Episode 7 | Being Muslim in China

This month, China’s National People’s Congress held its annual meeting and passed a new law on ‘promoting ethnic unity and progress’. The legislation further codifies the suppression of non-Han languages and customs in China in the name of national cohesion and civilisational uplift.

For years, the Party-State has dictated the correct way to be Chinese and subjected the Uyghurs and other Muslim populations in Xinjiang to mass internment, high-tech surveillance, and forced assimilation. Yet, for centuries, Muslims have been an integral part of the country we call China today. Islamic and Confucian cultures learned from and enriched each other. What does it mean to be Muslim in China, historically and in the present? What has led to the current repression in Xinjiang, and how might one survive and struggle against state violence and authoritarian control in the year 2026?

For this episode, Yangyang spoke with historian Rian Thum and anthropologist Darren Byler on the past and present of the Uyghur homeland, and how identities can survive in community and through the written word.

Guest Bios:

Rian Thum is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester, where he teaches courses on the history of China and the history of the Islamic world. His research focuses on Muslims of China and their diasporas across Asia, with special attention to mobility, technologies of the word, Islamic thought, and linguistic diversity. Thum is the author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (2014) and Islamic China (2025). He has also published on atrocity crimes in the Uyghur region.

Darren Byler is an Associate Professor in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on the Uyghur people in China, surveillance technologies and colonial racial capitalism. He is the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (2022), co-winner of the 2023 Gregory Bateson Award from the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the 2023 Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology. He is also author of In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (2021), which investigates the surveillance and internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and co-translator of The Backstreets (2022), a Uyghur language novel by Perhat Tursun.

Related Materials:

Byler, Darren. 2021. In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Byler, Darren. 2022. Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Thum, Rian. 2014. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Thum, Rian. 2025. Islamic China: An Asian History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tursun, Perhat, translated by Darren Byler and Anonymous. 2022. The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Full episode transcript:

Yangyang (00:00)

Every child growing up in China, which includes myself from 30 years ago, knows the legend of Zheng He, the Ming era sailor and diplomat whose fleet traveled all the way across the Indian Ocean to reach the Horn of Africa. I can still hear the pride in my mother’s voice when she first told me the story of Zheng He Xia Xi Yang. I did not know it at the time, and I only found out quite recently Zheng He was a Muslim.

I’m still struggling to reconcile the idea of a celebrated Muslim Chinese hero from six centuries ago with the ethnic and religious oppression faced by Muslims in China today, especially in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. Perhaps there is a reason why Zheng He’s Muslim faith is not more widely known. What does it mean to be Muslim in China? What is happening in Xinjiang and why?

I’m really honored to be joined by two preeminent scholars on these subjects. First, we have Dr. Rian Thum, senior lecturer at the University of Manchester and the author of a fascinating new book, Islamic China: An Asian History. Rian, thank you so much for joining us.

Rian (01:13)

Thank you, it’s great to have a chance to talk with you.

Yangyang(01:16)

So Rian, in your new book, and congratulations on that, you take issue with this question, when did Islam first arrive in China? What is the problem with such a question?

Rian (01:26)

Well, let me answer it first. Maybe somewhere seventh, certainly by the eighth century, we have our first Muslims arriving in China. I don’t have any problem with the question if you’re interested in understanding the seventh or eighth centuries in China or in the Muslim majority world. Where it becomes a problem is the place where this question most appears, is when people expect answering that question to have significant explanatory value for people a thousand years later to understand the Muslims of the Qing or the Muslims of the present in China people’s first question is often well how did they get there and the answer is they were born there in most cases. So this question leads to some a lot actually of empirical misunderstandings and and sort of wrong information about the history of Muslims in China. It’s also a philosophical problem that I won’t get into. Philosophers have long criticized the idea that you would try to understand the nature of something by looking at its at its origins. But let me give a couple of more practical examples of how this question works. One is that if we if we look at the history of Buddhism in China and compare it to the history of Islam in China, you don’t so often find people asking, well, how did those Buddhists get here in China? Because the idea is that Buddhism is a part of an authentic Chinese culture. Whereas the idea behind the question of, when did Muslims come to China is that, well, this is a kind of ultimately alien thing.

