On Anti-Muslim State Violence in Northwest China

 By Darren Byler

When conducting research on the everyday experiences of detainees and camp workers in the anti-Muslim internment camp system for Uyghurs and other Muslims in Northwest China, I was struck by an image one of the former camp workers told me was stuck in her mind. The worker, a Chinese teacher named Qelbinur Sedik, who herself was a Turkic Muslim, described how on one of her first days working in a newly filled camp she observed how non-Muslim Han Chinese guards laughed at the Uyghur detainees as they filed out of their cell to the fortified classroom where she was to teach them Chinese. To ensure that the detainees did not rush out and overwhelm the guards, who were armed with wooden clubs and tasers, the camp workers fastened the iron cell door with a short, heavy chain that created a gap of only around 12 inches or so between the door and the door frame. This meant that to leave the cell, the 40 to 50 detainees in the small cell had to pass through this gap one at a time, ducking down to the three-foot height of the chain. As each one ducked under the chain, scurried after the detainee in front of them pressing against the wall in single file, Qelbinur recalled that the detainees had expressions of either fear or a kind of numbness on their faces. She also observed the way the guards, their clubs and electric prods in hand recognized this fear. But what Qelbinur remembered the most was the sound of her non-Muslim co-workers’ laughter and the way they referred to the Muslim detainees as “dogs.” The repetition of the ducking of the detainees, and the way they hurried along one after another struck them as funny.

They enjoyed watching this, relishing their power over these supposedly dangerous Muslim men, who had been deemed guilty of minor “terrorism” or “extremism” activities such as conducting prayers too often or studying the Quran independently. Qelbinur remembers the laughter because it demonstrated the cruelty of the racialized violence that was cultivated and institutionalized by the mass internment system. Not only did the guards take pleasure in this scene of abjection, what made it funny to them, was the scale of the ducking. It was funny in part because there were so many detainees all crammed into the same cell repeating the same motion one after another.  

Thinking in dialogue with Carlos Sanchez, and his examination of brutality in Mexican narco-culture, in this essay I will consider the image of the ducking detainees as a starting point from which to examine the particular scale of cruelty created in a Chinese carceral context, and how it can move into a broader life world and become a part of cultured thought. I then consider the way this initial enjoyment of racialized mass-violence begins to dissipate as it is normalized, and, as this happens, the way violence hardens into a durative brutality.   

Sanchez’s work has much to offer when it comes to diagnosing the discourse, economy, and personhood that emerges from cultures of violence such as narco-culture. Indeed, in a longer essay, I could consider how these elements to find their expression in the culture of racialized and colonial-capital violence that has enveloped Uyghur society. But in order to look more closely at the central terms Sanchez is working out in his examination of particular forms of violence, namely, cruelty and brutality, I would like to bracket these elements to the side. In his discussion of the two terms, he writes, “what I want to propose, however, is that cruelty without passion is not cruelty but brutality; that is, cruelty is essentially related to subjective passion so that cruelty without this relation is not cruelty but something else—namely, brutality” (92-93). Here Sanchez is building on the work of a number of scholars from Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler, but he is particularly focused on the way Max Scheler locates cruelty as an outcome of violence that produces enjoyment on the part of perpetrator (101). It cannot be banal violence, or violence that is unaccompanied by what Arendt refers to as “reflective thought.” Instead, cruelty refers to a vicarious masochism, the sadist’s glee. Which, Sanchez points out, means, paradoxically, that in enjoying the pain of another, the perpetrator recognizes the humanity of the other. In order for cruelty to be manifested, the perpetrator must in fact be perversely empathetic, sharing the pain of their victim, but only as it feeds an internalized and insulated narcissism. The enjoyment comes from luxuriating in the power over life that violence gives the cruel actor.   

If what Qelbinur observed is indeed an instantiation of cruelty, then the animal mimicry of the ducking detainees is “funny” to the guards precisely because they recognize the detainees as human. If they were indeed animals, then this behavior would not be funny in the slightest. At the same time, if the detainees were non-Muslim acquaintances, or friends or family members of the guards, or even if the detainees were simply other Han Chinese, this scene would likewise not be as funny to the guards, in fact it might turn to a kind of horror. The racialization of ethnic difference is what allows them to “derealize” the humanity of their fellow Chinese citizens, even as they nevertheless recognize them as human or human-like. Finally, if there was only one or two detainees in the cell, the herd-like repetition, which is what made the behavior appear animal-like, would not be present. And this too would make the scene less humorous to the guards. So to summarize, the scene was funny because the detainees were human, but marked by an ethno-racial difference, and because there were so many of them. Put another way, the horrific scene was funny because it was a quintessential expression of the cultured thought and institutionalization of a racialized mass internment campaign.  

