#darren byler

[argyrocratie]

"In his 2002 dissertation, Dr. Pan Yue, the current commissioner of China’s Ethnic Affairs Commission, proposed that a mass migration of 50 million Han people to Tibet and Xinjiang would simultaneously address three major problems confronting China: overpopulation, demand for resources, and the problem of ethnic and religious difference.4 Pan, who became the first non-ethnic minority commissioner of ethnic policy in the history of the People’s Republic of China in 2022, suggested that Han migrants should be considered “reclaimers.” The “backwardness” of the frontier he suggested had become a danger to national security, fostering terrorist and extremist activities. He called on China to learn from a trifecta of contemporary colonizers: the United States, Israel and Russia. Taking elements of each as a model of how contemporary China should further colonize Tibetan and Uyghur lands, he suggests that the Western expansion of settler colonialism in the United States and Russia’s imperial settlement of Siberia, should be combined with the more contemporary example of Israel’s controlled deployment of West Bank settlers and infrastructure in Palestinian lands. 

Finally, drawing from a model that draws on China’s post-Maoist legacy of state-managed economy and export-oriented development, and I argue, coincidentally mirroring aspects of the economy that provided a paradigmatic example of racial capitalism, Apartheid South Africa, Pan proposed that minorities should be proletarianized through assigned industrial labor. In his study, it was clear that Pan wanted to combine a land grab with the dissolution of the Maoist system of ethnic minority autonomy within a socialist political and economic system. He was thinking comparatively about the world system of global capitalism not as an object of critique, but as a way of understanding mimetically what China’s place should be with in it. 

Part of what this implies, I argue in this book, is that Pan’s “post-ethnic” framework called for the abolition of the limited protections of difference that the Mao era had fostered, and—as to some extent in the U.S., Russia, and Israel—the replacement of civil liberties and autonomous claims for Muslim and Indigenous citizens, with markers of an imagined evil, the figures of the terrorist and the proto-terrorist, the non-secular “backward” other. Recalling Apartheid South Africa’s “color bar,” Xinjiang’s Muslim reeducation and assigned labor system should be thought of as a kind of “Muslim bar,” a legalized racialization of ethno-religious difference that holds in reserve the majority of positions of managerial and ownership power for Han settlers. 

Pan was explicitly looking to the capitalist-colonial past and present, because taking this comparative move seriously is also to take seriously China’s position within the global world system. In what follows I will think comparatively with Apartheid South Africa, and the Marxian world systems theory elaborated by Cedric Robinson (1983) and others that emerged from analysis of it, to show that racialization is an essential part of the global process of on-going original or primitive accumulation.5 This suggests that racialization—as an institutionalized process supported by the police, the law, the school system, and so on—is not simply an organic outcome of transhistorical process or an effect of particular political formations.6 On the contrary, it is a historical feature of global capitalism and the imperial economic expropriation—or legalized theft—on which it depends. 

Produced as a Terrorist

The account of one of my Uyghur interlocutors, someone I’ll call Abdulla,7 and the way his life path was redirected and shaped by the structural factors I describe above demonstrates what all of this means in everyday life. Abdulla was just one of the dozens of Uyghurs and Kazakhs whose stories shape the narrative of this book. Though many of the other Muslims I interviewed and observed came from lower class positions and had less formal education than Abdulla, many of the things I observed in Abdulla’s story happened to them too. His fast transfer from the camp and unfree labor system to neighborhood arrest and a return to medical school, are the primary differences between him and others. And these differences, which can be directly correlated to his near perfect Mandarin elocution and his practice as a physician’s assistant who was just two semesters away from receiving his degree as a medical doctor, demonstrate how finely graded the system of Muslim racialization and how it is reproduced.

Abdulla, like nearly all Uyghurs I met in the city, came from a rural village in Southern Xinjiang where Uyghurs formed a supermajority of over 90 percent of the population. For his first 18 years, all of his life happened in Uyghur. Then he arrived in the city as a college student and was confronted with world of Chinese. The first born of a village teacher, he knew from a young age that he wanted a life that was different from the farmers he was surrounded by. This is why he poured himself into learning Chinese and English, watching the entire Friends TV show on repeat. He wanted a Uyghur version of that fictitious life. To do this he understood that he had to present as urban and secular, he had to shave his moustache, wear clothes from the Chinese shopping mall, and speak in jocular Chinese with Han colleagues. At the university he studied biology and science in Chinese, preparing for a career in in the Chinese medical system. But at night, he and two other friends from villages near his hometown, studied English. In the space of several years, they became so fluent in American pop culture that they started their own English school training hundreds of other Uyghur villagers to speak the language of American TV and imagine a world outside of both the Uyghur and Chinese one they grew up in.  

His students and friends gave Abdulla the nickname “suyok,” meaning he moved like water, flowing effortlessly from one social scene to another, codeswitching, mastering the multiple consciousnesses that are necessary for a minoritized person to succeed in a racialized world. He was a smooth operator. But he was also influential among Uyghur young people, and over time the police began to take notice of him. They sent informants to the night school where he taught to report on things students said and how the Abdulla responded to them. But Abdulla anticipated this, so when he discussed the biography of Nelson Mandela he was careful not to make direct comparisons to the Apartheid conditions that Uyghurs experienced in the city.8 In the private-public space of the classroom they did not discuss the way only around 15 percent of Uyghur college graduates were able to find jobs regardless of how well they spoke Chinese and English.9 Nor did they discuss the stories his students told him privately of the way they had witnessed police brutality and how the same police protected the non-Muslim settlers that had inundated their villages as part of the large-scale migration Pan Yue had called for. 

But then in late 2014 three of his students disappeared from their dorm room, leaving behind their belongings. They didn’t tell their families where they were going until several weeks later when they re-emerged in Malaysia at the other end of the underground trafficking route that took them across the hills of Myanmar where they joined North Koreans and Rohingya fleeing state violence. The police questioned Abdulla for days. Abdulla vowed that he had no knowledge of their plan.

That incident, and the arrest of the parents of his students, the way the police began to search Muslim homes on a regular basis, and the new prohibitions on any form of religious speech, made him quite concerned. He started plotting his own escape. Utilizing all of his connections, in 2016 he managed to obtain a passport and visit Europe and me and other friends in the United States, thinking through the logistics of an international move and what it would take to get his medical training recognized abroad. It would be hard he realized, but it seemed like the only path forward. All he had to do was find a way to get passports for his wife and children and sell his apartment in the city. But he never did. 

In 2017 he was detained along with hundreds of thousands of other young Uyghurs and sent to a closed concentrated education and training center. His travel history, his association with students who the state now regarded as international terrorists, was more than enough for him to be regarded as untrustworthy. Yet unlike most other detainees, all of whom had similar digital dossiers of thought crimes and “abnormal” behaviors, Abdulla had an advanced degree in medical science, he spoke perfect Chinese and could recite all the laws and regulations related to ethnic policies. If the political and economic goals of the camp system were to train Uyghur villagers to speak Chinese and work in factories, why detain and train someone already working in a Chinese institution? 

Fundamentally, Abdulla and the hundreds of thousands of other migrants and farmers had been detained for particular political and economic reasons that had less to do with their past individual actions, though the digital footprint of these actions were collected and assessed, and more to do with their ethno-religious and generational status as young, rural-background Uyghurs. But simultaneously, the cost of producing them as workers was also being externalized to the village communities that had trained them, the families that had sacrificed their livelihoods to send them to school. Even workhouses need doctors. It appears that Abdulla was destined to become a rare Muslim doctor tasked with maintaining and reproducing the system of racialized carceral care. His devalued assigned labor was not in the factory, but for the factory workers and their child. He could never leave the city, instead his future was a permanent state of probation. He could always be sent back to the camp or demoted to the factory or worse. 

2017 Xinjiang :: 1972 South Africa? 

In many ways, discussion of what has happened in Xinjiang resembles discussions of Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. Among conservative and liberal proponents of the capitalist world order, both cases are often seen as exceptions rather than limit cases of capitalist logics. 

 However as radical historians such as Martin Legassick (1984), Walter Rodney (1972), and sociologist Michael Buroway (1974) have demonstrated, South Africa was in fact a capitalist state whose economy centered on the production and reproduction of difference.10 South Africa was a paradigmatic example of a state-managed capitalist order that codified a so-called “color bar” (Buroway 1974, 1054) that excluded black and brown people from certain forms of employment reserved for whites. This exclusion along with processes of removing native peoples from their lands and forcing them into external resource dependent, impoverished reserves resulted in two new modes of production. Subsistence living on reserves and a supply of surplus miners from those reserves. The color bar “fixed” in place the contradiction between capitalism and democratic politics, preventing black South Africans from preserving their own wealth, denying them social mobility in the workforce, and strangling systems of mutual aid.

It was from this example, among others, that scholars such as Cedric Robinson (1983 [1999]) and Mahmood Mamdani (1996 [2018]) began to build a general theory of the way capitalist-colonial development works through the production of difference—rather than homogenizing effect of “all boats rising” as national economies grow as a whole.11 By devaluing the labour and possessions of citizens and non-citizens deemed and legally categorized as different, state-subsidized and supported business interests and settler overseers are empowered to accumulate wealth in a fixed, ongoing manner. 

Fast forward five decades and the outlines of a similar “color bar” fix can be seen in motion operating through an anti-Muslim racial regime. As in South Africa, Xinjiang multinational and domestic corporations are deeply invested in maintaining continual growth. The system in Xinjiang relies on a dual mode of racialized capital accumulation in the form of labor and data. In a general sense, the labour theft element of the system relies not only on the theft of the individual worker’s life, but also a theft from the family and community that raised and cared for that worker. By stealing a daughter or son from an Uyghur family and community, the reeducation campaign externalizes the cost of producing an unfree worker. As the state hired 90,000 new non-Muslim teachers with high-school degrees from villages across China, the reproduction of this labor-force was further ensured by a residential school system that would produce the next generation of Uyghur factory workers.  

As with Apartheid South Africa, the world is the market for much of the prediction products and consumer goods produced by the unfree workers in Xinjiang. It also participates in the global discourse of anti-Muslim racism. These areas of convergence with the imperial North—through both memetic political relations and a shared global economy��point to the ultimate lesson of Xinjiang. In a world where the power of Chinese corporations and autocrats is unchecked they operate in much the same way as other colonial powers." 

-Darren Byler's preface to the simplified chinesse edition of his book "In the Camps", June 2023

[doyelikehaggis]

Fandoms + Ships (for Prompt Purposes)

As I like to reblog prompts a lot but have the annoying little habit of jumping ship on a fandom, I decided it is finally time I make an official list, which will be constantly updated as I develop new interests! If there’s a ship you want to request but it isn’t here, just ask and I’ll let you know where I stand with it!

In The Flesh

• Kieren x Rick

• Kieren x Simon

The Hunger Games

• Everlark (Katniss/Peeta)

• Finnick/Annie

• Haymitch/Effie

• Katniss/Madge

HSMTMTS

• Caswen (Ricky/EJ)

• Portwell (EJ/Gina)

• Mashlynn (Maddox/Ashlynn)

• Ricky/Jet

The Vampire Diaries

• Stelena (Stefan/Elena)

• Mattlena (Matt/Elena)

• Tylena (Tyler/Elena)

• Elenijah (Elijah/Elena)

• Barolena (Bonnie/Caroline/Elena)

• Stexi (Stefan/Lexi)

• Denzo (Damon/Enzo)

• Forwood (Tyler/Caroline)

• Maroline (Matt/Caroline)

• Bamon (Bonnie/Damon)

• Bamenzo (Bonnie/Damon/Enzo)

• Carenzo (Caroline/Enzo)

• Dalijah (Damon/Elijah)

• Parkwood (Tyler/Liv)

• Klayley (Klaus/Hayley)

Legacies

• Handon (Hope/Landon)

• Jandon (Josie/Landon)

• Henelope (Hope/Penelope)

• Hizzie (Hope/Lizzie)

• Kizzie (Kaleb/Lizzie)

• Methan (MG/Ethan)

• Ked (Kaleb/Jed)

• Dark!Jobastian (Dark!Josie/Sebastian)

• Landizzie (Landon/Lizzie)

Teen Wolf

• Sciles (Scott/Stiles)