And that’s exactly how the Chinese government today categorizes these two religious traditions. Buddhism is called officially a Chinese religion, whereas Islam is officially a foreign religion, despite the fact that both of them have been there for over a thousand years. I think another useful example for thinking about this question is the way that a community, an online community called Muslim disparagers in China talk about and talk to Muslims. And one of their common anti-Islam sayings is, well, if you don’t like what’s going on here in China, go back to your ancestors’ homes, which tells you a bit about what that question is doing.

Yangyang (04:10.817)

This is really fascinating and in your book, you also explore beautifully the value and the limitations of origin stories, like where the narrative breaks. And one of the examples I was also thinking about things like studying the history of science in China is, for example, in pre-modern astronomy. And of course, that is really important in terms of imperial charisma, in terms of the regulation of agriculture, the observation of astronomical phenomenon, the observation of the movement of stars. And of course, a lot of these instruments and techniques, they were heavily influenced by transmissions from the Islamic world. And some of these transmissions might have come from the Indian subcontinent through South and Southeast Asia. And some of these came through the ancient Silk Road. A lot of that is in the region we call Xinjiang today. And so Rian, could you tell us a bit about the region? Of course, it wasn’t called Xinjiang until the late 19th century. But what was the role of that region historically in interactions between the Chinese world and Islamic world. With the understanding that these two worlds were intertwined.

Rian (05:03)

The region known as Xinjiang or Eastern Turkestan has been one of the two main vectors of connection between Muslims in China and Muslims outside of China. One of the other important vectors is course the sea and the route represented by Zheng He’s travels which you mentioned.

But this Xinjiang or eastern Turkestan region has been especially important because it’s where the land connections happen. Through that region, not the earliest, but some of the very early exchanges happen, and they continue to happen well into the present. One of the results of that is that a lot of the forms of Islam that are dominant among both Chinese speaking Muslims and the Uighurs arrive, whether from Central Asia or from India or from Afghanistan, arrive through that region. And for the story of the Hui, the people who for the most part are Chinese speaking Muslims and are scattered around all of China, this means that a lot of their organizing ideas and senses of what Islam is and how it should be practiced, went through a moment of transformation among the ancestors of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang or eastern Turkestan before they then spread into the rest of China. And so you can find these little elements of what we might call today Uyghur culture embedded in the practices and beliefs of some of the Muslim groups around the rest of China.

Yangyang (06:51)

This is really, really fascinating. And as you mentioned earlier as well, right, like the region is very diverse. It has had different names throughout history and it is geographically fluid in that context. And of course, the name Xinjiang, The name was adopted by the Qing Empire, but then it was in the late 19th century when the Qing Empire was really intensifying its colonization efforts into making it into a proper Chinese province.

And then of course, Xinjiang became part of the People’s Republic of China after the Communist takeover in 1949. And over the past several years, the region has been in the news a lot and is regrettably not because of its ancient history or its rich culture, but because of the Chinese government’s ongoing oppression in the region that has made international headlines. And to talk about this, I would like to bring in our second guest. Dr. Darren Byler is an associate professor at Simon Fraser University and the author of Terror Capitalism, Wager Dispossession and Masculinity in the Chinese City. So Darren, can you give us a rough overview of what has been going on in Xinjiang over the past decade or so? Like when did this current wave of oppression start? Has anything changed over the past several years?

Darren (08:03)

Thank you, Yangyang, for inviting me to be here. It’s pleasure to speak with you.

The problems in Xinjiang have a long life and really didn’t just start in the last 10 years. Since the founding of the PRC, there have been waves of settlement, of bringing new people to the region from other parts of China. That though intensified in the 1990s and 2000s as China is… opening up to the west becoming part of the world economy in a different sort of way as it’s becoming an export oriented economy and needing raw materials to drive that economy. The Uyghur region is the source of around 20-25 percent of China’s natural gas and oil. It’s a large source of coal, even more significant probably than the oil and natural gas. And as infrastructure was built out in the 90s and 2000s, large-scale agriculture became possible in ways that it hadn’t been prior to this point. And so you see a real intensification of cotton production, so that now maybe more than 90 % of China’s cotton is coming from Xinjiang, which means that it’s a resource colony now in a way that it hadn’t been before.

