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2 VOLUME 6, NUMBER 4 AUGUST – OCTOBER 2021 CHINA 3 Robert Templer In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony by Darren Byler; The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain JOURNAL 4 Rian Thum The desecration of Uyghur mazars POEM 5 Muyesser Abdul’ehed Hendan ‘A letter to the prison’ POETRY 6 Dipika Mukherjee ‘Monsoon, Delhi’, ‘Sleep’, ‘Aphorisms from the Malay Archipelago’, ‘Keeping the faith’ HISTORY HONG KONG INTERVIEW 7 Yuan Zhu The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives by Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mühlhahn & Hans van de Ven (editors) 8 Jessie Lau For the Love of Hong Kong: A Memoir From My City Under Siege by Hana Meihan Davis 9 Koey Lee Nathan Law NOTEBOOK 12 Thomas Kean Myanmar on edge MYANMAR 13 Phil Thornton The Tatmadaw THE STRAITS 15 Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh Separation POLITICS 16 Michael Reilly Made in China: Wuhan, Covid and the Quest for Biotech Supremacy by Jasper Becker FIRST PERSON 17 Jim Weitz Shutdown in Wuhan ENERGY VIETNAM 18 Tom Baxter The end of coal 21 Hong Kong Nguyen Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu MALAYSIA 22 Marco Farrarese Ghost Lives of the Pendatang: Informality and Cosmopolitan Contaminations in Urban Malaysia by Parthiban Muniandy STREETFOOD Yishu Zhou Home sweet hawker SHORT STORY 23 Shih-Li Kow Under the circumstance FICTION SOUTH ASIA 25 Patrick Allington Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So 26 Sudipto Sanyal Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories by India’s Best Writers by Nilanjana S. Roy (ed); Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir by Malik Sajad TRANSLATION 27 Peter Zinoman Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath by Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock (translators and editors) LITERATURE POETRY 28 James Yu 29 Michael Freeman In your face A Gap in the Clouds by James Hadley and Nell Regan (translators) ANTHOLOGY 30 Tse Wei Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet by Ann Ang, Daryl Lim Wei and Tse Hao Guang (editors) NEIGHBOURHOOD 31 Anjan Sundaram PROFILE FOOD 32 Louis Raymond 34 Mark Robinson Street 390, Phnom Penh Bao Vuong Tokyo diners PHOTOGRAPHY 35 Farah Abdessamad Welcome to Cambodia: From War Zone to Tourist Destination by Paul K. Cummings TRAVEL 36 Emily Ding Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre by Tim Hannigan POEM Ghojimuhemmed Muhemmed ‘Sometimes’ CULTURE 37 Marc de Faoite Good Morning Towel BOOKSELLER 38 Sean Chadwell Café of Knowledge, Luang Prabang PUBLISHER & EDITOR Minh Bui Jones CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ko ko thett (poetry), Preeta Samarasan (fiction), Pauline Fan (translation), Abby Seiff (newsletter) DESIGN Jess Barr WEBSITE Nicholas Lhoyd-Owen SUB-EDITOR Allen Myers PROOFREADER Izzy Souster COVER Elsie Herberstein ARTISTS Damien Chavanat, Gianluca Costantini, Erica Eng, Paul Orchard Mekong Review is published four times a year; next issue November 2021
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CHINA Technology and terror Robert Templer DARREN BYLER In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony Columbia Global Reports: 2021 GEOFFREY CAIN The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future PublicAffairs: 2021 On 6 February 2021, the full story of what is happening to minorities in Xinjiang was briefly available to a small number of people in China. The audio chat room Clubhouse held a discussion on the detention of Muslim minorities. Moderated by Uyghurs and eventually including about 4,000 people, the discussion centred on the question ‘Are there concentration camps in Xinjiang?’ With what one commentator described as ‘an absence of … “Hansplaining”: Chinese-language discussions of Xinjiang which privilege Han perspectives’, the group had a mostly open discussion of the abuses against fellow Chinese citizens. A number of Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang described the environment there, with one calling the prisons for Uyghurs ‘smaller concentration camps inside a larger concentration camp that encompassed the entire province’. Other Chinese from across the country described their horror at what they learned from their compatriots. Two days later, Beijing blocked Clubhouse. You can still access the site using a virtual private network, but doing that in Xinjiang is enough for you to disappear into a high-tech gulag. Having an oldfashioned Nokia phone is sufficient for you to end up there too. Unsmart phones are more difficult for the state to monitor, and so they are now discouraged. Not submitting to the panopticon culture might mean you end up in a camp; being off the grid is in itself a cause of suspicion. The Clubhouse episode showed how any emerging form of social media has only the briefest life before the government shuts it down. Anything that exposes the brutality of the Chinese state against its Uyghur citizens is rapidly closed off or countered by the vast and dedicated propaganda force protecting the Chinese Communist Party. In what is the largest mass detention of people from a religious or ethnic group since the Second World War, the persecution of the Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs and the