with meat). Yusup and Ibrahim told me about how they both had made samsa in the past. They described how the ratio of fat to meat had to be just right, and how it had to be mixed with onion and cumin. They showed me how to eat a samsa when it was very hot by starting with a small bite in the corner. They took ­great plea­sure in showing me all of this and in the food itself. As we ­were talking, they both remarked on how so many “hard workers” (Uy: ishlemchiler) who used to be on the streets had left the city. The bazaars they used to walk in seemed empty to them now. Yusup said the “green card” passbook system, discussed in chapter 1, that had forced all Uyghurs with rural ­house­hold registration to return to their hometowns was a very bad policy. He said it was obvious that the enclosure system and the ­People’s War on Terror in general was meant to target Uyghur mi­grants, many of whom ­were hard workers like him and Ibrahim. He said: [The passbook system] destroys p ­ eople’s livelihoods and makes life h ­ ere in the city much harder for every­one. One year ago, before this new policy started, ­there ­were no gates on the small streets. You could walk anywhere you wanted without worrying too much. Now, t­here are so many places where they check us. The [Uyghurs] who live on ­these small streets are good ­people. They work hard and are very respectful ­toward each other. Actually, ­these ­people are the true “Natives” [yerlik] to this Devaluation 89

place. They truly have “achieved quality” [sapa]. I feel comfortable and as though I am ­really alive when I am around them. Yusup said the enclosure system that was directed at Uyghur mi­grants made him more fearful than anything ­else. The value he possessed as a carrier of Uyghur traditions was on the brink of being erased. Since he did not have a passbook himself, he said he knew that if he was caught at a checkpoint, he could be arrested or sent back to his home village, especially if the police w ­ ere able to connect him to his ­brother who was in prison. “My work, my ­family, my society, all of ­these ­things make me stressed,” he said. “No one helps me in any way. It feels like every­one just takes and takes from me.” A few weeks l­ater, Yusup told me that police contractors had caught Ibrahim at a checkpoint and forced him to go back to his home village near Kashgar. Yusup said: I ­don’t know if he ­will be able to come back or not. It’s a lot of trou­ble for us now. This year is definitely worse than the last. In terms of our lives, t­ hings are getting worse and worse. So now I am completely alone. Actually, I am not completely alone ­because you are still ­here. Maybe one ­really good friend is better than a hundred normal friends. This is my own proverb [Uy: maqla-­temsil]. A real friend is someone who spends time with you all the time and is ­there when you need him to be. A real friend follows you wherever you go; they share every­thing with you. Of course, when he said this, Yusup knew that I would soon return to the United States. He knew that I would no longer be able to loan him money to help him pay his rent or buy clothes. He knew that his status as a mi­grant without a passbook or the skill set for a high-­paying job in the urban economy would catch up with him. He knew he was being rejected by the city and urban society. But like the protagonist in “Iron W ­ ill . . . ,” he refused to accept charity; he would only accept loans from friends who he felt respected him. He also refused to have his “iron ­will” severed from his person and his authority as a Uyghur excised from his sense of self even as he tried and was blocked from moving into ser­vice sector jobs. A few weeks ­after Ibrahim was forced to leave, Yusup told me he had lost his current job as a waiter in a Uyghur restaurant. He said his boss said he could no longer risk hiring workers without passbooks. “I ­haven’t told my ­family back in my village. I can only tell my friends. My life is so difficult,” he said with a sigh. Very few Uyghurs are r­eally true friends. Usually they just try to act as though they are real friends, but as soon as you have nothing to offer or you 90  Chapter Two

need something from them then they ­will just turn their back on you. They make me beg them for money. They never seem to genuinely care about me. It is as if I am just a nuisance to them; like they are spitting on me [he spat violently on the sidewalk]. They ­don’t treat me as if I am a real person. For Yusup, the system of attempting to achieve cultural capital by developing marketable skills and personas seemed like a cruel joke. He felt as though urbanites mocked traditional craftspeople like him. Other ­people who work like me, who are genuinely good p ­ eople, treat me much better than them. They are like my true ­family. It is strange. We come from completely dif­fer­ent places but they are much closer to me than my own ­family. Yusup said that, despite ­these friendships, he felt as though the walls ­were closing in on him. In order to escape being caught without a passbook and the possibility of being detained, he felt as though he had to return to his village. This prospect filled him with a ­great deal of dread ­because he felt that he would no longer have the security of the social role he felt as a yerlik worker in the urban food industry. If I was back in my village, I would just be a “loafer” [Uy: bikarchi]. I ­wouldn’t have to worry about food or shelter or any of ­those basic ­things. But I also ­wouldn’t have work or freedom to think. Every­thing would be about my ­family and the po­liti­cal education ­there. I might even be sent ­behind the “black gate” [a euphemism for the nascent reeducation camp system]. ­Here, I had freedom to think and work. I always had enough to eat. I had enough money to buy new clothes. I had a good life in the city. I used to feel as though I had a ­future. If I go back to my village, I ­will never feel this way. Increasingly, Yusup felt the f­uture of his life story slipping away. He began to speak of the pre­sent in the past tense—in the language of narrative endings and giving up. The daily routines of work began to fade; the possibilities of Uyghur social reproduction itself seemed to reach an impasse. Yusup and many o­ thers had come to the city hoping to find a space for social autonomy that was missing in the tightly policed countryside. Now, that too seemed foreclosed. It was as if traditional work, and the broader social reproduction associated with it, was being suspended. In the short story “Iron W ­ ill . . . ,” the apprentice eventually leaves his job at the butcher shop and enters a life of crime as a pickpocket. ­Because of the passbook system, Yusup did not even Devaluation 91

have this option. He felt himself being forced to leave his trade ­because the digital enclosure system was now deeming him out of place. All the unpaid ­labor as an apprentice, the loneliness of a teenager far away from home, meant nothing in the eyes of the state and urban society. He was being told that the village was his place and, if he did not accept this, that the prison system was his only other option. Several weeks ­later, Yusup returned to his village. Unlike some other mi­ grants, he was not arrested upon his return, though he was interrogated by the village police. The police did not give him a passbook, so he was no longer permitted to leave his home county. But he did find temporary work on a construction site in the county seat a dozen kilo­meters from his home. Yusup said he hoped to find work in the bazaar, but no one was willing to pay him and he did not have enough money to start his own bakery or samsa place. In April 2017, I lost contact with Yusup. His WeChat account was deleted. Over the next few months, more than a million Uyghurs ­were sent to po­liti­cal reeducation camps throughout the Uyghur homeland.15 It is likely that Yusup was also sent into this system. He was a young underemployed adult male who had many mi­grant friends on WeChat who ­were involved in online pious Islamic practice; this alone was likely enough to warrant his detention. Conclusion The drastic enclosure and subtraction of traditional craftwork among low-­income yerlik apprentices in Ürümchi in 2015 demonstrate a pro­cess of devaluation associated with Nativeness in con­temporary Chinese Central Asia. Increasingly, Uyghurs ­were directed away from yerlik work—­which was seen as backward or low quality—­toward the production and consumption of what ­were referred to as “normal” (Ch: zhengchang) Chinese products. Not only was Uyghur work being deemphasized, but the importation of halal products from Turkey, Malaysia, and other Muslim-­majority nations was sharply curtailed. Both yerlik or Native products and halal international products became viewed as a potential marker of Uyghur ethnic pride or Islamic piety. Both of t­ hese markers ­were described in official discourse as “ethnic separatism” and “religious extremism” and associated with “violent terrorism.” The work of young Uyghur apprentices was thus both devalued within the urban economy and, increasingly, excluded from the city. The short story “Iron ­Will . . .” stages this diminishment by showing how a form of “achieved” Uyghur “quality” (Uy: sapa) failed to be converted into social value. Instead, the qualities that ­were valued in the city cohered to ­people 92  Chapter Two

with Han ethno-­racial identifications. Among Uyghurs, only qualities associated with state-­directed culture work—­expressed as a par­tic­u­lar form of multiculturalism—­and counterterror policing appeared to achieve a valued social status. The story demonstrates the perspective of a concerned schoolteacher who pities an apprentice but does not overtly value his work as part of the reproduction of Native lifeways. This failure to see the apprentice’s work as the work of reproducing Uyghur everyday life, rather than the work of the poor and uneducated, was the main form of rejection that Yusup and other apprentices offered in response to the story. In rejecting this ele­ment of the story, they w ­ ere also rejecting the role of the author and narrator as their benefactor. Instead, they wanted to claim authorship of their own life stories and the qualities they possessed as mi­grants. As this chapter has demonstrated, their stories appeared to be ­limited by their disappearance into the reeducation camp system and restrictions on movement imposed by the more general digital and material enclosure. Their story, like their work as yerlik craftsmen, became the target of subtraction from social life. At the same time, Han mi­grants saw their perceived qualities welcomed and amplified. Han workers involved in the cultural production of regional food cuisine or Han markers such as “pork” saw their businesses bolstered by the institutions of the state. Uyghur bodies provided a “low quality” (Ch: suzhi di) object of revulsion and disdain to which Han pre­sen­ta­tions of self w ­ ere indexed as valued. As a result, the life narratives of Han mi­grants seemed to open new chapters when they arrived in the city. At the same time, the way their flourishing was indexed to Uyghur dispossession was rarely recognized. Instead, Han mi­grants often saw their own hard work and their own investments in themselves as the cause of their success. If they did think about the diminishment of Uyghur social life, it was often seen as deserving of diminishment b­ ecause Uyghurs ­were backward or dangerous. Uyghurs w ­ ere often seen as not having achieved the quality necessary for life in the city. As a result, the enclosing of their social reproduction and economic production in the city was justified and the opening of a Han-­centric pro­cess of capital accumulation was accelerated. The definition of suzhi as “achieved” quality conveys the meritocratic illusion of a cultural good being equally available to any person. In fact, cultural quality is always linked to other less mutable categories such as class, gender, sex, ability, and, of course, race or ethnicity. Achieved quality, when it is naturalized as a universal standard of value, masks the way mechanisms of governance, historical legacies, and transnational modes of evaluation shape cultural values. Suzhi is not just a product but also a major force of economic growth and hard work. Not only does it produce and or­ga­nize desire in par­tic­u­lar ways; it Devaluation 93

also creates surplus value. This value is often expressed as confidence, distinction, and the production of further desire in the individual. It also reproduces hierarchies of power in ways that are unacknowledged. Often this value added to a life is not the result of personal striving. Sometimes improved social status comes to p ­ eople simply b­ ecause of the pre­sen­ta­tion of their body and the way that body is recognized by state and private institutions. T ­ hose impelled by an achieved quality economy to work hard may never be able to achieve what comes easily to a differently positioned person. Suzhi is mediated by linguistic regimes, popu­lar culture, educational policy, national security, and interpersonal distinction to name only a few of its catalysts. It also mediates development plans for the frontier Chinese city and the life proj­ects that compose it. A Han language instructor told me his “Chinese dream” for his life in Ürümchi was made up of all the ste­reo­typical ­things he, and Chinese society in general, “lacked”: submissive wives, dutiful ­children, luxury cars, and ­giant ­houses. He said his desire was to have “a Japa­nese wife, Korean c­ hildren, a German car, and an American h ­ ouse.” His desires, it seemed, took consistency through their aggregation throughout a transnational social field. As I spoke further with this Xinjiang University instructor, he said that “every­one knew” that Germans and Americans had the highest quality cars and ­houses. He had seen this form of con­spic­u­ous consumption in movies, he said. The achieved quality of Japa­nese wives and Korean ­children was likewise something he had seen through permitted Chinese mass media. He acknowledged that this kind of thinking was simplistic and perpetuated certain ste­reo­types, but he said that he ­really did think that ­these ­imagined ideals worked as standards that many Han mi­grants hoped to achieve. For him, suzhi had as much to do with intersubjective competition for economic achievement and survival as it did with personal and familial social reproduction. ­Because the achieved aspect of the suzhi discourse of quality often masks the class or ethno-­racial position of the self, it can also be used to solidify historical legacies and validate forms of social vio­lence.

94  Chapter Two

3 Dispossession

As I have shown in the preceding chapters, the turn to Islamic and market-­ oriented, individualized forms of work as a means of dealing with the authorized theft of land often had the effect of accelerating the elimination of certain aspects of Uyghur sociality. This chapter pulls back from the more tightly focused analy­sis of techno-­political enclosure and devaluation in the first two chapters to examine changes in the lives of young Uyghur men across rural social life outside the city and over the past de­cade. By broadening the temporal and spatial scale of analy­sis, it shows how enclosure and devaluation are nested within broader material and colonial pro­cesses of dispossession. This pro­cess of dispossession is associated with specific moments of expropriation in the emergence of industrial farming, the arrival of tele­vi­sions and smartphones, and fi­nally the ­People’s War on Terror. As a result, educated

mi­grants who had the ability to work in the valued knowledge economy—­ unlike Yusup in the previous chapter—­are drawn outside of more traditional skilled ­labor, through urban Uyghur-­medium vocational schools and social media, into more cosmopolitan forms of work. By drawing on the narratives of two young Uyghur-­migrant digital-­content producers, Mahmud and Aziz, I consider the itineraries of desire that motivated their migration to the city and why they strove to reinvent themselves as desiring subjects through divergent urban Islamic identifications. Using newly popu­lar forms of Uyghur-­language advertising, social media, and film as a starting point for conversation with ­these young mi­grant culture workers, I show how they negotiated their experiences of dispossession. The chapter is punctuated by images of murals that signify the types of dispossession that Mahmud and Aziz experienced in their home villages.1 My thinking on the pro­cesses of techno-­political enclosure and social devaluation was crystallized during an encounter with the police in a Uyghur village in Southern Xinjiang. The systems I had observed in Ürümchi w ­ ere in fact constituted through older and broader pro­cesses of rural colonial dispossession. The village where I did this thinking was a long way from the city. It was sixty-­eight kilo­meters of bumpy roads away from a county-­level town in Southern Xinjiang. When I arrived t­ here on a winter day in early 2015, t­ here ­were a few ­people on the road waiting for us. The news of the arrival of a foreigner must have filtered out. Mahmud, a young video advertisement producer I had met in Ürümchi, had assured me that ­there would be no prob­lems with my visiting his ­family and staying the night. I had warned him many times that this would prob­ably not be the case, but he convinced me to give it a try, saying his village was only thirty minutes from the big town where t­ here ­were ­hotels that accepted foreigners. In real­ity, the town was more like three hours away. Of course, Mahmud’s ­family had no car of their own, so getting anywhere would require a lot of work if it came to that. A ­ fter we ate a chicken they had purchased especially for my visit on the way to their home, Mahmud’s ­father suddenly received a call informing him that the police ­were coming to question all of us. I had just handed Mahmud my papers when a group of Uyghur men—­two men in police uniforms and half a dozen local farmers carry­ing clubs as security volunteers—­burst into the two-­bedroom ­house. I watched the ­faces of my hosts grow tight as they saw them come through the door. When they came into the room, all of us stood up. We shook hands and said our “salaams” clasping our hearts.2 Then we all became absolutely quiet. Mahmud’s dad explained that I was Mahmud’s friend from the university and that I was just planning to spend 96  Chapter Three

the night before ­going on to Kashgar. It seemed as though most of the volunteer militia just wanted to see what a foreigner looked like. The two police officers in uniform seemed more serious. One of them had a flashlight. The other had a laptop computer. The one with the flashlight asked a few questions. Speaking with me in Uyghur, he asked if I had a phone. I said yes. He then asked to look at my phone. Perhaps b­ ecause it was all in En­glish he ­couldn’t ­really figure out where the pictures might be. He looked at my contacts and opened a few apps. ­After a minute or two, he gave it back. Every­one filed out. In the courtyard, the lead Uyghur officer called his supervisor. On the phone he spoke in Chinese. ­After they left, Mahmud’s forehead was beaded with sweat. His friends sat in silence on the raised platform (Uy: supa) where the f­amily spent much of their time when in the ­house. It was where they ate and slept. The tv flickered in the background. Xinjiang Tele­vi­sion Channel One was reporting on how industrial farming was making the lives of Uyghur consumers better in the city. No one said a word. Mahmud’s nine-­year-­old ­sister came over and asked if I was worried. She said she was scared. I said every­thing was fine and that it was not ­really a prob­lem. But she could tell from the way we seemed frozen in place that t­ hings ­were not fine. A few minutes l­ater the police came back, armed with a digital camera. They took pictures of my passport; they said they would contact the security administrators of the county again and let us know if we would be taken to the police station. Now all of us ­were ­really anxious. I smiled at Mahmud’s ­sister, but my stomach was knotted in fear. Mahmud began to quickly pack his clothes in case we would have to take an emergency trip to town. One of his neighbors, who was sitting quietly now along the back of the platform, asked to look through the pictures on my phone. He flipped through them quickly looking for anything that would raise a concern. He told Mahmud that if he was interrogated he should tell them that he had met me through his work. “Tell them that you ­don’t know anything about him and what he was d ­ oing in Xinjiang.” He asked me if I had been staying in registered ­hotels and if my passport and visa ­were all in order. I assured him that every­ thing was fine. I apologized to Mahmud’s f­amily for bringing them trou­ble. They apologized to me for being powerless to stop this from happening. We sat and watched tv on the platform next to the kitchen waiting for the police to call. We switched the channel and watched Chinese Central Tele­vi­ sion news anchors talk in Chinese about a u ­ nion strike in France. They said France was very chaotic. Mahmud’s parents, who had dropped out of school in the sixth grade and never ­really learned Chinese, ­couldn’t understand what they ­were talking about. We sat t­ here silently and waited. No one spoke for what felt like hours. Dispossession 97

Fi­nally, the phone rang. They told Mahmud’s dad that my papers had checked out. The police chief of the county had signed off on my visit. The foreigner would be allowed to stay for the night in a Uyghur village in Southern Xinjiang. Every­thing was fine. As if a switch had been flipped, every­one breathed a huge sigh of relief. Suddenly every­one was talking again—­reliving the terror of the police visit. They talked about how the doorway into the home was actually ­really high but when the police had entered their home they had crouched down a bit, acting as though it ­were too low. Mahmud’s neighbor made motions with his hands as he said this and demonstrated the bowing motion that this door phenomenon caused in a police officer’s body. He talked about how scared the police ­were when they saw me. “They d ­ idn’t know what to do—­they just know how to say yes or no when it comes to foreigners. On the one hand, they want to give you the impression that our society is peaceful; on the other hand, they ­were suspicious that you might be a ‘terrorist.’ ” He talked about how hard it was for Uyghurs in Southern Xinjiang to feel like their true selves since they could not properly host visitors. He said that, in many families where f­ athers or sons had been arrested, f­ amily life had turned into a constant state of secret mourning while at the same time pretending to be grateful for the benevolence of economic development. He said that, ­these days, a Uyghur man could be arrested for the smallest ­mistake. “If you ­don’t smile when they say smile or dance when they say dance, they ­will say you are a ‘religious extremist,’ ” he said. Mahmud was glad I had the chance to see what life was r­ eally like for rural Uyghurs across Southern Xinjiang ­after the ­People’s War on Terror began in 2014. He said, “They come all the time—­almost ­every night and check on us.” Their f­ amily had received “a peaceful ­family” (Ch: heping jiating) rating sign on the main entrance of their home, so clearly the police w ­ ere not very suspicious of them. But still the police and their volunteer militia came unannounced ­every day or two. The possibility of their presence was what made Mahmud’s ­father and b­ rother shave their mustaches and prevented Mahmud’s m ­ other from decorating the walls of their home with anything that might be construed as Uyghur or Islamic. They said that, ­these days, all they did was work on their farm, attend po­liti­cal education meetings, wait for the police to come, and watch tv. ­Because they did not have ­People’s Con­ve­nience Cards (Ch: bianminka), they ­were not permitted to travel outside of their county without official permission. The tedium and poverty of this lifestyle and the feeling of powerlessness that came from the home invasions and po­liti­cal training sessions w ­ ere what made Mahmud want to leave his village and never come back. 98  Chapter Three

He had seen what the world was like from the perspective of the city when tele­vi­sions began to arrive in the early 2000s. The advertisements had called him to a dif­fer­ent life. Now the consumer-­oriented ads that popped up in between state-­sponsored tv programming reminded him of his need to escape the terror of the countryside. In fact, villa­gers ­were not permitted to unplug their tvs (see figures 3.1 and 3.2). Unlike in the city, it was common knowledge in Uyghur villages that tele­vi­sions should be turned on during police visits. State tele­vi­sion was an impor­tant way of communicating the values of the state and the “normal” (Ch: zhengchang) Chinese economy. Refusing to watch it by unplugging it or failing to turn it on was a sign of “abnormality” or “deviance” (Ch: yichang). The only way of escaping the police, underemployment, and state tv was to flee to the city. Before I turn to the role of tele­vi­sion and policing in the lives of rural Uyghur men, I ­will first sketch out how Uyghur dispossession began. In most con­temporary scholarship, the term dispossession refers to a Marxist critique

figure 3.1. A mural near Mahmud’s home village. The text reads: “Interfering with the normal lives of ­others by prohibiting them from listening to the radio or watching tv is an act of religious extremism.” Throughout this chapter, I have included images of murals that demonstrate the programming of the ­People’s War on Terror. ­These murals, which ­were painted by rural Uyghur farmer-­painters at the request of local Culture Ministry officials, began to appear throughout the Uyghur homeland in 2014. Image by Zheng Yanjiang. Dispossession 99

figure 3.2. Mahmud’s ­ father sits next to the tv while we wait for the police. Image by author.

of cap­i­tal­ist accumulation by dispossession. It is often used not to discuss “original accumulation” of natu­ral resources and colonized bodies but the way marginalized p ­ eople lose their property. As Glen Coulthard (2014) and Alyosha Goldstein (2017) and ­others have demonstrated, however,3 in colonial contexts, dispossession is more than the uncompensated loss of quantifiable abstract property; it also refers to a relationship of domination that moves through discursive and nondiscursive facets of everyday life, from the material to the epistemic. Possession does not simply refer to property remaining u ­ nder the control of its rightful ­owners; rather, in this context, it refers to a type of self-­determination or autonomy that is rooted in Indigenous knowledge. The dispossession of a Native p ­ eople’s way of life involves forcing them into a new social order, transforming their land into a commodity, their traditional ­labor into wage ­labor, 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. Importantly, as feminist scholars of cap­i­tal­ist frontier making have noted, the ongoing dispossession of marginalized populations creates forms of expropriated ­or stolen labor and property that are often unmediated by civil rights or contract law. As Nancy Fraser (2016) argues, ongoing pro­cesses of ethno-­racialization and sexism naturalize devalued, unfree, dependent l­abor that is excluded from “ex100  Chapter Three

ploitive” yet “freely chosen” wage l­abor.4 This results in colonized ­peoples and ­women being slotted into subordinated roles as sharecroppers, low-­wage or unpaid ser­vice workers, or domestic servants. The perceived threat, “backwardness,” or impurity of linguistic, cultural, and sexual difference justify enclosure and pro­cesses of devaluation similar to ­those I examined in preceding chapters. Expropriation is often enshrined through legalized and discursive forces. Simply allowing the dispossessed to live in servile conditions is often regarded as a sign of beneficent gift giving on the part of the colonizer-­capitalist (see also Yeh 2013). The work and resources of the dispossessed are pushed to the background, disavowed as the necessary foundation of the waged economy. Dispossession is the term I use ­here to name the ongoing pro­cess of more specific forms of l­ abor expropriation through devaluation and techno-­political enclosure.5 More specifically, I am following Glen Coulthard (2014) in his recuperation of the term dispossession from the likes of David Harvey (2014), who speaks of “accumulation by dispossession” as the ongoing pro­cess of cap­i­tal­ist expansion but does not dwell on the ethno-­racial and epistemic vio­lence that such pro­cesses produce in colonial contexts. Like Coulthard, in my view, dispossession speaks to a relational pro­cess of removal across the entire spectrum of social life from the perspective of the colonized, while expropriation speaks to a narrower juridical tradition of owner­ship rights and contract law from the perspective of the state and the co-­constituted capitalist-­colonizer. As a scholar committed to decolonial politics, it is impor­tant that the overarching conceptual framework I use to describe ­these pro­cesses proceeds from the standpoint of the dispossessed (Moreton-­Robinson 2015). A Short History of Uyghur Dispossession In the Uyghurs’ case, the pro­cess of dispossession reached a new threshold in the 1950s when structural adjustments to their social life and mode of production began to take a Chinese institutional form. One el­derly Uyghur farmer in Khotan I interviewed described this pro­cess using the lives of trees as an example. He said that, in the Uyghur homeland, ­there ­were three generations of trees. First, ­there ­were the trees that still remained from before the founding of the ­People’s Republic in 1949. ­These trees ­were quite rare and w ­ ere viewed as sacred by many Uyghurs. Then t­ here ­were trees that ­were planted in the new villages built during the ­Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. During this period, Uyghur farms w ­ ere consolidated into communes and farmers w ­ ere moved from stand-­alone farming homesteads on the land into villages where ­every ­house was the same height and every­one shared the same communal Dispossession 101

meals. The trees that w ­ ere planted in t­ hese new villages w ­ ere quite tall in 2014, but many of them had been replaced by a third generation of trees. T ­ hese new trees, planted in the 1990s, ­were the “Open up the Northwest” (Ch: Xibei Dakaifa) trees or, as other p ­ eople I interviewed referred to them, “Open up the West” trees (Ch: Xibu Dakaifa), planted in the early 2000s.6 They ­were planted when the old trees w ­ ere cut down in the 1990s and 2000s and replaced by “investment” (Uy: kapital) trees. In many cases, the communes sold the rights to ­these young trees to villa­gers. At a certain point, de­cades from now, they ­will be permitted to cut down the trees and enjoy the profits of their lumber. The old man sighed at this point and said, “What ­those ­people who are buying and selling trees are forgetting is that the trees hold the spirits of our ancestors within them. We have always used wood to build the thresholds of our h ­ ouses, but we did so out of re­spect for the trees and as a way of guarding our home from evil spirits. Now that re­spect is lost.” In essence, he was saying that, when ­people begin to treat sacred landscapes like natu­ral sources of capital, they are dispossessed of their relationship with the deep history of the land. This material transformation of the value of trees in the minds of Uyghur farmers was representative of broader structural adjustments to, and transformations of, Uyghur social reproduction. ­These broad transformations ­were signaled first by the consolidation of homesteads into communal villages in the 1950s and 1960s and then by the arrival of highways and railways in the 1990s and 2000s throughout the Uyghur heartland. This second wave of hard infrastructure transformations were built primarily as a way to target the oil and natu­ral gas reserves that the nation had not yet been able to expropriate to fuel the growing industrial economy in Eastern China. ­Here again, it is impor­tant to emphasize that acts of expropriation are never simply a neutral function of state capital in ser­vice to the economy; they are also a relationship of domination over nature and minoritized o­ thers (Moore 2015). When new infrastructure is built on Native land and, along with it, new ser­vice sectors and market economies are put in motion by settler populations, the expropriation of natu­ral resources becomes a schema of social domination, a more general form of dispossession, as well. It produces subjects that are enclosed and separated from their place in the world and increasingly drawn into new modernist economies where land-­based ­people’s ­labor can begin to be exploited as contingent workers in ser­vice and domestic sectors. It is only if they are privileged enough to be granted civil protections that they can enter the formal ­labor market and have their waged ­labor exploited in a more regularized manner. 102  Chapter Three

In the 1990s, as the state moved in fits and starts from socialist development to cap­i­tal­ist accumulation and the accompanying suppression (Cliff 2016b, 91) of so-­called separatism, the displacement of Native lifeways became more acute. Many Uyghurs refer to the de­cade prior, the 1980s, as a Golden Era when the possibilities of life seemed to open up. The relative economic, po­liti­cal, and religious freedom that accompanied the Reform and Opening Period seemed to promise a brighter ­future. Many Han settlers who had come to the northern part of the region during the Maoist campaigns to secure the borders ­were permitted to return to their hometowns in Eastern China. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the in­de­pen­dence of the Central Asian republics, the state in China was suddenly faced with rising tensions regarding Uyghur desires for greater self-­determination. At the same time, the fracturing of the Soviet Union—­China’s long-­term colonial rival—­offered new zones for building Chinese influence. Even more importantly, it created opportunities to access energy resources. A chief concern among state authorities in the region was that the new freedoms Uyghurs had enjoyed in the 1980s threatened to flower into a full-­throated in­de­pen­dence movement. As Uyghur trade relationships increased in emerging markets in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and cultural and religious exchange with Uzbekistan was rekindled, Chinese authorities became increasingly concerned that Uyghurs would begin to demand the autonomy they had been promised in the 1950s. As a result of ­these concerns, an under­lying goal of the Chinese state’s attempts to control Central Asian markets and buy access to its natu­ral resources became that of ensuring “that ­these states do not support the Uyghur cause in Xinjiang or tolerate exile movements on their own soil” (Becquelin 2000, 66). During the of time that the state in China was extending its control in post-­Soviet Central Asia, it also announced in June 1992 a new policy position that would turn the Uyghur homeland into a center of trade, cap­i­tal­ist infrastructure, and agricultural development capable of further serving the needs of the national economy (Becquelin 2000, 71). One of the main emphases in the new proposal was the need to establish Xinjiang as one of China’s primary cotton-­producing regions. Given the exponential growth in commodity clothing production in Eastern China in the 1980s (see Rofel and Yanagisako 2018), state authorities and market-­oriented state-­owned textile companies w ­ ere determined to find a cheap source of domestic cotton to meet the accelerating demand for Chinese-­produced T-­shirts and jeans around the world. As a result of this initiative, infrastructure investment in Chinese Central Asia expanded from only 7.3 billion yuan in 1991 to 16.5 billion in 1994. Dispossession 103

Over the same period, the gross domestic product of the region nearly doubled, reaching a new high of $15.5 billion (Becquelin 2000, 67). Much of this new investment was spent on infrastructure proj­ects that connected the Uyghur homeland to the Chinese cities to the north. As Ren Qiang and Yuan Xin (2003, 97) note, over this time Xinjiang became the fourth largest receiver of Han mi­grants in the country, ranking just b­ ehind Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong. By 1995 the Taklamakan Highway had been completed across the desert, connecting the oasis town of Khotan (Ch: Hetian) to Ürümchi, cutting travel time in half. By 1999 the railroad had been expanded from Korla to Aqsu and Kashgar, opening the Uyghur heartland to direct Han migration and Chinese commerce. During this time, the capacity of the railways leading from Ürümchi to Eastern China doubled, allowing for a dramatic increase in natu­ral resource and agricultural exports from the Uyghur region to factories in Eastern China. As infrastructure was built, new settlement policies w ­ ere also put in place. Like the settler policies from the socialist period, ­these new proj­ects ­were intended to both alleviate overcrowding in Eastern China and centralize control of the po­liti­cal frontier. But unlike t­ hose ­earlier population transfers, this new settler movement was driven by cap­i­tal­ist expansion as well. For the first time, Han settlers in Xinjiang ­were promised upward mobility through profit in the lucrative natu­ral resource economy and capital investment. Initially, this enterprise—­formally labeled “Open up the Northwest” (Ch: Xibei kaifa)—­ was centered around industrial-­scale cotton production. State authorities put financial incentives in place to transform steppe and desert areas for water-­ intensive cotton cultivation by both Uyghur farmers and increasing numbers of Han settlers (Toops 2004). As part of this pro­cess they introduced incentive programs for Han farmers to move to Xinjiang to grow and pro­cess cotton for use in Chinese factories. By 1997 the area of cotton production in Xinjiang had doubled relative to the amount of land used in 1990. Most of this expansion occurred in what had been Uyghur territory between Aqsu and Kashgar (Becquelin 2000, 66). In less than a de­cade, Chinese Central Asia had become China’s largest source of domestic cotton, producing 25 ­percent of all cotton consumed in the nation—­a proportion that increased over the following de­cades. By 2020, 84 ­percent of Chinese cotton was produced in the Uyghur region (Gro Intelligence 2019). Yet, despite this apparent success, impor­tant concerns began to emerge as well. Chief among t­ hese was the way the new shift in production and settlement was affecting the Native population. Many Han settlers profited from their work in the Xinjiang cotton industry as short-­term seasonal workers who received 104  Chapter Three

high wages, as settlers who w ­ ere given subsidized housing and land, and as man­ag­ers of larger-­scale farms. But many of the Uyghurs who w ­ ere affected by the shift in production did not benefit to the same degree. Using threats of land seizures and detention, local authorities, who acted as brokers with state enterprise buyers, often forced them to convert their existing multicrop farms to cotton in order to meet buyer-­imposed quotas. In the same manner, they ­were also forced to sell their cotton only to ­these buyers. ­These corporations in turn sold the cotton at full market price to factories in Eastern China. In this way, many Uyghur farmers w ­ ere pulled into downward spirals of poverty and dependence, while many (though not all) Han settlers continued to benefit from the shifting economic trends (see Cliff 2016b). L ­ abor exploitation coupled with dispossession gave rise to intensifying feelings of oppression and occupation as the need for cheap sources of energy and raw materials increased in the rapidly developing cities of Eastern China. Recalling the classic Marxist image of the American slave plantations that stood ­behind the cotton mills of Manchester (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018), b­ ehind the textile factories of Shenzhen stood the cotton fields of the Uyghur homeland. As the historian James Millward (2021) notes, although the economy has grown at exponential rates across China, Uyghur rural incomes have grown at declining rates and they have been pushed into tenant-­farming positions. Building on the pioneering work of the Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti (2009, 2015), he shows that systematic blockage of Uyghurs from lines of credit, business credentialing, and the obstruction of ­free movement, while incentivizing Han settlement and capital accumulation, has built a racialization of ethnicity into the economic development of the region. This has resulted in what anthropolgists Ildikó Bellér-­Hann and Chris Hann (2020) have termed “the g­ reat dispossession” of the Uyghurs—an overwhelming threshold movement within the broad sweep of the colonial history of the region (242). For Tohti (2015), the most impor­tant ­factors associated with Uyghur dispossession ­were “blatant ethnic discrimination in hiring, a rural ­labor surplus, overconcentration of economic resources in Han Chinese–­dominated urban areas, ‘stability maintenance policies’ that restrict population mobility and exacerbate rural unemployment, and severe underinvestment in basic education” (2014, 1). As James Millward notes (2021), “What Tohti described—­ without using the word—is a colonial system of settlement and extraction in Xinjiang.” This pro­cess has been fostered by state capital, which subsidized the development of natu­ral resource and industrial agriculture sectors by injecting billions of yuan into the region. As Ching Kwan Lee (2018) has shown, Chinese state capital often acts as a subsidy in securing long-­term economic interests Dispossession 105

even if they are not immediately profitable. By investing in the Han settlement of Xinjiang, putting settlers to work in natu­ral resource extraction and overseer positions on industrial farming plantations, and fostering a ser­vice sector that supported this development, the state was assured of a permanent reserve of domestic energy and raw materials essential to economic growth. By the early 2000s, the Uyghur homeland had come to resemble a classic peripheral colony. In the context of the nation as a ­whole, the primary function of the province was to supply the metropoles of Beijing, Shanghai, and the Pearl River Delta to the east with raw resources and industrial supplies. Cotton production continued to grow as it had in the 1990s, but by the early 2000s, industrial tomato production had also been introduced as a primary export product. By 2012 the region was producing approximately 30 ­percent of world tomato exports.7 At the same time, as in most peripheral colonies, the vast majority of manufactured products consumed in Xinjiang came from the factories in Eastern China. The clothes manufactured using Xinjiang cotton ­were thus purchased by Xinjiang consumers from clothing companies in Eastern China at inflated prices. The same was true of the natu­ral gas and oil that began to flow to Eastern China from Xinjiang ­after the completion of pipeline infrastructure in the early 2000s (Becquelin 2004). In 2014 Uyghur protests against ­these obvious forms of West–East wealth transfer w ­ ere officially outlawed as one of seventy-­five signs of religious extremism (United Front 2014). In the 2000s the buildout of infrastructure for natu­ral resource extraction that followed b­ ehind the new road and rail proj­ects of the mid-­to late 1990s again began to shift the center of Xinjiang’s economy. Within a few short years, oil and gas sales came to represent nearly half of the region’s revenues (Becquelin 2004). At the same time, given the push to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign cotton, oil, and gas, and to accelerate the settler colonization of the Uyghur homeland, the central government continued to provide nearly two-­ thirds of the region’s bud­get in the form of state capital investment. In the early 2000s, the Hu Jintao administration took the older regional proj­ect “Open up the Northwest” to a new level, rebranding it as “Open up the West.” Now all of peripheral China, including Inner Mongolia and Tibet, became the target of settlement and development proj­ects, though Chinese Central Asia continued to receive a greater number of new settlers relative to other regions. Given the way the older “Open up the Northwest” proj­ect had resulted in rapid and sustained economic growth of over 10 ­percent per year since 1992, state authorities ­were ­eager to take the development proj­ects further, opening new markets and new sites for industrial production (Becquelin 2004, 363). By the early 2000s, the Uyghur homeland had become the country’s fourth largest 106  Chapter Three

oil-­producing area, with a capacity of 20 million tons per year. Given that the area had proven reserves of petroleum of over 2.5 billion tons and 700 billion cubic meters of natu­ral gas, t­ here is l­ittle doubt that the region is thought of as one of China’s primary ­future sources of energy, even though extracting Xinjiang oil has proven to be logistically difficult (Becquelin 2004, 365). As of 2016, the average cost of oil in the region was approximately forty-­five dollars per barrel.8 Between 1990 and 2000, the population of Han settlers grew at twice the growth rate of the Uyghur population. By the late 2000s, it had grown to almost the same size as the Uyghur population, though many areas in Southern Xinjiang still had a high majority of Uyghurs. As Tom Cliff (2016b) and Emily Yeh (2013) have demonstrated, the development of state capital investments and industrial agriculture export production that accompanied the “Open up the West” campaign had the effect of rapidly increasing the rate of Han settlement in Uyghur and Tibetan areas. New infrastructure—­railroads, pipelines, and real estate—­have vastly benefited the millions of new Han settlers and produced exponential increases in the cost of living and widespread dispossessions of Uyghurs from land and housing. Mi­grants to the city told me that, over this period, the cost of basic staples such as rice, flour, oil, and meat more than doubled. Urban housing prices doubled or tripled, while proj­ects to urbanize the Uyghur countryside placed Uyghurs in new housing complexes that ­were dependent on regular payments for centralized heat and power. The land-­ based means of production in small-­scale Uyghur mixed-­crop farming with small herds of sheep and garden plots w ­ ere also often enclosed and turned into corporate farming through this pro­cess. Underemployment was further exacerbated by the widespread consolidation of Uyghur land into industrial farms and, more recently, restrictions on ­labor migration. All ­these public and private economic interventions produced a new kind of Uyghur farmer. One of the primary goals of the “Open up the Northwest” (Ch: xibei kaifa) state development campaign that began in the 1990s was to increase the production of commodity goods—­such as rape seed, tomatoes, cotton, and other commodity crops—on an industrial scale. Based on my interviews with farmers and their relatives, within just a few short years, many Uyghur farmers ­were forced to sign debt-­inducing contracts that did not meet their basic living expenses or their seed and farming equipment expenses. Farming itself was turned into a form of tenant farming in which farmers could not decide for themselves what they ­were to grow as centralized industrial farming took over their land. Millward notes, “­Under the system of the ‘five unifieds,’ plowing, sowing, management, irrigation and harvest w ­ ere all centralized ­under county Dispossession 107

and township control. Uyghur farmers had to buy seeds, fertilizer, pesticide, and plastic film (for ­water retention) from the local government, which determined the price for ­these inputs; the government also set prices for the harvest it purchased” (2021, 365). As the Uyghur scholar Bakhtiyar Tursun, a social scientist based at Xinjiang University, notes in a systematic study of farming economy in the Uyghur heartland of Khotan, Kashgar, and Aqsu, rural farmers ­were nearly always forced to pay a percentage of their profits to work brigades (Ch: dadui) who signed contracts with state and private buyers. As one local official in Khotan Prefecture described it to him, “If a farmer grows 10 acres of wheat, according to the local standards for harvest yield and grain sales price, the farmer should receive an income of 4,500–5,000 yuan. However, the farmland fee, planting fee, ­water fee, fertilization fee, management fee, land tax, township and village fund payment, public welfare payments and other expenditures ­will total around 4,000 yuan. ­After deducting ­these expenses, the farmer ­will only receive around 500–1,000 yuan” (B. Tursun 2003, 77). As a result, by the early 2000s, in many counties in the Uyghur homeland of Southern Xinjiang, the rights to a high percentage of arable land w ­ ere owned by a few power­ful individuals within local party institutions. For example, according to a number of farmers I interviewed, in a county near Turpan a single individual owned rights to an estimated 60 ­percent of all available farming land. In a county near Kashgar, a single ­family of local officials owned rights to nearly 80 ­percent of all arable land.9 This meant, in effect, that the majority of Uyghurs in ­these counties w ­ ere living as sharecroppers: their land and work ­were largely owned by local officials.10 Many Uyghur farmers, or their c­ hildren, ­were forced to look for work elsewhere ­either as mi­grant agricultural workers or as small-­scale traders and hired hands in local towns or, at times, the big city of Ürümchi. In 2003 local authorities began to implement ­labor transfer programs among rural Uyghur farmers as a way of countering the extreme poverty and underemployment that was fostered by the system (Memet 2011). ­These programs required farmers to spend significant portions of time away from their home farms working at state-­owned farming colonies elsewhere in the province picking cotton or working in factory positions in Eastern China in cities such as Shenzhen, Beijing, Tianjin, and Qingdao and smaller towns in Jiangsu, Shandong, and Zhejiang (“Transfer of 400,000 Young Uyghur W ­ omen” 2008; Hess 2009). T ­ hese programs provided cash incentives for such work, but ­there was frequently a certain amount of coercion as well. Village leaders ­were asked to find a quota of workers from their jurisdiction. Often poor farmers felt as though they had no choice but to follow the directive to enter the mi­grant 108  Chapter Three

l­abor economy. In Peyziwat—­a county with a population of 385,000 ­people in Kashgar Prefecture, 98 ­percent of whom ­were Uyghur—­the program began in 2003 with only 2,000 workers sent out to work as mi­grant laborers. By 2010 over 81,000 p ­ eople, 21 ­percent of the total population of Peyziwat County, had been sent to work in fields and factories away from home as part of or­ga­nized work teams (Memet 2011, 23). Other counties, from Khotan to Turpan, sent similar numbers of workers to the cotton fields in Xinjiang farming colonies and to industrial factories in Eastern China. Over the course of the de­cade, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs w ­ ere forcibly moved off their farms and into the market economy as wage laborers. Over the same period, the number of “self-­sent” (Ch: zifa) mi­grants began to increase as well. Since ­these migrations ­were not facilitated by the state, the numbers of rural Uyghurs who migrated to cities across Xinjiang and the nation are harder to track. By 2013 the official total number of ethnic minority mi­grants in the region was around 412,000.11 It is likely, however, that many “self-­sent” mi­grants ­were not included in this number. What is clear is that, over this period of time, informal settlements of twenty to thirty thousand ­people from places like Peyziwat and nearby counties such as Yupergha w ­ ere formed on the outskirts of Ürümchi. Similar communities sprang up in smaller prefecture-­level cities across the province. T ­ hese settlements often took on the name of the counties t­ hese mi­grants came from. Often a nearby mosque became a center of community life and came to be associated with the par­tic­u­ lar native place of origin and class positions of the community. They formed tight-­knit communities of traders and businessmen, craftworkers, entrepreneurs, and, in some cases, knowledge workers. Many mi­grants in ­these communities—as was the case with Mahmud and Aziz, whose stories I ­will tell ­later in this chapter—­came as individuals, detached from immediate ­family. They delayed the marriages that ­people their age typically aspired ­toward and saved money for their families back in the countryside while they pursued an urban life. As the Uyghur scholar Mijit Memet, a social scientist associated with Xinjiang Normal University, has noted (2011), in Uyghur Islamic thought, poverty and personal suffering have long been considered to be predestined by God. The difficulty of land-­based life was thus something of a test of one’s character. It was not something to be overcome but endured. In the past, this attitude led to an ac­cep­tance of one’s vulnerability and, in turn, a dependence on the ­will of God, one’s community, and the benevolence of local authorities. Memet noted that most Uyghur farmers placed l­ittle value in long-­term planning Dispossession 109

and investment and instead took one day at a time. He argued that, traditionally, Uyghur farmers have not stressed self-­reliance and thus spent what ­little money they had as soon as they received it. Memet is not arguing that Uyghur farmers are lazy—as is often the case in Chinese discussions of the work ethics of unassimilated minorities in China (Yeh 2007b). Instead, he is pointing out that, when Uyghur farmers are pulled into the market economy, they are forced to give up their reliance on the community and the benevolence of God, and instead claim a self-­motivated subjectivity. As a Uyghur w ­ oman from a village near Kashgar told me in an interview in 2020: [The farmers understand] that this is our ancestors’ land, so you feel as though you are safe ­there. The land is yours, so you are not dependent. You ­don’t have to listen to anyone ­else’s ­orders. If you give it up, you lose your freedom. If you grow up in the village, p ­ eople feel this kind of freedom. Farmers have their own opinions, to some extent they live according to their own rules. Leaving the village often gave farmers a feeling of giving in to the new economy of self-­reliance and failing the test they have received as Muslims. Memet writes that, in the early 2000s when the ­labor transfer programs ­were first put in place, “some mi­grant workers did not even tell their families at home at first, instead they secretly went to the colony farms and picked cotton” (Memet 2011, 40). ­Because of ­these feelings and their wariness of entering into dependent relations with Han settler employers, many Uyghurs w ­ ere, at least initially, reluctant mi­grants. Yet Memet also notes that, as a growing minority of former Uyghur farmers ­were given access to cash and capital, t­ hese mentalities began to shift. As some ­were able to move into the Chinese economy, feelings of communal and f­ amily reliance ­were mixed with feelings of individual achievement. The opportunities that came from travel, technical training, wage l­abor, and investment began to take shape in the minds of farmers, particularly t­ hose of the younger generation. Yet what felt like new forms of freedom and autonomy w ­ ere also mixed with new forms of dependence and in­equality. As young Uyghur mi­ grants began to see a larger horizon of possibility, they also began to receive messages that much of that larger world was not ­there for them but rather for ­those with more ethno-­racial privilege. Money could not make their lives count in the same way as it did the lives of Han settlers, nor would it buy them freedom from their fear of state vio­lence. Through the pro­cess of integration, they found that they ­were losing parts of their Native way of life and ­were being exposed to new forms of dispossession. 110  Chapter Three