• Scydia (Scott/Lydia)

• Mccallinski (Lydia/Scott/Stiles)

• Stalia (Stiles/Malia)

• Malydia (Malia/Lydia)

• Stira (Stiles/Kira)

• Scira (Scott/Kira)

• Liason (Liam/Mason)

• Allydia (Allison/Lydia)

• Allerica (Allison/Erica)

• Berica (Boyd/Erica)

• Malisaac (Malia/Isaac)

• Lydora (Lydia/Cora)

• Allora (Allison/Cora)

• Scanny (Scott/Danny)

• Malira (Malia/Kira)

The Witcher

• Yennskier (Yennefer/Jaskier)

• Geraskerer (Geralt/Yennefer/Jaskier)

• Raskier (Radovid/Jaskier)

• Trennefer (Triss/Yennefer)

• Geralt/Triss

EastEnders

• Frobby (Bobby/Freddie)

• Chryed (Christian/Syed)

• Ballum (Ben/Callum)

• Sukeve (Suki/Eve)

• Ben Mitchell/Kheerat Panesar

• Jack Branning/Michael Moon

• Whitney Dean/Chelsea Fox

• Lauren Branning/Peter Beale

• Lauren Branning/Lucy Beale

• Peter Beale/Fatboy

• Zack Hudson/Martin Fowler

• Zack Hudson/Felix Baker

• Anna Knight/Bernie Taylor

• Stacey Slater/Danielle Jones

• Peter Beale/Tamwar Masood

• Darren Miller/Tamwar Masood

• Masood Ahmed/Jane Beale

• Anna Knight/Bobby Beale

• Anna Knight/Bobby Beale/Freddie Slater

• Linda Carter/Alfie Moon

Hollyoaks

• McHay (Ste/John Paul)

• McShepherd (John Paul/Carter)

• Stendan (Ste/Brendan)

• Brendan/Walker

• Joel/Theresa

• Brendan/Warren

• Brendan & Mitzeee (platonic)

• Brendan & Joel (platonic)

• Amy/Michaela

• Leah/Vicky

Friends

• Roey (Rachel/Joey)

• Chanoey (Chandler/Joey)

Stranger Things

• Elmax (El/Max)

• Elumax (El/Lucas/Max)

• Byclair (Lucas/Will)

• Byler (Will/Mike)

• Ronance (Robin/Nancy)

• Steddie (Steve/Eddie)

Glee

• Blam (Blaine/Sam)

• St. Hudson (Finn/Jesse)

• Tike (Tina/Mike)

• Quinntana (Quinn/Santana)

• Pezberry (Santana/Rachel)

• Quinncedes (Quinn/Mercedes)

• Sike (Sam/Mike)

• Jarley (Jake/Marley)

• Kurtbastian (Kurt/Sebastian)

The Flash

• Barrisco (Barry/Cisco)

• Snowbarrisco (Caitlin/Barry/Cisco)

• WestStein (Joe/Martin)

• Superflash (Barry/Kara)

• Thallen (Barry/Eddie)

•Westthallen (Iris/Barry/Eddie)

• Westhawne (Iris/Eddie)

Outlander

• Jamie/John

• John/Brianna

• Brianna/Roger

• Lizzie/Josiah/Kezzie

• William/Denzell

Lucifer

• Lucifella (Ella/Lucifer)

• Douchifella (Lucifer/Dan/Ella)

• Mazifer (Maze/Lucifer)

• Douchifer (Dan/Lucifer)

• Chlaze (Chloe/Maze)

PJO/HoO

• Jasico (Jason/Nico)

• Jercy (Jason/Percy)

• Perachel (Percy/Rachel)

• Rachabeth (Rachel/Annabeth)

• Pipabeth (Piper/Annabeth)

Merlin

• Merthur (Merlin/Arthur)

• Mercelot (Merlin/Lancelot)

•Merwaine (Merlin/Gwaine)

• Morgwen (Morgana/Gwen)

The Dumping Ground

• Elektra/Faith

• Elektra/Carmen

• Carmen/Lily

• Tyler/Jody

• Jody/Sasha

• Tyler/Ryan

• Chloe/Candi-Rose

• Candi-Rose/Bird

• Candi-Rose/Jay

The Story of Tracy Beaker

• Tracy/Crash

• Tracy/Ben

• Tracy/Lol

• Lol/Wolfie

• Crash/Rio

• Justine/Rebecca

Life With Derek

• Dasey (Derek/Casey)

• Derek/Sam

• Derek/Trevor

• Casey/Sally

Boy Meets World

• Shory (Shawn/Cory)

• Jeric (Jack/Eric)

• Eric/Jason

• Shawngela (Shawn/Angela)

• Shawpanga (Shawn/Topanga)

Girl Meets World

• Rilaya (Riley/Maya)

• Riley/Zay

• Riarkle (Riley/Farkle)

• Lucaya (Lucas/Maya)

• Maya/Zay

• Riley/Maya/Zay

Descendants

• Jal (Jay/Mal)

• Jaylos (Jay/Carlos)

• Mevie (Mal/Evie)

• Hevie (Harry/Evie)

• Buma (Ben/Uma)

• Umaudrey (Uma/Audrey)

• Haudrey (Harry/Audrey)

• Humaudrey (Harry/Uma/Audrey)

• Bevie (Ben/Evie)

iCarly

• Creddie (Carly/Freddie)

• Carly/Sam

• Carper (Carly/Harper)

• Sparper (Spencer/Harper)

Victorious

• Tandre (Tori/Andre)

• Jori (Jade/Tori)

Zoey 101

• Quogan (Quinn/Logan)

[honeysucklepink]

Share some good things from this year (2022):

1. A new song or artist you enjoyed 🎶🎤🎸

2. A new ship you climbed aboard 🛳⛵️🚣‍♀️

3. A show you made someone else watch because you liked it so much 📺🎥🎬

4. A hurdle you made it over (even if you tripped over it) 🏃🏼🪨

5. A book that made you go ☺️

6. Favorite meme?

7. Blorbo of the year? 👑

8. Favorite thing you gifted to yourself? 💐

9. Favorite thing you gifted to someone else? 🎁

10. Number of times you changed your hair (style or color)?👩🏻‍🎤💇‍♀️🧑🏻‍🦲

I got quite into Doja Cat this year, mainly because of dance class. Also Lizzo's new album was a banger, and "About Damn Time" was on repeat (not enough on Spotify apparently)

Thank you to everyone who constantly posted about Our Flag Means Death and got me into Blackbonnet. Also now a fan of Stranger Things' Steddie (not a Byler shipper however, sorry, but Will can do better).

