Darren Byler is an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. An anthropologist and author, his research has focused on the dispossession of stateless populations — particularly Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang — through contemporary capitalism, digital infrastructure and colonialism. He is the author of In The Camps: China’s High Tech Penal Colony (October 2021) and Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (2022).
Darren Byler. Illustration by Lauren Crow
Q: First I would like to ask about the current state of Xinjiang. There was a recent AP report that described a normalization of fear there. How would you describe what’s happening right now?
A: Things have changed somewhat over the last year. There's been a new party secretary since January, a guy named Ma Xingrui, and he appears to be drawing down some of the more obvious forms of surveillance — checkpoints and things like that — that were in place. At the same time,
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