Dispossession through Media Infrastructure and Self-­Fashioning In addition to its relationship to material possession, dispossession can also be thought of as a relationship of the mind to the self. As Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou argue (2013), the idea of being fully in possession of one’s self as an individual is a par­tic­u­lar cap­i­tal­ist modality. It centers around the perception of control or autonomy on the part of the individual subject. By increasing more and more control over one’s self through pro­cesses of self-­discipline and self-­ responsibility, the cap­i­tal­ist subject assumes that the choices she or he makes are not enclosed by larger social forces or supported by pro­cesses of unpaid social reproduction; rather, they are acts of freedom. Possessing the self produces a disavowal or misapprehension of the community and infrastructures that enable a life to be lived. Although t­ here is a g­ reat deal of variation across sectors of the global cap­i­tal­ist economy, ideas of self-­possession have increasingly taken pre­ce­dence over feelings of communal forms of belonging. This site of conflict, what Nancy Fraser refers to as a “boundary strug­g le” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018), between the communal and the enclosure of the individual reflects the way capital accumulation attempts to eat into social reproduction itself (Federici 2004). As the Uyghur economy responded to state-­directed land expropriation, tele­vi­sion and social media seemed to offer ways of possessing the self and escaping from material dispossession. Young Uyghur men in par­tic­u­lar began to think of themselves as having control over their life paths in a way that previous generations did not. They began to pursue ­careers, lifeworlds, and life partners they chose for themselves. The trajectories of t­ hese life paths w ­ ere often both in tension and agreement with the desires of parents and other members of previous generations. On the one hand, by moving to the city they accrued status and, at times, capital that they could invest in their families back in the countryside. On the other hand, through their pursuit of cosmopolitan social networks and romantic partnerships—­which ­were mediated by social media—­ they ­were moving both outside the control of their families and into an intimate “second enclosure” on Chinese social media platforms (Boyle 2003) and tight proximity to the city and p ­ eople who ­were strangers to their lifeworld in the countryside. As a result, their parents often felt a sense of abandonment while the young men felt a sense of alienation in both the village and the city. Through this pro­cess Uyghur young men ­were moved from a condition of communal interdependence within a Uyghur lifeworld, to the world of a cap­i­tal­ist urban ­future. But, unlike the rural Uyghur lifeworld, this new world was not simply one they shared in common with their Uyghur neighbors and Dispossession 111

Uyghur state officials. The horizon of the city was shared with Han settlers and the institutions of the state in China. The urban world of self-­fashioning promised freedom through individual striving on the f­ree ­labor market, but often ­these promises w ­ ere enclosed by larger social forces as Uyghur l­ abor was devalued relative to Han settler ­labor. An impor­tant aspect of Uyghur self-­possession began in the early 2000s when state authorities and soes first brought electricity to rural Uyghur h ­ ouse­holds and then began to provide e­ very Uyghur h ­ ouse­hold with a f­ ree tele­vi­sion and cable connection. As Mahmud—­the young social media content producer I introduced at the beginning of this chapter—­told me, he still remembers when the first tv appeared in his neighborhood soon ­after electricity arrived. For several months, he and dozens of other villa­gers crowded into their neighbor’s small home to watch Xinjiang Tele­vi­sion broadcasts of the news, Uyghur ­music per­for­mances, and Chinese historical dramas that ­were overdubbed in Uyghur. Since neither he nor many of his neighbors spoke Chinese (at that time), they avoided the Chinese-­language channels and focused instead on Uyghur-­language repre­sen­ta­tions of life in the city. Mahmud found the images he saw on tv, like the foreign and domestic films that he had seen occasionally in town, deeply inspiring. They began to open up a world of possibilities apart from his f­amily’s farm and life in the village. Since—­like many Uyghur men in the 1990s and early 2000s (Dautcher 2009)—­with increased access to Chinese liquor his ­father had developed an alcohol de­pen­dency, the images also promised a way of escaping the vio­lence of his ­family life and the poverty that alcohol and broader structural adjustments had brought to his ­family. Around the same time, Mahmud was forced to drop out of high school to help his ­father and ­mother on the farm. ­Because of his ­father’s drinking prob­ lem and his inability to keep up with the farm work, Mahmud’s f­amily simply could not afford to continue to send him to school. Mahmud said that he “did not feel sadness” about no longer ­going to school ­because he felt he was not learning much t­ here anyway. Working at home gave him a chance to read books that he wanted to read: novels about the world outside. He also continued to watch a lot of tv and would occasionally go to the local bazaar to watch vcds that shop o­ wners would show in order to attract customers.12 The technologies of cultural dissemination and the aggregated desires they mediated became a significant part of his life. When he was seventeen, Mahmud began to write his own stories in a notebook while watching his ­family’s flock of sheep. The stories w ­ ere based on his own life experience and the t­ hings he was watching on tv. Eventually, he developed a storyline that tied them all together. His story, which he ­imagined as a screenplay for tv called “Life on the 112  Chapter Three

Road” (Uy: bayawandiki toghirak), was about a young Uyghur farmer who went to the city in pursuit of fame and fortune. Along the way, he helped a beautiful young ­woman escape from the abuse of a drug dealer. The story was a Uyghur drama in a Uyghur city in which the hero overcomes the complexities of modern life. It brought to life the way Uyghurs w ­ ere drawn into drug and sex trafficking as other paths to economic success ­were blocked,13 but it also promised success for young men who worked hard and took personal responsibility for their lives. ­There was no direct animosity ­toward the Chinese state and soes in the story—­Mahmud said he felt too afraid to allow ­those feelings to surface in public. Instead, it was a story about a Uyghur farmer becoming legible as a cinematic superstar. When Mahmud’s neighbors found out that Mahmud had written a 100-­ page novel about his ­imagined life, they told his parents that it would be a shame if a talented young man like Mahmud was not given an opportunity to work in the city. By this time, the allure of the city with its promise of distinction and achieved quality was on every­one’s minds. They began to put pressure on Mahmud’s f­amily to send him off to school. They told his ­family to pay attention to the advertisements for vocational schools they had seen on Uyghur-­language state tele­vi­sion. The schools promised to train students in how to use computers and how to speak Chinese. Some of them even taught En­glish and prepared students to study abroad. One of his neighbors had a ­daughter who had gone to college, so they asked her to look into the schools and make sure they w ­ ere legitimate. They found out that one of the advertised schools only cost 2,800 yuan per semester, that it accepted farmers without high school diplomas, and that the medium of instruction was Uyghur. For two years, Mahmud’s f­ amily saved money. Facing increasing pressure from the community, Mahmud’s parents fi­nally sent Mahmud on the bus to Ürümchi with 3,200 yuan (around $500) in his pocket. The community was thrilled that a young man from their village was g­ oing to the big city to make a name for himself. By pursuing his desire to achieve “quality” (Uy: sapa), he was building prestige for every­one he knew. For the first few months, Mahmud strug­g led. He hardly had enough money for food and it took him a while to find friends and distant relatives in the city. But he thrived in the school. As he put it: “When I arrived, I just studied Chinese. ­Every day I would memorize texts. By the end of the first year I had memorized over fifty-­three texts. Using this method, I learned Chinese very quickly.” With his new-found language skills he was able to begin to navigate the city. Eventually, he introduced himself to the editors of a Uyghur-­language literary journal and showed them his notebooks. They ­were impressed with his Dispossession 113

ambition. ­After reading through his work, an editor recognized the cinematic quality of what he had written. He saw in Mahmud’s novel the dialogue and scenes of a movie script. Looking back at it, Mahmud realized that ­because he was writing in response to what he saw on tele­vi­sion, he had written his dreams into cinema. Over the next few years, ­after the arrival of 3g networks in 2010, he found a place in the emerging industry of Uyghur-­language internet media. Mahmud taught himself how to make m ­ usic videos, short films, and commercials and began to cobble together a c­ areer in cultural production as a freelance worker for Uyghur businesses in the city. Islamic Contemporaneity and Self-­Fashioning Mahmud’s first exposure to tele­vi­sion and its effects on his imagination resonated in the stories of many of the young Uyghur mi­grants I interviewed. But, for many, ­there was also a religious component to the desires that drew young men to the city. As Talal Asad (2007) has noted, spiritual economies are the outcome of the intersection of global economic development and what he terms “a global religious revival.” Throughout the developing world, emerging forms of religious practice have been linked to economic development, new media, and the individuation of work ethics (Hirschkind 2006). In Indonesia and Taiwan, Islamic and Buddhist courses centered around training neoliberal workers in the individual responsibility of time management and productivity through “spiritual reform” are widespread (Pazderic 2004; Rudnyckyj 2009). Pentecostalism has produced new forms of ethical practice and economic striving in Africa and Latin Amer­i­ca (Bornstein 2005; O’Neill 2013). Scholarship in the ­Middle East has also queried the way Islamic practice is being adapted to cap­ i­tal­ist frameworks (Tripp 2006; Kanna 2010; Schielke 2012). In my reading of this scholarship, the sorts of religious economies that emerge tend in two directions. On the one hand, ­there are formally or­ga­nized proj­ects, such as ­those analyzed by Rudnyckyj in Indonesia, that “seek to si­mul­ta­neously transform workers into more pious religious subjects and more productive economic subjects” (2009, 106). On the other hand, as in the case of Kanna (2010) in Dubai, ­there are more flexible assemblages where reformist religious practices are pulled together in a highly subjective manner and then circulated among a collectivity. Due to their po­liti­cal and historical circumstances, the emergent religious economy that drew Uyghur mi­grants to the city tended ­toward the latter form. This was a product of the Chinese authorities’ decision to eliminate all but one highly controlled madrassa as it implemented the proj­ect of Maoist multiculturalism. This restriction was followed by the eventual prohibition of 114  Chapter Three

all forms of unapproved Islamic instruction, such as training in modern Arabic and Turkish or translating unapproved texts into Uyghur from languages other than Chinese. ­These forms of religious control ­were further extended by state control of all Uyghur forms of Islamic practice, such as Sufi rituals and pilgrimages to shrines (Thum 2014). ­These prohibitions have prevented Uyghurs from developing formalized religious training courses that center on economic productivity. Instead, Uyghur mi­grants have been compelled to rely on the covert circulation of online language teachings from movements within the global Islamic religious revival. Another young mi­grant, Aziz—­whose hometown near Khotan was around a thousand kilo­meters away from Mahmud’s village—­said that tele­vi­sion was also the first ­thing that inspired him to want to leave home. Unlike Mahmud, Aziz came from a deeply religious ­family, so the pressures he received ­were pointed in a slightly dif­fer­ent direction—­toward a Muslim contemporaneity. This new source of attraction, the cultural and religious imagery that ­were coming from Istanbul and Cairo, brought a new complexity to the desires of young Uyghur mi­grants. Yet, despite the differences between the impulses to become a movie star versus a con­temporary pious Muslim, within both of t­ hese trajectories the self-­fashioning impulse and the lure of the cash economy resonated with a generalized desire for an urban life. The young men who began to participate in piety movements in the 2010s when ideals of Islamic piety began to circulate via new 3g networks, often came to the city simply wanting to be “modern,” just like Mahmud. The turn t­ oward an Islamic contemporaneity that arrived with the social media phenomenon of WeChat propelled many new mi­grants, like Aziz, ­toward urban life and provided a new form of social reproduction for ­those, like Mahmud, who ­were already in the city. Aziz described his journey to the city as a pro­cess of finding his ­future: During my last year of high school in 2003, I dropped out ­because I and my ­father [a self-­trained religious teacher] felt like I w ­ asn’t learning anything. I was just studying on my own at home. I worked as a construction worker for a year earning 1,000 yuan per month. At the time, it seemed like a lot of money since I had no expenses and since it was my first job. But during that year, I saw a commercial for a vocational training school in Ürümchi called “885” when I was watching my f­ amily’s new tv. It was one of the first Uyghur-­run private training centers. Aziz said that within a few months, like Mahmud, he de­cided that he wanted to leave his village and go to the school in Ürümchi. He said that the ads made him feel for the first time that it was pos­si­ble for someone without a high school Dispossession 115

degree and formal training in Chinese to participate in the modern life he had seen on tv. He recognized that the advertisement was pitched to farmers just like himself who had few resources but ­great ambition to be successful members of the modern Uyghur community. Since so many p ­ eople ­were beginning to leave farming life in the early 2000s, many young p ­ eople ­were beginning to talk about trying to make it in the city. The advertising fed this imaginary; it made young ­people believe that it was pos­si­ble to escape the material enclosure of rural Uyghur life. Aziz said: Actually the school was nothing like the advertisement. They shot the advertisement at Xinjiang University, but actually the school was next to the university and the buildings w ­ ere ­really old. The tuition was 1,600 for one semester including tuition and housing. My parents sold their donkey for around 2,000 yuan and we used that money to pay for the tuition and my living expenses. My m ­ other also began working as a seamstress in the county-­level bazaar so she used the money she made to support me. The very first day when my ­father and I came, we paid the money, and then I sat in on a class. I loved it. That was the happiest day of my life. Aziz said that he felt as though he had been given owner­ship of his ­future. As a Native Uyghur speaker whose ­father was both a farmer and an unauthorized Islamic teacher (Uy: mullah) or “wild imam” (Ch: ye ahong) as the surveillance system would categorize him, he had given up on living as part of the knowledge economy, which seemed dominated by non-­Islamic Chinese content. He had thought he would be a manual laborer on his ­family’s farm his ­whole life. Now he realized that, even though he did not speak Chinese and had not passed the college entrance exam, he could still compete with other businessmen and entrepreneurs in the city. In his first few years as a mi­grant, he found part-­time work as an Amway salesman selling cookware and beauty products to other Uyghur mi­grants while he studied at the vocational school. He told his customers that he was a student and that he had used the knowledge he learned in school to research the highest quality American products. He said that, by selling himself as an expert on American culture, or “Amway: the American Way,” he learned a lot about marketing and using cultural knowledge to create commercial value. Aziz shifted his focus though around 2011 when the market for American products began to dis­appear. Many Uyghurs began to listen to the piety teachings that circulated via WeChat and through this came to believe that American products w ­ ere not “halal” (Uy: musulmanche). Instead, many Uyghurs came to understand that Islamic products imported from Turkey or 116  Chapter Three

Malaysia or Native products that w ­ ere produced in a verified halal manner had more “quality” (Uy: sapa). Uyghur desires ­were increasingly s­ haped by an imaginary that centered around Islamic contemporaneity. Around the same time, in his typing class at the vocational school, Aziz found that he had an affinity for computers. With the help of a few of his more advanced classmates, he began to teach himself the language of software engineering. The Latin script and logic of computing made sense to him. Within several years of his arrival in the city, he began designing Uyghur-­language online advertising and e-­commerce applications for smartphones. As Islamic piety movements gathered force, he also began to work with WeChat-­based companies to find ways to monetize and expand religious and language instruction for Uyghurs outside of the city. It became impor­tant for him to pre­sent himself as an urbane Muslim. He began watching Turkish movies. He divorced his wife, who he had met not long before through his Amway sales. He said he wanted a wife who would be more pious and would be willing to stay at home and care for his ­children while he worked with Uyghur internet companies. Aziz’s story demonstrates a desire for achieved quality as an urban, yet pious and patriarchal, Uyghur Muslim, which became common among many young Uyghur men at this time (Byler 2015). This caused a nested, further dispossession of Uyghur ­women who ­were slotted into a subordinate role, their value indexed to the public-­facing economic value of the work of pious Uyghur men. In an echo of cap­i­tal­ist frontier making in other contexts, the expropriated work of w ­ omen—­shopping, cooking, cleaning, the emotional and physical work of caring for c­ hildren and the el­derly, maintaining the status of the ­family through the constant work of hosting Uyghur visitors to the city—­was devalued relative to the largely male work of wage l­ abor and capital accumulation outside the home. In the past community-­oriented village life, ­women’s work both in the home and in the fields had a higher value. In the new market economy, the higher cost of living combined with the increased role of consumption produced a greater strain on domestic relationships. T ­ hese rising forms of misogyny w ­ ere exacerbated by the vio­lence and devaluation that men, and Uyghurs more generally, experienced in the Chinese marketplace. Uyghur male control and domination w ­ ere often off-­loaded on the h ­ ouse­hold in the form of imposed restrictions on the appearance and movement of w ­ omen and ­children. Men and o­ thers in the Uyghur community often pressured w ­ omen to dress in a pious manner. Of course, many Uyghur ­women also actively embraced new forms of piety as well (Huang 2012; Tynen 2019a). Both men and ­women taught ­children to pray, study the Qur­an, and do work for the dead at ­family graves (Uy: yerlik), which ­were understood to be the center of their Uyghur Dispossession 117

Islamic identity. ­Women also actively built pious public personas via WeChat and found ways to use the religious quality they accrued as forms of social value within the Uyghur community (Huang 2012; see also Mahmood 2005). Shifting Uyghur Urbanities in a Chinese City As Lily Chumley (2016) has demonstrated, across China “self-­styling” has been a central ele­ment in the development of the Chinese economy (see also Rofel 2007). Culture producers are now involved in all aspects of Chinese material life. Chumley argues: “The aestheticization of the world required and engendered a new kind of aesthetic subjectivity: an interest in style, a susceptibility to the attractions of commodities, a desire for contemporaneity and anxiety about lacking it, a habit of looking at and making small talk about commodities and their appearances” (Chumley 2016, 11; my emphasis). As young Uyghur mi­grants continued to arrive in the city in the early 2000s, they ­were influenced by the aestheticization done by Han cultural workers they saw in the city and online. They began to build their own brands and aesthetic forms for Uyghur audiences in the countryside. However, unlike the Han art students Chumley observed, for ­these Uyghur culture workers the feeling of “lacking contemporaneity” was complicated by the feeling that they lacked the quality of Han and Western culture producers; they felt the pressure to transform their ethnic difference into both an Islamic contemporaneity and a po­liti­cally acceptable Chinese cosmopolitanism. The push and pull of their personal histories, their Uyghur audiences, and the digital enclosure generated by state-­supported technology companies complicated their desire to build a self-­styled individual life. Many of the Uyghur-­medium vocational schools in the city served as incubators for the Uyghur mi­grant knowledge economy. The Uyghur schools gave students an opportunity to network with each other and build new styles and aesthetic subjectivities. The ­owners of the schools ­were almost universally recognized as Uyghur tele­vi­sion personalities; some of them w ­ ere popu­lar musicians. T ­ hese ­owners built up the brands of the schools by advertising on tele­vi­sion and by hosting widely viewed talent-­show spectacles in which their best students demonstrated the skills they had learned in the schools. The vocational schools thus offered young farmers a point of entry to the upper echelons of Uyghur society. By performing well in a Uyghur-­language vocational school, some students ­were able to circumvent the stringent Chinese-­ language requirements that faced them in Chinese university settings and the widespread discrimination of the Chinese private sector.14 118  Chapter Three

Many mi­grants, like Yusup in the previous chapter, w ­ ere not able to achieve an eco­nom­ically successful self-­fashioning. Although they also w ­ ere drawn to the city by the allure of Uyghur-­language tele­vi­sion advertising, they had less success finding jobs in the knowledge economy in the city. One young mi­grant told me that he was never able to r­ eally learn Chinese or computer programming in the vocational schools ­because his ­family could not help him with his tuition. Ablikim had to work full-­time just to afford his living expenses, so he had l­ittle time to study and find the job he dreamed of as an entrepreneur. Some of ­those I interviewed did develop culture production skills but ­were unable to find jobs or start their own businesses b­ ecause they lacked the connections and capital to do so. As I have signaled in the preceding pages, one of the issues regarding the evaluation of Uyghur mi­grant self-­fashioning had to do with changing gender values, as wider exposure to Islam led to a widespread reconsideration of Islamic contemporaneity between 2010 and 2014. Paradoxically, the same technological development that allowed Uyghur mi­grants access to cultural production through online publishing and video production also offered Uyghur farmers in the countryside greater exposure to global Islamic piety movements. As much as the schools acted as incubators of Uyghur modernization, the cultural production they enabled paled in comparison with the Islamic media production that many rural Uyghur farmers viewed from sources in Turkey,

figure 3.3. A mural from a village near Mahmud’s home that was painted in 2014: “Wearing ethnic costumes is a way of carry­ing forward ethnic culture, wearing a burka is a betrayal of ethnic culture.” Image by Zheng Yanjiang. Dispossession 119

Central Asia, and the M ­ iddle East via the internet (Harris and Isa 2019). The TV shows and teachings dubbed in Uyghur or produced by Uyghurs in the diaspora had a power­ful effect. They ­were often seen by young mi­grants such as Aziz as “true” (Uy: rast) Islam, unfiltered by the Chinese state-­directed public sphere. Like the urban advertising they had seen on tv in the previous de­cade, this worldly Islamic content interpellated Uyghur farmers. It asked them to imagine themselves as members of a modern global Islamic community. As Mahmud put it: When I started at the school, t­ here ­were forty-­three of us Uyghur students. Now [four years ­later] ­there are just twenty-­eight [still in the city]. Most of the students who dropped out w ­ ere ­women—­and a lot of them ­were from Khotan. The p ­ eople down ­there are actually becoming more and more opposed to education. They just ­don’t see the purpose in sending ­women to the city. They think it is better if they just get married. I have one distant cousin who also came to the city. She was ­doing ­really well ­here and then her ­father suddenly changed his mind. She said it was b­ ecause her job w ­ ouldn’t allow her to wear a veil that covered her neck. I told her, this is not impor­tant. Your faith is something you carry with you on the inside. You ­shouldn’t let a small ­thing like this change the course of your life. But she said, this is what “true” [Uy: rast] Islam means. She said she was at peace with it. Of course, t­here are deeper reasons for why, when they hear t­ hese Islamic teachings on the internet, it makes sense to them not to allow w ­ omen to be educated. They ­don’t want them to think for themselves; and they ­don’t want them to be influenced by Han ideas. Exposure to con­temporary Islamic teachings online and widespread social dispossession expressed through enclosure and devaluation combined to produce intensified forms of masculine control. The cloistering of ­women—­relegating them to devalued forms of domestic ­labor—­while at the same time men pursued devalued work outside of the home, produced emergent forms of sexism in the midst of dispossession. As Uyghur farmers across the Uyghur homeland began to gather in small group discussions about the forms of Islamic orthopraxis that ­were common in the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, the impulse to move to the city began to change. Now, instead of talking about economic and cultural opportunity, ­people began to talk about the religious freedom of the city. Many of the rural-­to-­urban 120  Chapter Three

mi­grants I spoke with said they came to the city simply to escape the religious policing that was becoming so intense in rural communities. They said that in the city no one noticed if mi­grants went to the mosque five times a day or not. Young mi­grants could attend illegalized prayer-­room discussions and, beginning in 2011, online WeChat groups without police coming to their door. But at the same time, with that freedom, the allure of non-­Muslim culture in the city was more intense for mi­grants like Mahmud. For a time, particularly in the years a­ fter the vio­lence of 2009 when internet technology was built out and it became increasingly clear that Chinese state authorities viewed Uyghur mi­grants as disposable, young Uyghurs in the city lived in a tension between two ideological magnetic fields. On the one hand, the technological life of the city pulled them into the market economy and the task of making one’s self legible in urban society, while, on the other hand, the same technological life pulled them t­ oward new forms of Islamic orthopraxis and identification. Both of ­these forces of dispossession and re­orientation have been introduced just over the past two de­cades. ­These competing forms of self-­fashioning, ways of making the self sensible, pulled Uyghur mi­grants in competing directions. The qualities associated with Chinese and Western cosmopolitanism competed with Islamic piety. For some, each of ­these forms of contemporaneity felt like a dispossession of “Native” (Uy: yerlik) forms of knowledge and practice even as they found new ways to fashion themselves as con­temporary. At the same time, both Mahmud and Aziz felt strongly that b­ ecause they had adapted to city life they had begun to “think for themselves” (Uy: özum dep oylimen), unlike the rural farmers they grew up around. They saw themselves as fashioning a life for themselves. They felt that their fluency in the systems and aesthetics of the urban world signaled a kind of success. In their home villages, ­people spoke of them with a sense of pride. They had made it in the big city. Both Mahmud and Aziz w ­ ere highly aware of their need to perform their success and maintain a public persona of sophistication. One of the ways they signaled their urbanity was through their style of dress and grooming. Neither of them had facial hair since this was read as a sign of Uyghur rural masculinity and Islamic piety as the ­People’s War on Terror began. Both of them dressed in name-­brand clothes—­Aziz consciously chose a Turkish cosmopolitanism while Mahmud wore Eu­ro­pean designer clothes. Both of them noted that their appearance was a large part of their success as Uyghur mi­grant entrepreneurs. They said that, unlike Han settlers, they always had to prove that they ­were not imposters in the city. As Aziz put it: Dispossession 121

Just last week I bought a new suit from Caravanchi [a Uyghur-­run Turkish import store]. It is a blue Turkish suit made of wool that cost 2,000 yuan [$320]. I’ve tried other suits like Dior and stuff like that, but they always make me look old. The Turkish suits make ­people look cool. They have a slim fit and are very flexible. I first started wearing suits when I was selling Amway. At that time I thought that it made me look more impressive. L ­ ater I realized that it just made me look like a cheap salesman ­because it was a cheap suit, so I ­stopped for a while. Last year I bought my black suit at a place in Xiao Ximen [a commercial district in the city] for around 1,000. I thought that if I was ­going to be an entrepreneur, it was impor­tant that I look the part. So for the past year I have worn that suit ­every day. Aziz said that dressing like a young businessman from Istanbul was a way of demonstrating his affinity for Islamic fashions and halal consumerism while still not appearing too pious as surveillance intensified. Mahmud, on the other hand, wanted to be perceived as Western. He had his hair cut in a high fade. When he walked the streets, he was careful to drape his Apple-brand white headphones over his shoulder to signal that he was a person with means. He wore black aviator sunglasses and a maroon T-­shirt that said “armani” in bold white letters for weeks at a time. But in both of their cases, ­there was something more to their appearance than simply a way of signaling their sophistication. For both of them, the threat of policing was always hanging over them. Dressing like an urbanite, rather than like a pious Islamic farmer, was a tactic of survival that eventually would be undermined by the digital enclosure. Dispossession by Terror As Timothy Cheek (2015) and Lisa Rofel (2007) have noted, since the 1990s ideological-­aesthetic production across the Chinese nation has in large part turned from the propaganda state of the Maoist period ­toward a “state-­directed public sphere” (Cheek 2015, 9). This state capital–­directed public sphere, a form of Chinese governmentality, allows for greater latitude in public speech, though such speech has not been granted full ­legal protection. ­Under the ­People’s War on Terror, the freedom of the directed public sphere began to subtract. Now, Uyghurs ­were directed to consume Chinese-­language commercial tele­vi­sion and attend Uyghur patriotic talent shows as a way of demonstrating their loyalty to the state. The P ­ eople’s War on Terror—­which began in May 2014 as a response to a series of violent incidents involving Uyghur and Han 122  Chapter Three

civilians—­brought much tighter restrictions on what farmers could view on the internet and in their homes. Not only was viewing or listening to illegal materials a criminal offense punishable by long prison sentences but—as I described in the opening pages of this chapter—­prohibiting or refusing to watch state tv was also considered to be an act of so-­called extremism on the list of seventy-­five signs of extremism that was codified in 2014 (United Front 2014). Suddenly, Mahmud and Aziz found themselves working in a media environment where every­thing they produced was directed against religious ­extremism and ­toward Uyghur assimilation. At the same time, back in their home villages, their loved ones began to face the threat of detention for unauthorized religious or po­liti­cal media they had consumed over the past five years of internet access. The trauma began for Mahmud in early 2015, just two weeks ­after the visit to his home that I described at the beginning of this chapter. He told me: My dad called me two days ago and told me to be very careful, to not communicate with anyone over the phone; he said that something had happened but that he c­ ouldn’t talk about it. Then yesterday a friend came from a town near my village and told me what had happened. This is the first time t­ here has ever been any vio­lence in my hometown. I think ­things ­will get a lot worse ­there now; a lot of trou­ble for me and my ­family. Mahmud sighed and began rubbing his ­temples. His ­father had told him that he and the rest of the f­amily ­were now just sheltering in their h ­ ouse. The stretch between their h ­ ouse and the location where sixteen Uyghurs had been killed was on lockdown. He asked his f­ather if he should return home to be with the f­ amily over this time. His dad said no. If he w ­ ere to come back now, he might not be able to leave. We all sat ­there for long moments of silence trying to pro­cess the gravity of what had happened and how ­those sixteen lives that ­were lost would affect such a large group of p­ eople. “Sixteen ­people. That is not a ­simple ­thing,” Mahmud said. Over the next few days, we pieced together what had happened. Several of Mahmud’s neighbors had attempted to grab a Uyghur police officer’s gun during a home inspection and turn it on the inspectors. The police, with the support of police volunteers, had been threatening to arrest the neighbor’s wife if she did not stop wearing an illegalized Islamic covering. The gun’s safety was set, so the neighbor was not able to harm the officer or the farmers who had been conscripted into the security detail, but the neighbors and o­ thers in his prayer group had attacked the police with knives. Within several minutes, armed security forces arrived and began to shoot indiscriminately in the home Dispossession 123

and the street in front of the home. According to official reports, more than a dozen ­people ­were killed, including the neighbor’s wife and six-­year-­old ­daughter, as well as one of Mahmud’s m ­ iddle school classmates. Talking a few days l­ater about what had happened, Mahmud said: “This is unimaginable; it is not Islam. ­People should not kill other ­people ­under any circumstance. Life on this earth is a gift from God. Only He can give it or take it away. If ­humans do ­these sorts of ­things, it changes them from a ­human to something more like a monster.” State authorities used the incident as a pretext for ­going ­house to ­house to arrest p ­ eople who seemed suspicious. In an enactment of the murals that had been painted across the Uyghur homeland (see figure 3.4), within several weeks over one thousand ­people ­were arrested on suspicion of conspiring in the plot against the police or for questioning the use of force by the police. Five of Mahmud’s ­uncles ­were arrested during this time on charges of inciting ethnic hatred; the evidence used against them was recorded messages of Hanafi Islamic teachings on their phones and forced confessions. Over the next few weeks and months, they ­were given sentences that ranged from five to twenty years. One of Mahmud’s u ­ ncles simply dis­appeared; Mahmud now assumes he died during his interrogation. But the terror and subtraction within Mahmud’s ­family did not stop ­there: ­ fter they w A ­ ere arrested, we ­were all numb with fear and pain. My ­mother was devastated. Despite the pain they felt, my parents de­cided to adopt two of my ­uncle’s ­children since my aunt ­couldn’t manage the farm work on her own or find a job and therefore d ­ idn’t have any source of income. ­After several weeks of caring for the kids, the police came again and made all of my ­family members come with them to the police station. They accused them of “caring for the ­children of terrorists” and opposing government policies. At the police station, they asked, “Why did you act in this illegal way?” My parents answered, “­These kids ­were living u ­ nder difficult circumstances, so we lent a helping hand. We had no other motive.” In the end they made my parents sign a “­legal pledge” not to care for my nieces and nephews. Since then, my mom has been detached and in kind of a haze. She has nightmares when she sleeps. L ­ ater we tried to see [the ­children] many times at the address where they said they would be, but they always told us that the c­ hildren ­were not ­there. Even now, we ­don’t know what has happened to them. Over the next week, the local authorities began to conscript ­those who had not yet been arrested to participate in apprehending suspects who had fled 124  Chapter Three

figure 3.4. A mural near Mahmud’s home: “Crack down on the ‘three forces’ to maintain social stability!” The “three forces” referred to ­here in the euphemistic rhe­toric of the terror state are “National Separatism, Religious Extremism, Violent Terrorism.” In fact, what they refer to are Uyghur self-­determination, religious piety, and all re­sis­tance to Chinese sovereignty. Image by Zheng Yanjiang.

from the police. They required that ­every ­house­hold provide one person to assist in the manhunt. They said that whoever did not cooperate would be treated in the same way as ­those they ­were attempting to find. Since Mahmud had already returned to the city, his ­brother was sent to join the manhunt on behalf of his ­family. For months he walked with groups of police and other conscripted young men in search of their neighbors who ­were in hiding in the mountains. Back in the city, Mahmud found it difficult to focus on his work. He said that now he found making online advertisements meaningless. ­Every day he received reports from his f­ amily of what was happening to the p ­ eople who had sent him on his journey away from rural life. ­ fter I returned to school in the city, I heard that a lot of ­people who A ­were forced to join the search w ­ ere imprisoned for not cooperating. ­Going back home is not an option ­because the situation, particularly for young men, has become simply horrible. Like many other families, my ­family has been placed on a list of suspicious families. They are no longer allowed to leave their village. Dispossession 125

Some of the stories he heard ­were deeply troubling. My f­ amily is fine, but every­thing around them is terrible. Already over one thousand p ­ eople have been arrested. ­Every day they see more and more ­people being dragged down the road at gunpoint. ­There is absolutely no way that all of t­ hose ­people had connections with what happened back in February. My f­ amily thinks that this is just an opportunity for them to grab more ­people. If they can get the numbers up then it looks better for them. Now my younger b­ rother is back from the mountains and working for the local militia, which means he has to go out most nights to check ­houses. He also has to go to the local town once a week for training [he demonstrated what that training looks like by ­doing some lunges with his arms extended as though holding a club]. My f­ ather tried to prevent it from happening, but the police said that if he ­wouldn’t allow him to go, then it would mean that he had “a prob­lem with your priorities.” The police came and interviewed my mom as well a­ fter they arrested her five ­brothers. They asked her what she thought of the situation; ­whether she had anything to say in their defense. Of course, if she had defended them she would have been arrested as well. So she just said, “You are ­doing the right t­ hing, the party knows best.” She had to disown her own f­ amily. Now, if you are a young man you have ­either been arrested or they have made you work for the police. ­There is no one ­else left. ­Women are the only ones left in many ­houses. Some of them are ­really old and some of them are pregnant or have small ­children. No one is planting crops. Every­one is just trying to survive each day. Some of my close friends have been taken. The rest are working for the police now. The armed police come by ­every day, hunting ­people. At this point, they can just shoot without any consequences, so many ­people are just shot if they run. At least six ­people we know have died from torture in prison. My ­father saw that, on the day of the incident, t­ here ­were actually dozens of bodies lying in the courtyard of the local police office. So when they say ­there ­were only sixteen, they are just trying to make it sound as though they handled it better than they did. ­These days every­one is afraid. No one is d ­ oing any work. They are just trying to keep a ­really low profile and go to all of the meetings. My ­little ­sister has been pretty traumatized by every­thing. When she goes to school [in a larger town over twenty kilo­meters from Mahmud’s village], the Han kids call her “a ­little terrorist.” She comes home crying. Over the next few months, Mahmud heard of ­things that ­were happening in his community that w ­ ere previously unimaginable. ­Every day his parents 126  Chapter Three

­ ere required to go to the local village center, watch instructional videos, and w learn patriotic songs. State authorities began to raise a Chinese flag at the local mosque ­every Friday when they opened the mosque for the weekly prayer ser­ vice. His ­mother was forced to burn her prayer rug in the village center. All his ­family members ­were asked to write and publicly recite loyalty pledges to the Chinese state. Although Mahmud’s ­brother was not initially detained, in March 2017, as the mass detention of as many as 1.5 million Muslims began, one of his ­brother’s friends from the neighborhood confessed that he and Mahmud’s ­brother had listened to illegal Islamic messages on his phone several years prior. Soon ­after this, Mahmud’s ­brother was also detained in a camp. Many p­ eople began to crack u ­ nder the pressure. Two months a­ fter the mass disappearances began, Mahmud told me: Two days ago my cousin’s ­uncle and his wife passed away suddenly. My cousin’s relatives found them hanging from trees ­behind their ­house. It seems as though they planned it b­ ecause they had just bought all of the white burial clothes and had placed them on the sleeping platform in the h ­ ouse. The reason every­one says that the government caused it is ­because every­one knew that the police had been ­going to their ­house ­every day demanding that they make their son come home. Actually no one knows where that son is. He could be in Eastern China, he could be in prison, he could already be dead. He d ­ oesn’t have a green card like me,15 so the government suspects that he is an extremist. But b­ ecause this ­couple ­didn’t know where their son was, the police ­were constantly harassing them. They ­were sixty-­five and fifty-­nine years old. Maybe the pressure had gotten even stronger recently, b­ ecause of what happened in February. Of course, this kind of act is forbidden in Uyghur society and Islamic teaching—­a person can never take a person’s life—­that is why ­people never talk about ­these kinds of ­things and if they do, they say that it is the government that killed them. This is the first time something like this has happened to ­people I know, but I’m sure it is happening all over the South. Every­one’s “spirit has been broken” [Uy: rohi sulghundi]. Mahmud worried about his own safety in the city. He worried that b­ ecause he lived away from home, his ­family would be put ­under greater suspicion. He worried that ­because so many of his relatives had been arrested, someone would accuse him of not being patriotic and submissive. The police always want to know where e­ very ­family member is. They ­will make you responsible for every­thing your ­children do. They always Dispossession 127

ask my parents where I am. They tell them “he is working in Ürümchi” and show them a copy of my green card. But now my green card is not enough. They ask them “Can you prove that he is not d ­ oing illegal work?” So then they show them my commercials on their phone and pictures of me. They can see in the commercials that I am an urban person and that I have a stylish haircut. So then they believe them. If they ­weren’t able to do this, they would put a lot of pressure on my parents to make me come home. This is happening all over Southern Xinjiang from Khotan to Kashgar to Aqsu; ­every place is like this now. That is why so many young ­people in the city have been forced to leave. Someone who is part of the city-­level Public Security Bureau told me that already three hundred thousand Uyghurs have been forced to leave the city ­because of ­these kinds of pressures. If you ­don’t have your ­house­hold registration [Ch: hukou] ­here you are forced to leave. They tell them to return to your hometown and apply for a green card and then you can come back. But actually most ­people can never pro­cess this card. You can never come back. Every­one knows this. That is why young p ­ eople have so much pressure to go back ­these days. For Mahmud, the pressure forced him to maintain a par­tic­u­lar aesthetic. It made him stop ­going to the mosque even on Fridays. Instead, he prayed privately in his apartment. He kept working, producing video commercials for Uyghur companies. Increasingly, the narratives of ­these commercials began to be pitched not just to a Uyghur audience but to a Chinese-­speaking audience as well. It was now impor­tant that every­thing spoken in Uyghur be subtitled in Chinese. The symbolism of the Chinese flag began to suffuse Uyghur-­language commercials. Often the rhe­toric of “ethnic solidarity” (Uy: milletler ittipaqliq; Ch: minzu tuanjie) was included in the slogans for Uyghur products. The par­ ameters of the newly implemented digital surveillance system began to partition Uyghur public media consumption and desire ­toward po­liti­cal goals. The directed public sphere was turned back ­toward the surveillance capacities of terror capitalism (see figure 3.5). The digital enclosure proj­ect of the ­People’s War on Terror was mapped on top of the marketization that had pulled Uyghurs into the city. Their data was building the system. T ­ oward the end of 2018, Mahmud’s ­brother was transferred from a camp to a tightly monitored textile factory owned by a corporation based in a city in Zhejiang Province. He has not been able to visit his home. His basic needs are cared for by the reeducation system, but he does not receive more than several hundred yuan per month to spend in the store in the factory. Mahmud worries he ­will never see him again. 128  Chapter Three

figure 3.5. A mural near Mahmud’s home village. The inscription reads: “The use of the internet to download and disseminate violent terroristic audio and video content w ­ ill be subject to ‘severe’ [Uy: qattiq] ­legal punishment.” Image by Zheng Yanjiang.

Aziz was also affected by the aesthetics of the ­People’s War on Terror. Like Mahmud, he was a green card holder whose h ­ ouse­hold registration was in Southern Xinjiang. He said his ­family was also ­under pressure ­because he was away from home. He continued: I know [the police in my hometown] are watching me, but I just feel like I have nothing to hide. I am an urban person, anyone can see that from just looking at me. On my WeChat account, I actively weed out the ­people that I think are what they call “separatists” by posting patriotic and ethnic harmony ­things on my accounts. If someone complains about it, I delete them immediately. Many times t­ hose ­people that are pretending to be ­really proud of their Uyghur identity are just plants trying to get you to agree with them and say stuff that they can use as evidence against you. Despite Aziz’s proactive stance in maintaining an acceptable public persona, his ­family was also affected by the counterterrorism campaign. His f­ ather was also taken to a reeducation camp ­because he had studied Arabic, had some knowledge of Islamic law, and had taught ­others even though he was not authorized to do so. Aziz did not know if they would give him a prison sentence Dispossession 129

or if eventually he would be sent to a reeducation factory. He said that now his ­mother was barely getting by. He was providing for her as best he could in the city, but he was also worried about what would happen if he went back to his village. My mom is just barely getting by on her own. We opened a small store where she sells daily necessities and noodles. Actually, a­ fter Ramadan I need to go back to my village and renew my green card. I ­don’t know if I ­will be able to come back or not. Now they are saying that it is r­ eally hard for ­people whose relatives have been arrested to get the card. I have a lot of friends in the police department and I also have money so I think I should be able to do it. But you never know for sure. I would have no reason to live if I went back to the countryside. All of my work is h ­ ere. If I was ­there, I would just be a farmer. For Aziz, the thought of life as a farmer was no longer a possibility. Although pro­cesses of dispossession can never be finalized, his home had been taken away from him while at the same time the promise of possessing his own life path by moving to the city in pursuit of economic success was never fully available. His life was not his own; and the support he had known in his home village was no longer available to him ­either. Conclusion The pro­cess of dispossession that Mahmud and Aziz experienced encompassed both material displacement and a conversion of their sociality via the digital knowledge economy. They found that technology systems mediated their lives, calling them to transform their appearance and interests and, through this pro­cess, they ­were pulled into a new world. At the same time, the push of state terror in the countryside both tethered them to the suffering of t­ hose they loved and made it impossible for them to consider returning to it. The risks ­were simply too high. The digital enclosure mediated the aesthetics they ­were permitted to produce. As the system intensified, the knowledge they produced began to be slotted into a new regime of truth that ignored the trauma both of them ­were facing. Now, ­human surveillance compelled Uyghur farmers to leave their TVs on and surveillance checkpoints obligated them to carry their smartphones at all times. The knowledge economy they helped build now became compulsory. Following directives from their home village work brigades (Ch: dadui), they used their WeChat app to publicly denounce forms of pious Islam and ethnic pride and proclaim their love of the Chinese state. Increasingly, they 130  Chapter Three

­ ere terrified that the digital footprint of their past online activity would be w found through scans by assessment machines that could be plugged into their phones. Mahmud and Aziz felt they had no choice but to carry on business as usual to support their remaining ­family members in the countryside, as if the imprisonment of their loved ones had no effect on them. Their urban aesthetics had become a ruse, a grotesque parody of the freedom they had hoped for when they left their villages. They now felt in a much deeper way that their lives and appearance w ­ ere being expropriated. As I show in the next chapter, the disappearances of precriminals and the par­ameters of the newly imposed forms of digital and biometric surveillance pushed Uyghur young men to turn to their friends for social support.

