Xinjiang Year Zero

Dear Colleagues,

We are glad to announce the publication of Xinjiang Year Zero, a book published by ANU Press in collaboration with the Made in China Journal. You can download it for free at this link: https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/xinjiang-year-zero.

Below you can find the summary and Table of Contents.

The Editors,

Darren Byler, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere

Xinjiang Year Zero

Since 2017, the Chinese authorities have detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in ‘reeducation camps’ in China’s northwestern Xinjiang autonomous region. While the official reason for this mass detention was to prevent terrorism, the campaign has since become a wholesale attempt to remould the ways of life of these peoples—an experiment in social engineering aimed at erasing their cultures and traditions in order to transform them into ‘civilised’ citizens as construed by the Chinese state. Through a collection of essays penned by scholars who have conducted extensive research in the region, this volume sets itself three goals: first, to document the reality of the emerging surveillance state and coercive assimilation unfolding in Xinjiang in recent years and continuing today; second, to describe the workings and analyse the causes of these policies, highlighting how these developments insert themselves not only in domestic Chinese trends, but also in broader global dynamics; and, third, to propose action, to heed the progressive Left’s call since Marx to change the world and not just analyse it.

Table of Contents

Preface – Andrea Pitzer

Introduction – Darren Byler, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere

Part I: Discursive Roots

1. 1. Nation-Building as Epistemic Violence – Ye Hui
   2. Revolution and State Formation as Oasis Storytelling in Xinjiang – Zenab Ahmed
   3. Blood Lineage – Guldana Salimjan
   4. Good and Bad Muslims in Xinjiang – David Brophy
   5. Imprisoning the Open Air: Preventive Policing as Community Detention in Northwestern China – Darren Byler

Part II: Settler Colonialism

1. 1. Oil and Water – Tom Cliff
   2. Recruiting Loyal Stabilisers: On the Banality of Carceral Colonialism in Xinjiang – Guldana Salimjan
   3. Triple Dispossession in Northwestern China – Sam Tynen
   4. Replace and Rebuild: Chinese Colonial Housing in Uyghur Communities – Timothy A. Grose
   5. The Spatial Cleansing of Xinjiang: Mazar Desecration in Context – Rian Thum
   6. Camp Land: Settler Ecotourism and Kazakh Removal in Contemporary Xinjiang – Guldana Salimjan
   7. Factories of Turkic Muslim Internment – Darren Byler

Part III: Global Connections

1. 1. The Global Age of the Algorithm: Social Credit, Xinjiang, and the Financialisation of Governance in China – Nicholas Loubere and Stefan Brehm
   2. Surveillance, Data Police, and Digital Enclosure in Xinjiang’s ‘Safe Cities’ – Darren Byler
   3. Transnational Carceral Capitalism and Private Paramilitaries in Xinjiang and Beyond – Gerald Roche
   4. Chinese Feminism, Tibet, and Xinjiang – Séagh Kehoe
   5. China: Xinjiang :: India: Kashmir – Nitasha Kaul

Conclusion – Darren Byler, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere

Appendix: Xinjiang Timeline