My sister and her GF finally watched Only Murders In The Building so yay for that!

My promotion to professor document! It's gotten through over half the process; now I'm just waiting for the Dean, Provost, and University President.

(tiny voice I didn't read any books this year I'm sorry, though I tried, but fanfic was too strong)

There have been so many, but the entire site improvising a 1970s Scorsese movie was fun. Watch Goncharov become real...

Always been Darren, always gonna be Darren.

My 49th birthday trip to New York and seeing 6 shows in 4 days.

I got my hubby a small bottle of Floris No. 89, the cologne that James Bond canonically wore in the original Ian Fleming books.

Actually, zero...I spent this year growing out 2021's color and am now fully back to my natural brown with new streaks of gray.

[basiltonpitch]

12 for stranger things, 16 for NHIE, 18, and 19 for both fandoms 👀

12. Is there an unpopular arc that you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?

i liked the russia arc in s4 honestly!! there's not much else to say other than that i just thought it was fun and i love murray lmao

16. If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?

is it too much of a cop out to say i would recast darren barnett as someone who actually looks 16 lmao

no for real though as far as changing things goes i just want to dive even deeper into devi's mental health. like yes in season 2 we got that whole spiral of hers after "crazy devi" and in s3 we see her start to heal but like. progress isn't linear and i want to see bad days sprinkled in with the good and i want to see her happy one minute and then breaking down the next because she suddenly starts missing her dad so much it physically hurts (that may just be me projecting my dead mom issues but oh well lmao)

edit: coming back two days later to say i would keep fabiola ans aneesa together bc they were the sapphic jock/nerd pairing of my dreams and i will never forgive the writers for taking them away from us

18. Does not shipping something ‘popular’ mean you’re in denial and/or biased?

i don't think it automatically makes you those things, there are people who are both regardless of the popularity of their ship. (altho i haven't interacted with d*xton tumblr since s3 of nhie came out so....who knows how they're doing actually)

19. What is the one thing you hate most about your fandom?

for nhie, the people who love ben but absolutely HATE devi (and like...the entire rest of the characters too?? like? they only like the ONE white character???)

for stranger things i don't really see much outside of the little byler bubble i curated for myself but like. every time i see a screenshot of something a b*lly stan said i die a little bit inside like full offense wtf is going on in their brains

[jeffreychang]

戴倫．拜勒 Darren Byler

《新疆再教育營：中國的高科技流放地》

In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony

《黑甲山的微光：中國恐怖資本主義統治下的新疆，從科技監控、流放青年與釘子戶一窺維吾爾族的苦難與其反抗》

Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City

[beep-beep-robin]

st = stranger things

hh = heartbreak high

w = wednesday

IT = IT

911 = 911

el and coke (st, elmax)

eddie fading (st)

eddie and wednesday (st, w)

robin gifset (st)

st ships x sure thing by miguel for valentines day (st, steddie, ronance, byler, jargyle, elmax, lumax, joyce x hopper, dustin x suzie)

canon queer characters x männer und frauen by die ärzte (st)

robin and nancy meet heartbreak high (st, hh, ronance)

fruity four before and after (st)

stranger things x halloween (st)

autistic robin quotes from rebel robin (st)

quinni gifset #1 (hh)

quinni gifset #2 (hh)

quinni's outfits (hh)

quinni and common autism traits (hh)

quinni and common autism traits pt. 2 (hh)

quinni and darren (hh)

amerie gifset (hh)

[threeimagineryboys]

all my fave lgbtq+ shows happen to air around the same time and now they’re all on hiatus, pre-production etc. like... how am I supposed to live under these conditions? no stranger things? no our flag means death? no heartbreak high? no young royals? FOR OVER A YEAR????? *dying*

[mariacallous]

Ekpar Asat, founder of one of the most popular Uyghur-language websites, started his career as many tech entrepreneurs do: In 2007, he turned his college project into a successful news site and forum called Bagdax.

On the wall of his office were pictures of his role models: Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and Jack Ma. As a minor celebrity in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, Asat, also known as Mr. Bagdax, was invited to provincial government events and to the offices of China’s tech giants. Even if the platform had to adhere to China’s strict censorship rules—at one point, four police officers were tasked with monitoring it—its base quickly grew to over 100,000 users.

In early 2016, however, Asat was swept up in a mass detention campaign, alongside a reported 1 million members of Uyghur and other Turkic minorities, after returning from an entrepreneur leadership program organized by the US State Department.

Within a year, Bagdax and other popular Uyghur websites—such as Misranim, Bozqir, and Ana Tuprak—permanently stopped updating. And they weren’t the only ones. As Beijing’s crackdown in the Xinjiang region unfolded, the vast majority of independent Uyghur-run websites ceased to exist, according to local tech industry insiders and academics tracking the online Uyghur-language sphere.

“It’s like erasing the life work of thousands and thousands of people to build something—a future for their own society,” says Darren Byler, assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and an author of several books on China’s treatment of Uyghurs. Many of the people behind the websites have also disappeared into China’s detention camp system. Developers, computer scientists, and IT experts—especially those working on Uyghur-language products—have been detained, according to members of the minority living abroad. The detentions are a part of China’s crackdown on the majority Muslim region, which has been rocked by several terrorist attacks in the past two decades. Human rights groups have accused the Chinese government of mass surveillance, forced labor, and wiping out the ethnic minority’s culture. Beijing claims that the camps are reeducation centers for vocational job training and countering extremism. 

Ekpar Asat’s sister Rayhan Asat says that the shutdown can be seen as an attack against Uyghur language and culture and that the Chinese government’s repression has often targeted the region’s best and brightest. “Why would an eminent tech entrepreneur need to be reeducated? What kind of skills does he need?” she says. The Public Security Bureau of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, did not respond to phone calls.