Dispossession 131

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4 Friendship

The first time I met Ablikim he was sitting in the corner farthest from the door. He was a thin man with a closely trimmed mustache. He sat hunched over, his shoulders drawn in. As is customary among Uyghurs, no one introduced us. The previous week I had met a young man named Batur at a Turkish coffee shop. Now I was at his apartment for a birthday party. I assumed the man in the corner might be Batur’s cousin visiting from the countryside. We told each other our names, but I still ­wasn’t ­really sure how to place him. Over the course of the eve­ning, he sat in the corner quietly, his eyes darting around the room. It ­wasn’t ­until much ­later, when we ­were walking to our respective homes, that he began to speak. Ablikim ­didn’t like speaking in groups. He ­wasn’t a new arrival from the countryside; he was Batur’s closest friend. They had been living in the city for nearly a de­cade. Unlike the other mi­grants

I have discussed in preceding chapters, he had a bachelor’s degree from a local university. ­Because of this certification, he had hoped he would be able to find more institutional affiliation and security in the city—­something he desperately wanted. But he had recently been forced by a combination of defiance from his students, daily mockery from his coworkers, and a discriminatory work assignment to leave his job as a teacher in a government-­operated vocational school that received funding from the World Bank. Since then, he had been trying to find work that would not make him feel isolated and emasculated. He had gone to Beijing, a distance of nearly two thousand miles, to try to find a job as a business con­sul­tant with Batur. He had come back to Ürümchi with Batur to try to work for a Turkish food import com­pany as a ware­house man­ag­er, but none of ­these jobs had worked out. He said: “I went to Beijing, and then back to Ürümchi, just to try to figure t­ hings out. But I d ­ idn’t get anything figured out. I’m still trying to figure ­things out.” He said that his friendship with Batur was now the only ­thing that kept him from giving up on life. As I built my own friendship with Ablikim, I was struck by how his story as a failed professional and the importance of his friendships resonated with the experiences of the dozens of low-­income Uyghur mi­grants I observed. In the big city, Ablikim and the thousands of unemployed young Uyghur men just like him found themselves trying to figure out a Chinese world while using a Uyghur framework. And as they tried to enter that social flow, they constantly found themselves pushed into eddies along the side. Since they ­were often cut off from their extended families through the pro­cess of migration, the vio­lence of this movement made t­hese single young men cling to each other as they waited to become the authors of their own stories. Although Ablikim had been able to find institutional support as a teacher for a time, like mi­grants with less formal education, he too had been caught up in the tumult of social vio­lence in Xinjiang. He had first found a job during the summer of 2009—­the same summer that Ürümchi was rocked by Uyghur citizens’ rights protests described in chapter 1. Although he had been in a nearby city during the protests, when he came back to Ürümchi a few weeks ­later to take up his position as a chemistry teacher, he had been detained by the police. He was let go ­after a drawn-­out interrogation, but that experience, along with countless other experiences of everyday ethno-­racism over the subsequent years, had wounded him to the point that he had fi­nally dropped out of mainstream Chinese city life and s­ topped looking for work outside the Uyghur enclave at Ürümchi’s south end. He gave up his job. He developed a constant tremor in his hands. He stayed in his bare, concrete apartment for days 134  Chapter Four

at a time, sleeping l­ittle. He often spoke about suicide and how his friendship with Batur prevented him from ending his life. In many ways, Ablikim’s position was symptomatic of displacements and dispossessions that ­were happening all across the world. As capitalism spread around the globe post-2000, nearly 2 billion p ­ eople moved from rural poverty to urban precarity (“World Urbanization Prospects” 2019). They ­were being forced to move away from a fragile yet ontologically stable existence as subsistence farmers by urban development, industrial agriculture, and forms of dispossession. Over the past two de­cades in China, 221 million p ­ eople have abandoned their small plots of land for the hustle of city streets and small concrete apartments (Xiong 2015); since the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is one of the primary receivers of Han mi­grant urban construction workers, miners, and oil workers, the majority of the 25 million inhabitants of the region are also living far from home. Yet, as I described in the preceding chapters, for Ablikim—­ and the hundreds of thousands of other Uyghur mi­grants to Ürümchi—­the additional repulsion of the colonial relation of ethno-­racial domination was folded into this economic and class-­based structural foment. The discrimination that was fostered by the surveillance enclosures of counterterrorism was a mechanism that marked and sorted their bodies in unique and par­tic­u­lar ways. In the end, they often found themselves slotted by ethno-­racialized hiring and renting practices into the Uyghur enclave in Ürümchi, where, for rural underemployed mi­grants, the vio­lence of ethno-­racial policing mixed with feelings of desperation to find a firm social footing. Local police entered Uyghur mi­ grants’ homes on a weekly basis, searching for unregistered Uyghurs from the countryside. Checkpoints ­were built on street corners, Uyghur men w ­ ere asked to produce their papers and allow their cell phones to be scanned for links to terrorism. Jobs ­were hard to find, particularly if a mi­grant was alone in the city. They hustled just to get by, to stay just out of reach of police surveillance. As Ablikim said one day, “The countryside felt like a lake of stagnant w ­ ater, but the city feels like a ‘raging river’ [Uy: derya süyi dawalghup turatti].” The relative stability of a tightly policed, yet stagnant, boring Uyghur community on the flat desert plain in Southern Xinjiang had been replaced by the frenetic pace and dangerous terrain of a city where he was surrounded by strangers. The word Ablikim used to describe the “raging” river, dawalghup, also carries with it the feeling of social vulnerability, of life in chaos and agitation. T ­ hese feelings of disconnection and desperation, in turn, produced a Uyghur experience of what Alan Bray describes as a “crisis of friendship” in which social networks become a valuable yet fragile source of stability (2003, 2). Increasingly, Bray Friendship 135

argues, elective relationships in market-­oriented environments have become essential ele­ments in pro­cesses of social identification and economic productivity. This development in social reproduction pushes cap­i­tal­ist subjects to extend their social network beyond coworkers, fellow citizens, and their immediate ­family members—to use their friends as a way of achieving economic stability. What stands apart in the Uyghur context is that, given the colonial vio­lence of the racialized city, homosocial friendships w ­ ere experienced not as elective but essential in the boundary strug­g le against enclosure and devaluation (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). As in all social contexts, the conditions of Uyghur male friendships and the shape of Uyghur masculinity itself is historically contingent, s­ haped by the social forces that define it.1 While in the past, Uyghur manhood was largely defined by tradition maintenance, a patrilineal domination of w ­ omen and competition with other Uyghur men (Dautcher 2009; Smith Finley 2015), in the context of the colonial vio­lence of the city new forms of masculine definition emerged. Young Uyghur men saw themselves increasingly defined as a threat to the smooth economic functioning of the city as the institutions of the city came to center on general Islamophobia and the ethnocentrism of the city’s Han settler population. As urban mi­grants, they w ­ ere isolated from their rural families, forced to delay marriage, and in turn compelled to rely on each other for support. When young men like Ablikim discovered that their dreams of becoming a success in the urban marketplace ­were blocked, the hope that was associated with the seeming openness and vital movement that came from economic migration often became a source of cruelty. Since job placement rates for more-­ privileged Uyghur college students with baccalaureate degrees ­were now less than 15 ­percent due to state-­authorized job discrimination (Tohti 2015), finding a job that would give Uyghur mi­grants ­legal status in the city was often seen as a major stroke of luck and a way of escaping a life of policing and poverty in small towns in the countryside. Underemployment was endemic throughout much of Uyghur society, with less than 20 ­percent able to travel to the city and find some form of wage ­labor (Tohti 2015). Escaping rural poverty was made even more difficult ­because their social networks, both in daily life and on social media, ­were used by the policing contractors, beginning with the ­People’s War on Terror in 2014, as a way of surveilling their movements, cultivating in­for­mants, and as evidence for detention or expulsion from the city. ­These forms of social enclosure and devaluation pushed them into tight homosocial bonds with fellow mi­grants they could trust. It was through ­these forms of care that they maintained a sense of urban belonging. 136  Chapter Four

In this chapter, I consider how homosocial friendships can act as a form of palliative care for heavi­ly policed Uyghur young men who are marginalized by the economic and po­liti­cal pro­cesses of con­temporary colonization. I examine why friendship became so crucial for Uyghur young men and how such homosocial friendships are developed. I argue that the forms of care that arise from hearing each other’s stories and sharing the same ethos and life produce a fragile source of Uyghur existential stability. Although ­these anticolonial homosocial male friendships are often blocked by the techno-­political surveillance system from developing into formal decolonial politics, they have general implications for decolonial masculinities more broadly and the work of anthropology itself. Ultimately, I develop an analytic for understanding what I call anticolonial friendship as a form of homosocial empowerment and care. It places scholarship in feminist social science on the social construction of masculinity (Sedgwick 1985; Gutmann 1997; Kimmel 2004) in conversation with anthropological studies of Islamic masculinities (Dautcher 2009; Rana 2011), Indigenous masculinities (Innes and Anderson 2015), and my own ethnographic evidence, to show that Uyghur male friendships can define manhood less in terms of the domination of ­women described in the previous chapter and more as protection from the dispossessing effects of enclosure and devaluation. Drawing inspiration from feminist, decolonial, and existential anthropology,2 I demonstrate that ­these friendships are built largely out of an intersubjective being “together” (Uy: bille) that is fostered by sharing stories and life rhythms. Storytelling and friendship offer forms of protection from the vio­lence of police contractors and market expropriation, resulting in a new experience of manhood and social reproduction itself. At the same time, if ­these friendships are severed, they can also become the locus of vio­lence and emasculation. Subtraction, Ethics of Friendship, Storytelling During my two years of fieldwork, many friends and acquaintances told me about the way their friends and members of their families dis­appeared or have been detained in­def­initely by state authorities for resisting or appearing to resist Chinese settler colonialism (“ ‘We Are Afraid to Even Look’ ” 2009). Following the uprising against the racialized killings of Uyghurs in 2009, disappearances of young Uyghur men became so endemic that local police stations issued a form for families to fill out to request information on the whereabouts of their loved ones. If they w ­ ere able to recover the living bodies Friendship 137

of their sons and b­ rothers from reeducation facilities and prisons, often they found them in a state of psychic brokenness—­frail shells of the vital persons they had once been. My friends spoke often about the strug­g le to overcome their fear that the same might happen to them. They talked about how they had to swallow their pride and not react when confronted with institutional forms of racialization and the everyday encounters it produced. They compared Xinjiang to con­temporary North ­Korea and their ethno-­racial position to the Jews in Germany, just before the Holocaust. They saw their situation as both a typical site of China’s rapid cap­i­tal­ist development and an extreme case of state-­directed oppression and Han ethno-­racism. Dispossession was forced on Uyghurs in the city since they w ­ ere often legally prevented from renting and working. Since their bodies ­were seen as worthless and not worth grieving for, they w ­ ere made to bear the burden of underemployment, illegalization, and heightened exposure to vio­lence and death. As I grappled with the stories and experiences I heard about from Ablikim and dozens of other mi­grants, I found scholarship that frames dispossession as a co-­constituted effect of global capitalism and colonialism stimulating for thinking through Uyghur male trauma and daily strug­g les (Coulthard 2014; Goldstein 2017). Throughout the modern history of capitalism and colonization, conditions of dispossession have disproportionately affected minoritized groups at the margins of socie­ties. Karl Marx ([1848] 1963) conceptualized the dispossessed as the “lumpenproletariat.” This “lumpenization” pro­cess refers to the ways in which groups of ­people, often the descendants of slaves and the Indigenous, have been refused a class status and instead find ways to work and live in a “gray zone” of the informal economy (Bourgois and Schoenberg 2009, 19). As Marx noted, changes in modes of production and the partitioning and commodification of land that came with the unending expansion of the cap­i­ tal­ist frontier has the effect of disturbing the social order, particularly for the most vulnerable. This results in a range of disposability from homelessness to ­human warehousing in prisons and ghettos and unfree ­labor. Thinking about dispossession as a pro­cessual working out of life, allows for less focus on more static “zones of exception” such as camps and prisons (Agamben 1998), and more on an insistence that engagement with colonized subjects must focus on the exposure and agency of intersubjective life itself (K. Mitchell 2006). In general terms, colonial forms of dispossession often occur over a long, seemingly unending duration. The gendered, intergenerational trauma of colonial vio­lence plays out over the scale of de­cades and centuries through the replacement of language, removal from the land, and the fragmentation of social institutions. It is a pro­cess not an event (Wolfe 2006). By focusing on 138  Chapter Four

the minutiae of vulnerable life, this decolonial studies approach supplements existing scholarship on the politics of Uyghur identity (Bovingdon 2010; Smith Finley 2013). This approach builds on previous studies of Chinese minorities that utilize a gendered analytic attendant to relations and pro­cesses of power,3 to consider how masculinity and homosocial relationships emerge as a lived pro­cess of Uyghur anticolonialism. In gender-­segregated Uyghur society, friendship has historically been a major source of ethical obligation and sociality. In some areas of the Uyghur homeland, ­people commonly used the word friend (Uy: adash) at the beginning and end of ­every sentence when speaking to anyone of the same gender and generation. ­There are many words for friend: dost, adash, aghine, borader; all ­these variations combined with adjectival modifiers lend a dif­fer­ent tone to the sort of friendship being described. But Uyghurs reserve a special referent for the sort of friendship that is shared by young men such as Ablikim and Batur, the figures I introduced at the beginning of this chapter. They referred to that sort of friendship as a “life and liver friendship” (Uy: jan-­jiger dost)—­meaning they ­were friends who shared the same life-­spirit and liver organ. The liver is considered to be the seat of courage in Uyghur epistemology (much like the gall of a gall bladder connotes a sense of audacity in other contexts). The Uyghur concept of a “life and liver” friend conveys the feeling not only of the “soul mate” aspect of close friendship but also a willingness to sacrifice oneself for the other as a “blood ­brother.” The friendship inscribed in con­temporary “life and liver” friendships comes from multiple sources. Since Uyghurs have a long tradition of yerlik urbanism in the oasis cities along the old Silk Road, the development of specialized trades and crafts has long affected the life paths of young men. For centuries, a minority of young men—­like ­those I discuss in chapter 2—­have left their hometowns and traveled to nearby cities to apprentice as bakers, tinsmiths, woodworkers, and the like. Often t­ hese ­earlier forms of migration ­were formed around natal-­home social relationships. Young men who shared the same hometown (Uy: yurtdash) ­were often the first ­people to become friends in a new urban location. The second ele­ment in the con­temporary iteration of “life and liver” friendship was a newer development. Often close friends w ­ ere classmates (Uy: sawaqdash) from the same school. This emphasis on classmate relationships was a recent phenomenon that corresponded with Chinese late-­socialist ­family planning policy and the organ­ization of Chinese school systems. Since most Uyghur families were permitted only three c­ hildren and since the education system placed c­ hildren within a singular, segmented, unchanging class throughout primary and secondary education, many young Uyghurs (as with Friendship 139

Chinese classmates [Ch: tongban tongxue] more generally) have come to think of classmates of the same gender in terms similar to that of siblings. In the case of Ablikim and Batur, they had been classmates for over seventeen years. All through their lives, they had shared an interwoven life path. State institutions of f­ amily planning and education that ­were meant to corral their bodies into permitted Chinese “model minority” slots had also ­shaped the conditions of the relationships that sustained their autonomy (Schein 2000). For many con­temporary Islamic socie­ties, gender segregation along with changes in methods of economic production have led to a greater reliance on homosocial relations (Ouzgane 2006), particularly in the pro­cess of migration (Rana 2011, 119). Initially, as the Chinese economy was opened to market forces, Uyghur elective relationships became more inflected by the utility of socioeconomic networks expressed as business “associations” (Uy: munasivet), a development that parallels the elaboration of guanxi relations in other parts of China.4 As Jay Dautcher has shown, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the 1990s, in the near past Uyghur male friendships ­were often formed around utilitarian relations and economic success (2009, 136). At the level of peri-­urban neighborhoods, or mehelle, formalized friendship networks formed impor­tant senses of belonging that w ­ ere developed through rituals of competition at regular gatherings, or meshrep (141).5 Yet, as the colonization of the Uyghur homeland intensified in the 2000s and young men w ­ ere forced to leave their neighborhoods for the city, ­these relationships of utility and competition ­were increasingly replaced. The enclosure system and Han settler evaluations had the effect of forcing young Uyghur men to identify with each other in new and deeper ways. The ethical imperatives of jan-­jiger friendships turned on an obligation of being together: of listening to the friend in such a way that they came to feel as though their lives had entered into the same experience. Over the course of the 2010s, Uyghur young men increasingly used “life and liver” friendships as a resource to survive life in the city. For example, in 2011 when I did my first year of fieldwork, I met a young bazaar worker named Nurali whose jan-­jiger dost was a young kabob-­seller named Shirali. In 2014, during my second year of fieldwork, I met two young jade sellers from Yaken—­Hasan and Adil—­who described their relationship as one of “life and liver” friends. I met a cell-­phone repairman from a small village outside of Khotan who had a jan-­ jiger dost named Erkin from the same village. Nearly all of the more than forty young men I interviewed had a very close male friend who helped them survive. ­Those who did not, often said they wished they did. ­These homosocial friendships demonstrated that the way young men strug­ gled with dispossession was never fully singular. For young Uyghur men in the 140  Chapter Four

city, living with dispossession was often a strug­g le that engaged their friendships. Friendships did not offer a cure for the exposure they felt in the “raging” (Uy: dawalghup) torrent of the ethno-­racialized city, but they provided a space for narrating it—­trying to “figure t­hings out” as Ablikim mentioned when I first met him—­and thus an ave­nue for coping with it “together” (Uy: bille). Storytelling as Constitutive of Uyghur Male Friendships One of the ­things friendships did was give young Uyghur men a daily space for the “subjective in-­between” of storytelling (Arendt 1958, 182–84, cited in Jackson 2002, 11). As the anthropologist Michael D. Jackson has argued, storytelling is a way of giving order and consistency to events in the lives of modernist subjects, who often begin to experience their lives through a life-­path narrative of “­free ­will” and self-­possession, as discussed in the previous chapter. In personal stories, market-­oriented subjects—­often the narrators—­become the main characters rather than bit players on the sidelines of social change. It is not just that stories give meaning to h ­ uman lives in general but rather that they change how ­people “experience the events that have befallen [them] by symbolically restructuring them” (Jackson 2002, 16). By defining lives, stories supply ­people with a way of overcoming how social structures block subjects from realizing their hopes. By narrating existence and staging repre­sen­ta­tions of their lives, modernist subjects make their words and thoughts stand in the place of the world. As Jackson points out, what is crucial ­here is to understand that the stories which are told are not identical with the structure of socie­ties—­rather, storytelling is impor­tant ­because it shows subjects how they live. Their importance rests less on ­whether stories are empirically true or w ­ hether they offer a sense of hope than in what they indicate about systems that constrain them and what this knowledge enables subjects, particularly colonized subjects, to do. Of course, ­there are many kinds of stories. Some stories confirm what is already known, while o­ thers call into question what had previously been thought of as sound knowledge. For Uyghur friends, this latter form—­stories that undermined authority and refused the regime of truth imposed by the enclosures of the techno-­ political surveillance system—­became a power­ful weapon in maintaining a sense of existential well-­being. Often their stories focused on a moment of affective encounter—­a time when they felt extremely angry, scared, or sad—­ and how they resolved that situation. Uyghurs have always been subjects who actively remake their worlds, but they w ­ ere now also subjects confronted by new forms of devaluation and dispossession. The stories they told became Friendship 141

a kind of palliative therapy—­not a cure—­for the vulnerability of young Uyghur friends in the city. But no ­matter how partial storytelling might be in recovering a sense of well-­being, my argument ­here is that storytelling worked to give p ­ eople a feeling of autonomy and protection even as their friends and relatives dis­appeared into the mass detention and unfree ­labor system in the countryside. This approach to storytelling as a pro­cessual building of an intersubjective lifeworld emerges out of feminist, decolonial, and existentialist traditions in anthropology.6 In this tradition, attention to embodied practice and discursive narration are seen as entwined “traces of meaning left in the wake of ­human action” (Desjarlais 2003, 7). As in the socie­ties studied by other scholars, Uyghurs have a ritualized storytelling tradition that centers on transmitting traditional knowledge and conveying gendered forms of authority and rights to knowledge.7 The intensification of policing over the period of this study turned storytelling and the being “together” (Uy: bille) it fostered into a sharply anticolonial mode of care and empowerment that resonates with the decolonial strug­g les of Indigenous men elsewhere. Sharing stories of trauma and emasculation opened up spaces of care and belonging for Uyghurs, a pro­ cess that was similar to the findings of Robert Alexander Innes and Kim Anderson (2015) among alienated Indigenous young men in North Amer­i­ca. As the Cree/Métis scholar Gregory Scofield noted, listening to stories of colonial strug­g le and alienation opens up ways for Indigenous men to find modes of being “which you can embody, which you can pull yourself into” (quoted in Innes and Anderson 2015, 253). Storytelling can foster Indigenous brotherhood and make “the world come alive” (Innes and Anderson 2015, 258) by fostering vital modes of protection and, in spaces where civil rights are protected, collective action. The obligations that sprang from dispossession provided the conditions of possibility for stories to be told and heard among friends. Since the majority of Uyghur mi­grants to the city ­were single young men who ­were delaying marriage in order to make a better life for their families back in the countryside, ­there was also a strong gender component to this phenomenon as well. Young men ­were sent to the city b­ ecause they w ­ ere young men. Uyghur parents often thought that it would not be safe for unmarried young ­women to try to make it in the city as underemployed hustlers. Young w ­ omen did come to the city to work as maids for wealthier Uyghurs who worked in the state apparatus, but they ­were less of a public presence. In the patriarchal structure of U ­ yghur society, they w ­ ere seen as part of the h ­ ouse­hold where they worked. Young men, on the other hand, ­were often on their own. Like Yusup, Mahmud, and 142  Chapter Four

Aziz—­whose stories I told in previous chapters—­they often came to the city full of masculine energy, the pride of their families and their villages. They wore their mustaches with dignity and wore their single set of clothes boldly. Yet it was precisely this appearance that rendered them untrustworthy and dangerous—as potential ethnic separatists or Islamic terrorists—in the evaluative gaze of Han urbanites, and, by extension, the techno-­political system. Uyghur men, like racialized men elsewhere in the world, w ­ ere often seen as being guilty of harboring violent intentions, of being prone to wild be­hav­ior, ­until proven other­wise (Welch et al. 2002). Thousands of underemployed, proud young men without families, who faced widespread discrimination, thus provided the social ground for ­these emerging friendship networks. In addition to a “subjective in-­between” of oral storytelling with trusted friends, in the early 2010s ­there was also an emerging body of Uyghur fiction and poetry that resonated with common experiences of Uyghur male alienation in the city. As in other urban Indigenous contexts (Furlan 2017), t­ hese written texts provided a shared temporal and spatial discursive frame and a way of staging the grief and rage of other depressed young men. As I began to show in Chapter 2, these textual artifacts offered me a broader framing method through which to start conversations about shared stories and friendship with Uyghur mi­grant men. As I conducted ethnography between 2014–15, I found that the relationship of young men to t­ hese novels and poems enabled an analytic that held the vio­lence of racialization and the palliative care of homosocial friendships in tension. In ways that w ­ ere similar to the effects of loss and mourning in the work of Renato Rosaldo (1993) and Charles Briggs (2014), the conditions of my research and its modes of expression forced me to adapt my ethnographic methodology. It took on the shape of anticolonial friendship, and drew into sharper focus the work of anthropology itself. Ablikim’s Stories The story Ablikim told Batur and me most often was of his detention in 2009. It happened when he was on a public bus traveling from his school—­which was in a predominantly Han neighborhood in the northern part of Ürümchi—­a few weeks ­after the large-­scale interethnic vio­lence in the city. As they ­were ­going through a checkpoint, he realized that he was the only Uyghur on the bus. Not only that, but he had a mustache, which marked him not as an urban Uyghur with a high level of Chinese-­language education but as a mi­grant from the countryside. His face could be read as overtly masculine and unassimilable in its difference relative to Han ­faces. He knew that, in the minds of many Friendship 143

Han he met, he looked like a suicide bomber. The police took one look at him and immediately forced him off the bus. He said, “At that time I ­didn’t even know what I said. I was just so terrified. I d ­ idn’t know what they would do to me.” The trauma of this experience gave him an unshakable feeling of fear. He said that he felt completely exposed and vulnerable. ­After that he realized that being a Uyghur in Xinjiang meant that his body could be taken at any time. Ablikim said his depression stemmed not only from his experience with policing but also from the apathy and discrimination of his coworkers at the school where he worked as a teacher. He said that the experience of being harassed humiliated, and isolated turned him into a “crazy person” (Uy: sarang). ­ fter I was put in the interrogation room for a ­couple of hours that time A in 2009, it took me years to feel normal again. Actually, I still ­don’t feel normal. That was the w ­ hole reason why I started hating that school and my job and why I eventually quit. It is so hard to get over t­hings like that. For the next year, I acted like a crazy person. I think I gave all of my coworkers a very bad impression of me. They thought I was some strange guy who was always ner­vous, always shy, never willing to talk or act in normal ways. He told Batur and me he found out ­later that his students and fellow teachers, who w ­ ere mostly Han, openly referred to him as the “Mustache Teacher” (Ch: Huzi Laoshi) ­behind his back. He said that perhaps for ­these reasons, and ­because he had no friends at the school, the administrators de­cided that he should be sent to the countryside as a po­liti­cal instruction “volunteer” (Ch: zhiyuanzhe)—­a practice that became a standard method of implementing colonial reeducation in rural Xinjiang post-2009 (Byler 2018b). As Ablikim put it: “­After I taught at that school in Ürümchi for two years, they sent me away to ‘volunteer.’ But in the end, I just quit. I ­couldn’t do it.” He hated being in the position of enacting colonial domination on other Uyghurs, forcing them to memorize party dogma and punishing them if they v­ iolated the rules. Yet b­ ecause ­there ­were few other possibilities to support his ­family back in the countryside and start his own f­amily, Ablikim felt an intense obligation to continue to work. Yet, at the same time, he hated himself and the way Uyghur farmers who w ­ ere forced to attend his po­liti­cal ideology classes looked at him as a “collaborator” or “traitor.”8 One of the hardest t­ hings about quitting my job was that most of my ­family was r­ eally upset with me. They felt like they had sacrificed a lot so that I could get that job, and that I w ­ asn’t being very grateful. But I 144  Chapter Four

r­ eally ­wasn’t very happy in that situation. I had no real role. It was just a fake government job [as a propaganda worker from the city]. T ­ here was no way that I could be happy ­doing it. So I quit that job. The reason Ablikim began studying chemistry in the first place was not in order to work as a teacher. Like many of his classmates, he saw science as the answer to overcoming the perceived “backwardness” (Ch: luohou) of Uyghur positions relative to mainstream Chinese society. Already in the 1980s—­before the market economy and mass media infrastructure had reached the Uyghur homeland—­science and engineering had become a primary focus of Chinese education and, thus, had become a central focus of the Uyghur-­language curriculum. Since the language of science was seen as universal and necessary for developing the nation, it became the preferred topic of study for both Han and Uyghurs. In opposition to the po­liti­cal rhe­toric that dominated the e­ arlier Maoist era, science came to be seen as the way of the ­future. In Xinjiang this push ­toward engineering became even more prominent as resource expropriation became the primary driver of the economy in the 1990s. As Ablikim plainly put it, “I got interested in chemistry ­because I thought it would lead to a good job in the oil industry.” But Ablikim also found solace in chemistry research; he learned to speak its language and took plea­sure in it. “­There is something about me that makes remembering rare facts about chemicals and compounds easy. I also ­really liked working in the lab and creating chemicals that had never been seen before. The colors that t­ hose compounds could create w ­ ere so strange and unnatural. I had never seen anything like it.” Like many young Uyghur students, Ablikim gained a strong feeling of self-­worth from mastering something as universal and modern as chemistry. For the first time in his life, he did not feel the limits of being a minority; with science he could fashion a self that seemed to have universal social value. As a scientist he had access to a world beyond language and skin color. When he was in the lab, he felt as though his primary position was that of a scientist. His ethnicity seemed as though it was no longer a disadvantage relative to his Han colleagues. Yet, despite the plea­sure and security he took in science, he found that outside of the lab his scientific skill had l­ ittle currency. Immediately a­ fter college, his ­uncle, who was a leader in a county-­level state-­owned utility com­pany in the countryside, pulled some strings to get Ablikim a job at a chemical factory on the outskirts of Ürümchi. Unlike the laboratory, which he had loved so much, this job required intense manual ­labor alongside Han mi­grant workers; it ­didn’t require any expertise at all. And Ablikim was one of the only Uyghurs Friendship 145

working for the com­pany. “When I worked at the chemical factory, I ­really felt as though ­there was no place for me. I worked at that factory for four months, but during that ­whole time I never felt comfortable. It was just too Han.” The same ­uncle then arranged a teaching position at a state-­run vocational school but again the same result. “At that school too, I never felt comfortable the w ­ hole time. On the surface every­one was always r­ eally nice to me; they never said anything bad to me. But I could always see in their eyes that they ­were judging me. They ­were thinking that I ­wasn’t qualified for the job. I felt this the ­whole time. And so I put on a fake persona too. I tried to act r­ eally nice all the time. ­Really agreeable. But it always felt fake to me.” For Ablikim, the experience of working for Han employers required him to give up too much of what he valued. In order to make himself marketable in the new environment, he felt he had to give up his attachment to devalued forms of Uyghur masculinity. The impossibility of developing what felt like au­then­tic relationships with his Han coworkers, the stress of teaching unmotivated students, coupled with the dispossessing effects of enclosure and ethno-­racialized evaluation forced him to reroute his life. The institutions that Ablikim encountered ­were oriented around Hanness. As Sara Ahmed points out, racialized institutions “take the shape of ‘what’ resides within them” (2006, 132). In t­ hese kinds of homogeneous spaces, bodies of the majority are “somatic norms” that make nonmajority bodies feel “ ‘out of place,’ like strangers” (Ahmed 2006, 133). As in racialized spaces elsewhere, the bodies of minoritized men in Xinjiang ­were framed as si­mul­ta­neously dependent and violent, inept and predatory (Kimmel 2004). Although Ablikim could never pass as Han, he was nevertheless called into ­these spaces that ­were built around the power and reach of Han bodies. When Ablikim entered t­ hese institutions, he told me he felt his body being s­ topped and searched over and over again not only by security guards at the entrance to the institutions but also by all the bureaucrats and other Han workers and students he encountered. Many of the stories he told me and Batur focused on this. He felt as though ­every conversation, ­every encounter in Chinese institutions was filled with questions: Who are you? What are you ­doing ­here? He felt as though he was being rejected by the institutions and was being forced to go back to Southern Xinjiang “where he belonged.” As a rural-­origin Uyghur law student told me: I saw ­really quickly [­after I began studying law] that Uyghurs w ­ ere charged much more heavi­ly than Han ­people for the same crime. In hospitals and in the court we often do not receive the same treatment as Han ­people. Often they cheated us, and made us pay more. So we always 146  Chapter Four

tried to avoid ­those places. Every­one knows this. The ­legal system and the health care system ­were not made for us. We just accept this. As in other contexts of racialization and impoverishment, Uyghurs saw state and Han-majority institutions as indifferent, exploitative, and violent spaces (Gupta 2012). Lauren Berlant uses the phrase “slow death” to describe the “physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of p ­ eople in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence” (2011, 95). For her, the key ­here is the way “mass physical attenuation” results from the vulnerability of social vio­lence and displacement. For Uyghurs, this feeling was not just a condition of cap­i­tal­ist exploitation and expropriation, as it was primarily in Berlant’s case. Instead, it was also a relationship of a deeper and broader epistemic and material colonial dispossession. For this reason, a “slow death” was experienced like a “subtraction”—­a physical wearing out and disappearance that defined their historical existence—by state-­capital directed institutions and corporations, and by surveillance systems carried out by police contractors and Han settlers. ­These systems of enclosure and devaluation prevented them from finding jobs or working their own land; blocked them from moving except ­under direct ­orders; forced them to watch state tele­ vi­sion, censor their speech, and proclaim their undying loyalty to the state; dictated what they could wear and how they cut their hair; and tracked their digital social network to determine who should be detained. The lack of solidity in knowing the truth of what was happening, the capabilities of the surveillance systems that ­were tracking them, and the apparent arbitrariness of who was chosen for detention placed the burden of narrating this pro­cess on the shoulders of the individual. ­There ­were no institutions that would help them assess the truth of what was occurring. Ablikim’s experiences w ­ ere thus often symptomatic of the experiences of someone attempting to live while being subtracted from social life, a theme I ­will return to in the final chapter of this book. The trauma of police harassment and losing his job transformed Ablikim. As with many young Uyghur men, the past five years of intensified discrimination and disillusionment triggered a defensiveness that pushed him t­ oward conflict escalation—­a kind of lashing out in order to grasp for agency. He told Batur and me a story over and over again about how sometime in 2013, four years a­ fter he was detained on the bus, he and another of his friends, Tursun, ­were walking in a market area near the train station when a Han policeman confronted them and asked to check their id cards. He said, “I told him, ‘Why Friendship 147

do you want to check our id cards? ­We’re not ­doing anything. Why ­don’t you check some Han ­people’s id cards?’ He immediately made us go with him to the police station. I ­wasn’t scared at all. Tursun was scared. But I ­wasn’t scared at all. I ­didn’t do anything wrong so why should I be scared of them? If they ­don’t re­spect me, why should I re­spect them?” ­After threatening them, eventually the police let them go. This incident was similar to numerous incidents I observed in which Ablikim and a wide range of other underemployed mi­grants confronted other ­people, both Uyghur and Han, over perceived slights or offenses. Beneath his placid expression, ner­vous eyes, and trembling hands, he carried a deep anger. Homosocial Friendship through Storytelling I suddenly realized that no m ­ atter how hard I tried I c­ ouldn’t figure out where my place was, where I was, or what street I was on. Not only this, but I ­didn’t ­really know which city I was in. The clarity of my thoughts gradually faded and I lost my perception of space. What country was I in? I gradually came to realize that I d ­ idn’t even know what planet I was on. I was lost in the infinite universe. Just then I realized that every­one becomes a homeless wanderer a­ fter they are born and has difficulty finding a proper place for themselves as soon as they touch the ground and let out their initial cry. They ­will spend their ­whole life trying to determine their position—­becoming anxious and griping about its vagueness. Every­one is a wanderer in space. —­From The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun As I got to know Ablikim better, I suggested that we should meet regularly to read and discuss Uyghur-­language urban fiction that represented Uyghur mi­grant life in the city. I had heard from other mi­grants that they had found reading Uyghur urban fiction and poetry illuminating. Perhaps ­because Ablikim was chronically underemployed and b­ ecause the two of us w ­ ere becoming close friends, he agreed to help guide me through t­ hese texts. The Uyghur-­language novel I suggested was called The Backstreets (2021) from a collection called The Big City by Perhat Tursun—­one of the most provocative con­temporary writers of Uyghur con­temporary life. Rather than using lit­er­a­ture as a tool of moral instruction, Tursun writes about social vio­lence, ­mental illness, and sexual desire (Byler 2018c). Since Uyghur lit­er­a­ture was heavi­ly influenced by Chinese socialist-­realism, as well as an Indigenous tradition of epic storytelling that privileges didactic and heroic Uyghur moral instruction (Thum 2014), this modernist approach 148  Chapter Four

to lit­er­a­ture was not well received. Instead, historical fiction that highlighted the exploits of the modern found­ers of the Uyghur nation as well as satirical fiction informed by socialist-­realist moralism became wildly popu­lar with Uyghur readers. Since Tursun, instead, wrote in conversation with Western authors such as Ralph Ellison, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus about traditionally taboo subjects, many Uyghur intellectuals distanced themselves from his work. It was precisely for t­ hese reasons that Ablikim had not read his work previously. Since it was the first time for both of us, our encounter with the warrens of The Backstreets was a shared experience of reading and interpreting. I also chose this text purposefully since it staged the experience of an alienated Uyghur mi­grant in a Chinese city. As I discussed it with Ablikim, and subsequently with dozens of other young men over the course of my fieldwork, I came to understand that, while it staged much of what I was witnessing in the lives of so many young men, the absence of homosocial friendships in the text made the narrative deeply troubling for them. Ablikim told me that “the difference between me and the person in the novel is that he has no friends, that is why he goes crazy.” The Backstreets follows several days in the life of an unnamed Uyghur man who comes to Ürümchi from the countryside ­after finding a job in a state-­ owned publishing h ­ ouse. As we read through the story, Ablikim and I began to understand the protagonist’s estrangement in his Han-­dominated work environment; we read how the young man was trying to escape the vio­lence and poverty of his rural village; he used mathe­matics as a language to transcend his minority status; and we saw how his coworkers rejected him and he slowly descended into ­mental illness. As we read, we noticed the way the protagonist translated the Chinese world around him in his mind. The character in the novel never quoted anyone speaking Chinese directly. Instead, he used Uyghur words and imagery to reconstruct a Chinese world as a vivid Uyghur world full of fog, cold, sewage, beauty, lust, and loathing. The smog of the world made the ­future appear bleak and hazy, but it also held some potentiality as the protagonist wandered the city while dreaming of the past in the countryside and holding out hope for a place in the city. As we read, Ablikim found striking parallels between the novel and the mi­ grant life he knew. We sat close to each other, our knees touching, in the corner of a Turkish teahouse reading out loud. The soundtrack of Uyghur folk ­music playing over the speakers in the bustling shop, and the raucous laughter of young mi­grants using the ­free Wi-Fi to watch videos on their smartphones formed the rhythm of our conversations. We spent hours discussing how disorienting life in the city was for young ­people who had just come from the Friendship 149

countryside. Over bowls of rice pilaf (Uy: polu), hand-­pulled noodles (Uy: laghman), and endless cups of sweet Turkish tea, we talked about how in the city young mi­grants needed to develop a new sense of direction; how the geo­graph­ i­cal features they had used to or­ga­nize their world appeared scrambled. Mountains that used to be to the north ­were now to the southwest. Houses in the countryside ­were often built in reference to Mecca—­a wall forming the spot where p ­ eople prayed. He felt it was hard to locate oneself in the city since the orientation of apartment buildings was rectilinear and dictated by the grid of the streets. As Perhat Tursun wrote in The Backstreets: I lost my sense of direction when I first came to the city. Since I was a kid I always thought the higher side was the north and the lower side was the south, and ­because of this I always gave myself a feeling of disorientation. Even ­after I realized that my method for determining the direction was wrong, I ­couldn’t correct it. My small village was located on the southern slope of the mountains. As you walked to the south, the land gradually descended into a scrubby marshland. When the sheep we ­were herding ­were grazing in the marshland, I would lie in the grass with my head resting ­toward the north and feel as though it was higher than the rest of my body. This feeling which I got from my birthplace became a permanent princi­ple of my constitution. It grasped me very firmly and prevented me from correctly understanding the geo­graph­i­cal situation and cardinal directions of other places. (26) For Ablikim and the protagonist of The Backstreets, this sense of disorientation was complicated by the material and digital enclosure of the city. Unlike con­temporary Chinese cities outside of Xinjiang, in Ürümchi ­every com­pany, ­every school, ­every mosque, ­every police station, e­ very park, ­every residential area was surrounded by walls and gates. T ­ here was no way to enter t­ hese spaces without the tacit consent of the police contractors who, along with automated camera systems, watched who came and went. It was at ­these bottlenecks that Uyghur young men ­were most frequently detained and questioned. As Ablikim put it: Gatekeepers in the city are always trying to exert their authority over other p ­ eople. Even though they know and you know that they have no real power other than their control over the gate, they w ­ ill still often demand that you show a lot of re­spect for them. And u ­ nless you manage to develop a good relationship with them, they ­will never help you solve any prob­lems you have with the bureaucracy of the place they are 150  Chapter Four

guarding. They ­will always tell you “It’s not my prob­lem.” They are one of the most frustrating aspects of living in the city. But p ­ eople still think they are necessary. Most of them think that a place is not secure without them. I c­ an’t believe they are treating us [Uyghurs] like this. This is a modern developed city of over three million p ­ eople, but they are still trying to herd us like animals. What do they think they w ­ ill ­really ac9 complish by ­doing this? Prior to the protests of 2009, many Uyghur mi­grant workers, or underemployed schoolteachers like Ablikim, lived in tightly built neighborhoods of gray, single-­story courtyard (Uy: hoyla öy; Ch: pingfang) housing. This housing, which was primarily owned by Uyghur and Hui mi­grants, was often built in an ad hoc manner without the requisite l­ egal paperwork. In the years that followed the eruption of vio­lence and suppression in 2009, much of this housing was demolished and replaced with government housing for documented mi­ grants in high-­rise apartment buildings. Neighborhoods with a high percentage of Uyghur residents that ­were not demolished ­were radically transformed through the introduction of new walls blocking off alleyways and the installation of tens of thousands of closed-­circuit surveillance cameras, which ­were monitored from command centers and ­People’s Con­ve­nience Police Stations in ­every city block. The policing contractors Ablikim complained about ­were part of this security apparatus—­reporting any suspicious activity directly to the state police. They made Ablikim feel as though even living in the Uyghur parts of the city was no longer ­really safe. As noted in the introduction to this book, the scholar Pun Ngai (2005) has developed an analytic for understanding the way the gendered and rural origins of Han mi­grant ­women in Shenzhen often resulted in a negative intersectionality. In a similar dispossessing intersectionality, the criminalized, gendered, ethno-­racial positioning and rural origins of young Uyghur men acted as an intensifier of social vio­lence.10 Their bodies justified the massive build-­out of detention facilities. In their subtraction, they offered numerous forms of capital accumulation: spaces open for Han settlement, the promise of commodified security technology that could be exported along the New Silk Road, and jobs for hundreds of thousands of police. Even as we w ­ ere reading The Backstreets together, Ablikim’s feelings of insecurity occasionally interrupted our reading just as they seemed to interrupt the thoughts of the protagonist of the book. On one occasion, we met at Ablikim’s apartment in a government housing proj­ect near Ürümchi’s South Bus Station. Being together in that space had an effect on us since it was a Uyghur-­dominated Friendship 151

area that was tightly controlled by police contractors, checkpoints, and camera systems. Up ­until two weeks prior, Ablikim’s cousin had been living with him. Since Ablikim’s cousin did not have the requisite documentation, neighborhood security officers had entered his home ­every few nights to check on the situation. Ablikim said that when they came, they thought I was hiding something, so they searched all the rooms and looked ­under all the beds. Once they even demanded that I let them look at my computer. I was like, what the hell! You d ­ on’t know anything about me, but you think I’m some sort of criminal. I asked them if they had some sort of warrant that gave them the right to demand this sort of ­thing. And this made them ­really mad. But I was furious. What the hell! It is bad enough that they come ­here to check on us all the time, but then they try to push us around like this as well. What the hell! As he spoke, Ablikim, who was normally so quiet and withdrawn, became ­really animated. He was pacing around. He normally never swore, but now he was interjecting curse words into e­ very sentence. The invasion of his digital life, the mapping of his social network, had the effect of forcing him to retreat further into himself and at the same time lash out, flailing at the system that was closing in on his social life. A few minutes a­ fter he told me this story, the buzz­er from the front door of his building rang. Both of us looked at each other. He said, “What the hell! I’m not answering.” My mind raced as I thought about how I would explain what we ­were ­doing—an American researcher and Uyghur mi­grant alone in a Uyghur apartment—­when the police contractors started knocking on the door. The knock never came. It must have just been neighbors who forgot their key to the building. We had merely been interpellated as disciplined subjects of the state. In an intensification of the way someone walking down the street is hailed when they hear a police officer yell “Hey you!” into a crowd—to use Althusser’s famous example (1971)—­with the buzz­er the enclosure system had invaded even the most intimate spaces of Ablikim’s life. In the span of several minutes, an intimate conversation between friends was shattered by the call; for a second we ­were terrified. Then we turned to each other and said we ­were ­going to refuse this appeal. We de­cided in a split second to stand as friends and ignore the police. This moment offers a win­dow into the way psychic stress gets allocated to the least power­ful in the racialized politics of Uyghur dispossession, and the way bonds of care that are built through storytelling produce forms of anticolonial friendship. Just as in the book—­where the protagonist was pushed 152  Chapter Four

around by even the Han janitors in his work unit—­Ablikim lived in a state of constant paranoia and fear. He said, “Now you can see what my life is ­really like.” This moment also shows how intersubjective relations can refuse colonial forms of subjectification. The self can also be formed, at least partially, through fragile, yet essential, bonds of friendship. This is not to say that Ablikim did not also continue to seek his own individuated forms of protection by claiming owner­ship over his time and space. Despite the inherent threat he felt from the enclosure system, like the main figure in The Backstreets, Ablikim often sought shelter from the anonymity of the city. He tried to fight his boredom and depression by walking the city as an anonymous observer. “When I feel depressed I just walk. Sometimes I walk most of the day, just trying to get lost in what ­people are ­doing or noticing how ­things look. I never did this when I was growing up in the countryside b­ ecause we w ­ ere always too busy. ­People ­there just work hard and then come home and eat and sleep.” As the P ­ eople’s War on Terror intensified though, the fear of being noticed by the police made him want to walk in cir­cuits where he could blend in with other Uyghurs. The anonymity of being unrecognized made him feel more secure. While he was walking, Ablikim did in­ter­est­ing ­things with the scenes he observed. Just like the main character in the novel, he let the feeling of the city take on a life of its own. He liked collecting phrases from T-­shirts ­people wore and billboards he saw around the city. He often wrote down Chinese and En­glish phrases he saw like: “­Can’t tame me,” “Fast or last,” “Hey, love me,” “I am lost,” “Think, think, think.” He said thinking about them made him laugh. It gave him the feeling that he was narrating the city; getting lost in the way its images created a kaleidoscope of feeling. Of course, in the end, the sense of agency he received from reading the city was often met with a sense of paralysis since the inevitable enclosure proj­ect that was underway seemed to make it impossible for him to find a place for himself in the city. Often walking the streets was not enough for him to overcome his boredom and depression. He said: I just worry all the time about my f­ uture. It makes me r­ eally depressed. Mostly it has to do with my work. I’ve been trying for such a long time to find a real job, but I just c­ an’t find one. The longer it goes the more apathetic I become. I completely understand why someone could commit suicide. So much of the time life feels meaningless, and the parts of life that I enjoy are so rare. It was in t­ hese moments of “meaninglessness” (Uy: ehmiyetsizlik) that Ablikim turned to a resource that the protagonist in the novel did not seem to have: friendship. Friendship 153

