By Darren Byler

Emergent Conversation 19

This essay is part of the series PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 19 on Racism and Policing in Global Perspective. It also appears as a Directions Essay in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Volume 46, Issue 1.

“What do you think of ‘our turban-heads’ (women de chantou)?” the taxi driver wondered, nodding out the window at a Uyghur pedestrian. I stared at him blankly. Not waiting for my response, he continued, wanting to get my thoughts on how the United States’s war in Iraq was going. He had heard that it was going to affect the oil prices. It was 2010, and President Barack Obama had just been elected, so I mumbled something about how the new administration would try to find a way out of the disaster the previous administration had started. It was a short taxi ride through the office towers and hotels that brought the desert glitz to Ürümchi, the administrative center of the Chinese domestic oil industry and the colonization of the 15 million Muslims—Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and others—who saw the region as their ancestral homeland.

I have thought about that opening question a lot since then. As the mass campaigns against Turkic Muslims took form in the 2010s, first with a renewed “hard strike” campaign against ethnic separatism, religious extremism, and violent terrorism, and then, in 2014, an intensified “people’s war on terror,” the question of what constitutes “the terrorist” as a globally racialized figure became a central concern of my research.

Over the course of the past decade, hundreds of thousands of Turkic Muslims were detained as a result of a pervasive predictive policing surveillance program. But what led to the racialization of this surveillance? What did the taxi driver mean when he said “our turban-heads”? Embedded in the statement was the feeling that I—like the non-Muslim taxi driver—was not a “turban-head,” but that as an American white man, I, like him, had “turban-heads” of my own. It was clear from the conversation that he was conflating his Muslims with mine. That in any location, “turban-heads,” whether in Iraq or Xinjiang, were a problem to be contemplated abstractly and with military force. They were a problem because they might harm the economy and peace of mind of non-Muslims.

A difference perhaps, is that the Muslims who were the object of his “war on terror,” his casual anti-Muslim racism, were his fellow Chinese citizens, meters away, prevented from hearing his use of this slur only by a pane of glass. The Muslims he was referring to as mine were in Iraq. But, of course, the militarized occupation of Iraq also shaped the way my Muslim compatriots were treated back in the United States. There were many similarities between the Islamophobic actions toward Muslim Americans by American institutions and the treatment of Chinese Muslims by Chinese institutions (Brophy 2019; Doyon 2019). In both places police had long been tracking Muslim behavior and its “radicalization” through a domestication of military technology (Byler 2022b; Harcourt 2018). There was a different scale and intensity of the police warfare in Xinjiang. Here the police were supporting a colonial project against an internal enemy (Cliff 2016), Muslims, who were native to the place in which they lived that had been “infected” with so-called foreign Islam (Grose 2019).

As a great deal of excellent new scholarship on racial capitalism has shown, racialization is an essential part of the process of economic expropriation or frontier making (Byrd et al. 2018; Koshy et al. 2022). That is to say, racialization—as an institutionalized process supported by the police, the law, the school system, and so on—is not simply a natural outcome of transhistorical process; on the contrary, it is a historical feature of global capitalism and the imperial conquest on which it depends (Bledsoe and Wright 2019; Sheridan 2022). What was happening in Xinjiang was an emergent, intensifying process of racializing ethnoreligious difference, a sequence much newer than the older racialization in the North American settler colony.

The rhetoric of the global war on terror post–2001, and the figure of the terrorist it produced, intensified a new sequence in transnational racialization (Byler 2022b). It provided a socially acceptable way of reading the bodies and appearance of Muslim others and diagnosing them as “terrorists” or “radicals” from a distance (Asad 2007). In the Chinese context it accelerated older processes of racialization, not only of phenotypical difference but of the production of difference based on language, cultural, and religious practice, and claims to native autonomy that prefigured the modern state. Because the Uyghurs historically had claimed their own state, East Turkestan, prior to the unfolding of settler-colonial processes in the second half of the twentieth century, their difference had been categorized as “counterrevolutionary” or “separatist” before the arrival of the terrorism discourse after September 11, 2001. Now in the 2010s, as I began my fieldwork, things like facial hair, hair coverings, smell, techniques of the body, and so on all became racialized information about “foreign Islam” that proceeded before the person, speaking for them in advance, about whether they should be regarded as one of “our turban-heads” or not (Byler 2022b; see Amrute 2016 for a parallel discussion of new racism).