A major Central Asian Silk Road outpost in the past, Urumqi is no Silicon Valley. Still, by 2014 a small cluster of tech companies was beginning to form just south of its Grand Bazaar. But the blossoming was short-lived, and in 2016 repression was in full swing. “Our region literally became a prison without walls,”  says Abdurrahim Devlet, founder of Bilkan, the company behind 30 apps, a line of hardware, and the first online Uyghur bookstore. Devlet decided to leave Xinjiang after a wave of arrests targeting individuals, including Bilkan’s manager, who was later sentenced to 25 years in prison. After shuttering his company, Devlet is now living in Turkey and working on a doctorate in history. 

Making a living as a programmer also became hard, says a former Bilkan developer, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern for his family’s safety. In 2016, the government started requiring that websites establish Communist Party branches or be supervised by a party member, making it difficult to avoid blacklisting. 

Authorities have also expanded the list of blocked websites from Google and other Western social media platforms to GitHub and Stack Overflow, popular developer tool platforms that remain available to coders in the rest of China. Targeting of the Uyghur IT sector, especially website owners, keeps happening because these individuals are influential in society, says Abduweli Ayup, a language activist who has been keeping a tally of Xinjiang intellectuals who have disappeared into the camp system, a list containing names of over a dozen people working in the technology sector. “They are the leading force in the economy—and after that leading force disappears, people become poor,”  Ayup says. 

Xinjiang’s digital erasure is only the most recent blow to its online sphere. In 2009, after riots exploded in Urumqi, China hit back with an internet shutdown and a wave of arrests of bloggers and webmasters. Advocacy organization Uyghur Human Rights Project estimates that over 80 percent of Uyghur websites did not return after the shutdown.  But even though the region was plagued by small-scale periodic internet blackouts, the Uyghur internet had grown vibrant. And for the Uyghur community, those websites were a place for both rediscovering Islamic religious practices and having conversations about hot-button issues such as homophobia, trans issues, and sexism. More importantly, the internet helped Uyghurs create an image of themselves different from the one offered by Chinese state media, says Rebecca Clothey, associate professor at Philadelphia’s Drexel University. “An online space in which they can talk about issues that are relevant to them gives them the ability to have a way of thinking about themselves as a unified mass,”  she says. “Without that, they’re scattered.” 

Uyghurs in Xinjiang now use domestic platforms and apps made by China’s tech giants. Although WeChat still hosts Uyghur-language accounts, the platform is known for its censorship system.

Some Uyghurs, however, have found tiny cracks in the wall through which they communicate and express themselves. People hold up signs with messages during video calls, out of fear that their conversations may be monitored. Young people are switching their conversations to gaming apps.

On China’s version of TikTok, ByteDance-owned Douyin, Uyghurs have been stealthily filming scenes from Xinjiang that differ from state propaganda videos showing smiling dancers in traditional robes. Some have filmed themselves crying over pictures of their loved ones. Others have captured orphanages with children of detained Uyghurs or people being loaded onto buses, a possible reference to forced labor. The clips are stripped of information, leaving conclusions to the viewers.

Recently, Chinese authorities have been rolling back some controls over the Uyghur language, says Byler. In late 2019, Beijing announced that people held in vocational training centers in China had all “graduated,” while scaling back some of the more visible signs of its high-tech police state. 

Uyghurs abroad, however, say that many of their friends and relatives are still in camps or have received arbitrary prison sentences. Ekpar Asat was sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of inciting ethnic hatred and discrimination. And although some parts of the Uyghur internet are archived for future digital archaeology, much of it has simply vanished forever. “That’s just been eliminated overnight, and there’s not much of a way of recovering that information,” says Byler.

This article was originally published in the May/June 2022 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

[donewithcapitalistfrayers]

good article on "Adam Hunerven" aka Darren Byler. Bonus image of how Chuang collective member described Byler

[bbasmos]

Omg "Poison Blood" by Darren Hayes is such a Byler song 😭😭😭😭 Someone make a fan video with it please 😭😭😭

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The technology of Uyghur oppression

The Center for Global Policy is an "independent, non-partisan American think tank working exclusively on issues at the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and Muslim geopolitics."

It's just published a major report by Darren Byler on the tech of the war on Uyghurs and Kazakhs in China's Xinjiang province; a devastating high-tech panopticon whose most visible element are concentration camps where 1M+ people were imprisoned.

https://cgpolicy.org/articles/the-global-implications-of-re-education-technologies-in-northwest-china/

But the whole story isn't the walled prisons: it's the entire region, which has been turned into an open air prison where technology tracks and controls predominantly Muslim Turkic people while allowing Han people to go about their business largely unhindered.

This has been so effective that "within a single generation Muslim embodied practice and Turkic languages in Northwest China will cease to provide essential ways for Uighurs and Kazakhs to sustain their knowledge systems."

The people who are "free" - that is, not interred in a concentration camp - were nevertheless forced to provide blood, DNA, fingerprint, iris and facial biometrics to the security apparatus. The penalty for noncompliance was imprisonment.

Authorities set up a dense network of biometric scanning points throughout the region, points that Han people were typically waved through, while Turkic people had to stop and be scanned - more than 10 times/day.

And while Xinjiang is its own unique horror, it has its roots in the US post-911 counterinsurgency theory (COIN), pioneered by US Army General Petraeus, and in the EU's "Countering Violent Extremism" (CVE) programs.

These were the theoretical bases used as starting points by the Chinese architects of the Xinjiang project: it's "COIN and CVE with Chinese characteristic." Its motto: "teach like a school, be managed like the military, and be defended like a prison."

China's technologists and private contractors laud their advantages over US counterparts, though, because "they have a space to experiment with these technologies without fear of legal or civil resistance, or without shareholders holding them responsible for failed systems."

Technically, the companies supplying tools of oppression banned in America, but it's not enforced. Not only are their consumer products for sale in the US, but universities like MIT take funding from them, and commercial and academic scientists collaborate with them.

Megvii created the vision systems used in the concentration camps: "The director of research at Megvii USA has published articles with current researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Stanford, Duke, Georgia Tech, Brown, and Rutgers."