Friendship as a Way of Living with Dispossession In The Backstreets the main protagonist continuously mutters the phrase “No one in this city recognizes me, so it’s impossible for me to be friends or even enemies with anyone.” When I asked the author of the novel, Perhat Tursun, why this phrase became the refrain of the book, Perhat said that the feeling of invisibility was something that gave the protagonist a “sense of security.” I took this to mean that, when the protagonist muttered this u ­ nder his breath, he was reassuring himself, ultimately, of his existential well-­being. But, of course, in the novel the protagonist also actively seeks out recognition from ­people he meets on the street. He wants to be seen as a carrier of knowledge; he wants to be loved and wanted. The relative freedom of anonymous urban life was thus undercut by the atomizing effect of disconnection and loneliness. As much as Ablikim identified with the story in the novel, reading it and telling his own story gave him a way of highlighting the differences between the suicidal trajectory of the fictional protagonist and his own life path. Without his friendships, Ablikim said, he would have become lost in the city. That was why he followed Batur across the country first to Beijing and then back to Ürümchi. Ablikim said that part of the reason he and Batur became so close was ­because they had both tried to opt out of the system of the productive economy and Uyghur social reproduction in certain ways: It is hard to find friends in the city. If you are a mi­grant without an official place, it is difficult to meet p ­ eople. When I came t­ here ­were fifty of us in the same class, we w ­ ere all the same age, we all had the same status so it was easy to make friends. But ­after college, it became ­really hard to relate to my old classmates who gave up on being f­ ree and took government jobs as teachers and police back in the countryside. We ­don’t have anything in common anymore. Now the first questions they ask are: Why a­ ren’t you married? Why ­don’t you get a real job? ­Those of us who ­haven’t found answers to ­those questions just hang out with each other. This is why Batur and I are such good friends. But ­there is more to the closeness between Batur and Ablikim than simply this. Like many young Uyghurs from the countryside, Batur himself had experienced devastating loss. As a child his ­father was killed in a street fight with other Uyghur men. His ­father’s murderer was never brought to justice and from his m ­ other and siblings he learned how to keep on living. For him, t­ here ­were lots of reasons not to give up. Growing up in a small town in Southern Xinjiang, he had developed a close bond with his elementary school classmate 154  Chapter Four

Ablikim. They had shared every­thing. They had shared meals with each other ­every day for years. They had often discussed their dreams of moving to the city and pursuing fame and fortune. They ­imagined that they would be “life and liver” friends for the rest of their lives. Once, when Batur ­stopped by while Ablikim and I ­were reading The Backstreets in our corner of the Turkish coffee shop, we started talking about Batur’s relationship to the city. As was his habit, Batur spoke in an off-­the-­cuff monologue. He said: I like to think that life in the city is a joke, that every­thing about it is funny. If you approach it from this ­angle, ­there is no reason to get frustrated or angry in reaction to it. Of course, t­here are some t­hings like sitting in a police station waiting for paperwork to be pro­cessed that can be infuriating. So that is why I just say, fuck it, and avoid ­those situations at all costs. I ­don’t even have an official Ürümchi resident permit [Ch: hukou] even though it says I do on my id card. I’m totally fine with this. If they ­don’t know about me, why should I tell them? The less they know the better. And since it says Ürümchi on my id, it is never a prob­lem when I travel in the South. I run like this not in order to achieve something—­just as a practice of living. If you keep moving, the meaninglessness of life c­ an’t get you down. T ­ here is no meaning in life, but what are you g­ oing to do, kill yourself? No. I have to believe that parts of life are fun. And that is why I keep on living. At this point he paused and motioned to Ablikim who was sitting on the opposite side of the ­table. He said: “He tried to kill himself twice, or at least talked ­really seriously about it. But I always told him, why are you talking like this? You have to live your life. Work at it.” Ablikim did not say anything in response. He just smiled. I turned to Batur and asked him what his friendships meant to him when he feels as though life is meaningless. He said: Friendships are impor­tant ­because they let you sympathize with other ­people and share each other’s pain. Friendship is what helps you get through t­hose times in life when nothing seems to make sense. Friendships ­don’t drag you down, they build you up. They are dif­fer­ent from the obligations you have to your families. Some friends ­will fuck you up, so you have to stop hanging out with them. You c­ an’t do this with ­family. I ­don’t have to like every­thing my ­family does, but I have to accept it. And just let it go. This i­ sn’t the same as my relationships with my friends. Friends build each other up. They help each other learn how to better pace themselves when they run in the system. It’s about rhythm and breath control. Friendship 155

For Batur and Ablikim, friendship was something that prevented them from panicking. It helped them to remember to keep breathing. Without it, life in the city often seemed impossible. Their families back in the countryside could not provide the support they needed. In the city they needed “life and liver” friends in order to figure out their lives. When Batur talked Ablikim down from the ledge, he did it by making him think about how to keep moving forward. They talked about philosophy and argued about religion; they talked about living honestly and criticized Uyghur pop culture icons. They used illegalized vpns to watch American movies and read unfiltered news. But mostly what Batur did was more concrete than that. As with many of the pairs of “life and liver” friends I met, they felt that sharing food was essential to their well-­being. If a day passed without sharing a meal, both of them would begin to feel lonely. So Batur made Ablikim get out of the ­house and share a meal with him nearly e­ very day. Their friendship often centered on the uncompensated ­labor of supporting each other’s economic activities. On numerous occasions, Batur quit jobs himself so that he could help Ablikim find work. He said he “had to do it.” It was what needed to be done and so he just did it. Ablikim’s life was part of his own life, so he did not see it as some sort of major sacrifice. It was part of the logic of their friendship. In many ways, Ablikim saw his life reflected in The Backstreets. Yet, unlike the protagonist in the novel, he and many of the other young Uyghur men I interviewed had friends around them who shared both their instability and their aggrievement. Their attachment to the sociality of the countryside had not been as deeply cut off as it had been for the figure in the novel. They knew that it was better to be vulnerable together than alone. The feelings of vulnerability that came from the control of the state, the policing of male mi­grant Uyghur bodies, and the shame that came from the lack of a stable social role in the city ­shaped how they cared for each other. The closeness of their friendship gave their lives a sense of stability that would not have other­wise been ­there. ­There is a Uyghur saying that describes the sorts of obligations their relationship entailed: “A friend’s friendship is revealed the day tragedy befalls you” (Uy: dostning dostluqi bashqa kün chüshkende biliner). One way of interpreting this is that friendship has the power to mitigate a failure in the pre­sent and sustain a horizon of possibility. What is particularly intriguing ­here is that it was the ongoing practice of friendship itself that gave weight and promise to the ­future of their intersubjective narrative; Batur himself did not have the power to give Ablikim’s dreams possibility. But the obligations of friendship do have a certain agency. The subjective in-­between was what gave them their ­will to live. Despite their collective dispossession, being 156  Chapter Four

together in their predicament gave them more than the sum of their individual narratives. It allowed them to continue a palliative form of Uyghur communal social reproduction, in narrating their collective story, even as Uyghur sociality faced new forms of enclosure. As in ­others spaces of con­temporary colonial domination, life ­under constant threat had the effect of bringing their ethical and experiential intracorporeality into sharper focus. The exposure of life to uncertainty was what allowed them to share each other’s wounding and dispossession so directly. Vio­lence, ­after all, hurts the most when it threatens ­those close to you and you are powerless to do anything about it (Jackson 2002, 39). On June 29, 2017, back in the United States, I received a final message via email from Ablikim. He said: “It’s been a long time since we last talked. I am sorry to say I had to delete all foreigners from my WeChat friends list for security reasons.” He said he had returned to his village near Kashgar ­because his parents had arranged for him to marry a ­woman from his neighborhood. Several months l­ ater, Ablikim’s “life and liver friend,” Batur, who had remained in the city, said he had lost touch with him. He feared that Ablikim had been detained and taken to one of the many reeducation camps that ­were built in early 2017. It was likely that he had been deemed a preterrorist ­because he had used a vpn to download movies and read the news. Maybe the police also found out that he had fasted during Ramadan. Several months ­later Perhat Tursun, the author of the novel that had meant so much to Ablikim and dozens of other young mi­grants, was also taken. In the space of several months, many of the intimate homosocial friendships I had been tracking over the past seven years ­were shattered. Batur was terrified. Like many other young men who had lost their friends to the camps, he felt guilty b­ ecause he was somehow still f­ ree. He felt emasculated and powerless. Many of my Uyghur friends had trou­ble sleeping at night as they worried for their friends. They saw them calling out to them in their dreams. The severing of their “life and liver” friendships si­mul­ta­neously made them more vulnerable to state terror and more committed to the strug­g le against it. Anthropology as the Work of Anticolonial Friendship The anticolonial friendships I found among Uyghur mi­grant men are significant ­because they demonstrate that colonized men can define significant aspects of their subjectivity through friendships. Much popu­lar press discussion of the devastating effects of Chinese counterterrorism and colonization in Uyghur society situates Uyghurs as largely passive victims of ­human rights abuse. My research with Uyghur young men taught me to think carefully about Friendship 157

the ways they actively contested their colonization. They showed me how storytelling opened up obligations of friendship, and over time, built rhythms of palliative care that drew them into bonds of attachment and intimacy. The stories inspired by moments of vulnerability and terror allowed listeners to attach themselves to the life story of another. This pro­cess recalls the beautiful image of intimate care described by Juan-­David Nasio (2004 in Briggs 2014) of an ivy attaching itself to the cracks in a stone wall. The cracks in the masculine self allow the listener to attach themself to the spaces where the other needed them most, helping them to keep ­going. This is what Batur was alluding to when he said friendship was about helping the other to maintain rhythm and breath-­control within the system. Discussing stories of alienation with Ablikim and ­others drew me—­a white, American, male anthropologist—­into tight bonds of friendship and care with Ablikim and many other young men. Together we engaged in the palliative care of telling anticolonial stories of strug­g le. While reading The Backstreets, Ablikim began to merge his own story with the narrative of the novel. As he spoke he became the center of a narrative about colonial Ürümchi, a story about coming of age and a broken journey. Ablikim’s story was about dispossession and the friendship it demanded. The anomie of city life, the way that it felt at times to be absolutely ignored and then suddenly to be noticed and predetermined as guilty, had made him feel as though he was nearing the unfreedom of social death. He felt emasculated and disempowered by his fellow teachers, students, passengers on the bus, the police, and society in general. It was only his male friends, his jan-­jiger dostlar, who made him feel as though he could keep on living. Ablikim’s story, and the stories that dozens of other mi­grants shared with me, demonstrates that subjects also reproduce their subjectivity through intersubjective exchange with friends rather than being made a subject and realizing one’s own subjectivity solely in relation to po­liti­cal power and economic productivity. This is more than a po­liti­cal or economic relationship of power. As Veena Das and Bhrigupati Singh argue, this is an ethical relationship of care: ethical relations that both escape and build po­liti­cal power relations (Das 2007; B. Singh 2015). ­These are relations that call into being the way one ­ought to care for the self and the other. They form the basis of the reproduction of society itself. As Scofield notes, in con­temporary colonial situations, relations of care allow Indigenous men to find modes of being “which [they] can embody, which [they] can pull [themselves] into” (quoted in Innes and Anderson 2015, 253). They offer a pro­cessual response to colonial vio­lence. If given space to flourish, decolonial masculinities can be regenerated to center not on vio­ 158  Chapter Four

lence ­toward ­women, or even t­ oward colonizers, but t­ oward protecting others through practices of care and listening. This chapter has demonstrated that decolonial masculinities are a pro­cessual practice of friendship and listening among Uyghur men. Other studies have shown that such a practice can si­mul­ ta­neously strive to produce egalitarian relationships between w ­ omen and men (Allison Piché in Innes and Anderson 2015, 203; Messerschmidt 2012). This, in turn, has the potential to position ­peoples of all genders to embrace the role of protectors of traditional knowledge and of each other (Gregory Scofield in Innes and Anderson 2015, 251). It follows that the anticolonial friendships I found among Uyghur men w ­ ere the beginnings of a decolonial practice—­even as the flourishing of this practice was enclosed and subtracted. Anticolonial friendships take on par­tic­u­lar importance when confronting emergent colonial vio­lence. As has been frequently noted in the lit­er­a­ture on post-­traumatic depression, language often breaks down when attempting to tell stories of violent experience (Das 2003). The numbness of trauma makes the emotional ­labor of putting words to feelings daunting, particularly in the presence of strangers. It was hard for Ablikim to say why he felt the way he did, and difficult for o­ thers to recognize it for what it was. Instead, p­ eople often noticed that his hands shook involuntarily and that he seemed withdrawn. By speaking his story in a narrative form and in dialogue with The Backstreets, he actively took “charge of his . . . ​memories” (Jackson 2002, 56). That is to say, Ablikim had called me into more than a mere empathetic or sympathetic understanding of his emotional pain; rather, he had asked me, as he had asked Batur, to listen to his pain and participate in it—­a therapeutic comportment that Robert Stolorow refers to as “emotional dwelling” (2014, 80). In d ­ oing so, we entered into a dialogue that “dwelt” on his trauma, and attempted to articulate how unendurable it felt and thus moved forward in figuring out his own life path. By telling me his story, Ablikim was telling his story to someone other than Batur for the first time. His intersubjective framing of trust was thus expanding. In The Soul at Work, Franco Berardi (2009) points out that one way to cope with depression is through friendship. Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Berardi suggests that antimelancholic friendship means “sharing a sense, sharing a view and a common rhythm” (215). The dialectic of slowness and terror that comes with dispossession has the effect of intensifying t­ hese sorts of friendships, and if the stories that emerge are able to “re-­focalize, to deterritorialize the mind and expressive flow,” they can lead to new forms of care for the self (216). If depression is based on the “hardening of one’s existential refrain” (216), then the therapy that responds to it is an opening up ­toward Friendship 159

the other. This approach resonates with Ivy Schweitzer’s recent formulation of feminist friendship as a pro­cess of making selves vulnerable to each other while at the same time recognizing the difference of the other (Schweitzer 2016, 357–58). She argues that, through shared affection, ­people who may other­wise be alone can make life endurable. As Michel Foucault noted in his ­later work (1986), friendship becomes a way of life when ­people begin to think with another, frame their norms with re­spect to another, and allow another to shape their sense of self. As I saw dozens of friends dis­appear along with an estimated 1.5 million ­others into the reeducation camps since 2017, the emotional l­abor of thinking about their lives and their ­futures has become increasingly difficult. What does anticolonial masculinity look and feel like in a time of mass disappearances and isolation of Uyghur men? How w ­ ill Ablikim protect his f­ uture? ­These are open questions to which I have no satisfying responses, yet what Uyghur mi­grants taught me was that anticolonial practice begins with the obligation of listening to and protecting friends. As Charles Briggs (2014) has argued, in some contexts and in differential ways, “anthropology is the work of mourning” (335). He suggests that anthropologists can be interpellated by intersecting modes of knowledge production and the poetics and practices of the communities they engage. Anthropological contributions to the work of mourning, or in my case, the work of anticolonial friendship, are ­shaped from the start by the way participating in the community means being pulled into a strug­g le with larger social forces. Anthropology as the work of anticolonial friendship calls ethnographers ­toward ways of engaging with pro­cesses of dispossession, domination, and occupation. My interest h ­ ere is less in practices that are reactive to colonial structures of oppression, and more on the productive action of intersubjective friendship practices themselves. ­There is no single way of cultivating such friendships—­dif­fer­ent circumstances demand dif­fer­ent responses—­but I have found that listening to the stories and sharing the rhythms of colonized ­others can produce an intersubjective being together that fosters anticolonial practice. Importantly, such friendships cannot erase power differentials; they do not offer solutions. Instead, as Leela Gandhi (2006) has argued, anticolonial friendships produce a shared affective comportment and politics that invites the stranger to the self while at the same time refusing the colonial impulse to assimilation. That is to say, anticolonial friendships produce a self-­reflexive methodology for engaging with the colonized ­others as an accomplice in their grief and rage. Framing anthropology as the work of anticolonial friendship evokes both the way that ethnographers can be caught up in webs of friendship and how they can be taught to be a friend: 160  Chapter Four

how their work as storytellers and listeners can build relationships even as they are taught themselves how to build them. This can help anthropologists to think with more complexity about the way they participate in and observe a community, and the types of ethical obligations that are required by this involvement. By examining the specificities of how stories ­were told and care practices ­were enacted, this chapter has explored how retelling stories of trauma and dispossession allows marginalized ­people to rethink the value of their social position and maintain an intersubjective momentum even as the institutions of the colonial city continually repel them. The work I was called to perform required me to rethink the value of stories and listening, and the obligations that friendships require. As in Renato Rosaldo’s and Charles Briggs’s work, I found that my research proj­ect pulled me at least partially out of the distance of scholarly knowledge production into a practice of friendship that produced its own forms of knowledge. When I began to develop a regular practice of meeting Uyghur friends on a daily basis I was pulled into a lifeworld that was not my own and exposed to the social powers that laid young men bare and interpellated by their strategies for coping with them. I was asked to listen to stories as part of their effort to hold their world together at least for a time. I was obligated to participate in creating a pre­sent that would challenge the inevitable disappearance of Ablikim and hundreds of thousands of other young men into the camps. Writing this book is in its own partial way a practice of anticolonial friendship. The partiality and momentary successes of making pre­sents and f­ utures come alive with story and laughter built a cascade of images and memories of a lifeworld on the brink of erasure. In other words, ­there is also a role for ethnographic practice in the work of anticolonial friendship. This, also, is the work of anthropology: listening to and writing the stories of friends in order to stage them for readers to know that they ­matter. Conclusion By shifting the frame of the narrative of colonial-­capitalist vio­lence away from the authority of state capital-­enabled institutions, surveillance systems, settlers, and police contractors ­toward the work it takes for the colonized to reproduce their existence, The Backstreets gave Ablikim a new way of speaking and being heard. He said, “I feel as though this book was written just for me.” It resonated so strongly with him b­ ecause the feelings in the narrative w ­ ere his own feelings; the voice of the protagonist of the book felt like his own voice. Since public media was controlled by the state, ­there ­were very few public stagFriendship 161

ings of the experience of terror capitalism available for young Uyghurs to think about. They knew the stories of trauma told by their friends, but they had not seen ­those stories in print or on tele­vi­sion. Reading Perhat Tursun’s The Backstreets was thus a breakthrough for Ablikim. He felt as though he had found a friend in the novel. Framed in this way, he felt as though his own life had been given cultural form and substance. He felt again as though his life counted, not just to Batur, but also to a listener and reader like me. In this sense, the positive ethics of homosocial friendships and storytelling enabled a new, if fleeting, anticolonial politics of friendship. The story of Ablikim’s life ­after 2009 was more than just his own. What I have tried to foreground h ­ ere is the way Ablikim’s story was not contained by his own singular experience but was also contingent on Batur’s strug­g les to keep him alive. Perhat Tursun’s narrative of Uyghur experiences of Chinese social vio­lence also provided a way of highlighting and retelling his own story in a way that “counted” (Butler 2009) outside of the enclosures of the terror-­ capitalist system. By making his life and the vio­lence he faced intelligible and grievable, reading The Backstreets made Ablikim’s life feel “real” again. The co-­ constitutive ethical imperatives of storytelling and friendship thus gave him a way of both coping with aggrievement and finding a way forward in the ongoing saga of his life in the city. The larger point I am trying to make ­here, then, is that the work of reproducing anticolonial sociality ­under conditions of dispossession is not contained in a single life. In addition to this, Ablikim’s life story also demonstrates how the par­tic­u­lar form of Uyghur vulnerability in the “raging” (Uy: dawalghup) atmosphere of Ürümchi can be lived. For young Uyghurs who ­were living through a pro­cess of subtraction, storytelling and friendship could be a ­matter of life and death. The imminence of threat made them strug­g le for “life and liver” friends as though their dreams of tomorrow depended on it. As a result, the orientation of young Uyghur men t­ oward male friendships was being intensified and an ethics of homosocial friendship was becoming a central focus of their lives in the city.

162  Chapter Four

5  Minor Politics

In the early 2000s, cold, gray poisonous fogs, win­dows covered in soot, and dirty snow defined the long Ürümchi winters. It was an urban experience that gave its three million inhabitants their grit, their common sense. It was an atmosphere from which this population of mi­grant urbanites, both Han and Uyghur, cast their aspirations. T ­ here was also a sense of flow and emergence in the midst of this mundane atmosphere of cold and smog. As Gilles Deleuze notes, in e­ very city the complex arrangement of ­people, infrastructures, and climates “take the city out of its confines” (quoted in Simone 2003, 26). B ­ ehind the billboards on unclaimed land in the hills that surround the city, Uyghur mi­grants attempted to carve out a place for themselves. The “­Great Fogs” of Ürümchi winters taught them how to be si­mul­ta­neously vis­i­ble and invisible.

figure 5.1. The informal settlement of Uyghur mi­grant workers on the hills known as Yamalike. Image by Chen Ye.

The fogs announced the biopo­liti­cal priorities of the industrialized city; they warmed the lives that had been deemed productive in the state’s developmental scheme and seemed to hide the devalued lives in the informal settlements at the margins of the city. Over the next de­cade, as the city embarked on a new plan of branding itself as a techno-­political “smart city,” many neighborhoods of Uyghur mi­grants would be reduced to rubble. Over the same duration, the lives of Uyghur mi­grants would come to be seen with a new intensity by surveillance systems. Urban renewal and “greening” (Ch: lühua) the city became euphemisms for urban banishment (Appadurai 2000; Roy 2019), a part of the broader enclosure and devaluation pro­cesses that ­were directed at Uyghur and other Turkic minorities. In 2004, a year ­after I first visited the city, it was precisely the “­Great Fogs” of invisibility that invigorated Chen Ye, a largely self-­trained Han mi­grant photographer, to wander the city. He noted, “I’m haunted by Ürümchi’s ­great winter ‘fogs.’ I use up roll a­ fter roll of film . . . ​and still I feel invigorated by this frozen world. When I experience it, I feel awake to the world and I reimagine the ­people and the t­ hings I saw.” Chen Ye initially climbed the hills in order to get a bird’s-­eye view of the city, but while he was ­there he saw another world up above the city. ­Those neighborhoods of Uyghur mi­grant workers obfuscated by the leaden clouds on the barren Yamalike Mountain overlooking Ürümchi 164  Chapter Five

seemed to be out of step with the rest of the city. Talking about the past eleven years of his documentary photography proj­ect in 2015, he said: I ­didn’t start out wanting to take pictures of minorities. This ­wasn’t my goal at all. I wanted to take pictures of life in the city. This is just what I saw up ­there on the margins of the city. This was the scenery [Ch: fengjing]. P ­ eople are also scenery. You ­can’t ignore ­people, or trash, or anything that is ­there. I had no real purpose in taking ­these pictures. ­There was nothing b­ ehind it. I was just drawn to this sort of life. Of course, through the pro­cess I learned a lot about t­ hese ­people’s lives. Many of them ­were just ­really poor ­people who came to the city to try to make some money peddling clothes or fruit. At times they made some money, but other times they ­really had nothing. For ten years, Chen Ye, a Han mi­grant who was raised in a ­family of Anhui settlers on a paramilitary farming colony (Ch: bingtuan) made up of veterans of the Chinese Civil War in Northern Xinjiang’s high Gobi Desert, spent his winters with ­these Uyghur mi­grants. He watched the f­ aces of ­children harden and turn into a flat blankness. “They w ­ ere just like wild grass, dancing crazily in the wind, then gradually they grew up and became profoundly ­silent,” he noted. Looking through his archive of around thirty thousand images, I was struck by the way he has strug­g led to convey the fragility of their lives in the midst of pro­cesses of dispossession. “Often I’m not capable of capturing their image,” Chen Ye said. “­Those ­people have under­gone tortuous, unimaginable experiences and still find themselves in extremely bleak circumstances.” It was in this atmosphere that Chen Ye opened up questions regarding the ethics of witnessing the enclosure and domination of o­ thers, and how such questions created the conditions for a new minor politics. In this chapter, I argue that Chen Ye’s embodiment of the figure of both a Han rural-­to-­urban mi­grant, or “blind wanderer,” and a “long-­term Xinjiang resident” (Ch: mangliu and lao Xinjiang, terms I ­will analyze in detail below) enables me to hold in tension contradictions between the larger social concerns of colonial capitalism and its refusal. His documentary photography practice and its relationship to a colonial gaze both respond to and refuse con­ temporary terror capitalism. In the final sections of this chapter, I describe how his images offer evidence of his politics, but I do not attempt to center his politics in his photo­graphs. His politics instead arise from his practice and the way he implicates himself alongside the lives of his subjects. His Uyghur friends viewed him as one of them—as a Uyghur “accomplice” or “kin” relation (Uy: egeshküchi; qarandash).1 To them, he was more than a photographer, a po­liti­cal Minor Politics  165

activist, a Han mi­grant, a lao Xinjiang settler. B ­ ecause of this, I contend he can be thought of as a repre­sen­ta­tional figure of what a minor politics in Xinjiang might look like. Unlike homosocial friendships and the ethical obligations such relationships entail for young Uyghur men, the minor politics Chen Ye embodies moves across ethnic difference through a practice of witnessing. Like jan-­jiger friendships, this minor politics fosters forms of social reproduction that resist the enclosing effects of terror capitalism and gestures ­toward a decolonial politics. Life Making in Northwest China This chapter extends my engagement in the previous chapter with scholarship on colonial dispossession that focuses on intersubjective lifeworlds, or worlds of life experience, as sites of autonomy (Foucault 1977, 2007; Jackson 2013). This theoretical framing, as supported in recent anthropological work (Winegar 2006; Cattelino 2008; Bern­stein 2012), takes up the notion of autonomy in two distinct registers: first, embodied autonomy of individual and collective actors and, second, sovereign power as a form of domination as exercised by the governance structures of a modern nation-­state on the body of a subject. Starting with the sovereign body of a medieval king, sovereignty in the latter sense was animated through the body as a site metonymic for the power of the state. Over time, as the body of the king was dispersed into the institutions of the modernist disciplinary state, sovereignty came to regulate life through calculation and statistics. This new form—­something Foucault refers to as “biopower”—­came to regulate individuals through enclosure and evaluation as I have described in ­earlier chapters. Shifting attention from normative forms of po­liti­cal governance to the po­liti­cal impulses of ordinary ­people, recent scholarship on autonomy has focused on bodies as sites of the per­for­mance of sovereign power or domination. Bodies, and the lifeworlds that surround them, can be seen most clearly as sites of vio­lence ­under extreme conditions such as war, urban cleansing, or other forms of sudden social change (Foucault 1977; Agamben 1998; Simone 2003). Yet t­ hese instances are symptoms of a much greater and more insidious structural vio­lence that is taking place ­under fogs of normalcy in the marginalization that accompanies cap­i­tal­ist entrenchment and colonial expansion around the world. Exploring how cap­i­tal­ist and colonial norms—­such as ­labor migration, ethno-­racial discrimination, and counterterror vio­lence—­are routinized, scholars have shown that, despite being objects of sovereign vio­lence, 166  Chapter Five

individual selves and informal collectivities can also be sites of autonomy or refusal (Pun 2005; Hardt and Negri 2005; Simpson 2014; McGranahan 2016). They contend that, by the sheer fact of their ongoing existence, exhausted factory workers, protestors, artists, squatters, and the colonized can be seen as refusing to concede their autonomy. By the very fact of their survival, marginalized subjects refuse when they do not fit the norms of modernist development or submit to the sovereignty of the modern nation-­state. Some of t­ hese minorities refuse to participate in formal ways, refusing to recognize the authority of state institutions to grant them rights and recognition (Simpson 2014; ­McGranahan 2016). ­Others claim autonomy in less formal, embodied ways, refusing in practice to recognize truth regimes that devalue their lives (Byler 2018d). What is common in Native refusal is a claim to the priorness of Native forms of knowledge and practice. Their mode of being existed before and through the arrival of the modern state, and as such its value and authority existed prior to the sovereignty of the state and primacy of global capital. This form of refusal becomes po­liti­cal when new po­liti­cal solidarities are formed by minority groups who hold on to ethical frameworks from prior times and spaces beyond the control of the state. Over the past few de­cades, the American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant (1997, 2008a, 2008b, 2011) has demonstrated the tenacity with which ­people in Eu­ro­pean and American contexts stay attached to life no ­matter how vulnerable their circumstances. ­Women, the undocumented, the racialized, and the colonized find ways to live by drawing on communal resources that help them get by. This commitment to the po­liti­cal, to finding ways of living together, is a ­limited form of autonomy that ­people maintain as marginalized subjects. Within minority communities centered around affiliations to (and, at times, intersections of ) marginalized gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, and class positions, ­people build spaces in which they have the power to affect and be affected—­spaces in which they can stay attached to and reproduce their lives. It is by staying committed to each other that they can develop a shared affect that feels po­liti­cal. Regardless of the fragility and failure of their lives, Berlant (2008b) demonstrates that ­people find ways to feel a mea­sure of control over their lives by building “intimate public spheres” centered around commonalities in their lifeworlds. Even if they are not recognized within normative frameworks of citizenship and social rights, marginalized p ­ eople often find ways to reproduce a way of life as a collective. T ­ hese forms of “minor politics” (Deleuze 1986; Lionnet and Shih 2005) provide a “sense of a shared affective management” of the crises of ordinary life (Berlant 2008b, 5n12). In marginalized communities, p ­ eople build Minor Politics  167

affective bonds and friendships with each other. They intuit ways of living in the pre­sent by drawing on past experiences they hold in their bodies and drawing from the knowledge of past generations. Put simply, a minor politics, as I define it, is a politics of minority groups that is centered around a shared attachment to the reproduction of minority life. It provides marginalized ­people with a po­liti­cal sensibility of having power to move and act in the world and on ­others, but its legitimacy does not rest on ­legal or formal recognition from the state or cap­i­tal­ist institutions. This is not a form of civil or consumerist disobedience as much as a form of epistemic disobedience—­a “not buying-in” to the system (Mignolo 2009). As such, it is a form of po­liti­cal life that is si­mul­ta­neously vis­i­ble and invisible to dominant po­liti­cal systems. ­Until the full maturation of terror capitalism in 2017 and the rollout of “smart” city checkpoints, digital enclosures, mass internment, and monitored ­labor systems, it was not contained by state-­run education systems, police systems, religious systems, culture systems, or financial systems. Instead, communities that develop out of marginal living can become a minor politics or po­liti­cal “torsion” that twists forms of control t­ oward other, nonnormative, ways of living together (Rancière 2009). Ürümchi as a Stage for Minor Politics The young city of Ürümchi is situated at an old intersection on the trade routes of Central Asia. Located in a high valley between the Mountains of Heaven (Uy: Tengri Tagh; Ch: Tian Shan) and the Mountains of God (Uy: Boghda Tagh; Ch: Bogada Shan), it has long been a meeting point for differently identified groups of ­people. The history of Ürümchi cannot be understood without an understanding of the broader social forces that fell within its orbit and drew its inhabitants to it. Ürümchi is young but the ideas that circulate within it are old. Over three-­fourths of the three to four million ­people who live ­there have come to the city in the last twenty years. The ­people of Ürümchi come from a Maoist past and from rural ways of life. Some of them consider Xinjiang to be their homeland but some do not. All are s­ haped by par­tic­u­lar proj­ects of h ­ uman engineering that accompanied the arrival of China’s modern state form—­for example, the logic of Maoist multiculturalism, which in the 1950s began the pro­ cess of placing ­people within essentialized ethnic ascriptions without a politics of self-­determination. In the space of Ürümchi, the goals of ­these state proj­ects at times seemed to have been achieved for t­hose who possessed the relative privilege of Hanness; for ­those who did not have this privilege, this logic was 168  Chapter Five

often experienced as an intimacy with an ethno-­racial vio­lence that ate into the basic fabric of their social life. The city formed the center of this segmented cultural production. Following the founding of the Xinjiang ­People’s Press on March 5, 1951, Ürümchi became a central node through which Maoist prescriptions for Uyghur and Han settler life were published and disseminated. U ­ nder the leadership of the Xinjiang Provincial Culture and Education Commission, Maoist multiculturalism was staged in publications and per­for­mances of ethnic solidarity in class strug­g le. When in 1980 the arts w ­ ere liberalized for commercial consumption, the overall goals of Han-­centric socialist liberation continued to dominate government-­approved aesthetics. In 2021 the Ürümchi-­based Xinjiang Culture Ministry continues to give final approval to all cultural production, though production has been semiprivatized and sources of funding are now much more diverse. When it comes to Uyghur culture work, the public sphere is still quite tightly directed, and as the P ­ eople’s War on Terror has intensified, increasingly constrained by the propaganda work of state-­imposed multicultural domination. Nearly all Xinjiang culture work must promote “interethnic unity” (Ch: minzu tuanjie) and opposition to antirevolutionary, and now “terrorist,” forces.2 Chen Ye was one of the content producers in this milieu. His f­amily, like many Han in the Uyghur autonomous region, came from Anhui Province to the Chinese–Soviet border in the 1950s as part of the army of paramilitary agricultural workers who took over the steppes with tractors and deep-­bore wells. The telos of this ­human engineering proj­ect was one of “opening up” (Ch: kaifang) Kazakh pastureland deemed “wasteland” (Ch: huangdi) through the creation of a population of Han settler-­pioneers. Across China, governance was implemented at a very localized level, which allowed for a mea­sure of po­ liti­cal participation (Gao 2007). Each individual had a place, a role, a number, a quota, a ration, and a dossier. In many ways, social order seemed fixed in place. In the 1980s and 1990s, this began to change. The new flux and freedom of market liberalization, resource extraction, and the flood of new Han mi­ grants that ­these new development proj­ects brought ­were deeply unsettling to Han workers such as Chen Ye and his ­family who self-­identify with the ­earlier settlement proj­ect as original Xinjiang “locals” (Ch: bendi). Like many who came in the first waves of Han pioneers in the 1950s and 1960s, Chen Ye looked back on the covalent certainties of poverty and equality ­under the discipline of communism with a certain amount of nostalgia. Back in ­those days, the divide between Han and ethnic ­others was not as stark. In many cases, early Han settlers learned local languages and ­adopted local cultural norms. Over time, Minor Politics  169

many of them came to see themselves as “old Xinjiangers” (Ch: lao Xinjiang). Yet, with the arrival of millions of new Han workers and divestment in the Xinjiang state farm colony system in the 1990s, this sense of identity began to fracture. Suddenly, identification as a pioneering settler was seen as a backward, dead-­end social position. As recent anthropological scholarship has shown (Joniak-­Lüthi 2015; Cliff 2016b), many Han who grew up in Xinjiang found themselves allied, to a ­limited extent, with Uyghurs against the onrush of new Han mi­grants who had arrived to build both state-­funded and privately funded infrastructure and real estate. As described in chapter 2, recent Han mi­grants often found jobs by traveling along employment pipelines generated by interstate l­abor bureaus, private job brokers, and kinship networks in their home provinces (Guang 2003, 618). Xinjiang Han, on the other hand, w ­ ere at times excluded from ­these job opportunities due to their h ­ ouse­hold registration status. Since the region was so far from the metropoles of Beijing and Shanghai, all Xinjiang identifications, regardless of w ­ hether they w ­ ere Han or minorities, w ­ ere often viewed as the most “backward” (Ch: luohou) and “lacking in achieved quality” (Ch: meiyou suzhi) in Han society.3 As one lao Xinjiang ­woman told me, “­Today, ­house­hold registration from any place other than Xinjiang is worth more than Xinjiang registration.” Many mentioned that it seemed impossible for them to find jobs anywhere outside of Xinjiang since they did not have close social connections or prestige and, ­because of all the new migration to the region, it was also sometimes hard for them to find jobs within what they saw as their home region. ­Because Chen Ye was identified as an old-­time Xinjianger from a rural farming colony, he felt this sense of disorientation acutely. Forced by a changing economic system that devalued rural Xinjiang ­labor, he first came to Ürümchi as a student in the late 1990s. ­After graduating from a small college on the outskirts of town with a generic business degree, Chen Ye hoped to find a job by “jumping into the ocean” (Ch: xiahai) of private business. Yet, like many ­children of farmers who received degrees from small colleges in third-­tier cities, for Chen Ye jobs of any sort ­were very hard to find. ­After many months of unsuccessful job hunting, Chen Ye spotted an advertisement for a training course at a vocational school. I had a business degree, but that r­ eally ­didn’t help me find a job. So I saw a flyer for a private school. At that time in Ürümchi ­there ­were lots of private schools. The tuition was only 2,200 for a two-­month photography course. I thought that it ­wasn’t too expensive and it seemed like a 170  Chapter Five

skill that I could use to start a business. So I did it. ­After the course was finished, I rented an apartment and opened up a business. But business was terrible. I could only make around 300–500 per month. So a­ fter nine months I just gave up. A failed entrepreneur, Chen Ye did something many mi­grant workers do. He refused to go home. Chen Ye de­cided to scratch out a life in the city. Since he already had the equipment for a darkroom and a large supply of inexpensive black-­ and-­white film, his main expenses ­were food, which his friends in the city and relatives back on the colony farms provided for him. “In the beginning, it was just sort of a way to fill the time. I c­ ouldn’t find a job and ­didn’t want a job . . . ​ so I just started to live like a ‘blind wanderer’ [Ch: mangliu]—­going around taking pictures.” The “Blind Wanderer” in Chinese Discourse Beginning in the 1950s, the word mangliu was used to describe rural mi­grants to Chinese cities. The term was first coined in a 1953 state document that described state opposition to the “blind flow” of mi­grants to the city. It was attached to p ­ eople without formal ­house­hold registration, without a place in the planned economy of the Maoist society. ­Others viewed them as destitute and homeless. It meant the person was not a useful member of a work unit and thus not a productive member of society. The “unseeing,” “directionless” flow of bodies was viewed as a threat to the centrally planned communist revolution. Interestingly, this way of viewing migration conveyed a feeling quite similar to the feelings Ablikim (in chapter 4) described upon his entry into the “raging river” of Ürümchi social life. In both cases, mi­grants came to the city riding a meta­phoric stream of w ­ ater, fighting to find their footing despite the structural enclosures arrayed against them. Over the de­cades that followed, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, the term mangliu came to be used as an epithet to denigrate strangers to the city. It conveyed a feeling of failure and irresponsibility. As Guang Lei has shown, the term came to refer to a form of “circular affirmation” between urban-­based government policies that sought to control the inflow of cheap l­abor and the xenophobic urban popu­lar culture that sought to deny strangers a right to live in the city (Zhang 2001; Guang 2003, 615). Mi­grants ­were characterized as both “irrational (blind) and elusive (floating)” (Guang 2003, 622), and thus could be viewed as amoral and illegal and therefore not deserving of basic rights such as a minimum wage, health care, education, and retirement benefits. Minor Politics  171

Of course, l­abor rights activists have voiced objections to ­these characterizations, pointing out that in fact the vast majority of mi­grants have prearranged jobs in the cities to which they migrate (Guang 2003, 623). This is certainly the case among many recent Han mi­grants to Ürümchi.4 Since the mid-1990s, officials in Xinjiang and across the nation have begun to use the term farmer-­worker (Ch: mingong) to describe mi­grants rather than mangliu, but in some circumstances, particularly among Han mi­grants from rural parts of Xinjiang, the older term has stuck. For Chen Ye, then, calling himself a mangliu became a way of identifying himself with a state of permanent wandering within his old-­time Xinjiang identity. He was no longer looking for a home to which to return; he was content in his poverty and lack of rootedness on the margins of the nation. For Chen Ye, the power of the stigma associated with the word mangliu has been inverted and used as a locus of identification and pride. By using the term, he was attempting to identify himself with the Uyghur mi­grants he photo­ graphs, who he often described as “blind wanderers” as well—­though, as I ­will discuss in the next chapter, they often described themselves using a slightly dif­f er­ent term, traveler (Uy: musapir). Some Han in­de­pen­dent artists and other ­people of relative privilege have engaged in similar issues concerning mi­grant dispossession. Since the market reforms in the 1990s, the arts in cities across China have exploded (Rofel 2007; Welland 2018). Photography was one genre that quickly became a major field within the new con­temporary art scene. As Wanning Sun (2014) has shown, although the primary foci of new Chinese photography ­were travel, landscapes, and fashion, a substantial number of photog­raphers also became engaged in documentary photography or social issue–­oriented proj­ects focused on urban migration and the industrialization of Chinese society. Although state authorities and digital surveillance companies had often tried to corral such proj­ects ­toward a cele­bration of China’s rapid economic development and the improved living conditions of Chinese rural-­to-­urban mi­grants, by the early 2000s migrant-­photographers such as Zhang Xinmin and Song Chao began portraying the precarious lives of mi­ grants that they themselves had lived. Zhang’s first book, Besieging the City (2004), and Song’s “Miners” (Song 2012) set the standard for a w ­ hole generation of migrant-­photographers who w ­ ere just beginning to find their voice at the margins of Chinese society. Rather than representing mi­grants as “leading a dull, mysterious and hard life” (Song 2012), ­these proj­ects attempted to portray the full range of feelings that marginalized mangliu ­people possess. What makes Chen Ye’s use of the term mangliu unique is the way he was attempting to combine the term with his lao Xinjiang identification and his 172  Chapter Five

Uyghur friendships. Given the context of his practice, this framing produced a kind of anticolonial politics. By attaching himself to this term and describing both himself and Uyghur mi­grants as “common p ­ eople” (Ch: laobaixing), which he utilized as a way of naming “regular ­people without po­liti­cal means,” he was attempting to build a form of lateral agency across ethnic lines within the context of the broader mass migrations that ­were happening all around him in Chinese society. This term was not perfectly commensurate with Uyghur mi­grant identifications; many of them did not think of themselves in Chinese terms nor could they pass as Han “blind wanderers” even if they wanted to. Yet, like Chen Ye, the Uyghurs he photographed and advocated for also identified as mi­grants who had been separated from their homes. Claiming a stigmatized mangliu position thus allowed Chen Ye a way of thinking, however imperfect, from an allied position as a friend and accomplice in their suffering. Minor Politics on the Margins By situating himself in this way Chen Ye was claiming a par­tic­u­lar type of positionality—­one that included a recognition of ethno-­racial, rural, Xinjiang difference. It was for this reason that many Han observers of his practice thought ­there was something peculiar about his work. ­Because of the recent explosion of vio­lence between ethnically dif­f er­ent groups in the city, a Han mi­ grant photographing and identifying with Uyghur mi­grants was a proj­ect that was difficult for both Han and Uyghur viewers to reconcile with mainstream politics and economics. Why was a Han photographer spending so much time with Uyghurs that many Han saw as prone to terrorism? Chen Ye spoke often about his photography as a kind of compulsion that no one r­ eally understood: “I would tell p ­ eople that you like to spend your money on cigarettes or alcohol, but I like to spend it on photography. It is my addiction.” In the beginning, the Uyghurs whose environments he attempted to represent often saw him as mentally ill or absurd: Many ­people thought it was strange that I was taking pictures all the time, and then that I would just give them to them without asking for any money. Some of them thought I had some sort of m ­ ental illness. They would see me taking pictures of some pile of trash or some poor old man and they would ask “Why are you taking pictures of something ugly like that?” But to me ­those ­things ­were extremely beautiful. As his obsession grew, his ­family too began to reject him. They felt as though he had a depressive personality disorder and urged him to seek psychiatric Minor Politics  173

treatment. They could not understand why he was “wasting his time” taking pictures of Uyghurs. Over the long duration of his proj­ects, he had many conflicts with art directors and Culture Ministry censors when attempting to display his work or publish his images. They always asked him why his art focused on what they viewed as negative ­things instead of a cele­bration of permitted forms of Chinese multiculturalism. They said, “It is as though I have a personality prob­lem. They are right. I do have a personality disorder. I document the ­things I see. In China we ­aren’t allowed to ‘speak about’ ­these ­things. Instead, every­thing should be ­great, every­thing is getting better and better. So anyone who speaks about them must be mentally ill.” Chen Ye’s positioning and the reactions engendered by his proj­ect beg deeper questions about the forms of politics that w ­ ere converging in his work. In part, the inherent abnormality of Chen Ye’s work in representing the precarious lives of Uyghur mi­grants came from the way his images belied the overarching sovereignty of the state. Chen Ye was deeply troubled by the experience of poverty and dispossession his images documented. He spoke often of the ways in which state authorities and digital media companies tried to coopt his proj­ect and turn it into an illustration of the backwardness of Uyghurs and the need to colonize them more quickly. Many times when he was interviewed, reporters would attempt to turn the proj­ect into a tale of Chen Ye’s heroic efforts to save Uyghurs from themselves. In a way that was similar to Wanning Sun’s (2014) findings in her work among documentary photog­raphers in other parts of China, state-­owned and mainstream digital media platforms often tried to frame Chen Ye’s images as mi­grants smiling through their pain, struggling to make China a better place. Yet t­ hose same media producers and Culture Ministry officials refused to confront the systems of enclosure and devaluation that had produced the vulnerable conditions of Uyghur life in the first place. With his refusal to be coopted by the state, Chen Ye functioned as a resistant social figure. He served as a point of convergence between the social concerns of documentary photography practice and the vio­ lence of settler colonialism. What Chen Ye hoped to frame through his photography was quite the opposite of the devaluative intent of many state-­sponsored culture producers who participated in the Uyghur reeducation proj­ect. He was stubbornly resisting the urge to look away and ignore his own role in enclosing, evaluative pro­cesses that dominated culture work in Ürümchi. His work was an attempt to attach himself to the lives of minority “blind wanderers” by detaching himself from the politics of the mainstream. Chen Ye felt that the lifeworlds of the Uyghur mi­grant community and the Han settler communities ­were “completely dif­fer­ent.” The Uyghur lifeworld 174  Chapter Five

“was straightforward and clear” while the other lifeworld “was a simulation of ­human existence,” he said. Over the course of the de­cade, he began to notice that what many Han p ­ eople took to be normal life—­buying a home and a car, starting a ­family, having a ­career—­were not parts of life that ­were available to every­one and perhaps w ­ ere not even necessary to live a full life. He said that he came to realize that “many times we ­don’t understand what is a desire and what is a demand.”5 The needs that arose from the devalued life in the Uyghur settlements made him reconsider his own attachments and the life he wanted to reproduce. It pushed him to think about social life beyond economistic activities. What Chen Ye’s experience pointed him t­ oward was an understanding of life that refused or is denied sociopo­liti­cal recognition. Up on the mountain, the Uyghurs he photographed w ­ ere excluded from the rationality of normal life. As figures at least partially outside the vision of the state, the mi­grant workers up on the hill w ­ ere living through a pro­cess of dispossession as a condition of participation in a Chinese frontier city. While they w ­ ere recognized as having expropriable potential as data sources and forced ­labor subjects, they ­were not recognized by the state authorities and surveillance companies as having normative po­liti­cal rights. They ­were ­people who could starve, freeze, be shot, or other­wise be subtracted without the usual implications—­without their deaths being viewed on the level of negligence or injustice. Yet the domination of the colonial relation was never absolute, and as such, their illegibility as rights-­bearing subjects could in fact be a productive strategy for re­sis­tance to the surveillance and discipline. As I w ­ ill show in the next chapter, their initial partial illegibility, outside the gaze of face-­scanning cameras and digital surveillance, was what allowed them to or­ga­nize their economies around mosque communities and practice forms of unauthorized Islam u ­ ntil this practice was enclosed by the surveillance system. For Chen Ye, though, the work of reframing ­these lives by entering into minor political-­aesthetic relationships with them came to be his primary task. Building this new type of solidarity was not easy. Many Uyghurs continued to view Chen Ye as radically dif­fer­ent. They saw themselves as “Natives” (Uy: yerlik) and him as “Chinese” (Uy: Khitay)—­a banned Rus­sian loan word that in Uyghur describes Han settlers as foreign to their homeland. Many Uyghur mi­grants did not see themselves as having full Chinese citizenship, while they saw Chen Ye as possessing this fully. Early on in his practice, Chen Ye was often viewed with suspicion and distrust. Uyghur mi­grants tried to place him. They wanted to figure out if he was a Korean Christian missionary or a government worker. They could not understand why he kept coming into their neighborhood. Minor Politics  175

figure 5.2. A film still of Chen Ye (right) introducing a Han photographer to one of his old Uyghur friends in a documentary film called Yamalike—­the neighborhood where Chen Ye did his work.

