Producing the Uyghur “Terrorist-Worker” through Digital Surveillance in Northwest China

Since 2017, the Chinese state has detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghur and Kazakh people in Northwest China for past Islamic activity and political behavior the government later deemed illegal. In a document submitted to the United Nations, Chinese authorities described these detainees as civilians whose extremist or terrorist activity “was not serious” or “whose malicious intent was not deep” and were able to “express repentance.”1 Over time a process of transforming these detainees emerged. More than 533,000 civilians, many of whom were first held in camps, were formally prosecuted.2 But thousands more were transferred from camps, known formally as “closed concentrated education training centers,” to factory complexes that have been built in the Uyghur region over the past decade. These industrial parks were often built by companies and government agencies from more affluent parts of the country such as Shenzhen or Shanghai.3 This system produced a reeducation labor regime that mimics aspects of the migrant worker system in eastern China that has made China the manufacturer of the world. But it has incorporated cutting-edge surveillance and policing to make worker movement even more highly controlled both on and off the factory floor than for migrant workers elsewhere in the country. This troubling arrangement has produced a new category of worker, which I contend is best captured by a phrase that combines ideas not typically associated with each other. They have become “terroristworkers.” My analysis of this situation is based on more than 24 months of ethnographic research in the Uyghur region between 2011 and 2018. This included extensive interviews with one such “terrorist-worker,” Iskander, who was detained in 2017. I spoke frequently and at length with him and with his brother (whose story I tell in chapter 3 of my book Terror Capitalism) before Iskander’s detention in 2017. Since that time, I have conducted repeated interviews with his family members, one of whom managed to flee the country while still maintaining contact with their remaining family members in Xinjiang.4 During my final research trip to the region in 2018, I observed the empty houses of Iskander’s relatives and spoke with low-level state workers about the goals of the camp system. In this essay, which draws from these interviews and observations,5 my primary aim is to demonstrate how Uyghur farmers can be turned into unfree workers under the sign of terrorism. Iskander’s account is thus best understood within the context of broader economic transformations in the region and by considering how the rise of this odd conjunction, the “terrorist-worker,” figures in scholarship of the frontiers of global capitalism. In doing so, my analysis makes a broader argument about a global turn toward techno-