"He has also co-published with researchers at Facebook, Google, and Adobe, among others. In nearly all cases, the leaders of these sanctioned companies are deeply embedded in the U.S. research community and tech industry."

Though the Chinese state denies human rights abuses in and out of the camps in Xinjiang, we have leaked primary sources that tell the tale.

Here's leaks detailing the plan for mass arrests and internments.

https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-cables/exposed-chinas-operating-manuals-for-mass-internment-and-arrest-by-algorithm/

Another round of leaks details the "No Mercy" plan for brutalizing Turkic minorities:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html

And here's a reverse engineering teardown of the app that Uyghurs and other Turkic people are forced to install on their phones:

https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2019/05/02/china-how-mass-surveillance-works-xinjiang

Byler ends his report with a set of US policy recommendations for ending complicity with the program and putting pressure on the Chinese state and Chinese companies to end the human rights abuses in the region.

1. Enforce existing sanctions and end the sales and operations by companies that collaborate with the Chinese state in Xinjiang.

2. Apply "Magnitsky" sanctions against the leaders of the forced-labor program and conduct a full investigation into the use of unfree labor in products ranging from electronics to textiles.

3. Pass a bill "to identify and extend sanctions on all companies and state entities involved in the forced labor system."

4. Extend sanctions beyond the 17 companies currently listed to the 1,400+ tech firms "involved in the re-education system and hundreds of manufacturing companies."

5. US and other western countries should "ban the collection and use of 'passive' or involuntary biometric information and data surveillance," establishing a global norm of biometric privacy.

[savinghongkong]

Leaked data show China’s Uyghurs detained due to religion

"Now, a newly revealed database exposes in extraordinary detail the main reasons for the detentions of Emer, his three sons, and hundreds of others in Karakax County: their religion and their family ties. The database obtained by the Associated Press profiles the internment of 311 individuals with relatives abroad and lists information on more than 2,000 of their relatives, neighbors and friends. Each entry includes the detainee’s name, address, national identity number, detention date and location, along with a detailed dossier on their family, religious and neighborhood background, the reason for detention, and a decision on whether to release them. Issued within the past year, the documents do not indicate which government department compiled them or for whom. Taken as a whole, the information offers the fullest and most personal view yet into how Chinese officials decided whom to put into and let out of detention camps, as part of a massive crackdown that has locked away more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslims. The database emphasizes that the Chinese government has focused on religion as a reason for detention — not just political extremism, as authorities claim, but ordinary activities such as praying, attending a mosque or even growing a long beard. It also shows the role of family: People with detained relatives are far more likely to end up in a camp themselves, uprooting and criminalizing entire families like Emer’s in the process. Similarly, family background and attitude are bigger factors than detainee behavior in whether they are released. “It’s very clear that religious practice is being targeted,” said Darren Byler, a University of Colorado researcher studying the use of surveillance technology in Xinjiang. “They want to fragment society, to pull the families apart and make them much more vulnerable to retraining and reeducation.” Credit to the source

[bountyofbeads]

In China’s Crackdown on Muslims, Children Have Not Been Spared https://nyti.ms/37hWRCU

In China’s Crackdown on Muslims, Children Have Not Been Spared

In Xinjiang the authorities have separated nearly half a million children from their families, aiming to instill loyalty to China and the Communist Party.

By Amy Qin | Published Dec. 28, 2019 Updated 12:37 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted December 28, 2019 |

HOTAN, China — The first grader was a good student and beloved by her classmates, but she was inconsolable, and it was no mystery to her teacher why.

“The most heartbreaking thing is that the girl is often slumped over on the table alone and crying,” he wrote on his blog. “When I asked around, I learned that it was because she missed her mother.”

The mother, he noted, had been sent to a detention camp for Muslim ethnic minorities. The girl’s father had passed away, he added. But instead of letting other relatives raise her, the authorities put her in a state-run boarding school — one of hundreds of such facilities that have opened in China’s far western Xinjiang region.

As many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others have been sent to internment camps and prisons in Xinjiang over the past three years, an indiscriminate clampdown aimed at weakening the population’s devotion to Islam. Even as these mass detentions have provoked global outrage, though, the Chinese government is pressing ahead with a parallel effort targeting the region’s children.

Nearly a half million children have been separated from their families and placed in boarding schools so far, according to a planning document  published on a government website, and the ruling Communist Party has set a goal of operating one to two such schools in each of Xinjiang’s 800-plus townships by the end of next year.

The party has presented the schools as a way to fight poverty, arguing that they make it easier for children to attend classes if their parents live or work in remote areas or are unable to care for them. And it is true that many rural families are eager to send their children to these schools, especially when they are older.

But the schools are also designed to assimilate and indoctrinate children at an early age, away from the influence of their families, according to the planning document, published in 2017. Students are often forced to enroll because the authorities have detained their parents and other relatives, ordered them to take jobs far from home or judged them unfit guardians.

The schools are off limits to outsiders and tightly guarded, and it is difficult to interview residents in Xinjiang without putting them at risk of arrest. But a troubling picture of these institutions emerges from interviews with Uighur parents living in exile and a review of documents published online, including procurement records, government notices, state media reports and the blogs of teachers in the schools.

State media and official documents describe education as a key component of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to wipe out extremist violence in Xinjiang, a ruthless and far-reaching effort that also includes the mass internment camps and sweeping surveillance measures. The idea is to use the boarding schools as incubators of a new generation of Uighurs who are secular and more loyal to both the party and the nation.

“The long-term strategy is to conquer, to captivate, to win over the young generation from the beginning,” said Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington who has studied Chinese policies that break up Uighur families.

To carry out the assimilation campaign, the authorities in Xinjiang have recruited tens of thousands of teachers from across China, often Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group. At the same time, prominent Uighur educators have been imprisoned and teachers have been warned they will be sent to the camps if they resist.

Thrust into a regimented environment and immersed in an unfamiliar culture, children in the boarding schools are only allowed visits with family once every week or two — a restriction intended to “break the impact of the religious atmosphere on children at home,” in the words of the 2017 policy document.

The campaign echoes past policies in Canada, the United States and  Australia that took indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools to forcibly assimilate them.

“The big difference in China is the scale and how systematic it is,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado who studies Uighur culture and society.

