Terror Capitalism
Discussion
Darren Byler:
"Defining Xinjiang as a war zone has created a data-intensive environment that allows some of China’s largest private and state-managed technology companies to develop new tools in digital forensics, image and face recognition, and language recognition – something which in turn allows them to expand into other domains and markets for ‘smart’ business and security solutions. This was facilitated by data-collection programmes that provided the companies with a base dataset that is unprecedented in its scale and fidelity. From face portraits, to iris scans, to voice signatures, to digital histories the companies are continuously collecting patterned data from the 15 million Muslims in the region.
This system mirrors and expands on data-harvesting done by private corporations in Europe and North America, from Google to Palantir, but in the case of the Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim populations in Northwest China the tacit consumer consent and legal rights available to protected citizens have been stripped away. In both cases, however, the information infrastructures make the intimacy of social behaviour and daily movement available to the gaze of the state and technology companies.
The second form of capital is in the unfree human labour that is facilitated by the digital enclosure system. Since 2018 Xinjiang’s regional development authority has been describing the camp and re-education system as a ‘carrier of the economy’, on the same scale as oil, natural gas, cotton, and tomato resources that had drawn Han Chinese settlers to the region in the 1990s. These internment camps held hundreds of thousands of detainees in a camp-to-factory pipeline. The threat of detention along with infrastructural power of a complex surveillance system held others in forms of assigned labour.
Much of what is produced in this system is destined either directly or indirectly for global export… it is important to understand that Uyghur unfree labour is a frontier of global capitalism.
The state documents suggest Uyghur and Kazakh ‘surplus labour’ has become an additional resource in the Xinjiang economy because state subsidies – ranging from rent-free factory facilities to payments for training workers, had combined with political pressure from local governments in Eastern China, and the subject population of workers to incentivise so many private companies to relocate parts of their production to Xinjiang. The information infrastructure system – smartphone tracking, checkpoints, face scans and so on – along with the fear of arbitrary detention, a form of state terror – held Uyghurs and Kazakhs in place, ensuring a docile workforce, and creating endemic conditions of unfreedom.
In this context, freely chosen work is impossible for most Uyghurs and Kazakhs. Instead, local authorities assign groups of former detainees and others deemed part of the ‘surplus labour force’ due to their lack of formal employment to jobs in state-designated factories. There is no space to negotiate wages or protest against them being withheld – which appears to be widespread throughout the system. In many cases, people are ‘free’ to choose to work in low-wage assigned jobs far from their families or ‘free’ to be interned. This false freedom – a condition beyond dependence on the ‘free’ market – is what I mean by ‘unfree labour’. Importantly, much of what is produced in this system is destined either directly or indirectly for global export. This is why it is important to understand that Uyghur unfree labour is a frontier of global capitalism.
Terror capitalism uses the rhetoric of ‘terror’ to justify state and private capital investment in data- and labour-intensive industries. Like sequences of racialised capitalism in other locations, the ethno-racialised threat of Uyghur and Kazakh bodies and societies allows their land and labour to be legally expropriated, or stolen, creating a new frontier in global capitalism. In my book Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press, 2021) I elaborate on the way colonial projects act as frontiers of capitalist expansion, arguing that colonialism and capitalism are co-constitutive. In my current work, I examine how the systems that Uyghurs confront are linked to infrastructural power in locations around the world and how these systems open up the labour of unprotected populations to intensified forms of exploitation."