Racial Learning

Race is a contentious topic in studies of ethnicity in China. Many in the field of China studies have accepted that widespread ethnonationalist notions of the Han ethnic majority’s superiority have created a “civilizing mission” (Harrell 1995) toward ethnic minorities, and that this in turn shapes Han attitudes toward minorities. But until recently, few would describe this dynamic as racialized. There are some good reasons for this. Many of China’s 55 official minorities—such as Yi, Zhuang, Miao, and others—in China have been more or less assimilated into the mainstream, they pass as Han, and speak Mandarin as their first language. Ethnic difference for these more assimilated minorities is primarily about cultural difference, food traditions, and particular rights and entitlements (Hansen 1999). Many scholars are also concerned with conflating Western experiences of racialization onto Chinese situations that are incommensurable (Castillo 2020; Liu 1999). Among some Chinese publics, so the uncritical thinking goes, it is impossible for Chinese to be racist, since Han Chinese are racialized as brown relative to white Europeans and North Americans, their former imperial oppressors.

More recently, though, there has been an emergent awareness that Turkic Muslim minorities, and to a certain extent Tibetans, are treated much differently than other minorities in China in terms of incarceration rates—Uyghurs are formally incarcerated at around six times the national average—and the criminalization of their faith practices and cultural traditions (Byler 2021b). The more obvious differences of language, racial phenotypes, claims to ancestral land, and Native populations that number in the millions make the “hardness” of Turkic Muslim and Tibetan ethnic difference more readily apparent than other minorities. When it comes to Turkic Muslims there is an additional factor. When the taxi driver says “our turban-heads,” he is making an explicit appeal to an emergent, global anti-Muslim racism. That is to say, he is enacting racial violence regardless of whether he conceptualizes Muslims and ethnic minorities in the same way that American xenophobes conceptualize Muslims. The mass internment of more than a million Turkic Muslims in Northwest China, a residential school system for Turkic Muslim children, the automated policing of Turkic Muslim bodies using biometric markers of racial difference (Byler 2021b), the desecration of Muslim sacred spaces (Thum 2020), all of which was just over the horizon, indicates that his speech act contributes to the same global discourse that led to the devastation of Afghanistan and Iraq, but from a new location.

Much of the discussion of race in China concerns widespread discrimination toward African workers in Chinese coastal cities. This racialization, Shanshan Lan (2019 481) argues, must be triangulated as a kind of “racial learning” by Chinese and Black workers—meaning that they must learn what race means about each other through global racial discourses that originated historically and in an ongoing manner from Europe and North America. It is not as simple as Black and white. Nor is it as simple as thinking that anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism are the same, so that one might claim that the ultimate and only culprit for contemporary racism in China is the white West. Instead, Lan (2014) points to the need to understand racialization as process and structure, that is, to see if racism is being institutionalized it is important to consider how legal and policing systems produce and enforce racial logics. While Roberto Castillo (2020) argues it is likely that “institutional racism” may not yet be an accurate way of characterizing Chinese racialization toward African workers in China, the racialization of Muslims in Northwest China is not simply a problem of ethnic bias that the state is attempting to manage (as may be the case of Black African guest workers in China). Instead, in this context the state is explicitly mandating anti-Muslim racism in the form of an institutionalized, colonial campaign that moves through the Xinjiang education, media, and banking systems to the hospital, the police, and the courts. It is not simply a matter of a taxi driver calling a Uyghur a turban-head; this casual racism is the result of racist institutions. The taxi driver’s statement is symptomatic of the whole of society’s approach to counterterrorism that the Chinese state has adapted since 2009. This means that state media continually frame pious Uyghurs as vermin who should be hunted down in the streets (Byler 2022b). It means that Uyghur schools are staffed with Han settler teachers who say things in the classroom like, “I have thought about learning Uyghur (language) because I have so many Uyghur students, but I’m worried that it will make me stupid” (Byler 2022, 409)—implying that Uyghurs are stupid because of the Turkic language they speak. Han state officials who discuss “foreign Islam,” meaning normative Islamic practice, such as Quranic recitation, mosque attendance, and votive fasting as signs of ideological cancer (Grose 2019). And most importantly perhaps, given its relationship to violence, police on the hunt for “terrorist gang” bounties infiltrate communities, turning Uyghurs into informants and employing low-wage Han migrants as red-arm-banded “security personnel” at every housing complex and bus station. Eventually an army of over one million “volunteers” were coercively drafted to live in Uyghur villages, and the police built digital dossiers for each Muslim, slotting them into finely tuned categories of trustworthy, normal, untrustworthy. In each of these contexts Uyghurs are taught that their own culture, traditions, language, and appearance are “backward” (Chinese: luohou) at best and dangerous at worst (Byler 2022). In such a context, “racial learning” abounds in an institutionalized form (Lan 2019).

