{"id":832,"date":"2018-06-07T01:20:03","date_gmt":"2018-06-07T01:20:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=832"},"modified":"2018-06-07T01:21:26","modified_gmt":"2018-06-07T01:21:26","slug":"ethnography-of-a-surveillance-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=832","title":{"rendered":"Ethnography of a Surveillance State"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Medium<\/a><\/h5>\n

By\u00a0Jonathan\u00a0Hiskes<\/a><\/h4>\n

In the last three months, University of Washington anthropology student Darren Byler has spoken about his research to AI developers at Google, business leaders at the Washington State China Relations Council, and journalists at the Foreign Correspondents\u2019 Club in Beijing. Each group has sought his help in understanding the situation of the Uyghur people in China\u2019s far-northwest Xinjiang province.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not how Byler expected to spend the final months of his doctoral program at the UW, where he studies the role of art and politics in daily life in Xinjiang\u2019s capital of \u00dcr\u00fcmchi. But the Chinese government\u2019s treatment of Uyghur people has changed so severely, and so quickly, that observers struggle to understand the extent of what may be the largest surveillance operation in the world. After his years of fieldwork, Byler\u2019s deep ties in the region have been in high demand.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a story whose very scale makes it difficult to tell. To begin with, most Americans need an introduction to Xinjiang, a desert and mountainous province twice the size of Texas, and to Uyghur (pronounced wee-gur) people, a Muslim ethnic minority of more than 11 million who have long lived under Chinese rule, with varying degrees of stability.<\/p>\n

Throughout the twentieth century China has feared Uyghur separatism and has responded violently to conflicts between Uyghurs and the 10 million Han (Chinese ethnic majority) people who the government sent to settle in the region. In 2014, China declared a \u201cPeople\u2019s War on Terror,\u201d building thousands of police checkpoints and launching a green-card system that restricted movement for millions of Uyghurs, especially young men. It sent police into Uyghur homes with a checklist to assess individuals\u2019 \u201crisk\u201d of violence based on criteria such as whether they pray daily or have studied Arabic. In a culture where religion is central to identity, it banned fasting during Ramadan, required Uyghur shops to sell alcohol, and restricted practices as personal as women\u2019s veils and men\u2019s beards. (The\u00a0AP<\/a>, the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/a>,\u00a0Radio Free Asia<\/a>, and others have extensive reporting on all of this.)<\/p>\n

In spring 2017, the government began sending thousands of Uyghurs to internment \u201cre-education\u201d camps where they are taught Chinese language and cultural practices, reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution fifty years ago. Very few prisoners have been released, and estimates of the number interned range from 200,000 to more than a million.<\/p>\n

Again: it\u2019s a scale that boggles the mind.<\/p>\n

The reach of high-tech surveillance techniques is remarkable too.\u00a0<\/strong>Uyghurs who have smart phones must download a mobile app, Jingwang Weishi (or \u201cClean Net Guard\u201d), that enables police to search their phones at stations throughout the city. The state collects Uyghur DNA samples, fingerprints, blood types, facial imagery, and audio recordings for voice recognition, creating a massive registry of biodata. When buying a kitchen knife, Uyghurs must have their ID data etched onto the blade as a QR code\u200a\u2014\u200aostensibly for tracking if it is used in a crime.<\/p>\n

International journalists say it\u2019s perhaps the most important story in China. Yet it\u2019s a difficult one to cover, since few of them speak Uyghur, they are\u00a0trailed by police<\/a>\u00a0when they report in the region, and talking to people about the situation can put their sources at risk\u200a\u2014\u200athousands of Uyghurs have been disappeared for lesser acts.<\/p>\n

Reporters have turned to Byler for analysis and connections to his network of Uyghur contacts in Xinjiang and abroad. Economic leaders and AI developers have asked him to speak about his firsthand experience with new surveillance operations. (He describes being stopped at a checkpoint and\u00a0escorted to a police station<\/a>\u00a0on his most recent trip in April.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe effect of all the monitoring is to project absolute authority and to create fear,\u201d Byler said in a presentation at Google\u2019s Seattle office in April. \u201cIt becomes normalized. You expect to have your phone checked every day and your ID checked a dozen times a day. You also expect to have relatives taken to these camps. Almost everyone knows someone who\u2019s been taken. You don\u2019t know if you might be next.\u201d<\/p>\n

