In the Camps Quotes

“Chinese authorities have placed as many as 1.5 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Hui into a system of medium- to maximum-security “reeducation” camps since 2017—making it the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II.”
― Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony

“Chinese government documents show that in some Uyghur-majority areas, as many as 70 percent of children up through age five are now held in Mandarin-medium “Kindness Kindergartens” while their parents are in prisons, camps, or factories.”
― Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony

“Since the camp system began, in some areas of Southern Xinjiang, birth rates among Uyghurs have plummeted by between 50 and 80 percent due in part to these restrictions on Muslim reproductive rights.”
― Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony

“Across the entire region, the Civil Affairs Ministry had embarked on a “Zero Illegal Births” campaign. She herself, at age forty-seven, was forced to have regular inspections of a new IUD that state workers had forced her to implant. State documents show that women of childbearing age who did not submit to surgical sterilization or IUD implantation and regular inspections would not be added to the list of “trustworthy” citizens. Illegal pregnancies were to be “disposed of early”—a reference to forced abortions.”
― Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony

“Turkic Muslims understand that in a time of reeducation they are subject to the gaze of the system. Anyone can be an informant; no one is a guaranteed ally; and the algorithms of cameras and scanners are always on. In this context, for ethnoracial minorities, there appears to be no space that is fully outside state power.”
― Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony

“They built an iron gate, high electric fence, and four watchtowers around the Kazakh school,” he recalled. “If we found anyone suspicious through the ID checks, they would send them to the Kazakh school. They had suddenly turned it into a prison. They forced all of the people who had been visiting mosques, praying, or wearing headscarves to go to that school.”
― Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony

“Because the authorities have forced all residents of Xinjiang to register for a new state-issued ID card, they have a base library of high-definition images of each person’s face, and in addition, they have collected tens of millions of images of the faces of residents who pass through the checkpoints. The Face++ and similar algorithms such as those from companies like YITU and Sensetime run extremely fast. As the Shawan study notes, in 0.8 seconds it can run a match of a face, and register and record notification alarms related to up to three hundred thousand targeted people.”
― Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony

“What is happening in Northwest China is connected to camps at the southern border of the United States, digital control in Kashmir, and checkpoints in the West Bank, but its scale and cruelty takes it beyond those other sites of exceptional power over marginalized populations.”
― Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony

“As I listened to them, I came to the unsettling conclusion that the dehumanization they experienced was created at least in part in computer labs from Seattle to Beijing.”
― Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony

“The system is premised on a rhetoric of a war on Muslim “terrorism” that the Chinese state has imported from the US and its allies post–September 11, 2001. As recently as 2017, Xinjiang authorities hosted British counter-terrorism experts as part of a diplomatic exchange called “Countering the root causes of violent extremism undermining growth and stability in China’s Xinjiang Region by sharing UK best practice.” In the Chinese context, countering violent extremism—something that British experts refer to simply as Prevent—is premised on detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims deemed “untrustworthy” in camps and prisons, and placing still other Muslim adults in jobs far from their homes.”
― Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony

“An internal police report noted that visiting a mosque “more than two hundred times” would result in a Muslim being sent “for education” in the camps. In the mosque featured in the report, this threat—along with a face-scan checkpoint at the entrance of the mosque—had precipitated a 96 percent drop in attendance in a single year.”
― Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony