The Literature of Uyghur Disappearance

The Literature of Uyghur Disappearance

Three recent books offer a searing portrait of the calculated brutality of the ongoing Uyghur genocide.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: An Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide
by Tahir Hamut Izgil, trans. by Joshua L. Freeman
Penguin Press, 2023, 272 pp.

The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang
by Perhat Tursun, trans. by Darren Byler and Anonymous
Columbia University Press, 2022, 168 pp.

Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City
by Darren Byler
Duke University Press, 2022, 296 pp.

Tahir Hamut Izgil’s recent memoir, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, brings to life a cast of poets and intellectuals who used to meet under the cover of darkness, against the backdrop of mass detentions in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang province. In his 2018 poem “Somewhere Else,” Izgil, who escaped China, writes with the exile’s keen longing: “Of course / I too can only stare / for a moment into the distance.”

Izgil’s friend Perhat Tursun, whose own poetry had run afoul of both state censors and the mores of the Muslim community in Ürümqi, wasn’t as fortunate. His novels, including The Backstreets, his first book to be translated into English, provide an intellectual lineage for the disaffection many young migrants to the city may have felt before being absorbed into China’s detention system. Arrested in 2017, Tursun had already written his own epitaph eleven years earlier in “Elegy”: “When they search the streets and cannot find my vanished figure / Do you know that I am with you.”

The Backstreets was co-translated by Darren Byler, whose own treatise, Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City, contextualizes the scale of the surveillance and reeducation state that has targeted the Uyghurs. He shows how “machine learning enclosed them, turning them into patterns of behavior, and made them a new frontier in state-directed capitalist accumulation”—and how Uyghurs still managed to forge connections and keep on living. Together, these three books offer a searing portrait of the calculated brutality of the ongoing Uyghur genocide.

The detainment camp system in Xinjiang has been in operation since 2014. The following year, several thousand religious and cultural leaders were sent to local Communist Party education centers. Previously used to train party members, the centers were converted to spaces of disappearance. In 2016 and 2017, new facilities explicitly constructed for detentions appeared, and hundreds of thousands more Uyghurs were detained. The descriptions that leaked out of these places likened them to forced education camps, but as Byler has said, what’s happening is “not actually education . . . it’s about discipline, about forcing these people to recognize the power of the state and to submit to it.”

For a time, the reeducation project was mostly limited to the countryside. But intensified surveillance became the norm in cities like Ürümqi, and the early oppression of Uyghur villages was in fact a pilot for the destruction of urban communities of Uyghur musapir, or travelers—also known as migrant laborers—from Xinjiang’s villages. Once ensnared, detainees faced indefinite internment in camps, possible prison sentences, and, if released, forced labor as members of a permanent underclass of barely compensated, unskilled workers barred from contacting their families. The camps now hold as many as 1.5 million detainees.

Chinese religious affairs official Maisumujiang Maimuer outlined the government’s approach, known as the “Four Breaks,” on his Weibo account in 2017: “Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.”

In Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, Izgil recalls having his phone confiscated at one of the checkpoint towers—known as People’s Convenience Police Posts—that are stationed at 200-meter intervals in Uyghur neighborhoods. Police searched the phone for evidence of retroactively forbidden Uyghur-language media, recordings of informal religious instructors, or any sentiment questioning the right of the police to vanish Izgil’s relatives or friends. This was a common experience among Ürümqi’s Uyghur citizens. The enclosure of China’s digital networks was well underway.

A few months later, in 2017, Izgil and his wife, Marhaba, were summoned to the basement of their local police station in Ürümqi.

In the first cell stood a heavy iron “tiger chair,” used for interrogating and torturing prisoners. The iron restraint used for strapping prisoners’ chests to the chair hung open, and the iron rings for secured hands and feet dangled on either side. The chair looked as if it were waiting for the next unfortunate soul to sit in it. Along the walls, iron rings were affixed to the concrete floor; I figured these were for shackling people. In the middle of the floor were faded bloodstains.

After waiting in line, Izgil was told by his jail handlers to speak for a recording, and he did, in the government-reformed standard pronunciation of a Han newscaster. They took a blood sample, and later told him to stare at a camera and roll his head from side to side, up and down, and back to center position over a precise time interval. Izgil got it right on the third try; it took Marhaba six tries. They were two in a line of dozens of detainees whose biomarkers were meticulously processed that day. With little information to go on, Izgil and Marhaba thought that their visit to the police station meant their time had come, but they were allowed to leave.

As a film director with eighteen years’ experience working within the bounds set by the censors who oversaw his media company, Izgil hoped he was somehow exempt from the forces breaking apart the communities around him. There were red flags in his past: he had recently traveled abroad, and decades earlier had been imprisoned for three years after trying to leave Xinjiang to study in Turkey. Yet somehow Izgil and his family found a way out. According to his translator Joshua L. Freeman, Izgil was perhaps the only Uyghur intellectual to escape the government security apparatus.

