The Social Life of Terror Capitalism Technologies in Northwest China

Abstract

This article examines the digital enclosure of Muslim minority data and labor through a techno-political “reeducation” system in Northwest China to make a broader argument about the way surveillance capitalism can be linked to ethnoracialization. Specifically, it considers how Chinese state capital investment incentivizes technology companies to engage in the dataveillance of ethno-racialized populations to generate what the article names terror capitalism. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, interviews with former detainees, and analysis of internal police reports, and written in conversation with feminist anthropological scholarship on capitalism and social reproduction, it argues that these systems have created a matrix of conversion devices that produce Muslim social life under the sign of terrorism while expropriating it as data and labor. At the same time these systems, ultimately, are vulnerable to outside interception—opening them to a partial reversal of the surveillant gaze.