The official state goal is creating stability and avoiding violent jihadi movements (Syrian militant groups have\u00a0tried to recruit<\/a>\u00a0Uyghur immigrants living in Turkey). But Uyghurs say the intent is to break their spirits and eradicate their culture.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you wear white shoes, they will arrest you for not wearing black shoes. If you wear black shoes, they will arrest you for not wearing white shoes,\u201d one Uyghur intellectual told Byler.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey blacklisted me,\u201d Parhat Imin, a fruit vendor who found himself unable to pass checkpoints,\u00a0told the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>. \u201cI can\u2019t go anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deep Language and Daily\u00a0Art<\/h4>\n

Byler\u2019s first fascination with \u00dcr\u00fcmchi was not the political conflict but the artistic life of the city, which for centuries has been a multicultural, multiethnic crossroads along the ancient Silk Road. He first visited as an undergraduate in 2002 and returned several times to study the language and conduct fieldwork, including two year-long trips with his partner, Jennifer, in 2011 and 2014.<\/p>\n

As he studied the existing scholarship on Xinjiang, he learned that much of it focuses on \u201cthe discourse of oppression.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are good reasons for that,\u201d he said. \u201cThese people are being dispossessed. But what I wanted to do with my work is figure out how people live in spite of these conditions. How they find ways to make sense out of their lives, make meaning in their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

As an anthropologist, he knows that reducing a city to a single narrative\u200a\u2014\u200awhether human-rights victimhood or the Chinese party line of \u201charmonious development\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aflattens and diminishes the culture. For his field research, he took paintings, videos, and works of literature into neighborhoods to interview people about how these representations of their lives spoke to their condition. He found art imitating life, responding to ever-increasing monitoring through references in literature and visual art. He found a\u00a0pop star subtly navigating<\/a>\u00a0the demands of his audience and state censors, a state-sponsored\u00a0street mural team<\/a>\u00a0supporting anti-Muslim propaganda, and a\u00a0painter exploring hardship<\/a>\u00a0among rural jade pickers for a show at the 2012 Xinjiang Biennale.<\/p>\n

He was drawn to theorist\u00a0Gayatri Spivak\u2019s argument<\/a>\u00a0that without learning the \u201cdeep language\u201d of a culture, translation becomes another form of top-down exploitation, \u201cbecause translation in fact is a matter of power.\u201d As he developed friendships in \u00dcr\u00fcmchi, he met artists eager to have their work reach the wider world. He began translating the work of Uyghur poets for publications such as\u00a0Guernica<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0Banango Street<\/em><\/a>, and\u00a0Paper Republic<\/em>. He launched a lively website,\u00a0Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia<\/a>, that features poetry, short films, photo essays, and other art forms showing the full dimensions of life in \u00dcr\u00fcmchi. Like his dissertation, it includes Uyghurs along with Han migrants from eastern China, other Muslim minorities, and people from across Central Asia.<\/p>\n

Building trust and conducting research across those ethnic lines is rare, according to Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Byler\u2019s dissertation advisor and Associate Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think both Han and Uyghur individuals have trusted him with their stories because he really listens,\u201d Welland told me. \u201cHe is not interested in taking sides or finding heroes but in analyzing how the state and larger structural forces\u200a\u2014\u200atransnational capitalism, the war against terror, and the spread of Islamophobia\u200a\u2014\u200acontinually incite and take advantage of these fault-lines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Poetry of Resistance<\/h4>\n