Public discussion in China of the trauma inflicted on Uighur children by separating them from their families is rare. References on social media are usually quickly censored. Instead, the state-controlled news media focuses on the party’s goals in the region, where predominantly Muslim minorities make up more than half the population of 25 million.

Visiting a kindergarten near the frontier city of Kashgar this month, Chen Quanguo, the party’s top official in Xinjiang, urged teachers to ensure children learn to “love the party, love the motherland and love the people.”

INDOCTRINATION CHILDREN

Abdurahman Tohti left Xinjiang and immigrated to Turkey in 2013, leaving behind cotton farming to sell used cars in Istanbul. But when his wife and two young children returned to China for a visit a few years ago, they disappeared.

He heard that his wife was sent to prison, like many Uighurs who have traveled abroad and returned to China. His parents were detained too. The fate of his children, though, was a mystery.

Then in January, he spotted his 4-year-old son in a video on Chinese social media that had apparently been recorded by a teacher. The boy seemed to be at a state-run boarding school and was speaking Chinese, a language his family did not use.

Mr. Tohti, 30, said he was excited to see the child, and relieved he was safe — but also gripped by desperation.

“What I fear the most,” he said, “is that the Chinese government is teaching him to hate his parents and Uighur culture.”

Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in Xinjiang, in part by using schools in the region to indoctrinate Uighur children. Until recently, though, the government had allowed most classes to be taught in the Uighur language, partly because of a shortage of Chinese-speaking teachers.

Then, after a surge of antigovernment and anti-Chinese violence, including  ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and deadly attacks by Uighur militants in 2014, Mr. Xi ordered the party to take a harder line in Xinjiang, according to internal documents leaked to The New York Times earlier this year.

In December 2016, the party announced that the work of the region’s education bureau was entering a new phase. Schools were to become an extension of the security drive in Xinjiang, with a new emphasis on the Chinese language, patriotism and loyalty to the party.

In the 2017 policy document, posted on the education ministry’s website, officials from Xinjiang outlined their new priorities and ranked expansion of the boarding schools at the top.

Without specifying Islam by name, the document characterized religion as a pernicious influence on children, and said having students live at school would “reduce the shock of going back and forth between learning science in the classroom and listening to scripture at home.”

By early 2017, the document said, nearly 40 percent of all middle-school and elementary-school age children in Xinjiang — or about 497,800 students — were boarding in schools. At the time, the government was ramping up efforts to open boarding schools and add dorms to schools, and more recent reports suggest the push is continuing.

Chinese is also replacing Uighur as the main language of instruction in Xinjiang. Most elementary and middle school students are now taught in Chinese, up from just 38 percent three years ago. And thousands of new rural preschools have been built to expose minority children to Chinese at an earlier age, state media reported.

The government argues that teaching Chinese is critical to improving the economic prospects of minority children, and many Uighurs agree. But Uighur activists say the overall campaign amounts to an effort to erase what remains of their culture.

Several Uighurs living abroad said the government had put their children in boarding schools without their consent.

Mahmutjan Niyaz, 33, a Uighur businessman who moved to Istanbul in 2016, said his 5-year-old daughter was sent to one after his brother and sister-in-law, the girl’s guardians, were confined in an internment camp.

Other relatives could have cared for her but the authorities refused to let them. Now, Mr. Niyaz said, the school has changed the girl.

“Before, my daughter was playful and outgoing,” he said. “But after she went to the school, she looked very sad in the photos.”

‘KINDNESS STUDENTS’

In a dusty village near the ancient Silk Road city of Hotan in southern Xinjiang, nestled among fields of barren walnut trees and simple concrete homes, the elementary school stood out.

It was surrounded by a tall brick wall with two layers of barbed wire on top. Cameras were mounted on every corner. And at the entrance, a guard wearing a black helmet and a protective vest stood beside a metal detector.

It wasn’t always like this. Last year, officials converted the school in Kasipi village into a full-time boarding school.

Kang Jide, a Chinese language teacher at the school, described the frenzied process on his public blog on the Chinese social media platform WeChat: In just a few days, all the day students were transferred. Classrooms were rearranged. Bunk beds were set up. Then, 270 new children arrived, leaving the school with 430 boarders, each in the sixth grade or below.

Officials called them “kindness students,” referring to the party’s generosity in making special arrangements for their education.

The government says children in Xinjiang’s boarding schools are taught better hygiene and etiquette as well as Chinese and science skills that will help them succeed in modern China.

“My heart suddenly melted after seeing the splendid heartfelt smiles on the faces of these left-behind children,” said a retired official visiting a boarding elementary school in Lop County near Hotan, according to a state media report. He added that the party had given them “an environment to be carefree, study happily, and grow healthy and strong.”

But Mr. Kang wrote that being separated from their families took a toll on the children. Some never received visits from relatives, or remained on campus during the holidays, even after most teachers left. And his pupils often begged to use his phone to call their parents.

“Sometimes, when they hear the voice on the other end of the call, the children will start crying and they hide in the corner because they don’t want me to see,” he wrote.

“It’s not just the children,” he added. “The parents on the other end also miss their children of course, so much so that it breaks their hearts and they’re trembling.”

The internment camps, which the government describes as job training centers, have cast a shadow even on students who are not boarders. Before the conversion of the school, Mr. Kang posted a photo of a letter that an 8-year-old girl had written to her father, who had been sent to a camp.

“Daddy, where are you?” the girl wrote in an uneven scrawl. “Daddy, why don’t you come back?”

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she continued. “You must study hard too.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Kang was generally supportive of the schools. On his blog, he described teaching Uighur students as an opportunity to “water the flowers of the motherland.”

“Kindness students” receive more attention and resources than day students. Boarding schools are required to offer psychological counseling, for example, and in Kasipi, the children were given a set of supplies that included textbooks, clothes and a red Young Pioneer scarf.

Learning Chinese was the priority, Mr. Kang wrote, though students were also immersed in traditional Chinese culture, including classical poetry, and taught songs praising the party.

On a recent visit to the school, children in red and blue uniforms could be seen playing in a yard beside buildings marked “cafeteria” and “student dormitory.” At the entrance, school officials refused to answer questions.