And those dynamics, bringing all of these new people to the region, which are primarily Han people from other parts of the country. And through government sponsorship, helping them to really take root in the Uyghur region, in the southern part of the Uyghur region, which is the Uyghur homeland, where 90 % of the population had been Uyghur prior to this moment, or even more in some places, just has a dramatic effect. And so you see land being reallocated, land being taken really from Uyghur farmers, Uyghurs being pushed into sort of sharecropper positions, working for these big agribusinesses, and new controls happening at the local level in the government, in the schooling system, in the banking system. Basically the institutions of the Uyghurs were captured in ways that they hadn’t been, even during the Maoist period.

And so that’s really what’s intensified violence from Uyghurs towards this new settler population and towards the state authorities. In 2009, there was large scale riots and protests in the streets, which were really in response to Uyghurs being mistreated in Eastern China. They’ve been sent as workers in factories by Han workers. The center of the riot was around ethnic tension and whether the state was going to protect Uyghur workers. And from the Uyghur perspective, felt as though the state wasn’t protecting them, that the state was there to protect the Han population.

And so that’s what’s brought us to the current decade, which is where the state is now framing Uyghurs as potential terrorists or separatists, extremists, as a population. And they’re saying 15 % of the adult male and adult female population are potentially extremists or terrorists. And we need to find these extremists and put them into forms of reeducation. And we need to create this large scale job creation programs where we’re going to put people into factories to work. They’ve really radically transformed Uyghur society in the last 10 years and that is really unprecedented in the history of the region.

Yangyang  (11:43)

Thank you for placing the current oppression into this much longer and richer historical context. And as you mentioned, right, like the ethnic issues with regards to how or where Uyghurs belong in the Chinese context has been present since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. And the policies have shifted from the socialist period to the present day. And a lot of the current oppression are tied with economic development in China and the country’s integration into global capitalism.

And one of the issues that has really captured the headlines are these mass internment. These internment camps were, I guess, at its height., one million or more Uyghurs were interned there. And, Darren, you also have this shorter book in the camps that really documents what takes place inside these camps and what takes place outside of them. And in particular, the role of technology, how technologies both reflect and reproduce the differentiation between Han Chinese people and Uyghurs. So can you talk a bit more about that, how the racialization is reflected in these new technological developments.

Darren (12:53)

Yeah, I think that that’s a really important part of the story and how this system is being operationalized is the use of technology. The mid 2010s is when in the world we saw breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and face recognition systems, computer vision, and Chinese companies were keeping up with companies around the world who are pioneering these kinds of tools to manage populations at scale. And so we saw them adapting the same kinds of technologies that the Israelis were using, for instance, to control Palestinians, where they’re using tools that can scan through someone’s phone and look through their digital history. And this can be over years. They can adjust the parameters of the search, the scanning function of these tools to detect whether someone has used a VPN, has used WhatsApp, has images of people with Islamic symbols on their clothing or dressing as though they’re Muslim. And as they’re scanning someone’s device, they’re also looking at their thoughts, their search history. And so they’re combining some of the tools of surveillance capitalism something that all of us are part of everywhere in the world where big are the data that we’re producing as we’re moving through the world online is being used to target us with ads and figure out who we are as people.

They’re using those kinds of tools now to assess the loyalty of Uyghurs to the state and the potential criminality of Uyghurs to the state. And In some cases, it’s really not about actual criminality, as far as I can tell. It’s more about we can use this as a justification for putting this person into a camp. So using these kinds of tools, it begins to not only detect people’s past behavior, but predict their future and to control their behavior in the present, and so people now realize that in order to work within the system, they need to behave as the state wants them to behave, as loyal Chinese subjects, need to speak in Chinese, they need to repost the posts that the state wants you to post. And so it’s really training Uyghurs in ways to be political subjects that hadn’t existed prior to this and really reorienting them to the state.

Yangyang (15:31)

Yeah, I recall in your book, you had this part that really struck me, right? For example, someone who is Han Chinese, like myself, might be able to move through Xinjiang with relative ease. However, these new technological installations create a lot more obstacles and frictions and potentials to interface with the violent organs of the state for someone who is Uyghur or who looks or behaves Uyghur. And in Xinjiang today, it is not just the living who face these constant repression. Even the dead are not safe. And one particularly cruel act of erasure the Chinese government has been carrying out in Xinjiang is the destruction of traditional Uyghur burial grounds. So Rian, coming back to you, in your earlier book, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, you explore some of these cultural and religious significance of Uyghur burial grounds. In particular, these shrines are linked with also how books are written, read and shared in Uyghur culture.