How did he manage to leave? Izgil was in Ürümqi, but the record of his time in prison was held in his home village and apparently never uploaded to the “black box”—the enormous and growing central body of data used to determine who should be sent to the camps. After this narrow escape, Izgil greased the palms of the right doctors and acquired documents proving his daughter had a neurological disorder requiring treatment in the United States. The poet frantically arranged to leave Ürümqi while giving the appearance that he and his family would come back. After their passports were confiscated and then returned for no discernible reason, they made it out on a series of flights. Once it became clear that Izgil was not returning, his family in Xinjiang was forced to disown him. His contact with his homeland is now entirely clandestine.

Izgil and his family eventually settled outside Washington, D.C., where he took English classes and began working as an Uber driver. He continued to write poetry, though deracination often robbed him of inspiration: “Every time I tried to imagine how we would start our new life in America, I found I simply couldn’t focus. Even with a new world before us, my thoughts wandered constantly back home.” After finding his bearings in this new world, he began working on a memoir of the years from Xi Jinping’s ascent to power in 2013 to his flight from Xinjiang in 2017. The stories contained there evoke a lost world of Uyghur intellectual and family life, and chronicle its gradual erasure.

The title Waiting to Be Arrested at Night comes from Izgil’s decision, after an unsettling encounter with the police, to leave a pair of boots and warm clothes by the front door, in case the security forces came for him in the middle of the night. But it could also apply to the meetings hosted by Izgil and his longtime friend, the novelist Perhat Tursun, that brought together intellectuals in Uyghur restaurants and teahouses, mostly in Ürümqi. Poets, academics, novelists, and other writers would come from all corners of Xinjiang to read from recent work and to give and receive feedback. At their last gathering, in 2016, the police arrived to intimidate the crew, running background checks on their IDs and sitting at tables in adjacent rooms of the restaurant. The intellectuals were warned to stop these meetings, which could be seen as incubators of ethnic separatism. Tursun, Izgil recalled, was particularly shaken by the encounter.

Like Izgil, Tursun studied in Beijing at Minzu University of China, which specializes in developing minority students for careers as officials in their home provinces. After returning to Xinjiang in 1989, he wrote several provocative books on controversial topics in the Uyghur community, including sex and suicide. Tursun’s novels give a snapshot of the alienation and difficulties faced by Uyghurs long before the worst repression began. In The Backstreets, which Tursun first drafted in 1990, an unnamed narrator wanders the streets of Ürümqi at night in search of a place to live. He secures a job in an office only by forfeiting his right to an apartment subsidized by the company; as he walks, he frequently flashes back to the barely concealed hatred of his boss and coworkers, all of whom are Han. Where they seem secure in their positions, he is a musapir from the countryside, in a city that concedes nothing to the Uyghurs whose homeland it occupies.

The narrator begins to feel a thick, cold fog envelop him, and strangers materialize out of the mist. He stammers that he is looking for a house at a particular address, which he selected according to magical thoughts about a string of mysterious numbers in a children’s notebook he found trampled outside the door of his office. His bewildered interlocutors—those who don’t ignore him altogether—suspect that he is a criminal, walking in an area claimed by the Han. He tries to enter an unmarked house in what he thinks is the right location but is chased away. He then comes upon a crowd of idling Han migrants who beat and mortally wound him. As the life drains out of him, he crawls back the way he came and sees, illuminated before him, the correct address—beside the name of a psychiatric hospital.

This account of a hostile city was written well before the current era of state surveillance and repression of Uyghur life. In the 1990s, waves of migrants of all ethnicities came to Xinjiang to make money in oil and gas extraction, factory farming, and the urban economy that sprang up around them, fortifying the Han Chinese majority living in Ürümqi. Backed by state investments, these migrants saw themselves as living on the frontier, where they could succeed by dint of their hard work. There were high barriers to entry for anyone who wasn’t Han. The Backstreets is an important document of the struggles of a Uyghur migrant who, like his Han counterparts, had dreams of a secure life in the city—even as many Han Chinese viewed Uyghurs as “backward” (luohou) and “low quality” (suzhi di).

Byler, the co-translator of The Backstreets, chose to put the novel forward for publication after Tursun disappeared into one of the camps. Byler conducted field research as an anthropologist between 2011 and 2018, interviewing dozens of Uyghurs and capturing the slow unfolding of what was officially called the “People’s War on Terror.” He followed the development of a nascent Uyghur public cultural and religious sphere on WeChat and, in tandem, the rapid enclosure of these digital spaces, leading to hundreds of thousands of arrests.