Why did he keep taking pictures, giving pictures he had taken back to members of the community? Why did he help them to get medical treatment or negotiate with the police? On one occasion, an el­derly Uyghur man who had learned to speak Northeast dialect-­inflected Mandarin while serving in the ­People’s Liberation Army, asked Chen Ye: “Why do you want to take pictures ­here? Do you understand what is ­going on in this place?” Chen Ye said, “I had to ­really think about this question.” Then the old man “looked at [another Han photographer’s] camera and asked: ‘Your camera must be worth more than 5,000 yuan!?’ My friend said, ‘No, it was worth less than 3,000 yuan [$500].’ [The Uyghur man] said all of the t­ hings in his h ­ ouse­hold combined ­weren’t worth that much.”6 Finding his social status indexed in this way made Chen Ye realize that, in the eyes of this mi­grant, his fellow photographer was just like every­one else—­a bourgeois Han settler. Chen Ye said, “Looking at his face I felt all of the heaviness and despair of life.” As he talked further with him, the old Uyghur man began to reveal the basic needs of social reproduction that kept them as a population in the settlement: He said sometimes when [he and his wife and ­brother] went out to look for work, the three of them could not make even a combined 100 yuan [sixteen dollars] in one day’s work. ­Children need to eat. They need to go 176  Chapter Five

see the doctor. One stay in the hospital costs a lot. This year his c­ hildren needed to go to the hospital three times. They d ­ idn’t have the money to see the doctor. Living outside the norms of society and staying attached to life was thus at times compromised by the frailty of bodies. Many Uyghur mi­grants to the city said they had been dispossessed of their land due to infrastructure development and passbook systems. Coming to the city in search of work, often relying on tenuous relationships with distant relatives or neighbors, was their only way forward. Discussing the vulnerability of Uyghur mi­grant life, the old man continued: Other ­people in the neighborhood who had money just replaced t­ hose who [­were worked to death], they replaced whoever had been subtracted [he said]; ­those who lifted their heads first [following a death] ­were the ones who ­were able to move forward. (my emphasis) Being “subtracted” (Ch: jian shao; Uy: kımeytti) speaks to the calculus through which ­people ­were reduced to a numbered segment of work units ­under the discipline of party–state-directed modes of production, but as I have noted throughout this book, it also describes the way terror capitalism reduced Uyghur mi­grants to their data and ­labor power, transforming their bodies into biometric code, a “surplus population” (Ch: shengyu renkou) that could be subtracted from the city (see also Li 2017). As Chen Ye moved deeper into the world of minority mi­grant workers, he said the types of conversations he had that centered on discourses of subtraction “came so naturally it was suffocating.” Not only was the city set up in opposition to Uyghur mi­grant access; as the new proj­ects began, the police contractors actively harassed undocumented mi­grants at random and at fixed checkpoints, leveraging bribes or forcing them into the long slow pro­cess of rejection by making them wait in lines at police departments—­first to have paperwork pro­cessed and, fi­nally, to submit their biometric data. Clearly, many of the Uyghurs Chen Ye met wanted him to hear and see their stories. But what did it mean to him to “move forward” or to be “subtracted”? In each of the many discussions I had with Chen Ye, he always spoke of the way mi­grant Uyghurs helped t­ hose around them who w ­ ere in need: “The Uyghurs I met are beautiful ­people. They are deeply generous. They take care of each other.” He said he learned a lot about a politics of solidarity from the way his Uyghur friends had invited him into their homes and told him they would be angry if he ­didn’t eat with them. They said, “If we ­don’t eat together we Minor Politics  177

c­ an’t be friends.” They referred to him using the terms of kinship, giving him the Uyghur name Ali and referring to him as a “kin relation” (Uy: qarandash) using the honorific term older ­brother (Uy: aka). They taught him Uyghur and established that his priority was in sharing their pain. They saw him as an “accomplice” (Uy: egeshküchi) in their strug­g le. For Chen Ye, responding to the po­liti­cal question “How should we live together?” meant continuing to live in a way that allowed you to attach yourself to your neighbors. Often this meant living in opposition to the goals of terror capitalism. Many times when he saw Uyghur mi­grants being harassed by local police contractors on the street, he tried to intervene on their behalf. Yet often ­there was not much he could do. The contractors would just point him in the direction of the city and say “Out!” (Ch: chuqu!!). He spent much of his time assisting his friends in finding ­legal documentation that prevented them from being evicted and their homes being sold to Han settlers. But again, this was often a losing ­battle. He said, “­Those ­things happen all the time.” Minor Politics as Refusal of Devaluation Five years ­after Chen Ye began his proj­ect in the informal settlements up on the hills, on July 5, 2009, Uyghur university students took to the streets of Ürümchi demanding justice for the killing of Uyghurs as described in chapter 1. Unlike the vast majority of Han mi­grants with whom I spoke about t­ hese incidents, Chen Ye did not blame Uyghur mi­grants, Islamic tradition, or lack of patriotism for the vio­lence. He did not condone the vio­lence in any way, but he said he understood the frustration and resentment that motivated it. He watched in horror the way mobs of Han mi­grants beat Uyghur bakers outside his apartment building while the police watched from the sidelines in the days that followed the initial vio­lence. The areas where Chen Ye worked ­were rapidly demolished over the next several years and a new infrastructure of concrete grids and high-­rise apartment buildings—­with ­running ­water, working lights, and closed-­circuit security cameras—­was built further from the center of the city. Of course, many Uyghur mi­grants could not obtain the proper paperwork to gain ­legal access to the new housing or simply could not afford it. In addition, in 2014 when the new ­People’s Con­ve­nience Card system was implemented, hundreds of thousands of p ­ eople who had moved into the new housing or continued to live in the informal settlements ­were forced to leave. As Chen Ye put it: 178  Chapter Five

­ here are two major changes that have happened since the events of T July 5, 2009. First, on the surface, t­ hings have been radically altered. Old-­ style one-­story [Ch: pingfang] h ­ ouses have been torn down and replaced with new apartments. . . . ​Infrastructure has been improved, but the lives of ­those most directly affected by the redevelopment have not been improved that much. Instead, they have just found themselves dispersed into other parts of the city or forced to leave. Second, ­house­hold registration [Ch: hukou] restrictions have been drastically increased. Uyghur mi­grants are being si­mul­ta­neously pushed and squeezed. When they came to find work many [mi­grants] first built their own h ­ ouses without official permission, so this is the reason officials give for tearing down the h ­ ouses. I r­ eally ­don’t agree with this, ­because ­behind this is an attitude that Uyghurs “have no culture” [Ch: mei wenhua] [and therefore d ­ on’t ­matter]. ­People talk as though society should be controlled through competition. P ­ eople with abilities to do well should be f­ ree to live in the city and ­those that cannot should be pushed out. Of course, since Uyghurs are discriminated against and ­can’t move freely and speak easily in the Chinese world, this means they ­will be the first to be eliminated. Actually, if you follow this logic, all of Xinjiang should be eliminated since in the eyes of most Chinese it itself is so far “­behind” [luohou]. I ­really disagree with this perspective. It lacks vision into the complexity of the prob­lems we face h ­ ere. Pushing prob­lems to the side does not solve them. Every­one tries to blame their prob­lems on ­others without considering their own role in making them. Unlike many other Han in Xinjiang who blamed the vio­lence on Uyghurs who refuse to participate in the Chinese colonial proj­ect, Chen Ye saw himself as aligned with the placelessness of Uyghur mi­grants. Although Chen Ye was able to get the green card permit to live in the city as a mi­grant, he still identified with their position. He felt ­little desire to pursue what other urbanites might consider a good life, not only b­ ecause he knew this success would come at the expense of Uyghur losses, but also b­ ecause he found no joy in building a persona through consumption. Chen Ye lived in a s­ imple walk-up apartment made of concrete with patched green-­and-­white tiles on the floor. The walls ­were packed with bookshelves crowded with the poetry of Bei Dao and Xi ­Chuan, translations of James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, John Steinbeck, and Gary Snyder. On a side t­able above labeled jugs of vinegar, he had a few Uyghur naan. As is the tradition for Uyghurs, who view bread as something that should never be wasted, the old

Minor Politics  179

naan was broken in pieces in preparation for a sky burial. Once, while we w ­ ere sitting in his apartment drinking tea, he told a story about a Uyghur friend: I have a [Uyghur] friend from the Aqsu area who came to live ­here [de­ cades] ago but never managed to get an id or hukou established anywhere. So ­after July 5, 2009, they tried to force him to go back to Aqsu, but since he had been in the city for so long he d ­ idn’t have any connections in Aqsu anymore. No one would officially recognize him, so he was a person without place. This issue has still not been resolved even though it has been such a long time. He jokes that he is a person without a country. As he finished telling the story, he laughed ironically. To him, the story was symptomatic of the lives of Xinjiang p­ eople in general, both Han and Uyghur (see also Bovingdon 2010). Although he clearly recognized the way Uyghur mi­grants bore the brunt of dispossession, he felt l­ ittle loyalty to the Chinese colonial proj­ ect. He too felt like he was someone without a country he believed in. Chen Ye’s images w ­ ere a means to his politics. For Chen Ye, the feeling of being po­liti­cal, or being active in the world, was when he was concentrat-

figure 5.3. One of Chen Ye’s Uyghur friends poses with her son in her home. Portraits of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong have been turned on their sides to form the walls of her home in the Uyghur informal settlement. Image by Chen Ye. 180  Chapter Five

ing on life at the margins. T ­ hese feelings took place in homes, around table­ cloths on raised platforms; sitting with Uyghur friends on the porches or in the courtyards of their homes; and listening to their trou­bles, sharing in their pain. He felt connected when he advocated for them at the police station and when they accepted gifts of his vegetarian food and shared their meals with him. When he thought about the life philosophy that emerged through his aesthetic-­political practice, he said ­things like this: Taking photos is a life practice. In the chaos of the pre­sent, the simplicity of watching forces p ­ eople, who might merely want to soak in salon-­ style art at their leisure, to return to the inner stillness and bareness of life: you must go by yourself, see for yourself. You have to start from the periphery of the city and continue on alone. Walk silently while facing ­those scenes and emotions that your camera lens is unable to hold.7 Since so much had changed since the vio­lence of 2009, for Chen Ye and many other artists, photography as a life practice came to be tinged with a loss of trust in a better ­future. When life was lived in the moment, a ­future life seemed quite distant and bleak. Writing in 2013 he said: The dreamlike intimacy and kindness of ­these ­people brought me back to a place I knew thirty years ago. That door had been closed, so I always remained aloof, wandering in ­every direction. I tried to capture their unforgettable ­faces and the essence of their yearning for life. I know so many ­people who have wandered elsewhere due to the de­mo­li­tion. A few ­people still live on the margins. Sometimes I still hear the sound of the tambour drifting in the alleyways. In that sound I hear all kinds of longing and often catch a glimpse of t­ hose figures who have vanished into the past. Once, in a ravine, I took pictures of a kid. ­After I had gone on quite far away, he caught up with me. He handed me an apple, and then quickly ran back in the direction he had come. Then t­here was an old ­horse used for hauling ­water. One day, I approached it while it was chewing its cud. In the dusk it turned ­toward me, and looked at me with blank indifference. Its gaze touched me so deeply. In it I felt I could glimpse the entire ethos of life [on the mountain]. Now, when I see the deserted mountain slope where the Uyghur mi­grants used to live, it feels as if they have dis­ appeared in a mighty torrent. For a number of years I took pictures. I saw much happiness and suffering. I also saw many endings. I saw some of the foundations of h ­ uman existence. Life is made out of absurdities and bleakness, excesses and anxiety. It is incredible. (my emphasis) Minor Politics  181

Although life seemed meaningless, the pro­cess of dispossession was made survivable in the intervals of sharing friendship and looking honestly at the losses of t­ hose nearby. Chen Ye was not entering the world with Uyghurs out of hope for their ­future protection by the state, though he would welcome such protections but ­because of an ethical commitment to being-­with the other. That was all ­there was. The two encounters Chen Ye described above—­the child handing him an apple and locking eyes with an indifferent horse—­were images of witnessing. As Naisargi Dave (2014) has argued with regard to animal activists in India, a singular moment of locking eyes with a suffering other can become a life-­changing moment of witnessing. This moment of intimacy between subjects expands the self in a way that transcends previous horizons of relational possibility. When Chen Ye and his colleagues took up a photography that looked honestly at ­those who had been devalued by Chinese colonial-­capitalism, they ­were taking up a practice of witnessing. That is, in effect, their practice produced an ethical obligation to live as a perpetual witness. Taking t­ hese ethical claims a bit further, Dave (2014) argues that intimacy of this sort is more than the coming together of autonomous subjects as the founding myths of our autological modernist socie­ties might imply. Rather than being motivated by f­ree love, the suffering other is brought into the encounter precisely through its “unfreedom,” and the activist is compelled to surrender to an ethics outside of herself. Since Uyghur mi­grants ­were attached to, and artists such as Chen Ye refused to detach from, life as mi­grants, none of them had anywhere ­else to go. They ­were in it, a shared lifeworld, together. Of course, t­ here was a much greater mea­sure of choice on the part of Chen Ye since he could pass as a member of the privileged ethno-­racial majority. Yet, by rejecting the truth claims of the techno-­political system and taking on what many read as a dissident position by identifying with the Uyghur dispossession he witnessed, he was embracing a shared unfreedom that resulted in a deep interdependence. As Dave (2014) argues, witnessing thus compels the activist to expand the skin of the self to include the skin of the other, folding over forms of difference that previously had seemed insurmountable. For a witness, then, the vulnerability of someone in pain demands a minor politics, a politics that emerges from a shared experience of being invited into face-­to-­face relations as co-­creators of experience (Levinas 1979, 198). This immediacy, or true ­nearness—in contrast to the false intimacy of a techno-­political gaze described in chapter 1—is experienced as what Emmanuel Levinas (1979) describes as a “living presence” that refuses repre­sen­ta­tion as image or, in the context of terror capitalism, algorithmic programming. T ­ hese encounters, as a practice of 182  Chapter Five

living, produce more than a form of false empathy in which the participant claims a sense of moral superiority while sacrificing ­little. Rather, this is an imperative that compels the witness to try and fail and try again to make the pain of the other m ­ atter in the shared experience of life. It is an attempt to extend the value of their social reproduction. Witnessing produces a sort of torsion or twist in the normal weave of the social fabric. As Jacques Rancière (2007) has noted, po­liti­cal solidarities that arise among communities are centered around shared attachments. T ­ hese torsions around a shared object interrupt the normal ordering of society along normative categories of citizenship or, if adapted to a Chinese context, ethnic status and h ­ ouse­hold registration. Rancière argues that centering life around the shared inheritance of a marker, such as a shared attachment to Xinjiang mi­grant marginality, outside of the norms of formal po­liti­cal structures, allows for a new form of politics: friendship and equality routed through feelings of social intimacy and solidarity. What is crucial in this reframing of politics is that it moves from a liberal politics of inclusion—­aimed at normalizing the “excluded part” by bringing it into alignment with the norms of society—to opening up a politics with “anybody or whoever” (Rancière 2007, 99). In d ­ oing so, this form of politics allows the other to maintain her difference. Through this, the other is empowered to refuse to submit her autonomy. The other is instead regarded as a carrier of knowledge, as a constitutive part of the po­liti­cal sensibilities that emerge out of practices of witnessing, friendship, and shared attachments to life. Following Rancière’s argument further, this torsion is necessarily aesthetic in that it creates a new distribution of the sensible. Nonnormative sociality, or what I am describing as minor politics, “makes vis­i­ble what had been excluded from a perceptual field” (2005, 226). This was precisely what Chen Ye was attempting to do through his practice of witnessing and his attachment to life as a mi­grant. He was attempting to pull himself into a par­tic­u­lar Uyghur orbit and along the way document his experience and activate fellow Han artists and art viewers to share an intimate public sphere with Uyghur mi­grants. Over his de­cades of work, Chen Ye became widely respected in the artist community in Ürümchi. He used his position to advocate for Uyghur lives. This had the effect of making Han artists check their privilege and Uyghur artists feel welcome in the community. Yet, as Rancière admits, this form of politics is rarely successful in a formal lasting sense. It is difficult to step out of normative politics, and even more difficult for a torsion in the social fabric to have any lasting effect. Although Uyghur mi­grants stayed on Chen Ye’s mind and he identified with the conditions of their lives, and increasingly t­ hose he Minor Politics  183

­ hotographed saw him as an accomplice, at times, Uyghur and Han viewers of p his images had difficulty tuning in to the politics of his work. On June 6, 2015, one of Chen Ye’s friends helped him put on an exhibition of his work. It was held in a private coffee shop rather than a state capital–­ sponsored space where government censorship would have prevented the images from being shown. Chen Ye showed over two hundred images in a slideshow set to the Brian Eno soundtrack “­Music for Airports” that several of his Han artist friends had arranged. Around one hundred ­people came. Many of them ­were artists, some of them quite famous in the mainstream Chinese con­ temporary art scene. I invited Ablikim, the Uyghur mi­grant whose story I told in the previous chapter, to attend. As was typical in Han-­sponsored cultural events, he was the only Uyghur in the audience. ­After the show, I introduced Ablikim to Chen Ye. ­Because of the trauma Ablikim had been through over the past several years, he was reluctant to speak Chinese in public; Chen Ye too was reluctant to speak Uyghur in front of an audience. ­Because of this mutual shyness, it was difficult for them to speak freely with each other. Instead, I and other audience members led the conversation in Chinese. Chen Ye talked for an hour about how he got started with his proj­ect and how the lives of the ­people he has come to know so intimately have changed. He discussed how difficult it was for him to prevent Chinese media from putting a “happy face” (Ch: xiaolian) on the lives of Uyghurs. He spoke about how he did not see himself as a hero but rather as just a friend and advocate in Uyghur strug­g les. He was deeply uncomfortable showing his work in such a bourgeois environment. As we ­were walking home ­after our conversation, I asked Ablikim what he thought about the exchange. He held up his hand and positioned his fin­ger about an inch from his thumb and said: He is this close to understanding what the situation is ­really like for Uyghurs. Maybe he is as close as he can get to it. Whenever Han ­people talk to Uyghurs something always gets a l­ittle bit lost in translation. Uyghurs use slightly dif­fer­ent words and Han understand what they are saying in slightly dif­fer­ent ways. Han p ­ eople use words like “common p ­ eople” [Ch: laobaixing] and “backward” [Ch: luohou] to describe their situation as mi­ grants. Every­thing gets translated into the language of Chinese society. Actually, Uyghurs ­don’t think like that or talk like that very much. We think in distinctly dif­fer­ent ways—we ­don’t think we are “backward” compared to Chinese society and “common p ­ eople” makes it seem as though we are all equal. Maybe the way we talk and the way Han p ­ eople talk have 184  Chapter Five

some similarities but they also feel like they have some big differences. What I ­really like about Chen Ye though is that he ­doesn’t see himself as some sort of hero. He just has some ideas about how to do something like photography and he does it. He ­isn’t trying to make a name for himself or do something ­great. He just wants to see life the way it ­really is. I ­really re­spect that. He deeply admired Chen Ye’s personal ethics and he found his images presented something he had rarely seen staged before—­a profound sadness. I won­der why all his images make ­people look so sad. Actually, ­people are often happy even when their lives are not so good. Yet, as he spoke he answered his own question. The sadness of the images was in the intensifying dispossession of Uyghur mi­grant life itself and what it meant to make that experience of life sensible. ­ hose kids, the c­ hildren of “travelers” [Uy: musapir], are prob­ably only T happy two days out of seven. Their families have had their “spirits broken” [Uy: rohi sunghan] in some way or another. ­Either their ­father is a drunk, or their parents just fight all the time b­ ecause of money, or their mom was ostracized by the community they came from ­because she ­wasn’t pious enough or something like that. That is why they left the countryside and came to the city in the first place. They are trying to run away from something like religious restrictions or poverty in their home village. But, of course, they brought the prob­lems they had in the countryside with them to the city. So t­ hose kids can never get away from the feelings of anger and fear that they feel all around them. This is why they look sad, I’m guessing. Maybe some of it is also the way Chen Ye takes pictures. He is looking for moments like that. For Ablikim, it was obvious that the identity Chen Ye referred to as that of a “blind wanderer” (Ch: mangliu) was related to the Uyghur term for “traveler” (Ch: musapir). It was also clear to him that t­here was a range of issues that caused them to come to the city in the first place. He recognized that their spirits had been “broken.” Something had been done to t­ hese ­people to make them appear this way. The gap that Ablikim noticed in Chen Ye’s politics appeared in the incommensurability between their respective positions—­“traveler” from the Uyghur and “blind wanderer” from the Chinese. B ­ ecause Chen Ye’s images ­were being presented from a Chinese position, a fully decolonial politics was not pos­si­ble. As Ablikim put it: Minor Politics  185

What ­will Han ­people get out of looking at ­these pictures? ­These pictures make the prob­lem ­really clear. They put it right in front of you. But like Chen Ye said, they w ­ ill prob­ably just turn them into a series of pictures of cute kids and strange-­looking ­people taken by a heroic photographer. Of course, that is not what he wants and he also d ­ oesn’t want it to result in some sort of easy solution—as some excuse to make some kind of new housing or education policy. You ­can’t fix a prob­lem like this. You can only try to find ways to resolve the prob­lem. If you ­really want to resolve the prob­lem, you have to look at the prob­lems in the countryside, at the deep prob­lems in Xinjiang. You have to see how the structures of society are causing t­ hese sorts of broken families, how discrimination is forcing ­people to move like this to look for work, how the education infrastructure prevents poor p ­ eople from finding real jobs, how the education that rural p ­ eople have is not valued by society. You have to see how ­people’s voices are not heard and how ­people are being treated like animals. No one knows what caused the vio­lence in 2009. ­There are all kinds of theories that it was or­ga­nized by some centralized group or something. I think it is pretty clear to see that many ­people have deep anger that they ­can’t express. Many, like t­ hose ­people who live in the poor areas, are frustrated and hopeless. They can be pretty easily persuaded by other ­people who take advantage of that sort of anger. But, in any case, what happened ­after 2009 did not address the real sources of the prob­lems. It is just like 1989 or the Cultural Revolution, the leaders just say some very vague t­ hings about how t­ hings have been taken care of and now every­thing is harmonious. They just ignore the real prob­lems and act like they never happened. That is a very Chinese way of ­doing ­things. I think that is how most Han ­people ­will see Chen Ye’s pictures too. They w ­ ill just be a l­ ittle sad to see that life was so hard for p ­ eople like this, but they ­won’t do anything about it. Most ­people ­will just see them and think [the Uyghurs] are bad p ­ eople who ­aren’t willing to work or are maybe involved in some sort of crime. But the way they got to that condition was ­because society itself has rejected them. They ­didn’t ­really have that much choice. (my emphasis) What Ablikim is pointing to is the difficulty in translating a minor politics to a broader public. Attempting to redistribute the sensible through the development of a new form of aesthetic-­political reframing does not necessarily allow the intimacy of being-­with ­others to circulate outside of the immediate context of the site of production. Instead, images of poverty and otherness can also be read as an index of “backwardness” (Ch: luohou). They can even be read as 186  Chapter Five

evidence of the individual as the cause of vio­lence and poverty rather than the result of structural vio­lence and dispossession. Yet ­these ­were chances Chen Ye was willing to take. In the end, witnessing created its own life paths and its own politics, however minor they may have been. Conclusion Despite systemic enclosures from the techno-­political system and misrecognition from his viewers, Chen Ye continued his work. No ­matter what sort of urban-­cleansing proj­ects ­were deployed, Chen Ye felt as though the surveillance system could not extirpate “the p ­ eople, the objects, and feelings of a place” that sprouted up like blades of grass in zones of exclusion.8 When he began the proj­ect, “The city was very close,” Chen Ye noted, “within ten minutes you could go down the mountain to a main road where huge billboards kept out the hillside: beautiful w ­ omen, sofas, cell phones, tires, c­ hildren’s clothes . . . ​a wall of ­giant signs stretched out from the city to cover up its embarrassment.” Obfuscated in the winter by industrial pollution and in the summer by a wall of commercial billboards, the informal settlements on the hills ­were a lacunae in the landscape of the Chinese city. Lacking natal home relations and tacit knowledge of cosmopolitan manners, formal business acumen, and the passwords necessary to access capital, the slum population proliferated, cloaked in the “­ great fogs” on the margins of the city. It was only with a major shock to the integrity of the system—­with the mass protests in 2009 and then again with the unfolding P ­ eople’s War on Terror—­that ­those imbricated in the institutions down below ­were compelled to target the settlements beyond the reach of the city.9 And then, it was only with the intention of violently dispossessing the population of Uyghur mi­grants: reeducating them through digital enclosures, internment camps, and reeducation factories. If Chen Ye’s work of rendering the invisible vis­i­ble still allowed for a misrecognition of the stranger, at least in his artistic practice ­there was also a minor politics built out of love, generosity, and vulnerability. Although sharing a view of the world from the position of a Xinjiang-­specific “blind wanderer” or “traveler” did not necessarily produce a recognized form of po­liti­cal rights to live in the city, it framed a view of ordinary life as lived in the midst of vulnerability and that was already an opening to a new form of po­liti­cal feeling. Chen Ye was not trying to produce a form of multiculturalism in which the minority-­other is included in the mainstream without the member of the majority losing something. Instead, he was attempting to lose parts of his own social potential, by amplifying the voices of the other. By entering into an Minor Politics  187

intimate minor politics with Uyghur mi­grants, Chen Ye found a mea­sure of repair in his own life. He found ways to give up on the obligations to normalcy that had been placed on him by his ­family, the techno-­political system that mediated his life, and the safe enclosures of mainstream society that repelled him. He found a way to step out of normal life and share a life with the dispossessed. Rather than being part of an official ethnic solidarity team sponsored by state capital to bring minorities into categories of domination and productivity as the economy turned to terror capitalism, Chen Ye set out on his own to find resonances between his own life and the lives of ­those on the margins. In d ­ oing so, he was introducing a new specificity to the prob­lem at hand and, through this, a strategic reassembling of the terms with which Uyghur travelers ­were regarded by themselves, by other Han artists, and by art viewers. Uyghurs who saw his work considered it “almost good enough” and, for Chen Ye, that was enough to continue his culture work as fogs of pollution that obscured Uyghur neighborhoods ­were lifted and waves of biometric data collection and social reeducation began.

188  Chapter Five

6 Subtraction

In August 2014, when I walked down the backstreets in the Uyghur mi­grant community of Heijia Shan at around 8 a.m. on a Friday, the weekly day of worship in the Islamic world, I saw p ­ eople rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. ­Those who had woken up before 8 a.m. had coal fires burning in rusting metal barrels. Eggs ­were roasting on metal tripods. Big iron woks ­were filled with a slow-­cooking rice and carrot pilaf called polu. The butchers ­were slaughtering their second sheep for the day, hacking open rib cages with small hatchets. The juice pressers w ­ ere carting their presses out to their wagonload of shriveling pomegranates. The bread makers stoked the fires in their clay ovens lined with lime from the desert. This was one of the last Uyghur neighborhoods where ­people filled teapots from communal hot ­water taps. The smoke from coal fires from the last remaining one-­story ­houses hung in the air, mingling with the

acrid scent of Styrofoam burning in the ditches. Small ­children still had ­free rein in the streets, where they played in the rubble unsupervised. Farther up the mountain, one-­story homes ­were being dismantled by Uyghur day laborers brick by brick while new twenty-­story apartment buildings w ­ ere being built by Han construction crews. The sound of the construction of the government-­ subsidized orange and yellow towers mixed with the sound of dogs barking, the cheerful shouts of ­children on recess at the nearby elementary school, and the chanting of the antiterrorism army platoon stationed next to the community. In adjacent alleyways, Han mi­grants from Anhui and Henan sorted through insulation ripped from the sides of sal­vaged refrigerators in preparation for a big shipment to the recycling plant, but the vast majority of the twenty thousand mi­grants in the community ­were Uyghur. Uyghur mi­grants first built this settlement on the hillside in the 1990s; the Han and Hui mi­grants on the fringes came ­later. It was one of the last remaining Uyghur informal settlements or shantytowns in the city. In this gray island of brick, dust, sweat, and rubble, the city that surrounded it seemed to be at a remove. ­Here, every­thing seemed to be temporary, subtracting. Social life was si­mul­ta­neously disappearing yet ongoing. Since the entire area

figure 6.1. The rubble of Heijia Shan. Image by author. 190  Chapter Six

was scheduled for urban cleansing following the uprising of 2009, ­there ­were fewer cameras and more police.1 ­There ­were many newly constructed walls and gates, but they w ­ ere tended haphazardly. B ­ ecause every­thing was in flux, t­ here was a generalized sense of incoherence in the community. Many of the ­people who inhabited the space w ­ ere not actively resisting the development of the city; they ­were merely trying to live with what they knew and what they had. ­People lived, sorting the refuse of the city, waiting to be told to leave. The tens of thousands of Uyghur mi­grants on Heijia Shan self-­identified as musapir or “travelers” from elsewhere. Yet, for all the uncertainty and fragmentation of the community in the scene I just described, t­ here was still a center to social life. At the bottom of the hill, in the center of the alleyways, was the Heijia Shan mosque. It served as the institutional center of the community. During weekly Friday prayers, the crowd around the mosque swelled to several thousand. A vibrant bazaar sprang to life and for a few hours a spirit of conviviality took over the space. Despite the presence of plainclothes state police and uniformed contractors also came to scan the crowds for mi­grants suspected of Islamic extremism, in many ways the bazaar operated like a weekly rural market. P ­ eople from an area around half-­an-­hour’s walking distance in each direction converged once a week to buy supplies and share the news of the week. Mi­grants from the same home village met and commiserated. T ­ hose who attended the unauthorized prayer rooms (Uy: namaz-­xana) in Uyghur restaurants around the city used the Bluetooth function on their smartphones to share illegalized digital recordings of Islamic teachings they had downloaded from WeChat that week. They did not realize that this activity would be enough to send them to the internment camps, which would be built across the region beginning the next year. For now, WeChat functioned as a semipublic private sphere where online communities of religious piety formed along social networks (Harris and Isa 2019). Nearly every­one I met seemed to be in a Qur­an study group. They ­were not yet aware that they w ­ ere becoming the object of terror capitalism and a new industry of biometric and digital surveillance. The mi­grants who met through this new religious community used this space to network. They talked about which jobs w ­ ere coming available, about supplies of shoes, coats, toys, and cheap electronics that could be sold at a profit on the streets. By identifying themselves as travelers or musapir, they laid claim to a sense of belonging to this mosque community. This belonging in turn provided them with a weekly sense of economic support and well-­being. Despite the efforts of the state-­sponsored techno-­political system to eliminate the presence of this population in the city through the controlled distribution Subtraction 191

of rental and commercial permits, ­here the Uyghur mi­grant population found ways to survive but only for a time. This chapter considers the role of the Uyghur musapir as a basis for a religious economy that prolonged life in the city by fostering social reproduction beyond purely economic activity. Often life in a de­mo­li­tion zone appears to be a space of abjection. It might be seen as a space where the poor are slotted to suffer an almost under­ground existence as their homes and dreams are torn apart and buried in the rubble. Although ­there is an ele­ment of truth to this imagery of abjection, this chapter shows that the story of informal Uyghur settlements is more complicated than that. The Uyghur concept of the musapir—­ long conceived as an exception to the norm of Uyghur rootedness in farming communities and the stability of land tenure—­implies a feeling of desolation and loss, but it also describes a kind of piety and willfulness. Musapir, or musafir as it written in the original Arabic, means “traveler,”2 but among Uyghurs it has come to describe a sense of both psychic and material displacement and a surrender to Islamic faith. The Chinese term mangliu, or “blind wanderer,” is used in con­temporary Chinese discourse with both the negative connotations of poverty and homelessness and self-­ascribed positive associations of mi­grant toughness and courage. The Uyghur term musapir differs from this Chinese conceptualization in the way it is related to par­tic­u­lar religious histories of encultured thought. For Uyghurs, musapir also describes a par­tic­u­lar religious practice—­the Sufi tradition of the wandering Islamic mystic—­and it is ­here, at the nexus of the psychic, material, and religious, that it becomes fruitful as a specific conceptualization of the sociality of Uyghur mi­grants as they wait to be expelled from the city. Many self-­identified musapir repeatedly insisted that they w ­ ere hoping to someday be able to achieve ­legal status in the city and buy an apartment, yet many of them also admitted that this was not likely to happen. Most of them focused on just the week in front of them. They lived Friday to Friday, when they participated in the weekly Islamic ser­vice and street bazaar. The younger generation of mi­grants relied on their network of fellow travelers to help them find more short-­term work, pyramid schemes, and training courses when what they ­were ­doing in the pre­sent fell through. One of the ways of strengthening this network was through regular meetings to discuss unauthorized religious teachings or tabligh of reformist, or pious, Islam, which became enormously popu­lar among young Uyghur men in Southern Xinjiang as a result of their experience of dispossession and their new access to the internet and social media. An older generation of mi­grants relied on the same mosque community to survive the turmoil that came from having their homes demolished during Ürümchi’s 192  Chapter Six

urban-­cleansing proj­ects. Increasingly, they saw value in the new forms of piety that ­were being practiced by younger, more devout, mi­grants. Like the younger generation of mi­grants, they too saw themselves as becoming musapir. In what follows, I explore the way Uyghur mi­grants from Kashgar Prefecture strug­g led to achieve economic stability in their lives while contending with the rise of terror capitalism in Ürümchi. Since 2009 the digital enclosure system has forced hundreds of thousands of Uyghur mi­grants to leave their homes. The expulsions w ­ ere enforced by regular home inspections where Uyghur inhabitants ­were asked to produce “green cards” (Uy: yeshil kart) as described in previous chapters. Throughout the period of my fieldwork, hundreds of thousands of mi­grants ­were forced to leave the city. While, for Ablikim, dispossession had felt like an interminable pro­cess of subtraction that began in the city ­after 2009; as the ­People’s War on Terror was set in motion, dispossession began to move very quickly. By May 2015 entire apartment buildings had been vacated; hundreds of Uyghur restaurants had closed. In Heijia Shan, many had been forced to leave. ­Others had dodged the police contractors and lived without permits in the rooms of friends u ­ ntil eventually they ­were caught at checkpoints or by facial surveillance systems. By focusing on a tumultuous year in the life of a ­family of an older generation of mi­grants who inhabited a “nail h ­ ouse” (Ch: dingzihu) in this informal settlement, I show that mi­grant life was often comingled with Reformist Islamic practice. I examine how the ­family refused to accept compensation for the de­mo­li­tion of their ­house, thus enacting a “nail ­house” re­sis­tance while at the same time preparing themselves for its inevitable de­mo­li­tion by drawing on the musapir Uyghur tradition—an Islamic and communal practice of active interdependence. ­People in this community often depended on relational support while autonomously pursuing pious virtue. I also show how they refused to have their lives displayed in a documentary film but instead chose to tell their stories on their own terms. I found that, by participating in a mosque community made up of other musapir, the ­family was able to use urban sheep farming—­raising a small herd of sheep inside their home and in the rubble that surrounded it—as a ­viable means to prepare for the oncoming wave of dispossession. I then turn to the story of a young Uyghur musapir who lived in the same mosque community as the ­family. In his case, the mosque community and the online social network it fostered became the locus of his social identification and a source of economic stability. He actively used his musapir identification to validate his religious persona as a reformist Muslim. Within the mi­grant community, the knowledge he had gained through his immersion in prayer Subtraction 193

room discussions and online forums regarding Islamic othropraxis built a religious calling into his position as a temporary inhabitant of the city. I argue that the “nail h ­ ouse” mi­grant farmer, who was in the pro­cess of losing his h ­ ouse, and the younger religious mi­grant ­were at two ends of the spectrum of what counted as con­temporary musapir sociality. In the end, like the hundreds of thousands of other musapir, both of them failed to claim a secure space in the city. For the older man, strategic online invisibility prevented his detention, while in the younger man’s case online be­hav­ior led to his subtraction—­a term that describes the general pro­cess of urban banishment, epistemic erasure, and unfree ­labor that typified the effects of terror capitalism. Islamic Practice and Religious Economies This chapter takes inspiration from growing debates in anthropology on reformist and “everyday” Islam.3 My reading of the new lit­er­a­ture on the “everyday” is that, in many cases, it attempts to open ethnographies of religious ­people ­toward the way power structures other than moral or religious authority—­such as ­those of settler colonialism and non-­Western forms of racialization—­are also part of the fabric of con­temporary life for Muslims in places like Iraq, India, and in my case, Northwest China. Anthropological scholarship on the power and efficacy of religious piety from scholars such as Saba Mahmood (2005), Charles Hirschkind (2006), and Lara Deeb and Mona Harb (2013) pre­sents a compelling argument for the way reformist forms of Islam have precipitated a rise in ethical self-­cultivation. Many of the scholars of everyday Islam do something similar, yet they often place greater stress on the multiplicity of sources that inform this rise in ethical and po­liti­cal be­hav­ior (Zyskowski 2014; Fadil and Fernando 2015). For example, Veena Das (2010) attempts to come to terms with the way Muslims at times use Hindu moral frameworks as a way to resolve ethnic tensions in their everyday life practices. Likewise, in this chapter, I argue that the rise of reformist Islam was to some extent a response to a Chinese cap­i­tal­ist and colonial proj­ect that conflated Uyghur refusals to be eliminated with so-­called religious extremism. The vulnerability of social life in the midst of a settler-­colonial proj­ect structured and enabled the way Uyghurs understood, negotiated, and deployed Islamic moral frameworks. This push ­toward new forms of Islam was thus si­ mul­ta­neously an effect of techno-­political enclosure, facilitated by an infusion of state capital in new communication infrastructures, and, as shown throughout this book, the object of terror capitalism. Smart phones, 3g networks, mp3 recordings carried on sd cards, and transportation infrastructure w ­ ere all part 194  Chapter Six

of what fostered the religious economy among Uyghur mi­grants. In addition, the par­tic­u­lar form of land-­based Islamic knowledge they drew on informed the way they adapted reformist Islamic frameworks in their own lives. My argument h ­ ere is not that Uyghur lives ­were fractured in multiple identities, as is often conceptualized in Western liberal frameworks, but rather that their everyday experience of Islam was situated in changing structures of power, influence, and capital accumulation. One of the ways this adaptation was expressed was through the changing meaning of the figure of the musapir or traveler in Uyghur society. In a short story called “The Musapir’s Tavern,” the popu­lar Uyghur fiction writer Memtimin Hoshur (2015) describes the role of the musapir in Uyghur society in the early 1990s. In his portrait, the figure of the musapir represented a kind of drunken poet who frequented taverns and opined about Uyghur society and Islamic philosophy. He was a Uyghur man of a certain amount of privilege who spent much of his time talking about Sufi flights of the mind while drinking vodka and sorghum liquor. He was presented as a man who was bored with life and irresponsible in regard to the needs of his ­family. Of course, Hoshur was alluding to the rise in alcohol dependence in the 1980s and 1990s but underemphasizing the way this rise in de­pen­dency correlated with the rise in underemployment and new forms of consumption that accompanied the period of cap­i­tal­ist development ­after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. As I showed in chapter 3, in the 2000s, as the economic dispossession of the rural Uyghur population intensified, the population of rural-to-urban migration increased significantly. At the same time, a major religious movement began to gain currency, particularly among young men. By 2012 Uyghur men had in large part ­stopped drinking and smoking. With the arrival of WeChat, they began joining online religious discussion groups, which they associated with urban life and citizenship in the global Muslim community. The musapir lifestyle had come to be associated with pious Islamic living. Mi­grants often said they left the countryside to escape religious restrictions and detention. The younger generation of musapir often claimed this lifestyle as a material manifestation of inner spiritual striving for Islamic righ­teousness. This virtue seeking was expressed through a daily practice of devotion, moral comportment, truth seeking, and dependence on God and each other. It did not mean that they w ­ ere uninterested in worldly t­ hings, but they strove to see suffering as part of a larger spiritual journey. This path also provided them with a mobile network of economic support and a means of claiming prominent social roles even as they combated homelessness. For the older generation, ­those who had Subtraction 195

been musapir since the 1990s, this same transformation provided them with social, religious, and psychic resources as they clung to their homes in the city. When they identified themselves as musapir and integrated their lives in a material and virtual musapir mosque community, they ­were laying claim to an economic and religious position as con­temporary devout Muslims who ­were attempting to escape the oppression of colonization in the countryside by entering a religious community in the city.4 In fact, it was the enclosure of musapir lives that gave the community form and content. ­Those who lived in the community experienced the space as both a source of stress and a “comfort” (Uy: teselli)—­a community to which they could turn when confronted with the vulnerability of joblessness or the stigma of homelessness. It was a space that afforded them a sense of autonomy in their everyday lives. H ­ ere, I am thinking of autonomy not merely in the sense of the self-­reliant liberal subject but rather in relation to what Kathleen Millar has referred to as “relational autonomy” (2014). This is something akin to what Lauren Berlant describes as “lateral agency” (2011) in which a subject attempts to maintain the ­will to live by seeking comfort in food or entertainment. For Millar, though, relational autonomy is a kind of involuntary minor politics, finding a communal grounds for hanging on to vital forms of sociality. For Uyghur mi­grants, the mosque community allowed them to build and sustain relationships, develop social roles, pursue life proj­ects in the midst of uncertainty, and evaluate their subtraction in relation to the longer spiritual horizon. It gave them strength to endure. The poverty and rubble that marked the Uyghur musapir community in Heijia Shan was often a source of stigma in relation to more affluent Uyghurs. It produced a dissonance: comfort mingled with the stigma of poverty and the threat of subtraction by the techno-­political policing systems. To tease apart the threads of this religious economy, I turn now to the story of Emir and his wife, Bahar, and how they utilized the musapir community in their strug­g le to keep their home in Heijia Shan. For them, identifying with the musapir mi­grant community provided them with a way of clinging to the life they had known, at least for a time. The Last Sheep Farmer in the City The ­house was built into the hillside (see figure 6.2). When Emir and his wife, Bahar, had first built it in the early 1980s, they had designed it with sheep in mind. The main door was flanked on the right by a pen made out of old wooden doors. ­There was a long hallway built into the hillside that was made of 196  Chapter Six

brick and adobe plaster. A small door to the right led to the living quarters of the eldest son’s f­ amily. At the end of the hallway w ­ ere coal, wood, and leaf roughage storage rooms surrounding a small courtyard. In the center of this open-­air room was a large raised platform where f­amily life took place during the summer. In the far southeastern corner, built furthest into the hillside, was an earthen room that became the center of cooking and f­ amily life during the winter. Beside the kitchen door, ­there was a large earthen pot for ­water storage; on the wall ­behind it was a poster of snacks eaten during the cele­bration at the end of Ramadan. Next to this was a door to the adjoining sleeping area. The stovepipe from the cooking stove (Uy: mashq) moved horizontally through the adjoining room—­ providing heat as the smoke was directed out of the ­house. The kitchen was windowless, but Bahar had hung curtains on the wall opposing the eating platform (Uy: supa); on the opposite wall b­ ehind the platform was a large poster of what she identified as “a mosque in Saudi Arabia,” Masjid al-­Nabawi in Medina. They had bought it before the beginning of the P ­ eople’s War on Terror, when such images ­were still permitted to be bought or sold. ­There was no ­running ­water in the neighborhood. All the cooking was done over a coal fire. Bahar, who was sixty-­eight, strug­g led to lift the heavy round

figure 6.2. Emir and Bahar’s home in 2015. Photo by Nicola Zolin, used with permission. Subtraction 197