And I should also note that in your new book, Islamic China, you have these really fascinating details about how manuscript and printing technologies are reflected in the interactions between the Chinese, Confucian Chinese world and the Islamic world, which I encourage everyone to read. But coming back to the Uyghur culture and Uyghur burial grounds, can you tell us a bit about the Uyghur manuscript technology and its religious and cultural significance?

Rian (17:00)

Yeah. For the handful of people who’ve read both of my books, Yangyang, I think will notice that I have an obsession with books as physical objects and with books as one among many technologies of the word and a technology that comes in many different forms and has different impacts for the way we think about the world. I think this is something that’s becoming more familiar to people, non-scholars in their interaction with the online world. Everyone’s aware of how much not today about how much knowledge is shaped by the technology that we transmitted in, which is not really the case for the more old-fashioned technology of books.

So for the Uyghur case, there is a strong connection between these holy places, these shrines, and not necessarily all books, but books about the Uyghur past. And the shrines are seen as places where Or were seen I should say now Were seen as places where you might interact with your own past where you would learn about your own past and they were all the more important because the local history the history of us the Uyghurs or before they were Uyghurs they simply called themselves Musulman on our local our own history would not be taught in in schools there. There was widespread Primary education, but that that was not one of the subs and if you wanted to learn what happened in your own homeland in the past, the best place to do that was at the burial place of the figures who were active centuries earlier. And many of those were people who brought Islam to the region in the local telling, or they could be great scholars or warriors.

One of the interesting things that happens is that people begin to then attach the books about those figures to the shrines themselves, and the idea emerges that a good shrine, an authentic shrine, a powerful shrine, should have a book that goes with it. And the idea that your book is more authoritative if it was copied at the shrine or has some connection to the shrine itself. Because we’re dealing with a world, before 1930s, in which books are produced by hand copying, in which they are manuscripts, which has a kind of Wikipedia-like effect to it, where every time it’s copied, the copyist can add information, can alter the text, and they often did, and has the effect of comments. There’s a comment section in many of the manuscripts, which is what anyone who read those manuscripts, cared to write in the margins, and you can see traces of their shrine work worship there. To bring this back to where you started the question, which is in the recent repression in the region, these shrines have been recognized by the current state, the People’s Republic of China, as significant nodes of authenticity and meaning for local inhabitants, and they have been attacked.

Because the shrines, and I’m not sure that the officials really understand it in the same way I’m saying it, but they do see the reverence that people have for the shrines, and they do see the power of the shrines to bring people together in pilgrimage, and they do see that, I think they can see, especially the very local officials, that knowledge generated at and disseminated at the shrines has a higher level of authenticity and truthfulness for people. And so I have to say that when the intense repression really ramped up in 2017 and 2018, I was not surprised to see that what are arguably the two most important shrines for Uyghurs were destroyed. They were bulldozed. I think the classic interpretation of this is this is where Uyghurs were participating in Islam that was outside of the control of the state. And that it was a place where people gathered in large numbers, which this state is nervous about across China.

But I think there’s this additional problem of people seek medical treatment at shrines. And people will, for example, pray in the direction of a shrine from a distance without seeing it. So even when they’re not at the shrine, the shrine has some power and I really just don’t think the state can compete in its messages about what is true, what is good, what is bad, what is historically accurate, cannot really compete with the power of those shrines. At least it couldn’t a century ago and you can see I think in the destruction of these sites which are so important to… less so to urban Uyghurs, but especially to Uyghurs in rural areas, at least until recently, probably still today, are the vast majority of the population.

Yangyang (22:36)

Thank you so much, Rian. Actually, like The Sacred Routes of Uyghur Culture is a book I return to very often. When I first picked it up, I thought, this is a really technical subject. I might just skim it. But when I read it and I realized, this is actually really rich. And one thing that I’m taking from it is just the idea of how words are written and read and shared also impacts on one hand, who owns these words, who can lay claim to them. And on the other hand, what is the purpose of these words, right?