The Violence Work of Racialized Surveillance

The Uyghur region became an experimental space for innovations in policing. As Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, James Leibold, and Daria Impiombato (2021 17–18) note,

Dividing local communities into micro-policing units as small as 10 families, the authorities have combined human and automated surveillance tools to profile and preemptively target (nearly exclusively Muslim) ethnic minorities, removing any sense of privacy or safety from their homes…. [As a result,] the meaning of home, neighbours and the Neighbourhood Committee have all fundamentally altered in Xinjiang.

Many of the young men I interviewed during my ethnographic fieldwork during this period told me about how they or people they knew had been cultivated as informants. Several of them, I later learned, were secretly informing the police on the conversations I had with them. This is why they tested my attitudes toward the police and Islamic practice; they wanted to know which side I was on—for or against the “turban-heads.” For me, and much more so the Muslims I encountered, the circle of those who could be trusted radically narrowed.

A Uyghur police officer I interviewed after both of us left the region told me that his primary role in this system of oppression was to act as an interpreter for Han police commanders. “We were supposed to call [Uyghur suspects] ‘terrorists,’” he told me in Uyghur, interjecting the Chinese word for “terrorist” (Chinese: kongbu fenzi) (Byler 2022a). He explained:

The vast majority of the groups we found were not separatists or terrorists at all. These were labels we gave to people who committed other crimes, or didn’t commit any crime at all, but who had no one to defend them. (Byler 2022a)

Continuing, he said:

We had a policy which encouraged people to spy on each other. Often they did this for money, or because we threatened them or their families. Of course we knew that a lot of our tips were just false accusations. Some people did that for money, while some people did that to take revenge on others. But we would arrest people regardless of the truth of information. For example, if four or five people gathered together for activities such as visiting a friend or attending a funeral and someone said it was an illegal gathering to teach Islam or plan violence, we would arrest everyone who attended and label the host the ringleader. Everyone knew that at a funeral, people are required to conduct religious rituals. This is normal since Uyghurs are Muslim. But the spy would exaggerate and say it was extremist or terrorist. People who were being accused have no way to prove that they are innocent. Often, they ended up being sentenced to 4 or 5 years in prison or “education through hard labor” camps. The informant was given money and we received our commendation. This was so common.

As in all places where they exist, police in China are “violence workers” (Correia and Wall 2018; Tahir 2019). While the Public Security Bureau has existed since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, it was not until 1989 that the state found it necessary to create the institution of the armed police. Prior to this, public security was enacted through the human surveillance of neighborhood committees attached to work units. Vagrants, or those without a place within these units, could be detained and sent to camps for thought reform and hard labor. After the student protests in Tiananmen, the state decided that it was time to reform this system, providing a hard edge to community policing. It was then that they began to build a professional force supported by neighborhood committees reformed as a Civil Affairs Ministry and private security forces—police assistants and guards—hired by corporations and institutions. In the Xinjiang context many of the police and Civil Affairs Ministry personnel in positions of power came from the Han settler population—it was the low-level workers that were hired from Muslim populations. As my research has shown (Byler 2021b), many of them joined the police because it was a way of simultaneously providing for and protecting their families from the policing system.

By 2017, the Uyghur region had the largest concentration of police as a proportion of the Chinese population. As a study by Xu, Leibold, and Impiombato (2021) notes, drawing on a police academy report, as many as 10,700 regular police officers, along with 30,870 assistant police officers and 48,010 militia guards, were hired by 2018. The entire region has a population of around 25 million, while Muslims make up 60 percent of the population. One study I conducted showed that around 80 percent of police reports in the capital city focused on the Muslim population despite them making up less than 20 percent of the city’s population (Byler 2021a). Policing became a central driver of the economy, as all of these new officers began the task of evaluating, detaining, and monitoring the Muslim population. Billions of dollars were invested in state-of-the-art safe-city surveillance systems, a region-wide network of more than 7000 surveillance hubs—labeled “People’s Convenience Police Stations” (Wong 2019)—biometric checkpoints, and digital forensics tools that were used to scan targeted citizens’ smartphones.