“pot” (Uy: kazan) she used to make their daily meal of soup or pilaf. She said that usually Emir helped her with the pot and the iron rings she used to adjust the height of the pot over the coals, but he was not that strong e­ ither. He had what sounded like emphysema. On most days, if he was not praying and visiting with other older men at the mosque, Emir could be found puttering around in the rubble that surrounded their ­house. He would let his sheep out to “graze” (Uy: tokhtimay yeyish) and then chase them down and put them in an outdoor corral. At lunchtime, Emir and Behar shared their soup with me in a large tin bowl. Although ­there was snow on the ground outside, the kitchen was cozy. I could feel why they did not want to leave. Sitting t­ here with them, it was easy to forget that we w ­ ere in the center of the city surrounded by twenty-­story apartment buildings. All around us was the rubble of the Uyghur neighborhood of Heijia Shan. Their ­house was a “nail h ­ ouse” (Ch: dingzihu) that had not yet been demolished in the push to bring security and modern urban planning to the city of Ürümchi. As in similar situations in numerous cities across the nation, by sheer dint of ­will they had resisted the government’s efforts to bring renewal to the city. They ­were some of the last of the twenty thousand inhabitants of the neighborhood to be relocated to government-­subsidized apartment buildings or to be expelled from the city. They w ­ ere fighting to keep their home by refusing to leave. Emir had come to the city in 1974 as a Uyghur member of the Red Guard in Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. He and Bahar married in 1982 and had three c­ hildren. They supported themselves by raising their small flock of eleven sheep. Emir said that when the time was right he would sell them to butchers in the neighborhood. He said, “We have no pension, just the sheep.” It was ­because of this that they refused to take the government’s compensation for their ­house. “They offered us an 180,000 yuan discount on new housing in exchange for our ­house ­because it is so large—­over 200 square meters, but that means that we would still need to pay for the rest of the ­house [around 300,000 yuan], and of course we ­couldn’t keep sheep anymore,” he shook his head. They did not want to move into the nearby government housing ­because they would not be able to live off the land as they had their ­whole lives. “All of the government officials have told us to leave, but we w ­ on’t do it,” he stated, a look of resolve on his face. He also worried that if they agreed to move, they would be moved far away from the Heijia Shan mosque community where he had been an active member for around twenty years. B ­ ecause he had good relationships with the other Uyghur mi­grants in the community, he had a steady supply of leftover food from the restaurants in the neighborhood. The food waste that 198  Chapter Six

his son collected from the string of Uyghur restaurants that lined the street leading up to the mosque was what sustained his sheep. Without t­ hese suppliers and the space he needed to keep his sheep, he d ­ idn’t know what he would do. “I have always been a musapir, but now we are truly becoming ‘without a home or hearth’ [Uy: öy-­uchaqsiz],” he said. In Uyghur the term musapir has a deep cultural meaning. As I noted ­earlier, in the original Arabic the term refers simply to travelers. In the Uyghur context, though, it takes on the meaning of a stranger, an alien, a wanderer, or a refugee. In a material sense, p ­ eople often take it to mean precisely what Emir said they are becoming: “­those without home or hearth.” Yet t­ here is a psychic and religious dimension to the concept as well. One of the most common ways in which the term is used is in a proverb that ­people say when they are ­going through difficult times: “­Until you have been a wanderer, you ­can’t be a true Muslim” (Uy: musapir bolmighiche, Musulman blomas). This phrase draws on the Sufi derevish traditions of wandering mystics that have long featured in the Uyghur practice of Islam. Since the very beginning of the Uyghur exposure to Islam in the ninth c­ entury, “the bringers of Islam” (who ­today are regarded as “saints” or wali) w ­ ere ­those who traveled along Sufi networks from Iran, Iraq, and other parts of Central Asia. Over the centuries, this exposure continued with the ongoing presence of Sufi mystics who traveled from town to town in the ser­vice of Sufi masters (Uy: sheikhs) and par­tic­u­lar paths (Uy: tariqeh) of Sufi religious practice. ­These wanderers lived off the charity of the Muslims they met along the way; often they w ­ ere seen as homeless ascetics, “enthralled in passion” (Uy: meptun bolup ketken), and “careless with their own lives” (Uy: öle tirilishige baqmay). The Uyghur oral tradition of song and poetry was in large part developed by ­these musapir. Over the past seven centuries, the musapir’s life became one of the dominant themes in Uyghur folk ­music. It was a theme that reflected not only the Sufi mystic’s search for the beloved or divine presence, in a meta­ phoric or spiritual sense but also the way poverty and f­ amily obligations forced young men who had learned a trade in their hometowns to travel across the desert to other oasis towns in search of a stable life. Nearly e­ very Uyghur mi­ grant in Ürümchi would say “I’m like a musapir,” reaching for a poetic image of a lonely traveler far from home. But only the ­people who w ­ ere most vulnerable, like Emir and his wife, would refer to themselves as musapir who ­were “without home or hearth” (Uy: öy-­uchaqsiz). This is significant ­because it tells us that the experience of life as a Uyghur mi­grant was becoming more precarious and, along with this change, the Uyghur conceptualization of what it means to be a musapir was becoming more immediate and deeply felt. Subtraction 199

A Failed Documentary For Emir, his position as a member of a musapir community produced a feeling of dissonance. Although he acknowledged the poverty of the community and how the structural vio­lence of the city was threatening to erase it, he was also clear about the agency he had shown in choosing his life path and his standing as a Muslim elder in the community. During one of the many times when I ­stopped by to see him and Bahar, Emir told me about how his life proj­ect had brought him to this place. He began by talking about the rise of Mao Zedong and the Gang of Four as if it ­were something that had just happened recently. For him, national history was personal history. He said he came to Ürümchi in 1974; he was young, and becoming a Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution seemed like a good way to escape the poverty he had been born into. “At that time I was very (po­liti­cally) active. I ­really believed in where I thought the country was headed and I wanted to be part of it.” Of course, when he got to Ürümchi he realized that t­ hings ­were quite difficult for p ­ eople without official positions and regular food rations. For the first few years, he lived on bread and boiled ­water. Then in 1979, ­after Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping introduced economic reforms that changed his life. “In the 1980s I started d ­ oing some business, selling this and that, mostly fruit from Southern Xinjiang, and by 1984 I fi­nally had enough to afford a wife. That was when she came along.”5 At this point in the story, Bahar interjected, saying Emir should not be talking so openly about their private life, but it always seemed as though she was ­really pleased that he was elaborating on it so much. Fi­nally, we came to the pre­sent circumstances of his life in the community. As he put it: ­ fter the incidents in 2009, the government de­cided immediately that A areas like [Heijia Shan] needed to be torn down. They came to us with some kind of notice. It was all written in Chinese. T ­ here was no Uyghur at all. We c­ ouldn’t ­really understand it. So ­after they posted it, we asked a neighbor w ­ oman who had graduated from college to translate it for us. It had four or five points. The first one was that we had no ­legal right to live in that place. We ­didn’t have “the letter” [lease agreement] we needed and we would have to move. The rest of the points talked about where we should move and how the government would help us with it. Of course, they ­were just trying to scare us into moving. How can we not have a ­legal right to this place? I built it myself. In any case, we would consider moving if they would give us the money they promised. Instead, they said that what they promised would come in the form of a discount in the new housing. Since this place is so large, they said they would give us dis200  Chapter Six

counts on two apartments that are eighty-­five square meters each. So we de­cided to just wait for them to give us new h ­ ouses or force us to move. My son is already married and living ­here with us, so if we move then he could have a new ­house. Actually, we are just living on what I can make from raising my sheep and the 1,000 yuan he can give us from time to time. This is our life. ­These days the government workers are not coming ­every day. They say that in the end they know we w ­ ill move, so they ­don’t need to waste their time with us. For now ­things are fine for us. Although Emir said they w ­ ere ­doing fine while waiting for the inevitable de­ mo­li­tion of their home, when I began to pull apart and consider some of the implications of the strands of his story, he became much more fearful. He did not have a lease agreement for his property, nor did he have a green card that would give him permission to live in the city. He was deeply worried that the system would force them to leave the city without any compensation if they became too vis­i­ble in their opposition to the seizure of their home. One day I mentioned his story to Mahmud, the Uyghur screenwriter who is one of the central figures in chapter 3. By this time Mahmud had a large following in a Uyghur-­language WeChat “Short Film Salon.” Mahmud was intrigued to hear that ­there was someone living in the city raising sheep as a livelihood. He asked if I would introduce him to Emir and Bahar so they could discuss the possibility of making a film about Emir’s life. ­After we arrived, prayed for the ­house­hold, and Bahar served us tea, Mahmud broached the subject of making a film. He explained that he just wanted to focus on Emir’s life experiences. Mahmud thought it would be in­ter­est­ing to his hundreds of thousands of viewers b­ ecause many ­people did not know that ­there was a community of “mi­grants” (Uy: kuchman) living in such poor conditions in the city. While Mahmud was careful not to describe Emir as a musapir, given the stigma of homelessness that was often associated with the word, from the connotation of what he said he made it clear that this was how he was thinking about the documentary. While kuchman is simply a generic term that refers to someone who has moved to find work, in its current usage the term musapir, when ascribed to someone e­ lse, has come to identify someone who is perceived as destitute and in need of pity. Mahmud intended to highlight the way Emir’s son, a security guard, strug­g les to care for the ­family, and how Emir had hoped to get a new home for his son when he married but could not b­ ecause he was so poor. Mahmud’s ­imagined documentary would turn on the fact that Emir was not able to provide a home for his son ­because the government would not provide them with adequate compensation for their home. Subtraction 201

Emir was ­silent for a few moments. Then he blurted out, “As far as making a film, we ­couldn’t mention anything about the government or politics. But I’m happy to talk about my life.” Sensing that he was losing ground, Mahmud began to backtrack a bit, saying he was just starting to think about the story for the film so he was sure they could tell the story in a way that would make every­one happy. We talked a bit more and then Emir circled back to the topic of the film. This time as he spoke he was quite animated. His upper lip trembled a bit and he jumped up off the platform a few times as he gesticulated with his hands. His voice quavered as he thought through the implications of a digital repre­sen­ta­tion of his life: I’m still thinking about the film ­thing. I de­cided that it ­isn’t a good idea. Since the story is about how I am a ‘poor’ farmer, once it gets onto the internet it ­will go everywhere and p ­ eople ­will think I am complaining about my situation. It ­will make the government ­really unhappy and then they ­will come to me asking why I was willing to do what I did. They w ­ ill investigate me and find out that my residence permit is still in Kashgar, even though my ­children’s permit is ­here; they ­will find out that I ­don’t have a green card. And then they w ­ ill make me leave. Also, none of the ­houses ­here in this community have a lease [Uy: het]. I ­don’t have one ­either, so they w ­ ill just take my home away. If the film is about me being a poor farmer, then I’m not willing to do it. If we made a film about how much life had improved over the past forty years, that would be better. It ­really has improved. When I came to Ürümchi, we w ­ ere still using ration tickets and sneaking around to buy meat and t­ hings. We never had as much as five yuan even in the 1980s. Now we always have enough to eat. Now even the sheep are used to eating ­human food; they eat better than we did back during the hard times. Although Emir was not fully computer literate, he understood the danger of online surveillance. If his story was to “go everywhere,” it would certainly be noticed by the authorities and would produce a negative outcome. Unlike Mahmud—­and Hasan, whose story I ­will tell next—­Emir had a sharper awareness of his vulnerability as a musapir and his need to stay out of the gaze of techno-­political surveillance. “The police think that the p ­ eople who live h ­ ere are too dangerous, so if we make a film about this place they w ­ ill definitely notice. It is not pos­si­ble,” he stated matter-­of-­factly. What Emir was referring to ­here was the way Heijia Shan was considered to be one of the epicenters of Uyghur religious extremism and terrorism a­ fter the civil unrest of 2009. Many 202  Chapter Six

Han inhabitants of the city regarded it as a space where, if you w ­ ere to enter at night, you would never come out alive. This reading of the space as the locus of religious extremism and “low quality” (Ch: suzhi hen di) Uyghur mi­grants was something that mi­grants like Emir had internalized. He knew that t­ hose who lived ­there ­were perceived as potential threats, subject to digital and h ­ uman surveillance by community intelligence workers and software programs, and any public statement against government land seizures could be read as a call to terrorism. Emir thought of himself as having a l­ imited relational autonomy or comfort within the musapir religious community. It was only when he was observed from the outside that he felt stigmatized and when he was scrutinized by the state police and their contractors that he felt threatened. Emir’s refusal to allow a documentary to be made about his life speaks to both the vulnerability of his position and the l­imited forms of agency he possessed within the musapir community. It also draws attention to the limits of repre­sen­ta­tion. As much as Emir wanted his story to be told, he needed to tell it on his own terms. Thinking about the failure of documentary film to perform the kind of work he needed draws attention to larger frames of repre­sen­ta­tional failure. What are the limits of musapir sociality? What are the limits of what it can hold and represent? In a more methodological dimension, what are the limits of ethnography as a documentation of Emir’s life path? Islam and Musapir Sociality Emir said that for most of his life he did not pray five times a day. It was r­ eally only ­after his way of life was threatened ­after 2009 that he ­really de­cided to take religious practice so seriously. Many ­people in the community became more devout a­ fter the vio­lence as a way of coping with their increased vulnerability. So many young Uyghur men ­were killed or dis­appeared, ­children ­were left without ­fathers, and then the contractors began to demolish their ­houses. He recalled that, before 2009, it had been normal to be poor and in search of work, but now ­things ­were much worse. Out of the population of male mi­ grants who had been ­there before the vio­lence, only the old men ­were left. He felt that more young mi­grants had come from the South since 2009 and that they had also influenced the community through the knowledge they had gained in online discussion groups and from teaching recordings. Now almost every­one in the community was quite serious about praying five times a day, fasting during Ramadan, and maintaining personal purity. This did not mean that ­there ­were no longer any prob­lems with theft, drug abuse, or domestic Subtraction 203

vio­lence in the community, but he felt that t­here had been a shift ­toward cultivating virtue. The p ­ eople in the community depended on each other in deeper ways for economic support and spiritual protection. Since 2009 the mosque community had become the center of his life; he spent a good part of each day talking about Islam and gossiping with other older men at the mosque. Nine months a­ fter I met Emir for the first time, he told me that they ­were being forced to move in fifteen days. T ­ here was a kind of hopelessness in his voice as he told me: Our time has become short. Next month we are moving into a big building on the outskirts of the city in the Saimachang, over by the lake. They ­wouldn’t give us a space h ­ ere in t­ hese buildings, but over t­ here they gave us two h ­ ouses, one for me and my wife and one for my son and his ­family. We w ­ ill be on the first floor and they ­will be on the second. ­There are thirty floors in that building! I ­can’t take the sheep with us, so I ­will have to sell them. I’ve been raising sheep h ­ ere for almost forty years. T ­ here is nothing in ­those new ­houses. They are just bare. Of course they ­will have ­water inside, so it ­will be more con­ve­nient, but we ­will have to pay for every­thing: ­water, heat, electricity. It is a money-­eating ­house. The worst ­thing about this situation is that t­ here is no mosque in that area. I w ­ ill have to go on the bus to the mosque in front of Xinjiang University during the week and only come h ­ ere on Friday. We have no choice. This is the government we have. They just take what they want and tell us what to do. They ­won’t give us money for our h ­ ouse and let us decide for ourselves. If they would have done that, it would have been good. The prob­lem is that this new h ­ ouse ­really ­isn’t ours. They are just letting us live in it in­def­ initely. If they want to kick us out, they can. We ­can’t sell it. We have no choice. This government just takes from us Uyghurs and gives to the Han. They are making our lives harder and harder. We ­don’t have any choice. I have pain from all sides, but God ­will provide. (my emphasis) For Emir, the most difficult ­thing about moving into a “money-­eating” ­house in an apartment building on the grid was not just the financial uncertainty of needing to pay for utilities or even the fact that he would not be able to continue to practice his livelihood. He had even accepted the fact that the ­house he had built by hand was g­ oing to be reduced to rubble. By saying that the government “takes from Uyghurs and gives to Han,” he was alluding to the way his ­house would be replaced with commodity housing that only Han settlers could afford and that only they would be permitted to buy according to 204  Chapter Six

zoning regulations that prohibited Uyghurs from renting or buying property in Uyghur-­majority areas of the city. The most difficult t­ hing about the move would be the disconnection from his mosque community. Before, he had neighbors from his mosque to depend on for material, psychic, and religious support; he had a daily ritual practice that gave his life a sense of rhythm and purpose. Both he and his wife ­were highly skilled in caring for their ­family’s basic needs for warmth and food around the f­ amily hearth just as the musapir community had allowed them to feel as though they had a social role and a sense of dignity as experienced travelers in a community of travelers. As in the proverb regarding the way musapir life was a prerequisite of “true Muslim experience,” the depth of their experience provided them with a claim to religious, psychic, and material maturity. It had given them a sense of “comfort” (teselli) in the midst of vulnerability. On May 1, 2015, their ­house and hearth ­were demolished. The Story of Hasan I turn now to the story of another Uyghur mi­grant in the same community, a young man named Hasan, and the symbolic value that his role as a young religious musapir in the community held for him. As a recent arrival in the community, he used his standing as a devoted teacher and practitioner of what he referred to as tabligh or Islamic piety teachings to enter into a stable life proj­ect. Like Emir and Bahar, he perceived his identification as a musapir as a means by which he could transform and maintain his sense of self. Although the length of time they had spent in the community varied considerably, for both Emir and Hasan, the sense of dislocation they developed as they entered into the relational autonomy of the reformist Muslim community made returning to their hometowns or moving into government housing seem impossible. Of course, this fear of leaving was further exacerbated by broader structures of colonial and cap­i­tal­ist vio­lence. The first time I met Hasan he told me he was a musapir. He was walking down the street with a stack of fruit crates strapped to a small cart. He was peddling a special kind of naan made from chickpea flour that was said to improve your digestion. He told me he was originally from a small village outside the town of Yaken—­one of the poorest parts of Southern Xinjiang, near the border with Pakistan nearly fifteen hundred kilo­meters from Ürümchi.6 He had dropped out of ­middle school and begun traveling ­after his ­father died, and his ­mother remarried in 2008. His stepfather had beaten him and demanded that he earn money for the f­amily, so he had just left with his “life and liver Subtraction 205

friend” (Uy: jan-­jiger dost). For a number of years, he and his friends had dug for jade in the riverbeds of Khotan and then came to the city to sell their stones. They had sold their supply, which was why he was selling naan. With the new restrictions on travel that had been imposed during the P ­ eople’s War on Terror in 2014, it was difficult to travel back and forth between Southern Xinjiang and the city. He noted that, as a Muslim, it was now impossible to live in his hometown. ­There ­were just too many police. Hasan walked in a very patterned way through the city. When I suggested more direct routes, he declined, saying that he knew the way. He followed a path that was less direct but was connected by mosques and Uyghur bazaar life. We walked in close proximity to cell-­phone salesmen and makeshift theaters; we walked down nameless alleyways, not main streets. Hasan did not speak or read Chinese, but he had other forms of knowledge. Hasan knew the musapir sections of the city like the back of his hand. He knew exactly where ­every prayer room and mosque was located. He had been a traveler in the city for over seven years, so he had an extensive network of fellow travelers he could call on at a moment’s notice via his many contacts on WeChat. He walked purposefully with a long loping step, like a farmer who had used a pickaxe and wide-­bladed hoe for long periods of time. He walked quickly but was never in too much of a rush to avoid stopping to pray ­every two hours; he ate his daily meal in the same way, quickly and forcefully, pausing briefly to whisper a prayer between bites. He knew what he wanted when he talked to other hustlers. A ­ fter prayer on Fridays, he often ran into old acquaintances who told him about supplies of coats or shoes that they had access to—­they would make plans to get in touch with each other and pool their resources to buy a big supply and sell them together out of the back of a three-­wheeled truck. He relished opportunities to help other musapir; but he was also quick to ask about the status of mosque security as we did our cir­cuit from mosque to mosque. He needed to know what was happening: where the police contractors w ­ ere checking phones and where prayer rooms ­were being closed. “I used to have a lot of friends h ­ ere [in the musapir settlements], but since the new ‘green card’ policy and the destruction of the neighborhoods, many of them have left or gone to other places,” he commented. “So many of my friends d ­ on’t exist [Uy: yoq] anymore. I d ­ on’t know where they are. No one knows. They have [been] dis­appeared.” He recalled how over the seven years he had traveled to the city, much had changed; not only had many of his friends been subtracted, a marked absence in their families and friendship networks, but now ­there ­were many young ­people like him without ­fathers. As another young musapir in the community told me: 206  Chapter Six

­ fter July 5, 2009, so many men ­were arrested. Many of them died in A prison, or found a way to take their own lives. They just broke them. So now ­there are many kids like me ­running around whose families are just messed up. Some of them have had their minds broken. They are squeezing us very hard now. ­Every year it gets tougher and tougher to survive. Now in mi­grant neighborhoods like Sandongbei, Sanxi Hangzi, Saimachang, and Heijiashan, the police check us ­really closely. It is almost as bad as in the South, especially in Sanxi Hangzi. They check our IDs and phones everyday ­there. We are just trying to work and they are constantly harassing us. Fuck them. And fuck ­those Uyghur guys who betray Muslims by helping them. They are “infidels” [Uy: kafir]. You have to be ­really careful what you do in ­those areas, they have cameras and watch every­ thing you do. They ­will show up with assault ­rifles in ten minutes if they think you are d ­ oing something suspicious. Many p ­ eople have had to leave ­because they ­couldn’t get the green card, and the police tracked down where they live. If they know where you live, then they can make your life a kind of hell. I have a lot of friends who have had to leave. Most of us guys who are hustling in the streets ­don’t have Ürümchi residency permits or have that card, but since they h ­ aven’t found out where we live yet, we can still find a way to live ­here. Clearly, Hasan and other young men in the community felt that the digital enclosure system was their ­enemy. Many of them believed that, without the community of mi­grants around them, they would have no choice but to return to their villages, a prospect that terrified them since it would likely lead to their detention in the growing camp system. One day as Hasan and I walked through the Uyghur bazaar leading to the new gate in front of the Heijia Shan mosque, he turned and said, “It ­really ‘puts your heart at ease’ [Uy: köngülge yaqidighan] ­here, right?” When I pressed him on what he meant by this, he told me, “­Here, around the mosque we feel ­free to talk and joke with each other, buy and trade ­things, eat good food; ­we’re not looking over our shoulder wondering if the police are watching like we always must in Yaken and in other parts of the city; h ­ ere, we are f­ree.” For Hasan, ­there was a comfort in being surrounded by fellow travelers in the ­middle of a de­mo­li­tion zone. Although he was on the verge of homelessness, he felt he still had a place ­there. In fact, over the next few weeks as I followed him on the social media app WeChat and continued to meet with him, I came to realize that Hasan was deeply involved in the online community of pious young Uyghur musapir. Subtraction 207

He often posted images of himself on the streets of Ürümchi or praying in prayer rooms in restaurants around the city. He posted inspirational quotes and statements about Islamic orthopraxy and the sovereignty of Allah. One of his favorite words of wisdom was one that clearly expressed his relationship to the religious economy of the community: “Allah never shuts one door without opening another door.” When I asked him why he was so active on social media and how he chose to publish what he did, he noted that he felt like his role in society was to be a teacher to other young Muslims. Many ­others had not had an opportunity to study Islam as much as he had, so he wanted to encourage them as much as he could. By showing his followers that even a musapir can be a religious teacher, he was able to inspire o­ thers to become more devout. Of course, it was dangerous to publish too much on public forums, so he wrote ­things in ways that he thought the police contractors would find acceptable if they scanned his account. He tried to frame his piousness in elliptical ways that only other believers would fully understand. For example, he and his friends often paraphrased passages from the Qur­an that could be applied to the pre­sent Uyghur religious practice (see figure 6.3). Often the images and videos that accompanied this pious messaging demonstrated the religious devotion of the person’s online persona or featured more explicit religious messages since they assumed it would be more difficult for surveillance systems to detect Uyghur text in images or sound in videos. Occasionally, Hasan and his friends would also post progovernment messages and images about “interethnic solidarity” (Ch: minzu tuanjie) “in case the police ­were watching.” Hasan said that he needed the WeChat account in order to find jobs and connect with other musapir. None of them ­imagined that what they ­were posting in 2014 would be used as evidence of their extremism when the mass detentions began 2016. Despite their precautions, what the young musapir ­were posting was not at all safe. Like Aziz, who I described in chapter 3, Hasan said that before the P ­ eople’s War on Terror it was pos­si­ble to speak more openly about Islam on public forums. After 3g networks w ­ ere first established in 2010, he and many of his friends began to or­ga­nize study groups online. Using their smartphones, they shared mp3 audio files of Uzbek-­and Uyghur-­language teachings of Islam that ­were not authorized by the par­ameters of the techno-­political and ­legal systems. They called t­ hese teachings tabligh. When I asked him what this word meant, he told me it was simply a Uyghur word for “Islamic teaching.” In fact, what Hasan was most likely referring to—­though he was not able to trace this genealogy himself—­were teachings inspired by global Islamic piety movements such as the Tablighi Jama’at.7 Founded in 1927 by Muhammad Ilyas al-­Kandhlawi in India, the Tablighi Jama’at’s stated aim was to call Muslims to 208  Chapter Six

figure 6.3. One of the many images and Islamic exhortations that Hasan’s friends published on WeChat. The text reads as follows: “Prophet Sulayman approached his son and asked him: ‘I have received a message from Allah, I want you to circle the earth and see if ­there are more p ­ eople who are alive or more p ­ eople who are dead [in spirit].’ A ­ fter a period of time, the son returned and said: ‘­Father, I went to many places, and everywhere I went I saw more p ­ eople who ­were dead than ­those who ­were alive.’ Sulayman said ‘With the knowledge Allah has given to me I know that ­there used to be more ­people who ­were alive.’ ”

a constant state of nonpo­liti­cal spiritual strug­g le (jihad) through proselytization (dawah). In order to achieve this mission, the leadership of the movement of over ten million adherents developed a cellular orga­nizational structure that focused on oral communication in small grassroots groups (Balci 2015). It encouraged t­ hose interested in the movement to attend daily meetings in prayer rooms where leaders in the group presented models of orthopraxy. Like other forms of reformist Islam, the Tablighi sought to lead a separate life from the impious around them by adapting an Islamic lifestyle modeled on the life of Muhammad. Hasan, and many other young Uyghurs, told me that, over the past several years as smartphone technology became common, thousands of rural Uyghurs became part of similar modular under­ground groups. While it was not clear that the transformation of Uyghur religious practice was directly related to specific global piety movements, the similarities in organ­ization and oral teaching makes it clear that they ­were at least indirectly affected by such movements. The rise of a Uyghur version of movements similar to the Tablighi Jama’at translated into a revival of Uyghur traditions that focused on crossing the threshold of a doorway by leading with the right foot, sleeping on one’s right side, and, of course, the intense conflict between state authorities, surveillance companies, and Uyghur Muslims over the proper veiling of w ­ omen in public and beards among men. In most cases, the teachings appeared to circulate via oral recordings from in­de­pen­dently trained or, as surveillance algorithms and counterterrorism frameworks put it, “wild imams” (Ch: ye ahong) such as Aziz’s ­father, one of the figures in chapter 3.8 Often they ­were derivative of teachings found elsewhere in the Islamic world but then took on a life of their own when they reached the Uyghur private–public sphere (see also Harris and Isa 2019; Harris 2020). In any case, a nonpo­liti­cal form of reformist Islam came to be the most dominant. The Uyghurs who took such teachings most seriously w ­ ere often referred to as “the ones who wear the short pants” (Uy: kalte ishtanliqlar), since they began to wear pants that resembled ­those worn by Muslims in South Asia and the M ­ iddle East. One of the key points of the Tablighi and other piety movements was that Muslims must wear pants that ended above the ankle since it is said that the Prophet felt that clothes that dragged on the ground ­were a sign of pride. Hasan had not begun to dress in this manner, but he had begun to incorporate the teachings he listened to into his daily routines and express them in his public persona online. He was also aware that the police contractors and surveillance systems specifically targeted young men who wore such clothing since the par­ameters of the system recognized ­these repre­sen­ta­tional forms as a primary marker of so-­called embodied extremism. 210  Chapter Six

The Expanding Object of Terror Capitalism As the subtraction turned ­toward wider forms of mass detention through the operationalization of the digital enclosure, the level of threat began to heighten. Hasan said that, although t­ here was the constant worry of surveillance and vio­ lence in the musapir community in the city, in late 2014 it was nevertheless better than the current conditions in his hometown. In a matter-­of-­fact way he told me: In Ürümchi every­thing seems ­free, you can do business, you can pray, you can communicate, you can live freely. In Yaken none of this is pos­ si­ble. When you walk in the bazaar ­there, the police always stop you and ask for your id. Every­one is always monitoring what you do; it is hard to make any money ­because no one has any money or any opportunity to make any. They try to control you. This year during Ramadan [three months before] they locked me up so that I ­couldn’t pray; they made me break the fast. Police are the ­enemy of Muslims; they ­will never help you—­only make your life worse. When he said this last sentence, he spoke very quietly and pulled his hands up to his face. I asked if he felt scared to go back to Yaken. Actually I have to go back next week ­because I am being forced to go. The Yaken police have been calling me ­every day telling me that I must come back; they are making my parents call me and tell me the same ­thing. When I ask why, they ­won’t give me a reason. They just say that if I come back, every­thing ­will be fine. They say that if I stay ­here, they ­will alert the Ürümchi police and have me arrested. I d ­ on’t have any choice. If I go to another city, they w ­ ill be able to track me b­ ecause of my green card registration. I actually have all of the documents to live ­here legally, but now they are making me go back. So I am very afraid. Lots of my friends have gone back to Yaken ­because the police told them to come, and now they d ­ on’t exist. I ­don’t know where they are, no one knows, they have dis­appeared. My wife ­doesn’t say anything about this situation, but she is also scared. She ­doesn’t want to go back e­ ither. She knows that when we go back they ­will take away our green cards so that we can never travel again and that I might dis­appear. Hasan buried his head in his hands. His eyes filled with tears, but he ­didn’t cry. He whispered: I think this issue is connected to what happened [back in Yaken] at the end of Ramadan this year; 9 someone must have accused me of something Subtraction 211

or reported something I have done online. ­There is no freedom in this world. For Uyghurs life is very difficult and we have no freedom. I d ­ on’t even know what I am accused of but I must accept their judgment. I have no choice. Where t­ here is no freedom, t­ here is tension [Uy: jiddiy weziyet]; where ­there is tension, ­there are incidents; where ­there are incidents, ­there are police; where ­there are police, ­there is no freedom. Hasan dreamed of traveling abroad, of seeing the world, climbing mountains, sailing on ships, but he knew that none of ­these ­things would happen. He said that his phone was easily his most impor­tant piece of equipment for negotiating city life. It offered him the freedom to know, to move and live as he felt he should as a Muslim. It was what allowed him to teach o­ thers, which he felt was something that gave his life meaning. It was what he would miss the most when he dis­appeared in Yaken. It was strange to watch a condemned man contemplate his f­uture arrest and the silencing of his digital voice. It is ­here, at the boundary of relational autonomy, that the powerlessness of any form of repre­sen­ta­tion, minor politics, or friendship to stop the domination of the colonial relation meets its limit. Just as Emir’s refusal to be documented on film was motivated by the enclosure of the techno-­political surveillance system, h ­ ere Hasan’s impending disappearance enabled him to tell me his stories freely. He was beyond hope; he realized that his ­limited autonomy was subtracting. While he was in the city, his freedom as a traveler in the city had been mediated by rituals of Islam, by his constant fear of being dis­appeared, and by his responsibilities to his wife and one-­year-­old ­daughter. He needed money to survive day to day and he found that he had relational autonomy within the musapir community to both maintain his way of life and attain a feeling of social belonging. Now, he felt the fragility of his position. Over the next few days, as we walked the backstreets, we continued to talk about his imminent return to Yaken. Now, more than ever, he glanced over his shoulder with the look of the hunted. We talked again about the effects of the constant harassment of the police on young Uyghur lives. He said: When you are in the police station, you learn to never say anything yourself. If you do say something, if you respond to what they are accusing you of, they ­will beat you senseless. So you learn ­really quickly not to say anything. In Amer­i­ca they ­don’t have police like this, right? ­Here they have so many, but they have so many more in Yaken. Like Ablikim—­the main figure in chapter 4—­Hasan said he was comfortable talking to me b­ ecause I was an outsider. He felt that it was not likely that I 212  Chapter Six

would be arrested and forced to inform on him. With his other friends, he could never be sure. Eventually, the day came and Hasan and his small ­family boarded a sleeper bus headed to Yaken. They took all their belongings with them: two small bags. In his farewell message he wrote, “God willing, I ­will survive.” Within two days, I received another cryptic message from him. He was in the hospital in a small oasis town halfway between his hometown and the city. ­There had been an accident. His wife had been killed, he had broken some ribs and fractured his scapula. His baby girl had lost a fin­ger. “It was God’s ­will. Praise Allah,” he wrote in a text message. Two weeks ­later, I went to see him in the small town. He told me it would be safe b­ ecause no one knew him ­there. He met me in a restaurant next to the hospital in obvious pain. The driver of their sleeper bus had fallen asleep and run into a dump truck loaded with coal along the side of the freeway.10 His wife died within five minutes—­her throat crushed by a piece of flying coal. His voice steady, he recalled: At first I ­didn’t see that her throat was crushed; other ­people told me ­later. I just saw her bleeding from her mouth. We sat ­there in the cold for forty minutes before the ambulances arrived. I watched my wife die. ­There was nothing I could do. If I had been in her bed, I would have been killed by the coal too, but since my child was sleeping with me—­all of us ­were sleeping at the time—we ­weren’t hurt as badly. Many ­people lost limbs; four ­people died on the spot; three died ­later in this hospital. Hasan was still very young. He was only in his early twenties. But now when he walked he winced. He felt for his back. He propped his arm up in his jacket pocket. He had new shoes since his old shoes ­were lost in the accident; he had lost his id and green card as well. He noted that the hospital did not provide him with “comfort” (Uy: teseli). ­There ­were so many Han nurses who made him feel like he was a stranger undeserving of care by the way they talked as though he was not even in the room, denigrating his ability to speak Chinese. Yet, despite this, he felt as though eventually he would be well enough to travel and then, with the care of his ­mother, he would heal. He continued: “I’m ­going back to the Yaken prison—­that’s what we call it—­there is no internet, not even text messaging, but still the life ­there is good. My ­family ­will care for me.” Since he was injured, he was sure the police would not take him. We talked about his ­family’s situation and his f­ uture. He was ready to begin his life again even though his wife was gone. When I left him at the bus station, he told me: “I’ll see you again in Ürümchi, God willing!” Subtraction 213

His friends back in the city told me that within three fast weeks, a­ fter he recovered from his injury, he was taken by the state police. The first sign of his disappearance was that his phone was blocked. When I called it, I received a message saying the number had been disconnected due to illegal activity. When I spoke to his friends back in the city, they said he had been taken ­behind “the black gate” (Uy: qara derweze). They did not know if he would just be held in­def­initely in a reeducation camp or receive a prison sentence. No one knew what he had been charged with, or if ­there was a charge. His ­family and friends had no control over what would happen to him, and no way to fight it. They w ­ ere too afraid to even ask, since showing concern could be seen as a sign of extremism. It was clear that Hasan had been dis­appeared; he had been subtracted from the musapir community. Subtraction ­Because the par­ameters of the surveillance system are programmed to recognize racialized markers and signs of Uyghur sociality, nearly all Uyghurs are now seen as guilty of extremist tendencies and are living ­under threat of detention and reeducation. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, particularly men u ­ nder the age of fifty-­five, have been placed in indefinite detention or subtraction: a form of enforced disappearance that coexists with ongoing social life. Since Uyghur families ­were often not told where their loved one was being held, what they had been charged with, how long they would be held, or w ­ hether or not they would ever see them again, Uyghurs often described ­those who had been taken as being in a state of “nonexistence” (Uy: yoq) or said that they had been “subtracted” (Uy: kımeytti). Importantly, though, this pro­cess of disappearance differs from other forms of genocidal vio­lence where unwanted bodies are simply killed and buried in mass graves. In this context, state authorities and private proxies strive to make Uyghurs productive through subtraction by harvesting their data and through coerced ­labor. As I argue throughout this book, the subtraction of Uyghurs was calculated as a strategic part of the terror-­capitalist and colonial frontier in three distinct ways. First, ­there was a numerical calculus in place as to what percentage of the population needed to be reeducated. Throughout the region, state authorities used subsidies and penalties to implement numbered intelligence and detention quotas that targeted a proportion drawn from the entire adult Uyghur and other Muslim-­minority populations in the region, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on young Uyghur men (Leibold 2019). Second, subtraction held ­those who had not yet been physically subtracted in a state of suspension and unfree action, a form of 214  Chapter Six

dispossession that resulted in ­labor and data expropriation. The absence of the missing or­ga­nized the lives of the remainder, mobilizing them in police work and the fear-­driven performative work of demonstrating one’s patriotism and loyalty to the state. Third, the incalculable value of Uyghur life was converted by a numerical calculus that reduced their lives to data, to forms of racialized policing, and to the programming of reeducated l­abor in factories, and the affective ­labor of performing gratitude to their colonizers. Their lives w ­ ere turned into code, slotted into the biased gaze of cameras and police contractors. Machine learning enclosed them, turning them into patterns of be­hav­ior, and made them a new frontier in state-­directed cap­i­tal­ist accumulation. The dynamic of terror capitalism first devalued their knowledge and practices and dispossessed them of autonomy through the use of new technology and infrastructure, and then rapidly subtracted the social autonomy of their bodies by tracking that usage. In this chapter, I have outlined the emergence of a fragile relational autonomy that Uyghur mi­grants ­were turning to as self-­identified musapir or travelers. By identifying as pious Muslims without a home, they turned to a type of everyday Islam that was fostered by digital social networks. ­These networks responded to the colonial domination of their lives, but, paradoxically, it also made them targets of digital enclosure. Ultimately, traveler autonomy became the very reason for their internment. Being part of the material and virtual Uyghur musapir community provided the grounds for a temporary politics of holding on to life even as it was being taken away. The two examples I discussed in this chapter, that of the older c­ ouple Emir and Bahar and the younger man Hasan, who was subtracted, are examples from opposite ends of the spectrum of the religious economy of the musapir community. The older ­couple had built a home in the city over the past thirty years and was not deeply invested in online discussion groups. Yet, like Hasan—­who had only been t­here for five years and had a pious online persona—in the climate of terror capitalism, the community was only able to sustain their way of life for a short time. Despite the ultimate failure of the community to cradle their lives, Uyghur mi­grants who lived in the rubble of shantytowns in Ürümchi nevertheless had a certain form of autonomy. It is impor­tant to note, though, that this autonomy did not emerge out of a chosen po­liti­cal proj­ect as it did for Chen Ye in chapter 5. This is part of the reason why the Uyghur word musapir does not connote the same meaning as Chen Ye’s Chinese term mangliu. Both terms could be translated as “traveler” or “blind wanderer,” but they emerged from very dif­fer­ent forms of cultured thought and social positions within the Chinese nation. For one group, the Subtraction 215

lifestyle of a wanderer could result in a form of short-­term economic stability followed by social subtraction, as in Hasan’s case; while, for the other group, a quite similar lifestyle could result in long-­term economic stability, as I noted in chapter 2, and in some cases what I have described as an intentional “minor politics.” For Uyghur mi­grants, becoming a musapir was something that arose from their lack of access to permanent housing, employment, and freedom of religion; in general, this was not the case for Han mi­grants. This differential distribution stemmed from the settler-­colonial forms of enclosure and evaluation that regulated their lives in both the city and the countryside. At the same time, the autonomy of the musapir community was similar to what minor politics did for Chen Ye and his fellow Han “blind wanderers” in that, in both cases, ­there was a distancing or delaying of the direct power of the techno-­political surveillance system to determine how ­people should live together. This similarity demonstrates that, despite the disjunctures in autonomy, in both the Uyghur and Han mi­grant communities ­there ­were acts of turning away from the authority of the Chinese state and the surveillance capacities of the private Chinese technology firms ­toward other forms of existential stability, other ways of making do with the given. Hasan’s and Emir’s increasing interest in pious forms of Islam gave them ways of modifying their status in the community and extending their stays in the city. In both cases, though to dif­fer­ent degrees, they ­were demonstrating examples of what Millar (2014) describes as “an art of living through the precarious pre­sent, as that which makes pos­si­ble a continued, shared existence in delicate times” (2014, 48). Conclusion I began this chapter with a discussion of everyday Islam and the way it relates to religious economies. Islam is clearly an integral part of the lives of young Uyghur mi­grants. For most self-­described musapir, it was a central ele­ment of their self-­identification. Often they told me stories of coming to faith through informal online study groups. In an inversion of what David Montgomery (2016) noted in his recent ethnography of Islam in Kyrgyzstan, often they became interested in religion ­because the moral framework of the faith offered them a sense of existential stability. It also became something their friends and ­family expected them to practice, but this utilitarian impulse did not appear to be the primary driver. Unlike in Montgomery’s case, where Kyrgyz Muslims have a greater degree of autonomy, for many Uyghurs faith practice was grounded in a refusal to be subtracted by the techno-­political system. By turning to a global community of pious Muslims, they ­were turning what many 216  Chapter Six

refer to as the “hopelessness” (Uy: ümidsizliq) of the current situation into a feeling of belonging. As they began to practice, they said they came to understand the purpose of the faith and a consciousness of right and wrong. When I spoke to young men like Hasan, they frequently asked me about my own background as an agnostic former Christian and tested my moral limits by posing hy­po­thet­i­cal questions about personal life choices. Often what convinced them I was someone who could be trusted was the position I expressed regarding the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian Territories and their own situation in Northwest China. For them, Islam provided them with a strong sense of their social role in the environment of the city as well as being a source of psychic stability. As one young man told me: Before I left and became a musapir, I ­didn’t do anything. I just slept and ate and went to the mosque. I hung out with a gang of other boys who had also dropped out. We used to fight other gangs, steal ­things, and try to help each other find jobs. But then I started praying five times a day when I was twelve. It is our tradition. Every­one knows that when you are twelve you need to start to pray. Actually, before I went traveling, I used to just pray sometimes. This was ­because I ­didn’t ­really understand. Now I understand. You need to pray five times a day or you ­will go to hell. But, of course, the relative autonomy of being part of the religious economy failed to save young men like Hasan. They often felt quite exposed. In the religious economy of the musapir community, ­there was a fragile sense of comfort and relief from the social enclosure. As in Millar’s case among marginalized ­people in Rio (2014), ­there is a “politics of detachment” that is not simply the “anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation” Guy Standing (2011, 19) has identified as the conditions of l­abor precariousness. Instead, Uyghur mi­ grants actively or­ga­nized a parallel economy of mutual assistance. The lives of the musapir, at once a source of stigma and comfort, allowed bonds to develop between subjects and for life proj­ects to be extended if not sustained. They also allowed Uyghur traditional knowledge of Islam to adapt and change u ­ nder new conditions of oppression, settler colonialism, and exposure to global religious movements. A Uyghur religious economy allowed forms of relational autonomy to flourish for a time but then became a way for a techno-­political system to identify an entire site of social reproduction within Uyghur society. As much as it offered protection, it also left members of the community exposed, angry, and terrified. Once when I was walking with one of Hasan’s acquaintances near one of the mosques we frequented together, we met a unit of armed state police. For a Subtraction 217

second the young man panicked. Then he whipped out the student id card he had from attending a computer course at a nearby vocational school. Once we ­were out of earshot, he started talking loudly, his voice trembling a bit: Fuck, fuck, fuck, I hate them so much. But we have nothing to fight with, so we ­really ­can’t fight them. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I know it’s not appropriate to say ­these words, but ­those dogs make me so angry. In the end, being a religious musapir often failed. Although Hasan had many followers on WeChat, the sense of authority he drew from them was only temporary, while the traces of his activity could never be fully erased. Once he was arrested, his account was immediately deactivated and, it is likely, used as evidence of his so-­called extremism. In the end, Emir and Bahar also lost their ­house and ­were forced to leave the community and enter the state system as precarious tenants in government housing. When a documentary filmmaker attempted to represent their strug­g le, they felt compelled to refuse to put their story on display on WeChat forums. The threat implied by a repre­sen­ta­tion of their noncompliance exceeded the limits of the autonomy afforded by the musapir community. At the same time, Hasan actively represented himself as a religious musapir to his many online followers. Like hundreds of thousands of other young Uyghurs, he failed to imagine that this activity was essentially a way of tagging themselves in the metadata of the terror-­capitalist enclosure. Being assessed by the programming of ­these techno-­political tools would result in their mass detention two years ­later. The failure of repre­sen­ta­tion that musapir sociality points us ­toward calls into question the work of film and ethnography, and my own investment in decolonial friendships and minor politics, in attempting to document the hundreds of thousands of ­people who have lost their homes in Ürümchi since. The stories of Emir and Hasan try, but fail, to cradle their lives and the lives of the hundreds of thousands who have been dis­appeared in the ­People’s War on Terror. Of course, the Chinese state authorities and their proxies want to know every­thing about musapir lives in order to dominate them while liberal Western readers might hope to save them. On a deeper level, then, the failure of the documentary and this chapter to hold their lives in place, to make them ­matter, reflected the limits of the autonomy that musapir ­were able to achieve. They ­were only able to tell a certain kind of story and provide a ­limited, palliative form of protection. ­There are no happy endings to their stories. This is what is at stake in telling their stories not for consumption but in order to lift up their voices. As such, this ethnography as a repre­sen­ta­tion of Uyghur life ­under colonization ­will always fail. Like the community, a repre­sen­ta­tion 218  Chapter Six

of their lives is only a temporary amplification, a short echo, of their voices. Listening to their stories and trying to retell them are power­ful reminders that ethnography always fails. Yet ­there is a palliative comfort in being close to ­these stories, even if just for a time. I hope this intimacy, sitting knee to knee, with ­these ­people who have shared so much of their lives with me, might restore some of their authorship over their own lives.