And actually last year on our show, also had a professor Tom Mulaney and we talked about the history of Chinese typewriters and the history of Chinese language input methods, and that of course is also developed through the course of Chinese interactions with the West and Japan, and also that has impacted, for example, the conceptions of copyright in China as well. So I think that relates to what Darren was mentioning earlier as well, Technologies are not just these neutral, abstract, inanimate things. They are social, historical, and they are political. And so, Darren, coming back to you in Terror Capitalism, you have an especially moving chapter, which is about reading as a group and reading among friends. In particular, you talked about a young Uyghur man you befriended, which you call Ablikim, and you read a novel together, and then you co-translated into English, which became the first Uyghur novel to be published in English language. Can you tell us a little bit about that novel, its author, and your co-translator?

Darren (24:07)

Yeah, that was one of the most memorable things I’ve done in my academic career was, you know, sitting with a friend and reading a text really closely and under trying to understand this text, you know, both because it’s in Uyghur and I’m not a native Uyghur speaker, of course, but more so because of the knowledge that’s being conveyed through that text, the author of the book Perhat Tursun is someone who is influenced by world literature and philosophy, but also by his training as a sort of turkologist, as someone who knows Turkic languages and sort of Sufi poetics. And he’s bringing that into the contemporary by talking about a migrant who’s coming to the big city, Urumchi, the capital of the region and how he’s encountering this sort of strange world of capitalist modernity as someone who grew up in the shadow of the mountains herding sheep, that’s the character, but also Perhat the author, coming to the city and then being reoriented by the grid of the city and also by populations of people that he hadn’t grown up around and know speaking a different language, who are kind of always turning a blind eye to him, that are shooing him away, are seeing him as less than them, or in some cases as someone who should be targeted, should be eliminated. So there’s scenes in the book, one of the memorable ones is a whole wall on the page of the word “chop,” where it’s someone who maybe has a mental problem walking down the street saying chop, chop, chop, and he wants to chop off the heads of everyone in southern Xinjiang, which is, you know, that’s where the Uyghurs live. So it’s really clear that there’s a sort of genocidal rage that’s sort of under the surface. And there’s this fog, which is also the pollution of the city that is kind of invading the protagonist’s skin.

Anyway, there’s all these like really evocative images in the text and so reading it with this friend Ablikim, who’s also from the same, you know, small village in southern Xinjiang that the protagonist and the author are from, or you know, a similar one, and how he himself had experienced the same sorts of things that he hadn’t known until he got to the city what these tall buildings would be like and what it would be like to be referred to as the man with the mustache, to kind of have his body read in a certain way by the non-Uyghur, through the non-Uyghur gaze, through the Han gaze. And no matter how much he learned, how much he went to school, he would never fit in, he would never be able to sort of move up through the ranks of the different businesses he was part of or the school that he became a teacher at, and said he would be slotted into this particular role as a Uyghur. And also the kind of rage that my, that Ablikim felt, that Perhat felt as well, where they are trying their best, these are brilliant people trying their best to stay alive, to continue to think and be creative and build a future for themselves and for their families and how they’re continually blocked by virtue of who they are as people because of their religious and ethnic identity. And ultimately, Ablikim said, he feels like this book, the book we were translating, was written for him because it’s the story of his own life. And it’s the story of many of the other migrants I met.

When I interviewed them and told them about this book, was working on co-translating and they would say, they hadn’t actually read the book in some cases, but they felt like that story sounded really true to them too. And so, kind of bringing that book to life and seeing how it resonated with people and then how it resonates once it’s translated now in English has been a really meaningful thing.

For Ablikim, the main difference between him and the protagonist is that protagonist is all alone. And so, you know, in the end, the protagonist is pushed into kind of the insane asylum. And Ablikim told me that, you know, the main difference is he didn’t have any friends. I had friends. I have friends now who protect me and keep me alive, make me get up in the morning, that share food with me, that prevent me from taking my own life. Ablikim was someone who had thought about suicide multiple times, but would talk about his faith and also his friends as something that prevented him from doing that. Depression was widespread among young Uyghur men that I was interviewing. And so thinking about friendship and how it can really support people and keep them going as a kind of palliative care. It’s not something that’s going to solve their problems, but it keeps them engaged in the world was really meaningful to me. These kinds of friendships are really intense. It’s sort of a soulmate and blood brother kind of friendship, something that growing up in small town Ohio, I hadn’t experienced, at least not that intensely where there’s a kind of jealousy, where if you don’t respond to a phone call or a text message right away, like something’s wrong, or if you’re starting to have friends with someone else, that’s also a problem. Seeing the level of intensity and support that these men share, these are heterosexual men, but that they are supporting each other in this really intense way, just showed me a bit of what it means to be human. That this is like building these kinds of relationships and being open in that way is how you really sustain life, even in the worst kinds of circumstances.