During his yearlong trip in 2014, Byler became friends with Tahir Hamut, a prominent poet, filmmaker, and free-speech proponent whose story illustrates the difficulty of political advocacy for Uyghurs. After being imprisoned and blacklisted from jobs in China, Hamut fled with his family to Virginia, where he is seeking political asylum. He\u00a0spoke<\/a>\u00a0to the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0about his journey; the week after the story came out, his brother in Xinjiang was taken by police.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s nowhere that China can\u2019t threaten you,\u201d Hamut told the news outlet.<\/p>\n

In Seattle, Byler has organized Uyghur cultural events, including a\u00a0music and dance performance<\/a>\u00a0that filled an exhibit hall at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in 2016. He has seen fear rise as China targets the families of Uyghurs abroad who speak against the state. Byler hosted Hamut for a\u00a0series of poetry readings<\/a>\u00a0in Seattle in March. Only a few Uyghurs came from the Pacific Northwest\u2019s community of hundreds. They arrived late and left early, seemingly wary to be seen in public with a public dissident, Byler said.<\/p>\n

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There are good reasons to be cautious about feeding \u201cyellow peril\u201d narratives about China, given anti-Chinese\u00a0discrimination<\/a>\u00a0in U.S. history, and given our own human-rights shortcomings. Yet it\u2019s difficult to see how the situation in Xinjiang will improve quickly. Coordinated economic sanctions are unlikely, and would be unlikely to have much effect, Byler said.<\/p>\n

The scale and pervasiveness of the surveillance suggest that China is field-testing new techniques in Xinjiang for eventual use elsewhere, domestically or abroad. According to the South China Morning Post, Ecuador has instituted a\u00a0network of facial-recognition surveillance cameras<\/a>\u00a0in partnership with China.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs China\u2019s profile grows on the international stage, everyone would do well to ask if what happens in Xinjiang will stay in Xinjiang,\u201d the Georgetown historian James A. Millward\u00a0writes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On his most recent trip, Byler found a stark decline in religious practice. Once-lively neighborhood mosques were empty, their green crescent moons replaced with red Chinese flags. Traditional Muslim greetings were no longer spoken in the streets. The neon glow of police-station lights, some every 500 meters, cast a constant reminder of the state\u2019s surveillance.<\/p>\n

As Byler completes his PhD this summer, he expects his future will include both scholarship and advocacy. For him, they are deeply connected, just as art and politics connect for anyone seeking to understand both inner life and outer tumult. In writing about Hamut\u2019s\u00a0starkly poetic short film\u00a0Beautiful Lover<\/em>\u00a0(2015)<\/a>, Byler describes the inner lives of young Uyghurs moving from villages to the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I ask young Uyghurs why they like Uyghur folk music they often say that they feel as though they are tuning in to something timeless but at the same time something comforting and familiar,\u201d Byler writes. \u201cWhen they walk the streets of \u00dcr\u00fcmchi, with their iPhone earbuds turned all the way up, they feel like the problems they face in their lives lift a little. They feel like they are not all alone, that others have faced the same anxieties.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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This story\u00a0<\/em>also appears<\/em><\/a>\u00a0at the University of Washington\u00a0<\/em>Simpson Center for the Humanities<\/em><\/a>. Darren Byler has received a\u00a0<\/em>2017\u20132018 Society of Scholarships fellowship<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and a\u00a0<\/em>2016 Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship<\/em><\/a>\u00a0from the Simpson Center for the Humanities. He is the recipient of the Graduate Medal in the Social Sciences from the College of Arts & Sciences and a finalist for the 2018\u00a0<\/em>UW Graduate Student Medal<\/em><\/a>\u00a0for citizen-scholarship<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Jonathan Hiskes<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is a writer and communications director at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.<\/em><\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0https:\/\/medium.com\/@simpsoncenter\/ethnography-of-a-surveillance-state-e374764f01b7<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Medium By\u00a0Jonathan\u00a0Hiskes In the last three months, University of Washington anthropology student Darren Byler has spoken about his research to AI developers at Google, business leaders at the Washington State China Relations Council, and journalists at the Foreign Correspondents\u2019 Club in Beijing. Each group has sought his help in understanding the situation of the Uyghur […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinas-uyghur-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=832"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":837,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions\/837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}