Subtraction 219

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 Conclusion

The fundamental question considered in this book is how pro­cesses of cap­i­tal­ ist frontier making have built con­temporary colonial relations in Northwest China. When I first began researching and writing this book in the early 2010s, I was primarily interested in understanding how mi­grants lived meaningful lives in the city despite conditions of dispossession. Initially, my research centered around the minor politics that Chen Ye was enacting in Uyghur traveler settlements such as Heijia Shan and the positive ethics that Ablikim and many other young men w ­ ere building with their “life and liver” friends. Over the course of my research as the P ­ eople’s War on Terror intensified, I saw too that ­these novel forms of sociality ­were not enough to cradle the lives of ­those who ­were being dispossessed from rural ways of life. Over time, dozens of my contacts and friends w ­ ere banished from the city by the enclosure system,

detained in the mass internment camps, and forced to work ­under unfree conditions. The space for disobedience and desire that the broader new digital media development seemed to promise to culture producers such as Mahmud and travelers like Hasan was undermined by its entanglement with older and newer forms of surveillance and detention. When my in­for­mants began to dis­ appear near the end of my fieldwork in 2015, it became clear that the kind of antiracist politics fostered by con­temporary artists like Chen Ye or the friendship networks that Ablikim and Batur exemplified could not adequately protect Uyghurs from the forces subtracting their sociality. The targeting of Uyghur social reproduction led me to widen my focus to consider the way material dispossession and desire elicitation had motivated Uyghur migration to the city in the early 2000s. Spaces of autonomy in the city could not be separated from older colonial impulses and Maoist multiculturalism. ­These entanglements w ­ ere intensified by the rise of new forms of Islamic piety in the 2010s when 3g networks and social media apps enabled Uyghurs to connect with the larger Muslim world and global religious movements. The promise of greater autonomy in the city became a form of further dispossession in 2014 when the arrival of the ­People’s War on Terror hardened the new sequence of racialization that was associated with the perceived threat of young Uyghur travelers as so-­called preterrorists. New spaces where cultural production was fostered increasingly became spaces of technology-­ enabled entrapment. Novels of urban alienation, short films and commercials with ethno-­nationalist connotations or linkages to the wider Muslim world, and pious messages shared on WeChat ­were all used as evidence to “dis­appear” (Uy: yoq) Uyghur young men in indefinite detention. As t­hese pro­cesses intensified, young Uyghur ­women and men ­were increasingly forced to make a choice between working for state authorities as policing contractors, reeducation instructors, and intelligence workers u ­ nder close supervision of the state police or be sent into the camp and factory system. As I noted in chapter 1, as many as ninety thousand young w ­ omen and men chose private police work as an alternative to life in detention (Greitens et al. 2019). Once they joined the system as “data janitors” (Irani 2015), however, they quickly realized that they ­were being tasked with tearing apart families, interrogating neighbors, and surveilling their friends. A ­ fter they joined the digital enclosure industry, they realized that police work in the P ­ eople’s War on Terror was a lifelong choice. They ­were not permitted to quit. ­Those who did ­were arrested and sent into detention ­under suspicion of disloyalty to the state. Young men who began to work as police w ­ ere being forced to spend a 222 Conclusion

lifetime policing themselves. When I visited the region in 2018, rumors ­were widely circulating of young Uyghur contractors committing suicide. The P ­ eople’s War on Terror created its own forms of po­liti­cal and economic productivity. E ­ very young Uyghur found a place and a role within it. This ­human engineering proj­ect centered on the vast population of military-­aged bodies that found themselves being retrained in the camps, but it also implicated a vast army of young Uyghurs who enforced the subtraction of ­those bodies from the general population, enforced the rules of the camps, and monitored ­those who remained in the Uyghur neighborhoods of the city. The Uyghurs who lived outside of the camps and joined the Uyghur and Han police forces ­were asked to mediate their lives through the digital enclosure. They enacted their patriotism in public through social media, their physical appearance, and their attendance at po­liti­cal ceremonies. ­Those who remained outside of the camps became culture workers performing their reeducation through their everyday life. They w ­ ere asked to perform their desire for state ideologies and for Han culture on a daily basis (A. Anderson and Byler 2019). In this way the ­People’s War on Terror created roles for every­one: detainees, police, and the relatives of detainees. Every­one participated in the proj­ect. The economy of the P ­ eople’s War on Terror normalized confrontation between the police contractors and the general population. ­Every day was filled with encounters that reproduced acts of submission to authority. Young Uyghurs ­were expected to have their id cards checked as many as ten times a day at random checkpoints. The routinization of ­these confrontations and detentions had the effect of turning the vio­lence of the ­human engineering proj­ect into a system of standard operating procedures that masked the shattering of families and lives. The decision to send ­people into the camp system appeared to be both systematic and arbitrary. It felt systematic in that the confrontations and disappearances always followed the same trajectory. ­Because of the sweeping nature of the technical and ­human assessments of criminality, the detention of any person identified as Uyghur was always a possibility. As a result, detentions often appeared to be arbitrary. As local authorities in Xinjiang have noted since the beginning of the proj­ect, the majority of ­those who had been detained did not know what crime they had committed prior to their detention and reeducation (Qiu 2015). At first one’s personal relationship to local police could make the difference between someone being sent into detention or not. But later, guilt was often assumed and perpetrated by the “black box” of the digital enclosure programming; so making the case for why one should not be detained hinged on one’s perceived compliance and the way extenuating Conclusion 223

circumstances—­such as poor health, old age, or disability—­required mercy on the part of the interrogator. Since ­there was no judicial pro­cess in place for determining guilt or innocence, officials had a ­great deal of power in deciding ­whether or not someone was sent to a detention camp. As a result, the absolute authority of police contractors was fixed in the minds of ­people who had not yet been detained. The Uyghurs I spoke with said that ­these logics of vulnerability and subtraction had the effect of further “breaking the spirit” (Uy: rohi sunghan) of the general population (Byler 2020b). This vulnerability was further amplified by the way cultural works—­which told the stories of Uyghur collective history—­began to be subtracted by state authorities as signs of extremism. In 2017, as Perhat Tursun—­whose novel I discussed in chapter 4—­and dozens of other public intellectuals w ­ ere swept up in a wave of detentions of public figures, state authorities began a proj­ect to retroactively assess Uyghur-­language publications that had been published by state publishing h ­ ouses over the past several de­cades. Based on interviews with Uyghur writers in April 2018, approximately 30 ­percent of all Uyghur-­language publications ­were removed from the shelves as a result of this pro­cess (see figure c.1). Famous sagas of Turkic heroism and historical novels about the autonomous Uyghur participation in the Maoist Revolution w ­ ere banned as promoting ethno-­national separatism. Books that discussed state-­approved forms of Islam and Uyghur cultural festivals w ­ ere also targeted for promoting religious extremism or ethnic separatism. All tele­vi­sion productions, ­music, and digital media w ­ ere also reassessed through the digital enclosure. Many musicians, poets, artists, actors, and filmmakers ­were taken in as a result of this delayed censorship. The intellectuals I spoke with described it as a pro­cess similar to the Hundred Flowers Campaign in the late 1950s when Mao Zedong encouraged intellectuals to offer criticism of the Communist Party and they w ­ ere subsequently purged. Uyghur writers said that, in the 1990s and 2000s, they ­were often asked by the state Culture Ministry to write about Islam or ethnic issues in a way that would moderate discussions of religious piety or ethnic pride. Now they ­were being punished for having done this state-­mandated work. Si­mul­ta­neously, the state workers with the help of private social media firms—­such as WeChat and Douyin—­began an unabashed effort to promote po­liti­cal dogma and reified Chinese cultural traditions as examples of permitted culture (Wang Xiuli 2018). In a policy statement, Wang Xiuli, a researcher at the Xinjiang Acad­emy of Social Sciences, noted that culture workers “must confidently carry out face-­to-­face propaganda” for “China’s modern culture” (Wang 2018). She argued that this was essential to closely integrating “the 224 Conclusion

figure c.1. Empty shelves in the Uyghur-­language section of the Xin­hua Bookstore on Yan’an Road in Ürümchi in 2018. Image by author.

practical achievements of modernization and the personal feelings of the masses with an . . . ​ideology that goes deep into ­people’s hearts” (2018). In addition, she posited that culture workers must pay close attention to “unconscious education”: First, ideological propaganda must be used wisely to take advantage of the readable and vis­i­ble advantages of lit­er­a­ture and art, tele­vi­sion and film. It must be sensitive to and absorb our . . . ​ideology. Second, ideological propaganda must emphasize the tremendous achievements made by the country’s reform and opening up . . . ​so that ­people have the empathy to improve and recognize the value of the Party and the . . . ​system from the depths of their heart. Wang stated that, to begin this pro­cess, the first step was to “clean up and rectify” the existing media market. The second step was to subsume all aspects of life with ideological media and education. She wrote: “We must use scientific theories, advanced culture, and beautiful hearts to occupy all ideological and cultural positions and truly do it” (2018). This last line “truly do it” speaks to the way Uyghurs described the digital enclosure proj­ect more broadly as a Conclusion 225

pro­cess of “breaking their spirits.” They said that something was being done to them. Uyghurs ­were passive actors in the ­matter who had no choice but to rewrite their aesthetic sensibilities in patriotic red. They hung posters of Xi Jinping in their homes and posted videos of their ­children kissing the image of “­Uncle Xi” (Uy: Xi Dada). Uyghurs held dance parties where musicians improvised lyr­ics thanking U ­ ncle Xi for teaching them how to be “modern” Chinese citizens. ­Human engineering and the culture work that supported it was being imposed on them. Their spirit of autonomy was being eliminated and replaced by a new sycophantic spirit. ­People like Wang ­were “truly ­doing” the ­human engineering; they had the technologies, the camps, and the factories to back them up. Uyghurs who remained began to feel as though they had no choice but to participate in the affective and cultural work of producing their own con­temporary colonization. The strategic long-­term logic of terror capitalism centered on what Wang Xiuli (2017) referred to as “permanent” (Ch: changzhi) stability. She described the ­People’s War on Terror as a “protracted war” that would target the generation of young Uyghurs born in the 1990s and 2000s. This implied that an entire generation of Uyghurs would be held in place by the mass detention system and the workforce that regulated it (see also Cha 2020). Her thoughts echoed with broader declarations from the regional development commission, which declared the camp system to be a “carrier of economy stability” ­because it had attracted so many textile and garment manufacturers from localities across China. It also mirrored the marketing pitches from private technology industry leaders that figured Xinjiang as a space with “unlimited market potential” to develop automated assessment and enclosure tools—­creating docile, yet productive, populations.1 Yet, when I walked the streets of Uyghur districts in towns across the Uyghur homeland in April 2018, neither ­those who ­were targeted by the system nor ­those who ran it seemed happy. The sadness of what was happening was palpable, even as it was being differentially distributed. Many of the Uyghurs I spoke to in snatches of conversation in taxis and in parks said they w ­ ere “without hope” (Uy: umidsiz). When I went to our spot in the Turkish tea­house for the last time, I thought about how much had changed since I first met Ablikim. The song mix had changed a bit and the tea­house was nearly empty, but it was close enough to bring back memories of our conversations and evoke the horror of what has happened to him since then. His deepest fear has come true; he is no longer in control of his life. His story has entered a pro­cess of subtraction. In order not to be the foreigner crying in the corner, I went outside and smoked two Hong He cigarettes, one for him and one for me. 226 Conclusion

­Running Away The programming of the digital enclosure failed to fully capture what motivated new Uyghur forms of piety and re­sis­tance to colonial domination. As this book has shown, new Uyghur social formations ­were not catalyzed by ideology. Instead, re­sis­tance and refusal w ­ ere motivated by acute forms of social loss and a desire to protect Uyghur social reproduction. The vio­lence of the new sequence in racialized dispossession that confronted Uyghurs in the 2000s and 2010s was in fact the trigger that forced them to turn to new ways of making their lives ­matter. Many Uyghurs would prefer to respond to loss or the threat of loss not with reactive vio­lence but with other forms of refusal to concede their autonomy. If given a chance, they would prefer to leave and try to escape the reach of the techno-­political engineering proj­ect. This is precisely what Mahmud, the central figure in chapter 3, has done. In October 2016, with the help of some well-­positioned friends and a sponsor in the United States, Mahmud was permitted to obtain a passport and a visa to come to the United States as a language student. Over the next several months, Mahmud applied for po­liti­cal asylum in the United States and began to imagine a new life as an immigrant. For him, taking flight to the United States was an act of freedom and autonomy. It felt like a dream come true. For the first time in his life, he felt as though his life was his own. Leaving, becoming a permanent traveler, carried with it its own forms of dispossession. By applying for asylum, Mahmud committed to possibly never returning to the Uyghur homeland. He severed many ties with other Uyghurs and distanced himself from his “life and liver” friend. As the P ­ eople’s War on Terror tightened its grip and detained his b­ rother, it was increasingly difficult for him to contact his ­family. ­Because contact with ­people in foreign countries was closely monitored, they told him not to call often. They ­were no longer able to support him financially. In his new community in the United States, he found a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant cleaning Texas-­style barbeque pork off plates. He said he did not mind the work even though it was not halal, ­because it allowed him to continue to go to school and pay his rent. He said the other immigrants who worked in the restaurant treated him with re­spect. They did not care where he was from. He began to feel he had a social role, a kind of “runaway agency” that becomes available to p ­ eople in exile (Faier 2008). Mahmud’s action as a permanent traveler was an example of life making that both supported and weakened Uyghur social reproduction. By r­ unning away, Mahmud entered into a realm of actions that w ­ ere again autonomous and at least partially outside of the purview of Chinese techno-­political surveillance Conclusion 227

enclosures. In the United States, Mahmud could pass as Japa­nese, Mexican, or South Asian. Looking at him, no one assumed he was a Chinese subject or potential Islamic extremist. Most of the time, the Chinese-­specific sequence of racialization lost its hold on him in public life. In the United States, he was able to sustain his life through practices of autonomy and personhood both despite and ­because of his illegibility as a Chinese racialized subject. His masculinity was no longer read as threatening. Instead, he began to find a place among black and brown ­people from elsewhere. His knowledge and “quality” (Uy: sapa) as a Uyghur urbanite was transmuted into a practice of immigrant living. Mahmud started imagining new forms of culture work. He wanted to narrate the Uyghur story of survival in film. He began writing a screenplay that centered on his flight from the state in China and the digital enclosure that supported it. Yet he could never fully escape. In his language classes, Han international students w ­ ere surprised to find out that Mahmud was from Northwest China. They asked him if it was true that many Uyghurs w ­ ere terrorists. He felt that they always strove to remind him of his place in the world. In the American space, the microclues detected by the ijop system and its intelligence workers became banal microaggressions, constant reminders of deeply embedded Han prejudices. They did not seem deeply threatening though. In the context of the United States, they became a kind of brown-­on-­brown ethnic bias—­a type of “disidentification” that is so deeply entrenched in American society (Reddy 2011). Like all forms of racialization, Chinese Islamophobia is location specific. It works most fully in the colonial context of the Uyghur and Kazakh homelands. Living in Subtraction ­ uman engineering proj­ects—­building a Chinese frontier city, enacting a H ­People’s War on Terror—­are global cap­i­tal­ist proj­ects. They are linked to other spaces, infrastructures, and technologies that circulate elsewhere in the world. For instance, Ürümchi technocrats drew inspiration from the rhe­toric of the Global War on Terror, American war economies, and Silicon Valley experiments in artificial intelligence to build what eventually would become a China-­specific form of terror capitalism. Despite their specificities, the scale of dispossession and the intimacies of their cruelty, the central argument of Terror Capitalism is that the subtraction of Uyghur society is one frontier of a global social system. Such proj­ects—­whether they occur in Kashmir, Palestine, or the Uyghur and Kazakh homelands—­are built on the dispossession and subtraction of ethno-­racialized ­others and they benefit dominant systems of wealth and power. 228 Conclusion

­ here is an expropriative logic to them, a form of original accumulation, that T builds productive value into par­tic­u­lar objects. ­These objects—­land, groups of ­people, hard infrastructure, spaces of desire—­are made productive through a transformation of value. Uyghur and Kazakh lands ­were made productive for the extraction of natu­ral resources, industrial farming, real estate development, and tourism. Uyghurs as a collective w ­ ere made productive as the object of digital enclosure and devaluation, policing, reeducation, and monitored, unfree ­labor. Their perceived threat to the nation was catalyzed by an enormous flow of money and jobs, and research and development, from state capital to private technology firms. Terror capitalism, a new instantiation of capitalist-­ colonial frontier making, transformed the economy across the region. The product made by the new economy was social control in the form of reeducated minds, an army of young Uyghur, Kazakh, and Han police contractors, and Han settlers mobilized as Islamophobic proxies for state capital and the expansion of the cap­i­tal­ist frontier. As this system is normalized, ­people adapt; they find ways to live and make meaning. But a global proj­ect also has global consequences; it shifts the frame of what is permitted and what it is pos­si­ble to imagine. T ­ here has been a radical expansion of power and knowledge over Uyghur life through its transformation into data. Through this expansion, Uyghur life, and by extension life itself, is subtracting.

Conclusion 229

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Notes

preface 1 Zhang Dan, “Xinjiang’s Party Chief Wages ‘­People’s War’ against Terrorism,” cntv, May 26, 2014, http://­english​.­cntv​.­cn​/­2014​/­05​/­26​/­ARTI1401090207808564​ .­shtml. 2 For an authoritative text that centers on the role of po­liti­cal discourse and state power in the Uyghur camp system, see Sean Roberts 2020, The War on the Uyghurs. 3 Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, “ ‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Or­ga­nized Mass Detentions of Muslims,” New York Times, November 16, 2019, https://­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­interactive​/­2019​/­11​/­16​/­world​/­asia​/­china​-­xinjiang​ -­documents​.­html. 4 Darren Byler and Carolina Sanchez Boe, “Tech-­Enabled ‘Terror Capitalism’ Is Spreading Worldwide: The Surveillance Regimes Must Be ­Stopped,” Guardian, July 24, 2020, https://­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­world​/­2020​/­jul​/­24​/­surveillance​-­tech​ -­facial​-­recognition​-­terror​-­capitalism. 5 Xinjiang Reform and Development Commission 2018; Zhang Dong, “Xinjiang’s Tens-­of-­Billion-­Scale Security Market, the Integration ­Giant Tells You How to Get Your Share” [Ch: Shu bai yi de xinjiang anfang shichang, jicheng jutou gaosu ni ruhe caineng congzhong fen bei geng], Leiphone, August 31, 2017, https://­web​.­archive​.­org​ /­web​/­20190406231923​/­https://­www​.­leiphone​.­com​/­news​/­201708​/­LcdGuMZ5n7k6sepy​ .­html. See also Emily Feng, “Security Spending Ramped Up in China’s Restive Xinjiang Region,” Financial Times, March 12, 2018, https://­www​.­ft​.­com​/­content​/­aa4465aa​ -­2349​-­11e8​-­ae48​-­60d3531b7d11. 6 The name Xinjiang is a colonial term meaning “new frontier” or “new dominion” in Chinese. ­Because of this, most Uyghurs and Kazakhs who are ­free to choose how they refer to their homelands prefer not to use this name. Nearly all of what is referred to as Xinjiang ­today encompasses the native lands of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Mongols, Kyrgyz, Sarikoli Tajiks, Uzbeks, Tatars, and other groups. 7 See Dru Gladney 1998; Jay Dautcher 2009; and Rian Thum 2014 for ­earlier discussion of Uyghur chthonic identity.

introduction. what is terror capitalism? 1 See, for example, Christopher Chen 2013; Iyko Day 2016; and a special issue of Social Text on “Economies of Dispossession” (Byrd et al. 2018). 2 See also N. P. Singh 2017; and Ananya Roy 2019. 3 For a discussion of ­labor, disposability, and value creation in Asian contexts, see the work of Neferti Tadiar (2015) and Shu-­mei Shih (2016). Ching Kwan Lee (2018) describes the effects of overcapacity in the Chinese economic production. 4 For a discussion of the way racialized minorities in North Amer­i­ca are pushed to disidentify with each other, see Chandan Reddy 2011; and Iyko Day 2016. 5 For an additional discussion of how economic systems in Northwest China can be seen as an iteration of racialized capitalism, see David Tobin 2020. 6 As Nikhil Singh has argued, “The production of race as a method for aggregating and devaluing an entire group” depends on assessing the value of the targeted group’s social and biological reproduction in relation to the imperatives of capital accumulation and the reproduction of ­those already succeeding in the cap­i­tal­ist social order (2017, 57–58). 7 See the work of Stevan Harrell (1995), Shu-­mei Shih (2001), Tong Lam (2011), and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (2020) for similar approaches to understanding Chinese and Japa­nese colonial proj­ects. 8 In fact, Ann Stoler and Carole McGranahan argue that Chinese colonial proj­ects in the Qing dynasty and Republican-­era China ­were mobilized around “a virulent form of racial nationalism” vis-­à-­vis other Asian populations, precisely out of a comparative pro­cess of empire building (Stoler and McGranahan 2007, 25). This ethno-­racialization was informed by Japa­nese and Western forms of racialization, but was, at least initially, unsupported by the pseudoscientific evidence of eugenics. For a comparative discussion of ethno-­racial politics in China and the United States, see Jin 2012. Jin’s discussion is useful for understanding the comparative history of t­ hese imperial powers, but b­ ecause it fails to consider Uyghur and Tibetan understandings of their racialization (the paradigmatic examples of racialization in China), it is of ­limited use in understanding con­temporary ethno-­racialization in China. 9 As the historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom notes: “Japan asserted in many cases that it was not taking over territories, but freeing them from colonial rule, and allowing them to be governed at last by locals. They made this claim about Shanghai, proclaiming in the early 1940s that it was fi­nally liberated from all forms of foreign control, even as Japa­nese troops and Chinese puppet officials controlled the city. Beijing, too, does not talk of having an empire, but its ­handling of Tibet and Xinjiang rhymes with Tokyo’s imperial approach” (2020, https://­publicseminar​.­org​ /­essays​/­hong​-­kong​-­on​-­the​-­brink​/­). 10 See, for example, Barry Sautman’s defense of Chinese colonization of Xinjiang on ­these grounds (Sautman 2000). 11 See also Ann Stoler and Carole McGranahan 2007, 25; Stevan Harrell 1995; and Dru Gladney 1998. 12 Settler colonialism is a unique imperial formation that is premised by the way settlers are empowered by a state to enter Native lands, to stay, and to displace Native 232  Notes to Introduction

13 14 15

16

17 18

19

20

21

22

23

­ eoples and their way of life. It carries with it a relation of domination, pro­cesses of p dispossession, and conditions of occupation (Simpson 2014). For comparative discussion of the way liberal forms of multiculturalism extend settler power in Western contexts of settler colonialism, see Povinelli 2002. “Let Them Shoot Hoops,” Economist, July 30, 2011, http://­www​.­economist​.­com​/­node​ /­21524940. As many scholars have shown, the work done by ­women and minoritized ethno-­ racial ­others in domestic and ser­vice sectors is often calculated as inherently less valuable or valueless in cap­i­tal­ist systems (Federici 2004; Dawson 2016; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). Harvey and LaPlace 2019; Paul Mozur, “One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority,” New York Times, April 14, 2019, https://­ www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2019​/­04​/­14​/­technology​/­china​-­surveillance​-­artificial​-­intelligence​ -­racial​-­profiling​.­html. For a comparative example of technology use in racialized policing in the United States, see Brian Jordan Jefferson 2020. Nancy Fraser describes the relationship between spaces of social reproduction and cap­i­tal­ist modes of production that are supported by them as a “boundary strug­g le” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). This term conceptualizes the way capital is driven to exploit more and more of the systems of care and repair that make economic activity pos­si­ble in the first place. For work on cap­i­tal­ist surveillance and its effects on minoritized ­others, see the work by Simone Browne (2015); Mckenzie Wark (2017, 2019); Ruha Benjamin (2019); Lily Irani (2019); and Silvia Lindtner (2020). For scholarship on gender construction in Muslim socie­ties in general, see the work of Saba Mahmood (2005); Lila Abu-­Lughod (2008); Farha Ghannam (2013); and Mayanthi Fernando (2014). For work on gender construction in Uyghur society, see Jay Dautcher 2009; Cindy Huang 2012; Ildikó Bellér-­Hann 2015; and Joanne Smith Finley 2015. Although young low-­income ­women also migrate to the city and attempt to find work as maids, store clerks, and hostesses, the focus of the proj­ect is on how young men, the primary target of terror capitalism, embody their escape from poverty and detention in the countryside. For accounts of Uyghur ­women’s life in the city, see Cindy Huang 2012, and Joanne Smith Finley 2015. For accounts of Han ­women in Xinjiang, see Agnieszka Joniak-­Lüthi 2015. For more on the performativity of gender, see the work of Eve Sedgwick (1985), Judith Butler (1997), Matthew Gutmann (1997), Michael Kimmel (2004), and Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne (2016). Similarly, Islamic veiling was viewed as a challenge to the sovereignty of the Chinese state over Uyghur bodies regardless of w ­ hether it was forced on Uyghur ­women by Uyghur men or an act of autonomy on the part of the w ­ omen themselves (Huang 2012). As a result, Uyghur w ­ omen often became a “­silent object” on which the state vio­lence directed ­toward Uyghur men was carried out. The policing of gender practices established the state as the ultimate arbiter of masculinity and femininity. Notes to Introduction  233

24 As other scholars have shown, this attitude at times results in forms of domestic abuse. See Huang 2012; Smith Finley 2015; and Tynen 2019a.

1. enclosure 1 Chun Han Wong, “China’s Hard Edge: The Leader of Beijing’s Muslim Crackdown Gains Influence,” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2019, https://­www​.­wsj​.­com​/­articles​/­chinas​ -­hard​-­edge​-­the​-­leader​-­of​-­beijings​-­muslim​-­crackdown​-­gains​-­influence​-­11554655886. 2 Throughout this book I use the term police contractor to denote that most uniformed police are professional auxiliary police who are hired by local police departments through a private contract. Such police associates are often not authorized to carry lethal weapons and are primarily responsible for technological surveillance of the Muslim population in Northwest China. Police who are paid directly by the state and authorized to use lethal force are referred to simply as police or state police in this book. 3 See also Cedric Robinson 1983; Silvia Federici 2004; and Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi 2018. 4 Following Byrd et al. (2018) and other scholars of decolonization, I translate the German term ursprünglich as “original accumulation” rather than the less accurate “primitive accumulation.” 5 Zhou Yan, Wang Pan, and Pan Ying, “ ‘Unintentional Scream’ Triggered Xinjiang Riot,” Xin­hua, July 8, 2009, http://­news​.­xinhuanet​.­com​/­english​/­2009​-­07​/­08​/­content​ _­11675440​.­htm. 6 Megvii has subsequently claimed that some of their Xinjiang related systems ­were not implemented. Paul Mozur, “One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority,” New York Times, April 14, 2019, https://­www​ .­nytimes​.­com​/­2019​/­04​/­14​/­technology​/­china​-­surveillance​-­artificial​-­intelligence​ -­racial​-­profiling​.­html. 7 “Da shuju fankong yi cheng guoji qushi” [Big data counterterrorism has become an international trend], Xin­hua, March 28, 2014, http://­news​.­sciencenet​.­cn​/­htmlnews​ /­2014​/­3​/­289312​.­shtm. 8 A state bud­get report indicates that this was an increase in security spending of over 90 ­percent. “Guanyu 2017 nian zizhiqu yusuan zhi hang qingkuang he 2018 nian zizhiqu yusuan cao’an de baogao [Report on the implementation of the autonomous region bud­get in 2017 and the draft bud­get of the autonomous region in 2018],” Xinjiang Net, February 3, 2018, https://­web​.­archive​.­org​/­web​/­20181014075113​ /­http://­www​.­xinjiangnet​.­com​.­cn​/­2018​/­0203​/­2044552​.­shtml. See also Zhang Dong, “Xinjiang’s Tens-­of-­Billion-­Scale Security Market, the Integration ­Giant Tells You How to Get Your Share” [Ch: Shu bai yi de xinjiang anfang shichang, jicheng jutou gaosu ni ruhe caineng congzhong fen bei geng], Leiphone, August 31, 2017, https://­ web​.­archive​.­org​/­web​/­20190406231923​/­https://­www​.­leiphone​.­com​/­news​/­201708​ /­LcdGuMZ5n7k6sepy​.­html. 9 “Banking body prepares list of ppp proj­ects in Xinjiang,” China Daily, February 24, 2017, https://­archive​.­fo​/­qWSo4. See also Chin and Lin 2021. 234  Notes to Introduction

10 Zhang Dong, “Xinjiang’s Tens-­of-­Billion-­Scale Security Market, the Integration ­Giant Tells You How to Get Your Share.” 11 Zhang Dong, “Xinjiang’s Tens-­of-­Billion-­Scale Security Market.” 12 Zhang Dong, “Xinjiang’s Tens-­of-­Billion-­Scale Security Market”; Greitens et al. 2019. 13 Lili Wu, “Xinjiang shaoshu minzu liudong renkou falu yi shi de xianzhuang fenxi” [An analy­sis of the ­legal awareness among mi­grants from Xinjiang ethnic minorities], May 22, 2013, https://­c​.­m​.­163​.­com​/­news​/­a​/­FK7R622R0541LBHV​ .­html. 14 Ben Dooley, “ ‘Eradicate the Tumors’: Chinese Civilians Drive Xinjiang Crackdown on Separatism,” Bangkok Post, April 26, 2018, https://­www​.­bangkokpost​.­com​/­news​ /­world​/­1453014​/­eradicate​-­the​-tumors-­chinese​-­civilians​-­drive​-­xinjiang​-­crackdown; Byler 2020a. 15 Zhang Dong, “Xinjiang’s Tens-­of-­Billion-­Scale Security Market.” 16 Austin Ramzy, “He Needed a Job. China Gave Him One: Locking Up His Fellow Muslims,” New York Times, March 2, 2019, https://­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2019​/­03​/­02​ /­world​/­asia​/­china​-­muslim​-­detention​-­uighur​-­kazakh​.­html. 17 Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, “ ‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Or­ga­nized Mass Detentions of Muslims,” New York Times, November 16, 2019, https://­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­interactive​/­2019​/­11​/­16​/­world​/­asia​/­china​-­xinjiang​ -­documents​.­html. 18 “Ihr seid keine Menschen,” Die Zeit, August 1, 2019, https://­www​.­zeit​.­de​/­2019​/­32​ /­zwangslager​-­xinjiang​-­muslime​-­china​-­zeugen​-­menschenrechte​/­seite​-­2. 19 “Ihr seid keine Menschen.” 20 “Ihr seid keine Menschen.” 21 “Ihr seid keine Menschen.” 22 “Jiangsu yuan yi qianyan zhihui bu lingdao yanjiu nantong shi duikou yuan jiang gongzuo” [Leaders of Jiangsu aid to Yining Front headquarters investigate the paired aid to Xinjiang from Nantong City], Times of Nantong Aiding Xinjiang, May 31, 2018, http://­archive​.­md​/­f490v. 23 “Xinjiang: Zhongdian zhichi nan jiang fangzhi fuzhuang chanye fazhan” [Xinjiang: Focus on Supporting the Development of the Textile and Apparel Industry in Southern Xinjiang], International Business Daily, April 19, 2018, https://­web​.­archive​ .­org​/­web​/­20190525124330​/­http://­cms​.­dybcotton​.­com​/­archives​/­2827. 24 Dominique Patton, “Xinjiang Cotton at Crossroads of China’s New Silk Road,” ­Reuters, January 11, 2016, https://­www​.­reuters​.­com​/­article​/­us​-­china​-­xinjiang​-­cotton​ -­insight​-­idUSKCN0UQ00320160112. 25 For a comparative discussion of how Eu­ro­pean and North American deployment of counterterrorism creates its own regime of truth and economy, see Allen Feldman 1991; Mahmood Mamdani 2002; Laura McNamara 2011; and Joseph Masco 2014.

2. devaluation 1 This shooing sound and motion ­were an abbreviated version of the more elaborate and grammatically accurate phrase go out! or chuqu! Notes to Chapter Two  235

2 ­Here, Kipnis seems to be contradicting or nuancing his 2007 critique of anthropologies of suzhi as a product of market liberalization. See Anagnost 2004 and 2013 for authoritative accounts of suzhi as a modality of con­temporary global capitalism. 3 Of course, the distinction of possessing high levels of ­human capital does not exhaust the value systems of Chinese “enterprising subjects,” older cultural institutions such as “saving face,” which are related to intersubjective and familial relations (Kleinman, Yan, and Jing 2011, 12), as well as the emerging valorization of personal desire (Rofel 2007). Yet, as Anagnost (2004) has argued, even ­these forms of personal desire are often inflected by the logic of consumption and production of marketable personae and the production of desire for the sake of desire. 4 See, for example, Pun 2005; Yan 2008; Anagnost 2013; and Rofel and Yanagisako 2018. 5 Yeh notes, by quoting a local government report, that “in order for Tibet to be a stable out-­migration destination for this town, ­every year during Spring Festival we especially invite a representative [from among the successful Tibet out-­migrants] to have discussions with the government, and give them prizes” (2013, 113). This suggests that migration to the frontier cannot rely on suzhi aspirations and income benefits alone. It must be incentivized and interpolated by sacrifices outside of the usual structures of interpersonal relationships and f­ amily loyalties. 6 Luo Lin’s ­music video ­Under the Northern Sky can be viewed on YouTube: https://­ youtu​.­be​/­TBP​_­XEBpSw4. 7 For more on Han mi­grant perceptions of patriotic duty, see Tom Cliff 2016b. 8 With a population of around 93 million, Henan has one of the highest population densities in the world. 9 See chapters 1 and 2 for comparisons of experiences of Han and Uyghur culture workers. 10 For discussions of ­these views among the Tibetan diaspora community, see Emily Yeh 2007a. For scholarship on Inner Asian ­peoples who view terms such as Indigenous or Sufi as antimodernist or Orientalist projections, and instead prefer to amplify state-­centered readings of identity, see Sneath 2007; and Brophy 2019. 11 See Dawa Lokyitsang’s essay “Are Tibetans Indigenous?” (2017) and Guldana Salimjan’s article “Mapping Loss, Remembering Ancestors: Genealogical Narratives of Kazakhs in China” (2020) for a discussion of the way Tibetan and Kazakh politics of indigeneity intersect with global decolonial movements. An article by an anonymous author (“You ­Shall Sing and Dance” 2020) describes how decolonial methodology ­shaped her scholarship on Uyghur indigeneity. An article I co­wrote with Amy Anderson (Uyghur) (2019) also engages with global scholarship on indigeneity and antiracism. The Sarikoli Tajik writer and activist Nurdoukht Khudonazarova Taghdumbashi (2020) likewise engages decolonial theory. 12 Meaning that only approximately 60,000–100,000 Uyghurs had been able to secure a permanent ­legal right to live in the city of Ürümchi. 13 This value perception had to do with the way the state system had granted him a right to live in the city, and he had worked within the system to achieve recognition and prestige. He worried that his status as a Uyghur would prevent him from 236  Notes to Chapter Two

­ oing so. Over the next few years, ­these attitudes began to shift to some extent. d When I spoke to this official’s ­daughter in 2018 I learned that the official had been detained, accused of corruption, and given a prison sentence. She said that her ­family was beginning to understand the forces of dispossession that had been directed at rural Uyghurs for de­cades, but this sort of privilege was hard to unravel. 14 See chapter 4 for a discussion of this type of friendship as an expression of anticolonial masculinity. 15 See the introduction for a description of the implementation and effects of ­these camps.

3. dispossession 1 For more on the context and content of ­these murals, see Byler 2017. 2 This practice of greeting each other with the common Islamic greeting Assalam, “Peace be unto you” (Uy: assalam alaykum) was outlawed as a sign of so-­called religious extremism in 2017. 3 See, for example, Gutiérrez-­Rodríguez 2011; Vimalassery 2013; Pasternak 2015; Barker 2015; Day 2016; and Byrd et al. 2018. 4 As has often been noted, Marx points out that this is a “double freedom” ­because, in a cap­i­tal­ist system, workers are in fact “­free” to work or “­free” to starve (Marx [1846] 1978). 5 Rosa Luxemburg refers to dispossession as a pro­cess of Landnahme, Jason Moore calls it appropriation, while Nancy Fraser describes the entire pro­cess of dispossession as expropriation. While I appreciate the analy­sis of each of ­these theorists, in each of them (though less so in the work of Moore), ­there is a tendency ­toward Euro-­American settler centrism and a lack of attention to the epistemic vio­lence that accompanies colonial dispossession. In Fraser’s work, in par­tic­u­lar, ­there is a disappointing lack of engagement with scholarship on decolonization. Luxemburg 1951; Harvey 2014; Moore 2015; Fraser 2016. 6 ­These two campaigns—­“Open up the Northwest” and “Open up the West” (sometimes referred to as the “­Great Leap West”)—­began in the 1990s and early 2000s, respectively. Since the ­earlier campaign was seen as successful in bringing infrastructure and industrial farming to Xinjiang, the proj­ect was expanded to the entirety of China’s Western Regions. 7 Shao Wei, “China becomes tomato industry target,” China Daily, June 15, 2012, https://­www​.­chinadaily​.­com​.­cn​/­china​/­2012​-­06​/­15​/­content​_­15506137​.­htm. 8 Li Weiao, “Guoji youjia dimi zhongshiyou xinjiang youtian jinnian yi kong chan 68 wan dun” [With low international oil prices, PetroChina’s Xinjiang Oilfield has controlled production of 680,000 tons this year], Tencent Finance, August 11, 2016, https://­archive​.­fo​/­mRIaD. 9 It is difficult to obtain exact statistics on land contract owner­ship, however, the consolidation of land into the hands of a few local elites was common knowledge among many of the farmers I interviewed. The estimates I have included w ­ ere based on ­these interviews. See also Cappelletti 2015. Notes to Chapter Three  237

10 See also Eset Sulaiman’s report “In China’s Xinjiang, Some Uyghurs Are Forced into a Sharecropper’s Life” for an account of what this looked like in Khotan Prefecture in 2016 (Radio ­Free Asia, http://­www​.­rfa​.­org​/­english​/­news​/­uyghur​/­in​-­chinas​ -­xinjian​-­some​-­uyghurs​-­11222016151601​.­html). 11 Lili Wu, “Xinjiang shaoshu minzu liudong renkou falu yi shi de xianzhuang fenxi” [An analy­sis of the ­legal awareness among mi­grants from Xinjiang ethnic minorities], May 22, 2013, https://­c​.­m​.­163​.­com​/­news​/­a​/­FK7R622R0541LBHV​.­html. 12 Video Compact Discs (vcds) ­were the first form of digital media to reach the rural Uyghur homeland. 13 For more on drug dependence and the way Uyghurs ­were pushed into the gray economy, see Ilham Tohti (2009). 14 Some students in the Uyghur vocational schools ­were also matriculated university students who needed help learning En­glish and other skills, but many ­were simply high school dropouts who hoped to find a better life despite their lack of academic success. 15 See discussion in chapters 1 and 2.