And the most difficult part of this for me now is that, know, Abla Kim has, as far as I know, been sent to one of these camps. He may now be working in a factory. And Perhat, the author of the book, has been sentenced to 16 years in prison. And knowing how fragile both of them were before, that they were dealing with depression and now how their lives have been even more further upended because of how they were trying to live. Not that Ablikim was sent to a camp because of co-translating this, but because of having used a VPN and used basic technology that anyone would want to use if they want to know about the world.

That is just, it’s really hard, hard to think with, hard to live and kind of keep in your mind as a friend. I became friends with them as well, not to the same level that those Uyghur friends were, but they gave parts of themselves to me. And so I feel an obligation to them and I’m continuing to live with that obligation even in the present.

Yangyang (31:22)

Thank you for sharing this, Darren. I know it is really difficult. And I should mention the name of the novel is The Backstreets, and it can be bought in English translation from Columbia University Press. And its author, Perhat Tursun, is someone who I’ve only encountered through the page, through his words. He is also someone I think about often. He is about the same age as my parents.

And I think as Darren you just mentioned, he’s serving this long prison sentence. However, he was also someone in the 1980s who received a bilingual education and he wrote poetry and prose in both Uyghur and in Chinese. And so for as a Han Chinese person like myself, think at some point I might think in his mind, his Uyghur identity and his Chinese citizenship did not necessarily have to be in conflict at some point.

And the current government policies have made that impossible. And so he’s someone whom I think about in some ways also to think about the human cost and the social consequences and in some way to keep myself honest. And I know we are coming toward the end of our conversation. And there are two more questions I would like to ask both of you. And these are also questions that I think about a lot as a Han Chinese person living in the US and as someone who both studies history and also works on contemporary issues. So Rian, first coming to you, I remember I first met you several years ago when you and Darren and several other American scholars on Xinjiang were basically touring university campuses across the country to raise awareness about the ongoing oppression in Xinjiang.

And I can only imagine how physically, emotionally and intellectually challenging that was. And on the other hand, you’re a historian, you work in the archives, you just mentioned you’re a book nerd, you scavenge antique shops for old manuscripts. So how do you reconcile these two roles? And I also asked this at this political moment in this country, right? And I think this is a question about the social responsibilities and the civic responsibilities of the historian is also on the mind of lot of scholars of, US history or scholars of other authoritarian states.

Rian (33:48)

Well, I believe that history is always written in the service of the present. We don’t write histories of things that we as people living in the present aren’t interested in. So all history, despite appearing to be about the past, is equally entangled with the present. And for me, I really embrace that entanglement and I try to always have a clear relationship between the present and the past in the historical work I do. So it seems natural to me that historians would be involved in conversations about the present. There are of course also the more common defenses of history as something relevant to the present where we will say we can look at we can see larger patterns We can we can for example recognize that the Qing and the At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century tried some similar policies to what the PRC is is doing over the last decade for example trying to make all the Indigenous Muslim inhabitants into good Confucians and speak Chinese things like that at the same time, there’s a very practical element to this. When Darren and I were spending a lot of time giving talks about the situation, contemporary situation in the region, that was because, you know, colleagues at various universities were just sending out a flood of requests to anyone who knew something about the region. And a large portion of the people who had spent time in the Uyghur region were historians. So the bench is not very deep. And I think there was a special role to play over the last 10 years for historians of the Uyghur region, simply because we have some facility with the language. We’ve read a lot of the same books that Uyghurs have read. We know something about how the Chinese state works, even if we’re working on the Qing or even the Ming or earlier, because we have to deal with the state in terms of archives and things like that. Some of my role in documenting the extreme repression and atrocities that have occurred over the last 10 years was simply about familiarity with the culture and the text. Of course, I do think having a longer historical perspective is useful, but that’s also something I think most good anthropologists, for example, tend to have a pretty good grasp of.