The rise of this way of seeing and acting as a phenomenon did not start or end in the camp. Instead, the enjoyment of the suffering of others has spread through Han society like a contagion. Qelbinur described the way a Han co-worker told her that because of the mass internment campaign non-Muslims now had the power to “swat Uyghurs like flies.” She told me about the way Han neighbors lined the halls and cheered when a Uyghur young man in their apartment building was led out with a black bag over his head, bent over, his hands cuffed behind his back while his parents and younger brother watched the same scene in horror. This enjoyment of police brutality as ethno-nationalist pride points to another element of cruelty at scale. The collective effervesce that comes from the spectacle of racialized power appears to be a part of this too. The laughter of the guards, the cheering of the neighbors, would likely not have found its expression if it was a solitary non-Muslim watching a neighbor being dragged away. The enjoyment of racialized violence, like the amusement of white Americans at a Saturday afternoon lynching of a black man in Jim Crow Mississippi, is amplified by a tacit acceptance and support for such violence as an object of collective enjoyment.

In his discussion of narco-culture, Sanchez describes this type of violence as a process of derealizing others as individuals. One feature of the anti-Muslim, colonial violence in Northwest China is that there is a derealization not just of individuals, but of the ethnic other as a category of being. Yet, despite the defining role of ethnic and religious difference in the Uyghur case, the underlying paradox that Sanchez identifies nonetheless holds (111). Despite being rendered as objects, Uyghurs, like the victims of narco-violence, always continue to exist as still human. And, in this case, at least initially, this other, still has a face. The fear and horror on the faces of Uyghurs is part of what produces the vicarious enjoyment of the non-Muslims.

 * * *

It is important to know that the moments of cruelty I have just described occurred in early 2017, just as the mass internment of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs began. The enjoyment of the guards and neighbors who watched came from the scale of this internment, but also from its position at the beginning of this cycle of mass violence. Cruelty, it seems, is also associated with the thrill of the new. As time wore on, and the ducking under the chain and neighborhood detentions continued, the novelty of the violence appeared to wear off. The guards became less interested in the expressions on the faces of detainees. They stopped laughing. Qelbinur told me that as the smell of excrement-filled buckets and unwashed bodies, living in packed cells without running water, grew, the non-Muslim guards began to wear face masks against the stench. They found ways not to let the detainees out of their cells and keep the iron doors shut as much as possible. Cruelty began to give way to brutality.   

A former detainee told me that he noticed that over time the way the guards hit them began to resemble the way a farmer herds his sheep, prodding them to move as they were supposed to without stepping over the line that was painted around a foot from the wall of the hallway. Often as they stuck the moving detainees the guards would refer to them as pigs or dogs. At times they told them that they did not have the right to speak since they were only animals. But the name-calling and blows took on more of a ritualized, automatic quality. They became normal.

The herding blows and commands were quite different from beatings that were done as punishment for failing to follow orders or speaking Uyghur or Kazakh.  If they were being punished, detainees would be forced to lay on their stomachs in front of the other detainees while they were beaten with clubs or electric batons. The guards would strike them as hard as they could until the detainees stopped screaming. These punishments were often accompanied by anger on the part of the guards and were meant to punish the individual and send a message to the rest of the detainees. That is to say, the latter beatings were accompanied by subjective pathos, while the former, more common strikes, seemed to be more of an automatic, unthought reflex. It was like, as Sanchez puts it in his description of brutality, that they were simply hitting a piece of wood. 

Over time the system shifted to a normalized, scheduled, large-scale performance and acceptance of brutality. This brutality is different from the excessive violence of brutal killing that characterizes narco-culture. It was excessive in its scale and in its durative repetition rather than in spectacular death. Over time the event of mass internment, turned to the work of human disposability.  Unbalanced diets, lack of sanitation, enforced stillness under the cameras and lights of the cells, untreated tuberculous and other diseases weeded out the weakest of the detainees. Many others were eventually given long prison sentences, destined to more permanent human warehousing in the rapidly expanding mass incarceration system.

Ultimately the system began to reproduce itself as a manner of existence, and with this an acceptance of roles, places within the system. In other words, it became a structure rather than an event, an elaborated culture with media forms, standard procedures, and technological assessments. This, in a general sense, resembles the pervasive ethos of a culture of brutality, the type that Sanchez shows is reproduced within and by narco-culture.

