It is hard to avoid the history of concentration camps when describing the system of maximum-security “re-education” facilities that the Chinese Communist party has built since 2017 in Xinjiang.
The tragedies of the Boer war, Nazi Germany and the Soviet gulags are illustrative context but also only partial analogues. While some forms of 20th-century repression remain, the modern world of high-tech surveillance has created new forms of control.
Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, writes that he had these “continuities and ruptures” in mind when describing Xinjiang’s system of mass internment in his book, In the Camps.
In this intimate, sombre and damning account of the forces that led China to intern and “re-educate” more than 1m Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other mostly Muslim people in Xinjiang, Byler argues that the camp system is, at minimum, of a scale and degree of cruelty beyond all obvious contemporary parallels.