Yangyang (36:38)

Thank you, Rian. And so speaking of current politics, Darren, I believe you must also know from the news the story of a Chinese man named Guan Heng.

And so he risked his life to travel to Xinjiang to witness and document the internment camps. And then he fled to the US and he applied for asylum. And while his asylum case was pending, he was arrested by immigration enforcement and he spent months in ICE custody.

And as we are speaking now, know that Guan Heng’s asylum case has just been granted and he has just been released from ICE custody, even though his situation is still very precarious. So Darren, you work in Canada now, you spend a lot of time in American institutions as well. And in both countries, I think you probably have also encountered overseas Chinese students who are Han Chinese like myself, who would like to express solidarity with Uyghurs in Xinjiang and feel moral outrage and in some ways guilt over what the Chinese government is doing in some ways in their name. And we saw some of that solidarity being expressed, for example, at the White Paper protests three years ago. And so I’m curious to hear your thoughts in this current political environment, where both anti-immigrant sentiments and Islamophobia are on the rise. What can someone like myself or what can we in general do?

Darren (38:12)

That’s a great question and a difficult one because there’s always, you know, I think the feeling of feeling hopeless is something that is in the air, is something that many people are struggling with in our current moment.

Then we have to also think about different kinds of sort of citizenship and power that people have, what is at their disposal. Of course, building relationships and staying engaged is something basic to being human and something that all of us can do. It’s interesting that Guan Heng’s story is a really important one because he’s someone who’s coming from you know, a position that’s not necessarily connected to the Uyghurs that he’s not, as far as I know, someone who is, you know, particularly targeted because of his own position as a Han person. You know, often I see Chinese citizens who are also targeted because they’re, you know, from the Falun Gong or because they’re

also from an ethnic or religious minority or they’re labor organizers or they’re queer activists. But Guan Heng is like a regular guy and someone who was not okay with the authoritarian context that he was living in, think one of the things he said is like, someone who’s opposed to being enslaved will not permit other people to be enslaved.

And that was what was motivating him to document what he documented and also how he’s like reality testing Western reporting through his documentation that he was looking at this BuzzFeed article where they were documenting these camps using sort of satellite imagery and he’s like I’m gonna go see if those things are really there and he went and saw them and documented them for the world. And so, you know, he was he was really putting his life on the line to do that. And then he was running away. He was pao-ing which is like something that you see lots and lots of Chinese young people doing these days or thinking about is, you know, how do we find a different future? I think the zero COVID policies where people were being arbitrarily quarantined, were being tracked using technology, really drove home the point of that, you know, that what we were talking about, what they might have heard about in relation to how Uyghurs were being tracked in Xinjiang that the state really did have that capacity and was now using it across the entire country in this more felt to them very arbitrary way. And so I think you do see some unity or emerging forms of unity in opposition to these kinds of controls. At the same time, like what to do about it is hard. It’s hard to see.

During the campus protests across the global north in the United States, I was happy to see Chinese activists joining in solidarity with people opposed to genocide in Palestine, and in some cases talking about what had happened to the Uyghurs in relation to that. And so there you see some forms of solidarity and movement building, but now we also see that the current administration in the US is using sort of thought police technology to track who was involved. What I’ve actually seen is really the US turning more towards the kinds of controls that I was seeing in China. So how do we stand? Where do we stand? think one of the things I tell Chinese students is it’s not always going to be this way, continuing to hold on to each other, to build community in real life is is one way to to stay alive and to survive and You can move movements in opposition grassroots movements in opposition. We can also get you know, the institutions of democratic states are not completely gone. We can mobilize those as well But these technologies are in the world so I feel like I always have to you know, counter the optimism with the hopelessness. And it’s hard to know exactly what the path is. I think staying alert, naming the problem and building community is really what’s there as a possible way forward.

Yangyang (42:26)

Yeah, I think a consistent theme in our conversation today is the importance of community, right? To remember your roots, where you come from, and where our origin stories are important is also important to remember to not give in to false binaries or artificial boundaries. And on that note, Dr. Darren Byler, thank you so much for joining us.

Darren (42:46)

Thanks for having me.

Yangyang (42:48)

And Dr. Rian Thum, thank you and congratulations again on the fascinating new book.

Rian (42:52)

Thank you, was a real pleasure talking to you.

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