TOTALIZING INFRASTRUCTURES: STATECRAFT IN THE UYGHUR PENAL COLONY

There were three lanes at the checkpoint in Turpan—an old Uyghur-majority oasis city on the northern reaches of the Taklamakan Desert in Northwest China. Two lanes were fitted with turnstiles, ID and face-scanners, metal detectors, and “data doors” which matched the SIM card of cell phones to the IDs of individuals. The third lane, on the far left, went through a simple metal gate. It was opened by a Uyghur police assistant, who looked at the faces of the people lined up behind it. Only people who appeared to be Han were permitted to exit through the third lane. They did not show their IDs to the police assistant. The ethno-racial phenotypes of their faces were enough. Speaking in Uyghur to people around me I noted that two of the lanes were for “native” people (in Uyghur, yerlik) while the other lane was for settlers. Continuing, I said, “I’m not native or Han, so which line should I go through?” The Uyghur women next to me smiled slightly—a mix of embarrassment, nervousness and irony flashing across her face—at what my question implied. The framing of my question, something that is not often said out loud in public, made clear that the natives were being subjected to scans because of their ethno-racial difference, their belonging to this colonized Islamic landscape in Northwest China. 

 

She suggested I go through the “native” line. When I got to the front of the line a few minutes later, I told the Uyghur police assistant in Uyghur that I did not have a Chinese ID, I just had a passport. Responding to me in Uyghur, he said he would have to register me manually. As we walked to the police station he asked where I was from and how I learned Uyghur. I told him I was an American anthropologist who had lived in the Uyghur region for two years and that I had learned to speak Uyghur in the capital city, Urumchi. He said he had studied English when he was in school, but he had forgotten most of it because he had no one to practice with. As we approached the door he asked abruptly if I also spoke Mandarin Chinese. I responded in Chinese, “Of course.” As we entered the police station, I understood why he asked this question. We were entering a Chinese-speaking world. He led me to a Han officer and explained that I needed to be manually registered. The woman behind the desk scanned my passport picture and raised her smartphone to scan my face. I asked why she needed to scan my face. She responded, “It’s just to keep you safe.”

​

"In regions of contemporary states where such totalitarian infrastructures are implemented, they produce dispositions or patterns of propensity that arbitrate the possibilities of life itself."

 

As this was happening, a pale-faced Uyghur young man was led into the station behind me. His ID had caused an alarm as he went through the checkpoint. His hands were shaking and he stuttered while he tried to explain why his ID had set off the system. I did not have time to stay and find out what was to be done with him. My privilege as a passport-carrying foreigner meant that a pathway through the flexible enclosures of the policing system was opened up for me, just as they were being opened for Han settlers at the checkpoint. At the same time, the face and ID of the young man had set off the alarms of the system and the walls were closing in around him. 

 

Michel Foucault (1997) has argued that the enframing effect of architecture is what makes it effective in the enactment of power relations at the grass-roots or capillary level of society. Building on this approach, the anthropologist Allen Feldman (1991) argues that power is not in fact “distributed” from a center of power held in reserve as much it is enacted through a “metonym of doing.” Power, defined as the ability to affect another and be affected, is enacted not by a unitary state, but rather discrete acts of doing within the architecture of a state.  It is here at the jurisdictional boundaries of state institutions—for instance at a checkpoint in Turpan—that the material experience of the state is given structure and significance; movement is regulated; the environment is controlled. The structures of walls and gates, and the infrastructures of surveillance, open up certain forms of movement while foreclosing others. The policing and carceral systems that surveillance systems both symbolize and support, interpellate people as subjects, reinforcing the protections of settler society while undermining the autonomy of the colonized. In regions of contemporary states where such totalitarian infrastructures are implemented, they produce dispositions or patterns of propensity that arbitrate the possibilities of life itself.

​

"The police documents list violations such as being part of a Quran study group on the social media app WeChat or contacting family members who lived in Muslim majority countries as reasons why the person was detained. In many cases when these activities took place they had not yet been criminalized."

 

Since late 2019 I have been combing through a 52 gigabyte internal policing database from the capital of the Uyghur region, Urumchi. These police files obtained by The Intercept contain thousands upon thousands of reports of Uyghurs and others who were stopped at checkpoints just like the one I went through in Turpan in 2018. I have looked at thousands of images of young Uyghurs staring into the camera of a police officer as they are investigated. Like the young man who was led into the station behind me at the Turpan checkpoint they are moments away from finding out if digital scans of their devices and social network will determine if they are “normal” or “untrustworthy.” The police documents list thousands of names, ID numbers, and geolocations of Uyghurs who have been taken away either to prison or a sprawling reeducation camp system. In the neighborhoods, where I have the best police data between 5 and 10 percent of ethnic minority adults were detained (Byler 2021). Often their crimes, or what might be better labeled “pre-crimes” -- since they are described in state documents as “not reaching the level of criminality” -- had to do with algorithmic assessments of digital activity. The police documents list violations such as being part of a Quran study group on the social media app WeChat or contacting family members who lived in Muslim majority countries as reasons why the person was detained. In many cases when these activities took place they had not yet been criminalized. The total infrastructures of contemporary control collapse the past into the present, even as they mediate the individual choices of the future. As the anthropologist Sareeta Amrute has noted racialized algorithms leave a long tail, affecting social life across multiple domains (2020). In the case of totalizing infrastructures, the long tail transcends temporal dimensions. Past behavior is now being used to diagnose current status: trustworthy, normal, untrustworthy.