Darren Byler

With lots of help from Silicon Valley, China now runs the most extensive, intensive and exhaustive surveillance system in the world and in history. In its northwest, it has registered every ethnic person, right down to DNA samples and iris scans, operates police checkpoints every few hundred feet, and takes in at least hundreds of thousands and likely millions for “re-education”, according to race and religion. In Darren Byler’s In The Camps, the worst of Hollywood B movies and pulp fiction are excruciatingly real and revolting. This is another in the excellent series of books from Columbia Global Reports. I have yet to read one that is even just weak.

Xi Jinping is forever putting down protests. China is a multiethnic, multicultural and multilanguage country that has been impossible to pacify totally for as long as it has been China. Xi however, long ago decided to tackle it head on by breaking ethnic Kazakhs, Uyghurs and Hui of their identities. He has been flooding their homeland, the northwestern province Xingjiang, with Han Chinese from the Pacific coastal areas, with a clear goal of making these ethnics a minority in their own lands. Ethnic women are forced to have birth control IUD implants, and are often required to show they are in place. To ensure success, he has also empowered the Han to hate the ethnics, disparage them, beat them, refuse to work among them, and in this book, imprison them for re-education.

Byler has interviewed several survivors/escapees from the Chinese camps, safely back in Kazakhstan or the US. Their stories are identical to those I have read elsewhere, with added details and horrors normally considered torture. There is no longer any doubt about their authenticity. Now on the outside again, they feel broken and can never return to a normal life. And obviously, they will never forget their treatment at the hands of Xi Jinping. Interestingly, many Han Chinese who participate in the system are feeling the same way.

It begins with surveillance. All ethnics in Xinjiang must come in for a “health check” where authorities take DNA samples, iris scans, fingerprints and facial photographs from every angle. Police download all the contents of phones, copying contact lists, social media posts and files received. It all goes into a gigantic database for instant (less than a second) retrieval, thanks in large part to US firms like Palantir. If facial recognition software says someone is strolling down the street outside their own neighborhood, the ubiquitous police forces pick them up and haul them in. They are automatically guilty of “pre-criminal” activity, and are shipped out to re-education centers, where their lives are ruined.

And who are the suspects? Byler says “Chinese state authorities began to circulate a list of twenty-five official signs of Islamic extremism. Things like possession of digital files with religious content, using a VPN or installing WhatsApp…. were categorized as ‘pre-crimes’ that could lead to detention.”

In communal cells of up to 60 people, with one bucket at the back that can only be used for a maximum of 60 seconds per person, and bunks that must be shared, inmates find out the hard way they cannot speak to anyone, can only answer authorities in Mandarin Chinese (which many do not speak), and when not in indoctrination classes, must sit straight and still on low plastic stools all day without moving. Ten cameras per cell monitor their every movement and word, and guards scream at them over a public address system. Beatings take place for every little infraction, or none at all. Showering is granted once a week, for all 60 inmates of the cell - in just ten minutes under five or six shower spigots – ie. only the fastest get clean. The cells therefore reek. At one center, they brought in fresh underwear after several months because the staff couldn’t stand the stench any longer.

In “classes”, inmates “learn” Mandarin Chinese, memorize patriotic songs and the sayings of Xi Jinping, and must respond and act with sufficient enthusiasm so as to avoid beatings. There is no socializing at any point, no recreation, and food – a couple of steamed dumplings and soup – means painful hunger on top of everything else.

Anywhere inmates must go, they are manacled and hooded, including hospital visits. Lights are never turned off in their cell, and anyone who tries to pull the covers over their eyes or raises a hand to block the light is screamed at over the pa, and beaten. Same goes for moving around in bunks, crammed as they are with multiple inmates positioned head to toe. Every cell has a compromised inmate, charged with reporting on defective behavior in everyone else, to provide for additional beatings.

If they get out, they are released to their neighborhood, where they are spied on by neighborhood watchers for their every movement. They must report constantly, show up for Monday flag raising and boisterous singing the praises of Xi Jinping and the Communist Party – or find themselves back inside for another year or two of re-education.

The police manage their whole lives. Anyone can be hauled in again at any time and sent to the camps. I have read in other books that while they were away, police installed cameras in their homes so they can see and hear everything at all times. And yell at them for wrong behavior, even just for the language they speak at home or secretly praying. Not smoking and not drinking alcohol are suspicious activities. So is attempting to have a private conversation.

This brings up another difference in this book. Byler goes up the chain a little (but not far enough). He finds that Han Chinese minders are grievously offended by what they have to do to these people, who have committed no crime other than being non-Han. They too are required to be boisterous supporters of Xi Jinping and the Party. They must be enthusiastic beaters. They must harass and scream at detainees all the time, with sufficient ferocity to impress their own minders. They are equipped with foot and a half long truncheons, and must use them all day. They make inmates squat and then beat their rear ends to a pulp, making it all but impossible to sit perfectly still on their stools all day, resulting in further beatings.

And they can’t quit. If they dare to complain, protest or try to leave, they will be considered just as bad as the inmates, and suffer the same fate. One low level guard thought he had found a great job, with sufficient pay to raise his family, but he soon found it to be a horror he could not escape either. He told Byler “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 will end up in ‘re-education camps’ too.” And he now had firsthand knowledge of what that meant.

All up the line, everyone works in fear. Everyone must show sufficient nationalism, pride and enthusiastic violence towards those below, be they other officers or inmates. Managers fear their bosses just as much, bur Byler doesn’t pursue this stunning structure of institutional paranoia. Clearly, the whole system works by it. Xi has built a society in which everyone is suspect, everyone is under surveillance, everyone must toe the Xi line, where the slightest infraction is a fatal weakness, and everyone is kept off balance and alone. This dystopian society is a worthy successor to Nazi Germany. And a model for future aspirants.

Another aspect that differentiates Byler’s book from others I have read is his references to Primo Levi, an Italian philosopher and Auschwitz survivor. Byler uses him to compare life in Chinese re-education camps to life in Nazi concentration camps. The Chinese camps are not killing machines as such, but life in them is at least as horrific, as inmates cite the same stresses, routines, restrictions, fears and coping strategies.

Byler says “Alienation, removing the individual from the ownership of their labor as workers and, in this case, from their autonomy as Turkic Muslim individuals, is in fact a primary feature of the re-education factory. The goal of the re-education industrial parks is to turn Kazakhs and Uyghurs into a deeply controlled, docile, yet productive lumpen class – those without social welfare afforded to the formally recognized rights-bearing working class.” In other words, the entire system is transparently farcical, even to the Chinese.

Byler’s profiles include a young woman studying urban planning In the US, who came home for a long weekend and foolishly thought she was immune. Another was a herder in Kazakhstan who was just trying to settle his affairs in China before leaving again. Another was a teacher who was offered a job at a center – an offer that could not be refused – and found herself as restricted as her “students”. They are the lucky ones because they lived to tell the tale.

Many others get “job offers” working in the new factories Xi has set up to take advantage of all the slave labor his policies produce. When journalists or human rights workers come through, the workers are directed what to say and how to say it. And always smile and be enthusiastic over the opportunity the Party and Chairman Xi have given them for a new life. When officials visit, they even get their hair dyed black to hide the scabs and scars of being beaten about the head.

It all began in 2014, when Xi Jinping declared a “war on terror”. It has of course turned out that Xi Jinping is the real terrorist, and the Chinese are his victims. In The Camps goes a long way towards proving it.

David Wineberg… (mais)