After riots in Ürümqi in 2009, the state shut down internet services in Xinjiang for ten months. When it was rebooted, many Uyghurs began to use WeChat, which allowed migrants to the city to keep in contact with their families in the countryside. The app also became a site for budding entrepreneurs to send Uyghur-language videos, music, and advertisements to hundreds of thousands of followers. Previously inaccessible religious teachings and information from the global Islamic community proliferated, and a younger generation of Uyghurs descended upon the cities, swelling the ranks of attendees at daily prayers and Friday gatherings at mosques. They used a veiled language to disseminate the more subversive stances they were adopting against the Communist Party, which they believed would shield them from censors and the police. But with the active collaboration of WeChat’s developers and the tech firms engaged in the surveillance complex, the conversations became evidence used in mass arrests. Once sent online, these messages could not be permanently deleted from the company’s servers, and there was no telling when they would be seized upon by police or picked up by the scan of a phone at a People’s Convenience Station.

During his fieldwork in Ürümqi, before the mass disappearances ramped up in 2017, Byler showed the text of Tursun’s Backstreets to a number of Uyghur migrants. One of these men, whom he refers to as Ablikim, said it was as if the book “was written just for [him].” He too had a university education and had tried his hand at the various menial jobs available to him as a Uyghur in Ürümqi. He ended up teaching chemistry, his undergraduate major, in a high school with predominantly Han students. They mocked his facial hair, and colleagues and superiors looked at him with disdain. Once, on a field trip, police singled him out as the only Uyghur aboard the bus at a security checkpoint and took him to the station for interrogation.

Ablikim told Byler that the only thing that kept him from committing suicide was daily exchanges with Batur, who occupied a special place in his life as his “life and liver friend” (jan-jiger dost in Uyghur), and who would occasionally sacrifice his jobs to help his struggling friend find another of his own. These dyads of friendship were a key support for the young men living in Ürümqi whom Byler interviewed. In uncertain times, they had someone who, even if unable to fix the daunting systemic problems they faced, could provide a listening ear.

Many of the jan-jiger friendships that Byler witnessed were torn apart by disappearances. Like many young Uyghurs, Ablikim was forced to return to his home village in the countryside, where he was abducted by police forces and sent to a camp. Batur lost all contact with him. Those who relied on the support of their spouses fared just as poorly. One man Byler interviewed, who used WeChat to distribute religious teachings, was also forced to return to his hometown with his family. During the trip, his bus crashed; his daughter lost a finger, and his wife bled to death while ambulances took forty minutes to respond. He hoped his injuries would dissuade the police from seeing him as a risk. But after waiting three weeks for him to heal, the police picked him up at his home; Byler hasn’t heard from him since.

Byler argues that Xinjiang isn’t merely an epicenter of ethno-racial apartheid, but a frontier of what he calls “terror capitalism.” Surveilling the entire Uyghur population, it turns out, is big business. Many of China’s largest tech firms helped develop AI tools to distinguish Uyghur phenotypes based on biomarkers collected by police and private security contractors, whose ranks swelled to the tens of thousands. The police also recruited low-level “data janitors,” many of whom were Uyghurs or belonged to another Turkic minority, to watch CCTV footage collected from the city’s plethora of cameras and to report suspicious activity. When they discovered what the job entailed, some tried to quit, only to be told that if they did, they would be disappeared into camps just like the people they surveilled. The AI tools also scanned police records, travel records, and responses to neighborhood watch committee surveys determining whether the individual or family in question practiced Islam, had been to a majority-Muslim country, or was in contact with anyone who lived abroad. These factors, along with “up to 53,000 specific signs of extremism that algorithms attempted to detect,” helped determine whether an Uyghur was trustworthy in the eyes of the Communist Party. A neutral response was all it took to warrant a detention; often “trustworthy” individuals were detained as well. Many more were employed by the state to operate the reeducation camps.

Those who were later released were not allowed to return to their lives. They were immediately funneled to unfree and undercompensated manufacturing jobs, especially at textile factories. Seeking cheaper labor, Chinese companies from the eastern provinces contracted with the government to purchase cotton picked in Xinjiang, which Uyghur workers then turned into clothes. Byler estimates that an Uyghur-made pair of gloves sold online for up to $24—or much more at a Hong Kong boutique—would net the worker about fifteen cents. He argues convincingly that after breaking their spirits in the camps, China sought to create a permanent underclass of indentured laborers dispossessed of their families, their dreams, and their land (the majority came from the countryside, where policing and detentions were even more pervasive than in the cities).

In telling the stories of these men—research subjects who became his friends—Byler affirms the agency of the Uyghur people. In makeshift worlds that have been destroyed by mass surveillance, detentions, and forced labor, Uyghurs carried on their lives, emboldened by maxims they traded online, including: “Until you have suffered, you cannot be a true Muslim.” They supported their families and jan-jiger dostlar. By securing elusive jobs, they sought to upend Han prejudice and perceptions that they were “backward.” But the disappearances have snatched away these Uyghur men from society’s margins. China is now marketing its surveillance technologies abroad.

Nic Cavell is a writer based in New York.