Tighter security has become the norm at schools in Xinjiang. In Hotan alone, more than a million dollars has been allocated in the past three years to buy surveillance and security equipment for schools, including helmets, shields and spiked batons, according to procurement records. At the entrance to one elementary school, a facial recognition system had been installed.

Mr. Kang recently wrote on his blog that he had moved on to a new job teaching in northern Xinjiang. Reached by telephone there, he declined to be interviewed. But before hanging up, he said his students in Kasipi had made rapid progress in learning Chinese.

“Every day I feel very fulfilled,” he said.

‘ENGINEERS OF THE HUMAN SOUL’

To carry out its campaign, the party needed not only new schools but also an army of teachers, an overhaul of the curriculum — and political discipline. Teachers suspected of dissent were punished, and textbooks were rewritten to weed out material deemed subversive.

“Teachers are the engineers of the human soul,” the education bureau of Urumqi recently wrote in an open letter, deploying a phrase first used by Stalin to describe writers and other cultural workers.

The party launched an intensive effort to recruit teachers for Xinjiang from across China. Last year, nearly 90,000 were brought in, chosen partly for their political reliability, officials said at a news conference this year. The influx amounted to about a fifth of Xinjiang’s teachers last year, according to government data.

The new recruits, often ethnic Han, and the teachers they joined, mostly Uighurs, were both warned to toe the line. Those who opposed the Chinese-language policy or resisted the new curriculum were labeled “two-faced” and punished.

The deputy secretary-general of the oasis town of Turpan, writing earlier this year, described such teachers as “scum of the Chinese people” and accused them of being “bewitched by extremist religious ideology.”

Teachers were urged to express their loyalty, and the public was urged to keep an eye on them. A sign outside a kindergarten in Hotan invited parents to report teachers who made “irresponsible remarks” or participated in unauthorized religious worship.

Officials in Xinjiang also spent two years inspecting and revising hundreds of textbooks and other teaching material, according to the 2017 policy document.

Some who helped the party write and edit the old textbooks ended up in prison, including Yalqun Rozi, a prominent scholar and literary critic who helped compile a set of textbooks on Uighur literature that were used for more than a decade.

Mr. Rozi was charged with attempted subversion and sentenced to 15 years in prison last year, according to his son, Kamaltürk Yalqun. Several other members of the committee that compiled the textbooks were arrested too, he said.

“Instead of welcoming the cultural diversity of Uighurs, China labeled it a malignant tumor,” said Mr. Yalqun, who lives in Philadelphia.

There is evidence that some Uighur children have been sent to boarding schools far from their homes.

Kalbinur Tursun, 36, entrusted five of her children to relatives when she left Xinjiang to give birth in Istanbul but has been unable to contact them for several years.

Last year, she saw her daughter Ayshe, then 6, in a video circulating on Chinese social media. It had been posted by a user who appeared to be a teacher at a school in Hotan — more than 300 miles away from their home in Kashgar.

“My children are so young, they just need their mother and father,” Ms. Tursun said, expressing concern about how the authorities were raising them. “I fear they will think that I’m the enemy — that they won’t accept me and will hate me.”

______

Fatima Er contributed reporting from Istanbul

[uygurhaber]

Doğu Türkistan’da Terör Kapitalizmi ve Dijital Diktatörlük

Doğu Türkistan’da durum, son birkaç yıldır günbegün kötüleşmeye devam etmekte. Yerel etnik azınlıklar merkezi yönetimin Çinlileştirme ve “standartlaştırma” amaçlı yeniden eğitim kampanyasıyla hedef alınıyor. Araştırmacı Darren Byler ile röportaj: “Terör Kapitalizmi” ve dijital diktatörlük koca bir kültürü göz göre göre ortadan kaldırmaya çalışıyor.

Bu yazı; 21 Kasım 2018 tarihinde Project Sinopsis ekibi tarafından Darren Byler ile gerçekleştirilen röportajın,  Stand With Uygurs ekibi tarafından yapılmış bir çevirisidir. This is a translation of an interview by Project Sinopsis team with Darren Bylerpublished on November 21, 2018.

“Terör Kapitalizmi” ve dijital diktatörlük koca bir kültürü göz göre göre ortadan kaldırmaya çalışıyor.

Çin’in…

[garudabluffs]

People stand in a guard tower on the perimeter wall of the Urumqi No. 3 Detention Center in Dabancheng in western China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on April 23, 2021. After a UN report concluding that China's crackdown in the far west Xinjiang region may constitute crimes against humanity, China used a well-worn tactic to deflect criticism: blame a Western conspiracy.

Disappeared Uyghur author's novel translated into English for the first time

The World September 2, 2022

"The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang" is a short and powerful book that serves as a metaphor for the life of its author, Perhat Tursun.

He's Uyghur, a member of the mostly Muslim ethnic minority in western China. Human rights groups believe China has detained more than 1 million Uyghurs in recent years in so-called "reeducation camps."

Perhat Tursun is one of them. He disappeared in 2018.

His novel was released 30 years ago, but has just been published in English for the first time. One of the book's translators, Darren Byler, a Uyghur scholar, joined The World's host Carol Hills from Vancouver to discuss the text.

"It's interesting, because you're speaking in the present tense about him. You know, "he writes, he does this." But of course, we don't know if he's writing at all, because he's been disappeared. What happened to him?"

Do we know where he is, what prison he's in?

"We don't even know that. I went to his apartment building, couldn't really get past the front gate. And everyone I've spoken to really has no information. It's likely he's held in the same place as other intellectuals, which is a particular prison. But we can't confirm this. So, we think he's in Urumqi, that's the capital of the region, but beyond that, we don't know."

Has his family been in touch with him or been allowed to visit or lawyers or anyone?

"That I don't know. It's so hard to get any information out and to speak openly with anyone. So, we really can't communicate with his family members. I think them speaking to me would put them in jeopardy. So, there's a lot of sensitivity around this work and around asking questions. What we have is the communication I had for him before he was taken, where he was urging me to publish his work. And I'm honoring his request by translating and publishing this with a co-translator who also took great risks in assisting me in the process."

LISTEN READ MORE https://theworld.org/stories/2022-09-02/disappeared-uyghur-authors-novel-translated-english-first-time