* * *

There are, of course, a number of geopolitical and economic elements that makes the origins and expression of violence in Mexico and Northwest China unique. The racialization of ethnic difference, economies of oil rather than drugs, positioning within colonial and imperial histories are all important areas of comparison and difference, but for the sake of this short essay on violence as a cultured phenomenon, I will conclude with a few thoughts on the role of the state in the particular features of cruelty and brutality in Northwest China.

In my interviews with low-level human surveillance workers who had been drafted as “volunteers” by their employers to move into Uyghur majority villages, non-Muslim state workers framed their work as a kind of public health initiative that was necessary for the overall health of the body politic. Uyghurs, they said, “were backward.” The “cancerous” population, people “infected” with the disease of “foreign Islam” needed to excised or inoculated. Their reference points for understanding these tumours were videos depicting Islamic State violence, stories regarding the mass evacuation of Chinese migrant workers from Libya, and state-sponsored disinformation regarding Uyghur protest and suicide attacks. In short they had been primed by a state sponsored Islamophobic media campaign to see Uyghurs as always-already potential terrorists. In Southern Xinjiang where the vast majority of the 12 million Uyghurs lived, terrorists, they thought, were literally everywhere. This is why the state had mandated over 1 million state workers like themselves to descend on Uyghur society and sort the population into trustworthy, normal and untrustworthy categories. And the state had also mobilized nearly 100,000 police and policing contractors and $100 billion to build camps and technological assessment tools.     

Among the non-Muslim state workers I met in 2018 I saw a range of attitudes toward this work. Some relished the power they now had to walk into a Uyghur restaurant or business and see the staff drop whatever they were doing and rush to provide them service. Others took a more paternalistic attitude, realizing that Uyghurs were reeling from the mass internments, they voiced some sympathy with their suffering, but were also firm in their belief that the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of young Muslim men was necessary in order for Uyghurs to embrace a secular, modern, Han-centric Chinese identity and abandon the unassimilable difference of Uyghur Islam. There was pathos in both of these positions, on the one hand an embrace of the colonizer’s cruelty, and the other an embodiment of a colonizer’s smothering evangelical zeal.

But among other state workers, particularly, low level Uyghur police assistants and Han police officers, I saw a cold numbness, a kind of normalization of the mechanized scanning, loading, herding, the hard brutal work of decimating a society. They were tasked with scanning 200 phones per day, of filling the vans, of dragging the hooded and shackled detainees, from the vans to the camps. Dozens of kilometers every day. In reports Han workers wrote to their home communities, they noted how the stench that rose from the crowded cells and overflowing buckets used as toilets made it hard for them eat. The Uyghur officers talked about how they were not permitted to quit their jobs. If they did, their loyalty would be questioned and they themselves could be sent to the camps. The Han workers talked about losing their jobs, or being demoted, if they refused orders. My interviewees noted that among this population of workers, alcoholism while on duty under the gaze of the cameras was, in many cases, normalized. The brutal work of detainment and managing a large-scale camp was aided by a culture of inebriation.

But more importantly the mass mobilization of the bureaucratic state along with the nested forms of surveillance along the chain of command accelerated a banal efficiency and unthinking. Because of the state enforcement of technocratic action, brutality overtook cruelty perhaps more quickly than it likely did in other settler colonies such as the United States. The system in the Uyghur region was intended to be brutal. The racialization of Uyghurs was enforced and normalized by the state, by the law, the police order, the media, and the interests of capital.

The question of whether a state campaign is designed intentionally to be brutal, or whether it becomes unintentionally brutal, is not useful for making a moral judgement of whether one culture of violence is qualitatively better or worse than another. But the question of professionalization of management, the dispositions of infrastructures, and technological capacity, and so on, does perhaps say something about the speed and scale of violence and the possibilities for reflective thought within a given culture of violence. Perhaps a strong, technologically elaborated state does not need spectacular death to achieve its goals of reproducing itself. It controls through institutionalized coercive, disciplinary power, rather than excessive force, but nevertheless arrives at brutality.

Thinking with Sanchez’s framing of all this, I might tentatively suggest that the greater the level of technological automation and institutional normalization of violence, the more quickly violence may become brutal at scale. Regardless, understanding how violence moves from cruelty to brutality seems quite clearly an important first step in thinking with violence and denarrativizing the reflex of brutality. And this is why Sanchez’s work is so revelatory for examining the features of normalized violence.

Darren Byler is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of an ethnography titled Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press 2022) and a narrative-driven book titled In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports 2021). His current research interests are focused on infrastructure development and global China.