“No Cracks, no Blind Spots, no Gaps”: Technologically-Enabled “Preventative” Counterterrorism and Mass Repression in Xinjiang, China

Abstract

AbstractThe Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is now the site of the largest mass repression of an ethnic and/or religious minority in the world today. Researchers estimate that since 2016 over one million people (mostly ethnic Uyghurs) have been detained without trial in the XUAR in a system of “re-education” camps. Outside of the camps, the region’s Turkic Muslim population are subjected to a dense network of hi-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints, and interpersonal monitoring which severely limit all forms of personal freedom penetrating society to the granular level. This chapter argues that the erection of this “carceral state” has been propelled by a “preventative” counterterrorism that has incorporated key practices (e.g. greater reliance on new surveillance technologies) and discourses (e.g. Islamaphobia) of the “global war on terrorism” with the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in pursuit of the negation of the very possibility of “terrorism”. As such the contemporary situation in the XUAR represents not only the mass repression of an ethnic and religious minority by an authoritarian regime but also an example of the dystopian potentialities of ostensibly “neutral” technologies.