4. friendship 1 For more on the social construction of masculinity, see Eve Sedgwick 1985; Matthew Gutmann 1997; Michael Kimmel 2004; and Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne 2017. 2 See, for example, the work of Michael D. Jackson (2002), Robert Desjarlais (2003), Veena Das (2007), Lila Abu-­Lughod (2008), and Robert Innes and Kim Anderson (2015). 3 For some of the very best anthropological writing on gender, ethnicity, and power in China, see the work of Ralph Litzinger (2000), Louisa Schein (2000), and Charlene Makley (2007). 4 For more on the social importance of guanxi relationships in Chinese gender relations and sociality, see Alan Smart 1999; Susan Mann 2000; M. M. H. Yang 2002; and J. Yang 2010. 5 See also Roberts 1998. 6 See, for example, the work of Paul Stoller (1989), Renato Rosaldo (1993), and Lila Abu-­Lughod (2008). 7 For a comparative case, see Jack Sidnell 2000. 8 For discussions of the Uyghur “collaborator” role, see Joanne Smith Finley 2013. 9 As one Uyghur urban planner told me, “­There is a Chinese saying: guard the gate well; protect your ­people well [Ch: bashou damen hao; baohu ni de ren hao]. ­People think that e­ very housing district and com­pany should have a wall in order to protect it from strangers. Since society is becoming more complex, this has become more impor­tant. Before, in the countryside, ­there ­were none of ­these walls, but now, even in the countryside, the schools and housing districts have walls and guards around them.” Of course, in cities outside of Xinjiang, where the perceived threat of Uyghur vio­lence is less pervasive, walls have only been retained around exclusive housing complexes; other institutional spaces are now often freely accessible. 238  Notes to Chapter Three

10 Of course, Uyghur ­women ­were being placed in deeply precarious positions as well, and subjected to patriarchal vio­lence, but the threat of direct vio­lence and systemic profiling was skewed heavi­ly in the direction of men. W ­ omen ­were not often read as potential terrorists, while rural-­origin men ­were nearly always perceived as threatening. The everyday dispossessions experienced by Han mi­grant ­women—­under Chinese state-­directed cap­i­tal­ist development—as they ­were pulled into exploitative social relations in factories in Eastern China, w ­ ere ­here redirected ­toward Uyghur bodies as their bodies ­were both exploited and dominated as the primary object of terror cap­i­tal­ist formation.

5. minor politics 1 The term accomplice, as discussed ­here, comes from the type of thinking that Chen Ye and his Uyghur counter­parts ­were ­doing in building a minor politics. Although they did not explic­itly connect it to antiracist strug­g les elsewhere, ­those linkages could be clearly extrapolated. Corrections to situations of systemic injustice require costly solidarities across difference. For an excellent examination of the way the figure of the accomplice has been taken up in the context of the United States, see Powell and Kelly 2017. 2 See Cheek 2015; and Rofel 2007 for discussions of how a turn from the propaganda state to a directed public sphere was fostered by market liberalization. 3 See chapter 2 for a discussion of how this idea of “achieved quality” (Ch: suzhi) is associated with differently positioned populations. 4 In fact, unlike in other cities where Han mi­grants ­were viewed as violators of state planning (Guang 2003, 620), as I show in chapter 2, recent Han mi­grants to Ürümchi ­were celebrated as potential settlers who ­were bringing cultural quality to the province. 5 Quotes from Chen Ye in this paragraph are taken from a published Chineselanguage interview. In order to protect his identity, I have not included citations linking to ­these publicly available materials. 6 Quotes throughout the remainder of this section are from two separate published interviews with Chen Ye. 7 This quote and the quote in the following paragraph are translated from an excerpt of Chen Ye’s journal that was published in 2013. 8 ­Here, I am reminded of the way grass sprouts in the thinnest of soil between stones and across wide steppes of open ground. As Henry Miller put it so nicely: “Grass only exists between the ­great non-­cultivated spaces. It fills in the voids. It grows between—­among the other ­things. The flower is beautiful, the cabbage is useful, the poppy makes you crazy. But grass is overflowing, it is a lesson in morality” (in Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 30). 9 Often the complexity of a social system is only revealed when it is blown apart by a trauma; what follows then in a milieu of security is “a pro­cess of ‘spacing out,’ of generating, enfolding, and extending space in which mapping is always b­ ehind, struggling to ‘catch up’ ” (Simone 2003, 26). Agamben (1998) tells us that such traumas are, as Walter Benjamin (1986) predicted, becoming the norm rather than the exception. Notes to Chapter Five  239

6. subtraction 1 Wang Yuanyuan, “Wulumuqi shi penghu qu gaizao 2012 nian jiang touzi 50 yi jian wan taofang” [Ürümchi ­Will Invest 50 Billion Yuan to Build 10,000 Homes in Urumqi’s Shantytowns in 2012], Tianshan​.­net, March 28, 2012, https://­web​.­archive​ .­org​/­web​/­20120503050242​/­http://­www​.­xj​.­xinhuanet​.­com​/­2012​-­03​/­28​/­content​ _­24970063​.­htm. 2 Musafir also means “traveler” in Persian, Urdu, and Hindi. 3 See, for example, a collection of essays drawn from the archive of Cultural Anthropology by Kathryn Zyskowski in 2014 as a “Curated Collection: Everyday Islam.” 4 As in Cabeiri Robinson’s work (2013) on the making of muhajir in Azad Kashmir, migration becomes something of a form of jihad or “strug­g le” within the context of a religious hijrah or “exile” in the city. ­Here I am positing, much as Robinson argues, that the Muslims she encountered in her work use the concept of the muhajir, that Uyghur mi­grants use the concept of the musapir as a way of reconciling new forms of Sunni devotion with older Indigenous Sufi traditions and as a way of finding a sense of belonging within a religious economy. It is worth mentioning that the terms musapir and muhajir can be used interchangeably at times in the South Asian context. However, I did not find that Uyghurs used the term muhajir in everyday discourse. 5 In ­later discussions, he said: “I first went ‘inside the mouth’ [Ch: kouli] to Eastern China in 1966. At that time I was still a high school student [though classes had been suspended]. So I and some of my classmates went to Beijing to see Mao Zedong. We left in October of that year. We had to hitchhike from Kashgar to Turpan. Then we took a bus. And then in Lanzhou we took the train. Eventually we made it. ­There ­were tens of thousands of us activists in Tian­anmen Square. Then Mao came out and we sang some songs for him. It was ­really moving [he sang a few lines]. ­After a few weeks we came back to Xinjiang. I stayed in Ürümchi and helped one of the factions fight for a few weeks. Then I went back to Kashgar. I came again in 1974, still helping in the fight. In the 1980s and 1990s I worked in the Big Bazaar selling produce, fruit, and nuts, and raising sheep. I did this my ­whole life as an adult. Now I am retiring! Maybe you can take me to Amer­i­ca in your bag!” 6 Yaken is also sometimes written in Latin transliteration as Yarkand. In Chinese it is called Shache. 7 In general ­there has been a widespread shift among Uyghurs over the past twenty years ­toward more explic­itly normative transnational forms of Sunni, Hanafi Islam; much of this revival has been spread by new forms of informal instruction that ­people refer to as tabligh. It is impor­tant to note though that Uyghur tabligh does not refer exclusively to the formal teachings of the Tablighi Jama’at. The Tablighi Jama’at, a movement centered in South Asia, advocates for a “return” to the orthopraxis of seventh-­century Islam. Movements such as this came to the Uyghurs largely via the teachings of Uzbek proponents and Uyghur teachers based in Turkey. A small number of Uyghurs have also been influenced by Hizb ut-­Tahrir, a movement centered in London, that advocates for a nonviolent “return” to an Islamic caliphate. Sean Roberts (2020) has noted ­these forms of Salafi orthopraxy 240  Notes to Chapter Six

have led to a small minority of young Uyghurs being drawn ­toward the radical politics of groups like al-­Qaeda, and, more recently, the Islamic State (Daesh). 8 In 2014 ­there was only one government-­approved madrassa in all of Xinjiang. All imams who ­were given permission to teach had to be trained in this madrassa. Likewise, teachings could only be delivered ­after the Friday prayers at government-­approved Friday mosques. The teachings ­were often read from scripts that ­were approved by government censors. ­Because of this, the teachings of government-­approved imams ­were widely regarded as government propaganda rather than Islamic teachings. Given the tight censorship of the Friday mosques, many Muslims met outside of ­these designated areas to discuss Islamic teachings and pray. The mosque in Heijia Shan was a Friday mosque that was closely watched. It served mainly as a space to pray and connect with other believers; most piety teachings ­were shared in the periphery around the mosque rather than in the mosque itself. 9 He was referring to the large-­scale insurrection that occurred immediately ­after Ramadan over a dispute with police about the veiling of w ­ omen in the home of a Uyghur farmer. Based on the discrepancy between Chinese government and the Uyghur government-­in-­exile statistics, between 96 and 2,000 unarmed Uyghur civilians ­were killed by the police as a result of the protests. Consequently, a state of emergency was declared in Yaken County, which meant that the nearly 1 million Uyghurs in the county ­were subject to curfews, daily visits by the police, and mandatory po­liti­cal education meetings in 2015. As in many other counties, tens of thousands of Uyghur men ­were arrested and held without trial in reeducation camps (see S. Hoshur 2014 for further discussion). 10 In Xinjiang the cheapest way to travel long distances across the desert was by sleeper bus. This kind of bus was equipped with three rows of narrow cots. Hasan and his ­family ­were in the back of the bus when they hit the coal truck.

conclusion 1 Xinjiang Reform and Development Commission 2018; Zhang Dong, “Xinjiang’s Tens-­of-­Billion-­Scale Security Market, the Integration ­Giant Tells You How to Get Your Share” [Ch: Shu bai yi de xinjiang anfang shichang, jicheng jutou gaosu ni ruhe caineng congzhong fen bei geng], Leiphone, August 31, 2017, https://­ web​.­archive​.­org​/­web​/­20190406231923​/­https://­www​.­leiphone​.­com​/­news​/­201708​ /­LcdGuMZ5n7k6sepy​.­html.

Notes to Conclusion  241

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Index

Abu-­Lughod, Lila, 24, 233n20, 238n2 Agamben, Giorgio, 138, 166, 239n9 Ahmed, Sara, 146 AI Champions, 19, 41–42 Albro, Robert, 54 Alibaba, 43, 57 Althusser, Louis, 152 Amrute, Sareeta, 15, 47 Anagnost, Ann, 66–67, 72, 77, 236nn2–4 Anand, Dibyesh, 9, 33 Anderson, Amy, 81 Anderson, Amy, and Darren Byler, 38, 223, 236n11 Anderson, Michael, 6, 12, 81 Andrejevic, Mark, 17, 33, 55, 59 anticolonialism, xvii, 28–29, 137, 166, 173, 185– 86; decolonial practice and, xiii, xvi, 9, 16, 23, 26–27, 80–82, 101, 142–43, 218, 236nn10,11; community protection and, 24–25, 29, 137, 142, 153, 160, 182, 204, 217–18; critique of capitalism and, 5; gender and, 5, 25, 139, 160. See also friendship; minor politics; relational autonomy; witnessing antiracism, 6–9, 27, 81, 222, 236n11, 239n1 Anwar, Mutallip, and Darren Byler, 81 Appadurai, Arjun, 44, 164 Arendt, Hannah, 141 Asad, Talal, 6, 114 backwardness (luohou): anticolonialism and, 184; ethnicity and, 8, 38, 58, 63–64, 78, 93, 145, 174, 186; ­labor and, 64, 83, 87, 92, 101;

Xinjiang and, 75, 170, 184; indigeneity and, 80. See also laziness trope Baidu, 34 Balci, B., 210 banishment: 33, 36, 59, 151, 164, 177–78, 194; as urban cleansing, 44 Barker, Joanne, 237n3 Bear, Laura, Karen Ho, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Sylvia Yanagisako, 4, 16–17 Becquelin, N., 103–4, 106–7 Behar, Ruth, 27, 198 Bellér-­Hann, Ildikó, 105, 233n20 Benjamin, Ruha, xiii, 3, 20, 233n19 Benjamin, Walter, 239n9 Beraja, Martin, David Y. Yang, and Noam Yuchtman, 42–43 Berardi, Franco, 3, 159 Berlant, Lauren, 147, 167, 196 Bern­stein, Anya, 166 Bhattacharya, T., 16 Bianminka. See passbook bianmin jingwuzhan. See checkpoint Biehl, João, 27 biometric surveillance: dna and, 32; facial recognition and, 2–3, 15, 31, 42–43, 121, 193; iris scans and, 32; racialization and, 14–15, 231n4. See also computer vision; digital forensics biopo­liti­cal security: camp systems and, 5; conversion devices and, 16; digital enclosure and, 36; general technology defined as, 20, 53–54

bingtuan. See ­People’s Production and Construction Corps Bornstein, Erica, 114 Bourgois, Philippe, and Jeff Schoenberg, 138 Bovingdon, Gardner, 11–12, 43, 139, 180 Boyle, James, 36, 111 Bray, Alan, 135 Bray, Francesca, 20 Briggs, Charles, 143, 158, 160–61 Brophy, David, 6, 11–12, 38, 45, 236n10 Browne, Simone, 233n19 Bulag, Uradyn E., 11 Butler, Judith, 23, 162, 233n22 Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou, 111 Byler, Darren, xvi, 6, 34, 37, 43–45, 47, 49, 50–51, 82, 117, 144, 148, 167, 224, 235n14, 237n1 Byrd, Jodi A., Aloysha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy, 4, 34–35, 232n1, 234n4, 237n3 Cao, Huhua, 65 Cappelletti, A., 237n9 Cattelino, Jessica R., 166 Cha, N., 226 checkpoints, 2–3, 9, 15, 31–34, 44, 47–49, 52–58, 62, 73, 89–90, 130, 135, 143, 147–48, 152, 168, 177, 193, 206–7, 223; number of, 31; ­People’s Con­ve­nience Police Stations and, 31, 48, 151 Cheek, Timothy, 122, 239n2 Chen, Christopher, 7, 10, 16, 232n1 Chen Quanguo, 11, 44 Chin, Joshua, and Liza Lin, 234n9 China Electronics Technology Corporation, 34, 42, 47; relationship to Hikvision, 42; ser­ vice provider for Integrated Joint Operations Platform, 47. See also ijop Chinese achieved quality (suzhi), 55, 58, 62, 64–70, 73, 76, 85, 89, 93–94, 170, 202, 236n2, 236n5; as conversion device, 66; as self-­investment, 67; racialized field of power and, 68; as frontier technology, 68. See also devaluation Chumley, Lily, 118 Cliff, Tom, 13–14, 62, 69–70, 103, 105, 107, 170, 236n7 Cloudwalk, 46 colonial gaze, xiii, 11, 22, 35, 53, 60, 63, 83, 142, 165, 175, 215; refusal of, 181–82, 202

262 Index

computer vision, 3, 15, 31, 34, 41–50, 54–55, 58, 73, 131, 135, 175, 208, 233n16; black box effect and, 15, 54, 223 contemporaneity, xi, 28, 38, 64–65, 79, 82, 88, 114–21. See also self-­fashioning Cornwall, Andrea, and Nancy Lindisfarne, 233n22, 238n1 Coulthard, Glen Sean, 4, 6, 10, 35, 100–101, 138 Crapanzano, V., 27 Dahua, 46 Dao Lang, 70, 76, 89, 236n6 Das, Veena, 158–59, 194, 238n2 data janitors, 46–47; as private security contractors, 48, 54, 222; number of, 47, 222 Dautcher, Jay, 23, 112, 136–37, 140, 231n7, 233n20 Dave, Naisargi N., 182 Dawson, Michael C., 8, 14, 16, 133n15 Day, Iyko, 6, 232n1, 232n4, 237n3 decolonization. See anticolonialism Deeb, Lara, and Mona Harb, 194 Deleuze, Gilles, 159, 163, 167 Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet, 239n8 Desjarlais, Robert, 27, 142, 238 devaluation, 4, 5, 28; anticolonialism and, 85, 92, 136–37, 141–42, 178–82; dispossession and, 95, 101; ethnicity and, 54, 63, 66, 76–82, 140; frontier migration and, 68–70; gender and, 117–18; ­labor value and, 67–68; piety movements and, 119–20; security and, 20, 33, 55, 166; social value and, 67–68, 70, 92, 118, 145. See also Chinese achieved quality (suzhi); racialization; enclosure; dispossession; subtraction; terror capitalism; Uyghur achieved quality (sapa) digital enclosure. See enclosure digital forensics, 34, 46, 130–31 disappearance, 2, 22, 29, 41, 53, 69, 124, 137, 142, 181, 196, 203, 206, 211, 212, 218, 226, 228. See also subtraction dispossession, 101; decolonial critique and, 6, 10, 100–101, 121, 138–39, 147, 151, 161–62, 221, 228, 233n12; devaluation and, 3–5, 27–28, 137–38, 146; development and, 13–15, 68, 101, 107; enclosure and, 3–5, 27–28, 55, 59, 62, 137, 146; ethnography of, xiii, 26–27, 101, 138; gender and, 6–7, 23–26, 117–18, 137, 141, 154–61, 239n10; institutions and, 6, 95–96,

105–111; ­labor and, 6–7, 60, 100–101, 107–10, 135, 138, 185; land and, 6, 24, 95, 101–11, 192, 222; Marxist critique and, xiii, xvii, 35–36, 59, 99–101, 138, 151, 228, 237n5; racial capitalism and, 5–14, 23, 34–36, 59; re­orientation and, 114–16, 118–20, 121, 192–95; self-­fashioning and 111–14; technology and, 29, 37, 55, 60, 67; terror capitalism and, 122–30, 187–88, 213–15, 222, 228; Uyghur history and, 101–5. See also enclosure; expropriation; devaluation; Han settler society; subtraction; terror capitalism documentary film, 26, 176, 193, 200–203, 218 Douyin (TikTok), 224 East Turkestan, 38, 77, 80 Elliott, Mark, 80 enclosure, 33–37; boundary strug­g le and, 111, 136; the commons and, xiv, 35–37, 111; economy of, 42–43, 226; effects of digital enclosure, xvii, 4–5, 24–25, 28, 33, 40–46, 51–53, 128, 193, 196, 221; dispossession and, 5, 7, 15, 53–59, 95, 101, 212; devaluation and, 5, 17, 63–64, 74–76, 101, 136, 225; ethnography of, 27, 51–59; gender and, 24–25, 27; ­labor and, 46–51, 222–23; materiality of, 46–51, 196; par­ameters of, 79–80; racialization and, 6, 14–15, 44–47, 59–60, 79, 101, 135, 146, 194, 218; settler colonialism and, 6, 40–46, 59–60, 85, 89–92, 147, 150, 216; technology and, 15–17, 40–46, 118–22, 166, 218, 223–24. See also expropriation; original accumulation; passbook ethics: ethnography and, 27, 161; as distinct from politics, 158, 165, 167, 182–86; as self-­ cultivation, 194; work and, 58, 110, 114. See also friendship ethnic conflict. See racialization ethnic politics. See multiculturalism; racialization expropriation, xiii, 6, 101; as sequence of capitalism, 16, 23, 34–35, 102, 214–15; in terror capitalism, 35–36, 59; in settler colonialism, 76, 137, 147; dispossession distinct from, 95, 100–101, 237n5. See also dispossession; enclosure; original accumulation existential stability, 29, 89, 137, 141, 154; depression and, 159; minor politics and, 216. See also friendship; minor politics; relational autonomy; social reproduction

extremism: signs of, 44, 49–52, 55, 79–80, 106, 123, 224; algorithms of, 51, 214; as disease, 7, 46, 235n14; as precrime, 15, 49, 83, 223. See also separatism; terrorism Fadil, Nadia, and M. Fernando, 194 Faier, Lieba, 227 Fassin, D., 36, 47 Federici, Silvia, 16, 111, 233n15, 234n3 Feldman, Allen, 235n25 Fernando, Mayanthi L., 233n20 Fiberhome, 34 Fischer, Andrew M., 14, 69 Foucault, Michel, 20–21, 36, 53, 160, 166 Fraser, Nancy, 100–111, 237n5 Fraser, Nancy, and Rahel Jaeggi, 16, 18, 35, 66, 105, 111, 136, 175, 233n15, 233n18, 234n3 Friedman, Eli, 18 friendship, xvii, 139–41; anthropology and, 25, 157–61, 212, 218; anticolonialism and, 3, 25, 28–29, 134, 137–39, 154–61; capitalism and, 135–36, 140; depression and, 2, 135, 144, 153, 159, 223; emotional dwelling and, 159; ethics and, 26–27, 158–59, 161–62; ethnography of 16, 22, 26–27, 143–53; grief, xvii, 27, 143, 156, 160, 162; palliative care and, 91, 134, 137, 141, 154–57, 218; masculinity and 2, 25, 139–41, 148–53; minor politics distinct from, 165; politics and, 173, 182–83; rage and, xvii, 27, 143, 160; storytelling and, 141–43, 161–62. See also minor politics; musapir; relational autonomy; witnessing Furlan, Laura M., 143 Gandhi, Leela, 160 Gao, Mobo, 169 Ghannam, Farha, 233n20 Gilmore, R. W., 9 Gladney, Dru C., 231n7, 232n11 Global War on Terror, xi, xiii, 8; effect in Chinese discourse, 12; effect in Chinese counterterrorism, xiii, 4, 12, 19, 35, 41–46, 60, 166, 228, 234n7 Goldstein, Aloysha, 6, 21, 100, 138 Grauer, Yael, 50 green card. See passbook Greitens, Sheena Chestnut, Myunghee Lee, and Emir Yazici, 47, 222, 235n12 Gro Intelligence, 15, 57, 104

Index 263

Grose, Timothy, xii, 7, 45, 66 Guang Lei, 170–72, 239n4 Gupta, Akhil, 12, 147 Gutiérrez-­Rodríguez, Encarnación, 237n3 Gutmann, Matthew C., 137, 233n22, 238n1 Hansen, Mette H., 81 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, 249 Harrell, Stevan, 19, 81, 232n7, 232n11 Harris, Rachel, 210 Harris, Rachel, and Aziz Isa, 38, 120, 191, 210 Harvey, Adam, and Jules LaPlace, 233n16 Harvey, David, 34–35, 101, 237 Hathaway, Michael, 81 Hess, Stephen, 108 HikVision, 46; relationship to China Electronic Technology Corporation, 42 Hirschkind, Charles, 114, 194 Hizb ut-­Tahrir, 240n7 home inspections, 3, 34, 44, 98, 126, 151–52 Hoshur, Memtimin, 195 Hoshur, Shohret, 241n9 Huang, Cindy Y. L., 23–24, 117–18, 233nn20–21, 233n23, 234n24 ­human warehousing, 8, 33, 138; comparison to American mass incarceration, 8–9 Hundred Flowers Campaign, xxi, 224 iFLYTEK, 41, 44 ijop, 32, 47, 50–51, 54, 228 Ili Tele­vi­sion, 56, 58 Indigenous. See yerlik Innes, Robert Alexander, and Kim Anderson, 137, 142, 158–59, 238n2 Intercept, 51 Irani, Lily, 46–47, 54, 222, 233n19 Islamic State, 240n7 Islamophobia, 4, 6–9, 44; “bad Muslims” and, 6–7, 13; Islamic piety movements and, 6–7, 12–13, 39–40, 43, 85, 92, 125, 222; as new racism, 4, 7–8, 14–15; security and, 36; “Talibanization” and, 40; terror discourse and, xiii, 6–9, 39–40 Jackson, Michael D., 141, 157, 159, 166 jan-­jiger dost. See friendship Jefferson, Brian Jordan, 16, 36, 42, 59–60, 233n17 Jin, Wen, 232n8

264 Index

Joniak-­Lüthi, Agnieszka, 170, 233n21 Joyce, Patrick, 20 July 5 Protests, 40–41, 61, 77, 121, 134, 234n5; banishment and, 151, 178–79, 191–93, 200–201; disappearance and, 137–38, 207; piety movements and, 195, 203–4; psychological trauma and, 143–44, 162; reeducation campaign and, 144, 207; witnessing and, 178–79, 181–87, 202 Kanna, Ahmed, 114 Kashmir, xiii, xvi, 10, 228, 240n4; moral wound and, 9–10 Kaul, Nitasha, xvi, 8, 10 Kelley, Robin D. G., 21 Kimmel, Michael S., 137, 146, 233n22, 238n1 Kipnis, Andrew B., 66, 236n2 Kleinman, A. K., Y. Yan, and J. Jing, 236n3 Lam, Tong, 232n7 lao Xinjiang Han identity, 29, 165–66, 169; settler society and, 169; mangliu combined with, 172–73. See also mangliu Larkin, Brian, 37 laziness trope, 109–10. See also backwardness Lee, Ching Kwan, 19–20, 105, 232n3 Leibold, James, xii, 54, 214 Leon Technology, 43, 46, 230n5 Levi, Primo, xii Levinas, Emmanuel, 182 Li, T. M., 177 Lindtner, Silvia M., 233n19 Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-­Mei Shih, 29, 167 Lipsitz, George, 36 lit­er­a­ture, 29; as stage for common experience, 82–84, 91–92, 143, 148, 154, 195; historical melodrama and, 147–49; socialist realism and, 148; as po­liti­cal tool, 225. See also storytelling Litzinger, Ralph, 11, 238n3 Liu, A. H., and K. Peters, 65 Lokyitsang, Dawa, 81, 236n11 Luo, Yu, 81 Luo Lin. See Dao Lang Luxemburg, Rosa, 237n Mahmood, Saba, 118, 194, 233n20 Makley, Charlene E., 11, 238n3 Mamdani, Mahmood, 6, 235n25

mangliu Han identity, 29, 165, 171–73; musapir identity related to, 185, 192, 215. See also lao Xinjiang Han identity; migration; musapir Uyghur identity manhood, 136–37. See also masculinity Mann, Susan, 238n4 Marx, Karl, 34, 138, 237n4 Masco, Joseph, 42, 235n25 masculinity, 21–27, 120–21, 135–37; anticolonialism and, 160–62; racialization and, 13, 88, 143–44, 228; gender relations and, 120, 233n21; 233n23; homosocial friendship and, 135–37, 158–61; social construction of, 23, 137, 233n22; 238n1; Islamic identity and, 23–27; 233n20; yerlik identity and, 24–27, 143. See also manhood mass incarceration, 8–9. See also reeducation camps McCarthy, Susan, 11 McGranahan, Carole, 11, 167 McNamara, Laura A., 235n25 Megvii, 41, 234n6 Meiya Pico, 34, 46 Memet, Mijit, 108–10 Messerschmidt, J. W., 159 Mignolo, W. D., 168 migration: rates of, 65, 104, 109, 135; economy of, 74, 80, 117, 136; underemployment and, 36, 49, 79, 105, 136, 238n13. See also mangliu Han identity; musapir Uyghur identity; settler society Millar, Kathleen, 196, 216–17 Millward, James, 65, 105, 107 minor politics, 165–68; accomplice in, 29, 160, 165, 173, 176–78, 184, 239n1; friendship and, 176–78, 218; as method, 21–27; as practice, 173–78, 221; refusal and, 5, 29, 178–88; relational autonomy distinct from, 215–16; scholarship on, 167–68; witnessing and, 29, 183, 187. See also friendship; refusal; relational autonomy; witnessing Mitchell, K., 138 Mitchell, Timothy, 12, 20, 63, 69 Montgomery, David W., 216 Moore, Jason W., 102, 234n5 Moreton-­Robinson, Aileen, 13, 101 multiculturalism: Maoism and, 5, 11–12, 77, 84, 93, 114, 168–69, 222; capitalism and, 11,

78–79, 222; permitted difference and, 78, 81, 174; politics of recognition and, 11, 67, 154, 167–68, 236n13; settler colonialism and, 80–82, 187–88 musapir Uyghur identity, 29, 191–93, 199; anonymity and, 211; contradictions in, 200, 203, 214, 216, 218; jihad and, 240n4; muhajir and, 240n4; mangliu Han identity distinct from, 172, 185, 192, 215; motivations of, 185, 195–96, 203; piety movements and, 195–96, 203, 205; relational autonomy and, 196, 203, 205, 212, 215, 218; religious economy and, 203–5, 207–8, 216; social value of, 84, 192–94, 202, 216; yerlik identity and, 199. See also piety movements; relational autonomy; religious economy Nasio, Juan-­David, 158 Native. See yerlik “New Cold War,” xiii Newton, Esther, 23 Oakes, Tim, 19, 81 O’Neill, Kevin Lewis, 114 Open the West campaign, 72, 107, 237n6. See also settler colonialism original accumulation, xvi, 28, 34–37, 100–101, 229, 234n4; cap­i­tal­ist frontier making and, 6–8, 67 Ouzgane, Lahoucine, 140 Palestine, xvi, 10, 15 Pan, Jennifer, xvi, 45 passbook, xvi, 3, 44, 80, 89–92, 98, 127–28, 130–31, 176, 179, 201–2, 206–7, 211, 213; comparative history of, 15; as green card, 44, 193. See also checkpoint; home inspections Pasternak, Shiri, 6, 237n3 Pazderic, Nickola, 114 ­People’s Con­ve­nience Police Station. See checkpoint ­People’s Production and Construction Corps, xiv, 69, 165–66. See also lao Xinjiang Han identity ­People’s War on Terror, 6, 11, 231n1; aesthetics and, 129; capitalism and, 228; ethnography of, 3, 221; goals of, 226; Han identity and, 62, 78; Islamic practice and, 121, 197, 206; July 5

Index 265

­ eople’s War on Terror (continued) P Protests relationship to, 187, 193; ­labor and, 222; Open Up the West campaign relationship to, 17; masculinity and, 23; public sphere and, 122, 169, 208; racialization and, 222; space of exception and, 16, 223; subtraction and, 218; technology and, 28, 43, 89, 95, 98–99, 128, 136, 206, 227; yerlik identity and, 62. See also enclosure; Islamophobia racialization; regime of truth; terror capitalism; subtraction Petraeus, D. H., J. F. Amos, and J. C. McClure, 45 photography, 29, 164–65, 170–73; in China, 172, 174; ethnographic method and, 25–26; as po­liti­cal practice, 173–76; as witnessing, 181–87. See also colonial gaze; documentary film; minor politics; witnessing piety movements, 6, 12, 39, 83, 192–94, 205, 208–10, 224; digital media and, 115–19; 121, 191, 222; official Islam relationship to, 241n8; scholarship on, 194; Tablighi Jama’at as, 208–10, 240n7; as Talibanization, 40, 85. See also Islamophobia; religious economy; tabligh police contractor, 44–50, 234n2 po­liti­cal campaigns, history of, xii, 3, 4, 24, 72, 103, 107, 129, 237n6 Povinelli, Elizabeth A, 233n13 Powell, Jessica, and Amber Kelly, 239n1 primitive accumulation. See original accumulation Pun Ngai, 66, 151, 167, 236n4 Qiu Yuanyuan, 223 racialization, xiii; ethnography of, 25–27, 143; ethnic conflict distinct from, 14–15, 228; of ethnicity, 6–7, 14–15, 105, 134; Han as subject to, 10; gender and, 5, 13, 23, 146; historical origins, 80, 232n8; institutions of, 9, 138, 146; Islamophobia and, xvi, 44, 136, 228–29; new sequence of, xvi, 5, 7, 8, 14–15, 29, 222, 227; non-­Western racial capitalism and, 8, 10, 21–23, 67, 100–101, 147, 194; technology and, 15, 46, 60, See also antiracism; Islamophobia Rana, Junaid, 137, 140 Rancière, Jacques, 168, 183

266 Index

Red Guard, 198, 200, 240n5 Reddy, Chandan, 14, 47, 228, 232n4 reeducation camps: beginning of, 2, 241n9; as “black gate,” 91, 214; as “carrier of economy,” xiv, 55–59, 63–64, 226; as compared to other camp systems, xiii, xvi, 10, 15; gender and, 53; inevitability of, 2, 160–61, 205–7; as limit of digital enclosure, 5, 33, 50; migration and, 44, 207; number of ­people in, 40, 50, 92; po­ liti­cal ­will and, 226; psychological effects of, 51–53; reasons taken to, 49–53, 129, 157, 214; social reproduction and, xvii, 40, 93, 222–23; state terror and, 70, 223, 231n2; technology and, 15, 42, 49–51, 55; as “zone of exception,” 138. See also digital enclosure; subtraction refusal, 167, 174; extremism conflated with, 194; as minor, 27, 29, 165, 178, 203, 212; piety movements and, 216; re­sis­tance distinct from, 174, 227; as social reproduction, 11, 161. See also minor politics; relational autonomy; social reproduction regime of truth, 20, 22, 34, 60, 130, 141, 223, 235n25; normative be­hav­ior within, 79–80 relational autonomy, xiv, 91, 182, 193, 196, 203, 205, 215; enclosure and, 215; friendship and, 142; intersubjectivity and, 22, 137–38, 153, 158–59, 166–67; as lateral agency, 196; limits of, 212, 217–18; minor politics and, 215–16. See also existential stability; friendship; minor politics religious economy, 114–15, 192, 194, 196, 208, 215, 217, 240n4 Ren Qiang and Yuan Xin, 104 Rhodes, Lorna A., 47 Roberts, Sean R., 7, 43, 45, 231n2, 238n5, 240 Robinson, Cabeiri deBergh, 240n4 Robinson, Cedric J., 6, 21, 34, 35, 234n3 Roche, Gerald, and Zoe Ju-­HanWang, 81 Rofel, Lisa, 23, 118, 122, 172, 236n3, 239n2 Rofel, Lisa, and Sylvia J. Yanagisako, 4, 18, 48, 67, 103, 236n4 Rollet, Charles, 42 Rosaldo, Renato, 143, 161, 238n6 Roy, Ananya, 36, 44, 59, 164, 232n2, 254 Rudnyckyj, Daromir, 114

Ryan, Fergus, Danielle Cave, and Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, 42 Sadowski, J., 54 Salimjan, Guldana, 81, 236n11 Samimian-­Darash, Limor, 20, 53 Sapa. See Uyghur achieved quality Sautman, Barry, 232n10 Schein, Louisa, 11, 81, 140, 238n3 Schielke, Samuli, 114 Schluessel, Eric T., 38 Schumpeter, J. A., 13 Schweitzer, Ivy, 160 Scott, Joan W., 16 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 137, 233n22, 238n1 self-­fashioning, xi, 5, 28, 71, 74, 88, 111–21 Sensetime, 34, 41, 46; relationship to Sensenets, 41 separatism, xiii, 45, 50, 92, 125, 224, 235n14 settler colonialism, 10–11, 105–6, 160, 232–33n12; as co-­construction of racial capitalism, xvi–­xvii, 4, 6, 101, 138, 221; in comparative context, xvi, 9, 15, 24, 59, 72, 103, 138, 232nn7,8,9; as domestic conflict, 10, 232n10; epistemic vio­lence and, 100–101, 237n5; ethnography of, xiii; domination and, xii, 15, 27, 135, 144, 175, 212–15, 227; failure of cap­i­tal­ist critique to address, 237n5; franchise colonialism distinct from, 10; frontier making and, 34–36, 67, 100–101, 229; Islamophobia and, 5, 36, 228; piety movements and, 194; as pro­cess, 138; permitted difference and, 11; as related to moral wound, 10; racial capitalism distinct from, 6; repressive assistance and, xvi, 45; routes of colonial ideology, 9; semicolonialism and, 10; social reproduction and, 11, 21–22, 25, 136, 142, 158; technology and, 15–16, 26–27; subjectification and 153. See also anticolonialism; devaluation; dispossession; enclosure; expropriation; racial capitalism; settler society; subtraction settler society, xvi, 11–14, 60, 63–64, 73, 104, 170, 174, 232n13; authoritarianism and, 11–12, 169; capitalism and, 4, 6, 16, 42, 67, 102, 110–12; institutions of, 11; Islamophobia and, 136, 140; pioneer value and, 170. See also Islamophobia; settler colonialism; state power

Shih, Shu-­mei, 10, 29, 167, 232n3, 232n7 Sidnell, Jack, 238n7 Simon, Scott, 81 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 163, 166, 239n9 Simpson, Audra, xiii, 167, 233n12 Singh, Bhrigupati, 27, 158 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 232n2, 232n6 Smart, Alan, 238n4 Smith Finley, Joanne, 23, 32, 49, 66, 70, 136, 139, 233nn20–21, 234n24, 238n8 Sneath, David, 236n10 social reproduction, 5; as boundary strug­g le, 232n18; capitalism and, 8–9, 11, 22, 72–73, 111, 115, 136, 154, 165, 176–77; devaluation and, 28, 59, 63, 66, 68, 80; feminist scholarship on, 16–17; gender and, 23, 26–29, 137; refusal and, 183, 192; ­running away and, 227; technology and, 4, 20, 21, 35, 217, 222; terrorism discourse and, 6, 217, 222; yerlik identity and, 39, 81–83, 91–94, 102, 154, 157, 227. See also racial capitalism; refusal; settler colonialism Song Chao, 172 spirit breaking, xxiii, 12, 127, 224, 226; yerlik identity and, 12, 102, 139, 185, 196, 199, 204 Standing, Guy, 217 state capital, xi–­xiii, xv, 6–7, 19–20; anticolonialism and, 184, 187; colonialism and, 10, 14–15, 28, 74–75, 102, 105–7, 161; ethnography of, 26; global capitalism aspect of, 19, 42–43, 47; state power expression of, 8, 28, 60, 67; technology development and, 36–43, 54, 60, 122; theorization of, 19–20; as venture capital, 19–20. See also racial capitalism; terror capitalism; settler colonialism state power, xi–­xii, 11, 12, 18, 33, 42, 47, 59, 62–63, 67, 69; terror capitalism and, xi–­xii, 231n2. See also terror capitalism Stoler, Ann Laura, 15–16 Stoler, Ann Laura, and Carole McGranahan, 9, 232n8, 232n11 Stoller, Paul, 238n6 Stolorow, Robert D., 159 storytelling, 141–43; anthropology and, 141–43, 157–62; decolonization and, 142, 148, 152, 158–59; as method, 22, 25–27; oral tradition and, 81; friendship and, 137, 141–43. See also friendship; existential stability

Index 267

subtraction, xvi, 137, 194, 214–16, 223; breaking the spirit and, 224; historical genealogy of, 177; disappearance as distinct from, 214–16; digital enclosure and, 54; mass internment as, 8, 151, 162, 193, 211; slow death and, 147; social reproduction and, 82, 92–93; social vio­lence and, 124. See also disappearance Sun, Wanning, 172, 174 surveillance, 3, 20, 36, 151; colonialism and, 4, 8, 15, 23, 60–63, 116, 130, 164, 191, 210, 216; digital forensics and, 4, 15; as digital enclosure, 33; ethnography of, 3; history of, xii, 222; limits of, 175, 187; living with, 157–61, 175, 203, 208, 210–11; opacity of, 35; passive system and, 34; racialization and, 6, 8, 15, 24, 122, 135, 193, 214; technical body and, 20. See also enclosure surveillance capitalism, 4, 16–17; in Chinese context, 34–44, 191, 216; ­labor and, 44–60, 234n2; critique of normative framing, xiii, 5, 17–18, 233n19. See also enclosure; racial capitalism; terror capitalism suzhi. See Chinese achieved quality Swarr, Amanda L., 24 tabligh, 192, 205, 208, 240n7 Tablighi Jama’at, 208–10, 240n7 Tadiar, Neferti X., 27, 232n3 Taghdumbashi, Nurdoukht Khudonazarova, 81, 236n11 TallBear, Kim, 15 Tan Jie, and Jerry Zhirong Zhao, 20 techno-­politics 4, 15, 16, 20–21, 42, 60, 62, 74, 83, 164; the gaze and, 182, 218. See also enclosure; surveillance terror capitalism, xi, xiii, 4–9, 16, 19, 27–28, 33–36, 41, 63, 138–39, 168, 194, 211, 215, 228, 229; ethnography of, 22; foundational questions of, 4–5; gender and, 233n21; 239n10; global spread of, 231n4, 234n7; goals of, xiv, 43, 226; as productive, xiv, 7, 20, 35, 36, 60; public sphere and, 128, 162, 165; settler colonialism and, 75, 82, 89, 177. See also devaluation; dispossession; enclosure; Islamophobia; racial capitalism; settler colonialism; surveillance capitalism terrorism discourse, xii–­xiii, 4, 130–31; counterinsurgency theory and, 45; Countering Violent Extremism programs and, 43;

268 Index

euphemisms and, xvii, 45, 62, 125; racialization and, 5–9, 14, 173; ­legal support for, 43–44, 49–52, 55, 62, 79–80, 106, 123, 203, 224; origins of, 6, 12, 43–45, 235n25; space of exception and, 16, 42, 55, 223; vagueness in Chinese use of, 43. See also Islamophobia; Global War on Terror; ­People’s War on Terror; terror capitalism Thum, Rian, 231n7 Tobin, David, 66, 232n5 Tohti, Ilham, 105, 238n13 Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang, 10 Turkish cosmopolitanism, 78–79, 84, 115, 117, 121, 122, 133–34, 149–50, 155, 226. See also contemporaneity; self-­fashioning Tursun, Bakhtiyar, 108 Tursun, Perhat, 148–50, 154, 157, 162, 224 Tynen, S., 14, 117, 233n24 urban renewal. See banishment; July 5 Protests Ürümchi riots. See July 5 Protests Uyghur, pronunciation of, vii; population size, xiv Uyghur achieved quality (sapa), 62, 65, 76–79, 83, 85–88, 92, 113, 117–18, 228. See also devaluation yerlik, xvi, 11, 25, 29, 38–39, 81–83; demographics of, 231n6; priorness of, 167; as proximate to Indigenous claims, 81–83; in relation to settler society, 100, 175; as traditional practice, 38–39, 65, 89–94, 102, 116–18, 121, 139, 154, 157–59, 175, 227. See also anticolonialism; friendship; musapir; settler colonialism; settler society Vimalassery, Ma­nu, 237n3 Von Schnitzler, Antina, 21 Wang Xiuli, 224–25 Wark, MacKenzie, xiii, 3, 16–17, 20, 233n19 Wasserstrom, Jeffery, 232n7, 232n9 WeChat, 2, 34, 37–38, 41, 50–52, 72, 74, 78–80, 88, 92, 115–18, 121, 129–30, 157, 191, 195, 201, 206–9, 218, 222, 224 Weeks, Kathi, 16 Welch, M., E. A. Price, and N. Yankey, 143 Welland, Sasha Su-­Ling, 172 Wilcox, Emily, 81

wildness, 12–13, 143, 165; wild imams, 50, 116, 210. See also extremism; Islamophobia; racialization Winegar, Jessica, 166 witnessing, 5, 27, 29, 165–66, 182–87 Wolfe, Patrick, 10, 138 Xi Jinping, 6, 12, 19; role in reeducation campaign, 48, 226 Xinjiang: as colonial term, 231n6; demographics, xiv–­xvi, 231n6; as experimental space, xiv, 43, 226; geography, xiv–xv, 241n10; pronunciation of, vii. See also East Turkestan; settler colonialism Xinjiang Reform and Development Commission, 57, 231n5, 241n1 Xiong, Yihan, 135

Yang, Jie, 238n4 Yang, Mayfair M. H., 238n4 Yan Hairong, 67–68, 236n4 Yeh, Emily T., 12, 63, 68–69, 75, 81, 101, 107, 236n5, 236n10 Yi Xiaocuo, 24 Yining County Zero Distance, 58 Yitu, 34, 46 Yuan Weimin, 57 Zang, Xiaowei, 64 Zhang, Everett Yuehong, 23 Zhang, Li, 67, 73, 171 Zhang Xinmin, 172 Zhu Hailun, 32 Zuboff, Shoshana, xiii, 4, 16–17, 42 Zyskowski, Kathryn, 194, 240n3

Index 269

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