Mick Hartley

From an interview in Tablet with Darren Byler, author of In the Camps, his new book on the incarceration of some million and a half Uighurs in China's high-tech penal colony:

Based on almost a decade of research and interviews Byler has amassed in the United States and in China, including interviews with workers at the camps and former detainees, the book is a startling record of the deprivation and abuse detainees suffer in the camps, as well as a vivid account of how the Chinese government has leveraged cell phone data, facial recognition software, surveillance camera networks, GPS tracking, and biometric checkpoints, along with a traditional army of police contractors and neighborhood-level informants, to create an oppressive campaign of suppression…

You write about certain Uyghur-majority districts that have upwards of 70% of the children up to the age of five years old put in these kindness kindergartens, and they have parents who are either in confinement or in work camps. What is the future like for these children? Do they reunite with their parents, or are they put into the state foster system?

Because we’re talking about a large number of children, it’s hard to know for sure what always happens. But in many cases, particularly if both parents are sent to the camps, the children become wards of the state. In some cases we’ve heard reports, although it’s really difficult to verify, that some children have been adopted by Han parents.

The state has hired around 90,000 new teachers, mostly from other parts of China, who are teaching these children Mandarin, who are avowedly antireligious and are really raising the children to identify as Chinese rather than as Uyghur. To see Uyghurness and Islam as something that’s backward or that they shouldn’t associate with. In many contexts, residential schools for children produce forms of trauma. My sense is that trauma is quite widespread among the children that have been taken.

As you were collecting the stories from the detainees and camp workers—[Byler writes that detainees have been severely beaten, electrically shocked, and locked in so-called Tiger chairs and other restraining devices]—was there anything in particular that surprised you? Any moments that gave you pause, even in the context of what you’ve already learned?

Often as they’re describing things that happened to them in their cells, they’ll demonstrate it physically by standing up and showing me. That’s always emotional just because you can see that their bodies have been trained to do these motions through this experience in the cell. You can see that they’re sort of carrying the cell with them. This experience in the camp is now part of their bodily knowledge.

Almost everyone that I interviewed said they couldn’t sleep. When their family members come to visit them in the camp, guards would put a bag over their head and shackle them and lead them to the visitation area. Right before the guards took them inside, they would take that bag off of the person’s head, remove the shackles, and then the guard would go with them inside to the family meeting area. And they were supposed to tell the family members what they had been instructed to say, which was that everything is great here, I’m well fed, it’s a great school, and I’m grateful to be here. And their family members, who were also terrified to be there, would shake their heads and nod. And it’s this moment of pure terror for everyone, of saying the untruth.

For this one person I was speaking to, he said, “That was the moment where I really understood what it means to be powerless, and how difficult it is to be fully powerless.”