It was in this process that surveillance itself was racialized. To reprise Simone Browne’s (2015) conceptualization of racializing surveillance, the police, equipped with biometric assessment tools and digital forensics devices, produced parameters of what counted as normal and abnormal ethnoreligious behavior. It “reified boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines” (Browne 2015, 16). This new sequence in racializing surveillance, as in Bangladesh-India borderland contexts studied by Sahana Ghosh (2019, 870), produced a kind of racialized “detectability” of things that deviated from the imposed settler norms of colonial institutions.

As internal police documents demonstrate markers of Islamic behavior, such as wearing an Islamic veil or having a beard, as well as any behavior that fell outside of the gaze of the state, such as using a virtual private network (VPN) or encrypted chat application like WhatsApp, became a sign of untrustworthiness. “Turban-heads” were digitized. Whether as images or in real life, spotting the probability of a pious Muslim now resulted in an automated alert. This enforcement of anti-Muslim racism allowed police to diagnose the presence of supposed “extremists” and “terrorists” at an unprecedented scale. In the space of less than two years, between 2017 and 2018, hundreds of thousands of Muslims were detained. Automated systems harvesting and assessing data built by private state contractors, low-level Muslim police assistants, and Han settler commanders produced a project of racializing Muslim bodies while protecting the economy of the settler population.

There were inconveniences for everyone, but over time the absence of hundreds of thousands of people became somewhat normal. Nearly every Muslim family was missing a family member, friend, or neighbor. These absences subtracted parts of who they were, their absence placing life on hold at times. The fact of a loved one in detention was held over them as a threat. In many cases, they were asked to support the police’s decision to detain their relative. If they did not, they too could be detained (Byler 2021a, 2022b).

The normalization of this world of racialized surveillance affected non-Muslim citizens as well. As a Han woman told me after a recent visit to the region (Byler 2020):

There has been six years of this already, so it feels like it might continue on for a long time, even though it is not sustainable to keep it this way. Everyone is unhappy. The police have to work long hours away from their family. And the Uyghurs are being sent for training. We don’t know who has actually been the cause of violence in the years before. Back then we feared ISIS was coming, but now that threat doesn’t seem real, either.

Racialization and systems of policing are historically produced, institutionalized forms of control. The norms that were constructed by them required more than an individual acknowledging their complicity. Stepping away from, and abolishing, them takes organizing and revolutionary action, producing and reproducing that kind of world. Occasionally glimpses of that possibility emerge when Han people acknowledge how their fear of abstract threats has blinded them to their anti-Muslim racism. In an online forum that briefly took shape in 2021, one Han participant said,

All of us live with fear, that’s what happens when you grow up in a culture of fear, but there is one thing I can do when I am in China: Don’t spread this fear. Don’t bring this fear to your children. Don’t bring it to the next generation of young people (Byler 2021c).

While recent scholarship has shown that families also contribute to the logics and violence of policing (Ibrahim 2021), they can also be a space for cultivating abolition and antiracism through pedagogies that rely on cultural archives of resistance (Yonucu 2022). If there is to be an abolition of Islamophobia in China, this is the space in which it will begin. And as November 2022 protests across China and the world have shown, in brief episodes, occasionally conversations from around kitchen tables move to the streets (Dorjee 2022). These protests were sparked by the deaths of Uyghur children and parents in a fire in an apartment complex that had been locked down due to China’s “zero COVID” policy. In the streets in Shanghai and elsewhere, young people who had seen their own mobility tightly controlled by community surveillance held up blank pieces of paper as signs of their protests.

The range of things Han people were protesting—from arbitrary health checks to a regime founded on fear and police violence—could not be taken from their kitchen tables and openly articulated in public because they would be picked up by the cameras and would result in their arrest. The blank pages were drawing on a cultural archive of past protest movements where handwritten signs demanded revolutionary change. While most of the current protestors were motivated by their own experiences of policing, and were not protesting the treatment of Uyghurs, the blank pages of some protestors likely included a demand to close the camps (something that was made explicit in Chinese diaspora protests around the world) (Smith 2023). Though only a start, these protests in themselves should be read as a move toward the abolition of China’s security state.

Darren Byler is an anthropologist in the School for 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 book titled In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports 2021). His current research interests are focused on policing and carceral theory and global China.

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