In the Camps

How China used a network of surveillance to imprison over a million people and commit one of the biggest human rights crimes in the world. One of the biggest human rights crises has been happening for years in China's vast northwestern region, where more than a million and a half Turkic Muslims have vanished into detentions and labor camps. Based on hours of interviews with camp survivors and workers, thousands of government documents, and over a decade of research, Darren Byler, one of the leading experts on Uyghur society and Chinese surveillance systems, uncovers how a vast network of technology provided by private companies in 2016--facial surveillance, voice recognition, smartphone data--enabled the Chinese communist regime to blacklist millions of Uyghurs because of their religious and cultural practice starting in 2017. Charged with "pre-crimes" that sometimes consist only of installing social media apps, detainees were put in camps to "study"--forced to praise China, renounce Islam, disavow families, and labor in factories. Byler travels back to Xinjiang to reveal how the convenience of smartphones have doomed the Uyghurs to catastrophe, and makes the case that the technology could be used all over the world, sold by tech companies in Beijing and Seattle to authoritarian governments everywhere.