Chinese Muslims known as Hui brings together four strands of contemporary life: the surveillance society and its facilitation by smartphones; the use of big data; global supply chains; and the idea that governments can take any actions against what they define as extremism. US policies after the attacks of 9/11, including secret prisons, disappearances and renditions without legal process, opened the door for governments like that in Beijing to apply the same policies without restraint. Two new books, by the academic Darren Byler and the journalist Geoffrey Cain on what Uyghurs call ‘the situation’, tie together these threads, exposing practices that will send a chill through any reader. Big data and AI are facilitating the eradication of Uyghur culture and life in a digital genocide. This time they are not being eliminated, but their culture is being erased and they are being forced into factory work against their will. Constant observation by a modern panopticon forces complete compliance, breaking the spirit as much as the abuses inside the new gulag. Gianluca Costantini China claims that it is providing education to Uyghurs, teaching them to speak Mandarin, learn job skills and shed any proclivity to religious extremism. The reality is that the camps are places of dehumanisation and injury: one witness told Byler that they were forced to sit for so long without moving that people suffered prolapsed intestines. They are bombarded with mindless propaganda: party songs and endless loops of Xi Jinping’s speeches and tours. What real training there is focuses on getting them ready to work in prison factories. The very peril of gathering information under the scrutiny of the Chinese state and the risk of a ferocious backlash make the books both astounding achievements and illustrate the courage of those who have spoken up or leaked documents. By gathering the testimony of those Muslims of various ethnic backgrounds who have been imprisoned or worked in the growing gulag across western China, Byler and Cain explore the intersection of physical and mental abuses with the worlds of technology, global business and Chinese neocolonialism. The stories are familiar but nevertheless devastating. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens with no connection to crime or extremism have been rounded up on the most absurd pretences and subjected to months or years of torture, hunger and deprivation. The entire force of the Chinese state and its growing mastery of technology have been brought to bear on a tiny proportion of the population in an attempt to erase them as a people: from compulsory birth control to the removal of children to ‘kindness kindergartens’ away from their parents; from the imprisonment of intellectual figures to the elimination of mosques and other physical manifestations of culture. The digital genocide does not require the actual killing of Uyghurs as long as their language, culture and religion disappear. Racism underlies the campaign, but to legitimise it at home and abroad, the government has spread the idea that Xinjiang is a hotbed of religious extremism, terrorism and separatist violence. There has been violence in the province, and Uyghurs have been involved in attacks across China, but most of these occurred after crackdowns by the government. As Sean Roberts has demonstrated in The War on the Uyghurs, most violence is in response to state terror, and little is driven by ideology or religion. Even if it were, there is no reason to believe that Beijing’s approach is useful. Few credible links have been established with global Salafi jihadist organisations. Even if Isis or al Qaeda had gained a foothold in this part of the world, their reach would not extend to such a large proportion of the population. The Communist Party has viewed Xinjiang through a security lens since the People’s Liberation Army took control of the province in 1949. From the start, there were efforts to promote the ideas of permanent Chinese rule extending far back into history. The core policy line was to promote economic growth by increasing the population of Han Chinese. Development was driven by a paramilitary state organisation known as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, or Bingtuan for short. This organisation still dominates the economy of Xinjiang and has been closely involved in the internment system put in place since 2016. The high-tech genocide is as much about the colonial domination of the region as anything else; it echoes the US destruction of its indigenous people and the colonial genocides of European powers from the nineteenth century. Rather like Native Americans in the nineteenth century, Muslims in Xinjiang are confined to reservations, albeit enforced by the digital might Beijing can bring to bear on the region. Step outside your designated area and a checkpoint will pick up on it. Attend a mosque and a camera will identify you and log your presence in an enormous database. Travel and you will be identified and checked. Any sign of resisting this can result in your detention. Various lists have circulated laying out suspicious behaviours: using WhatsApp, growing a beard, refusing to drink or smoke, using the back door of your house, reading the Koran, listening to Uyghur music, covering your head with a scarf, in fact anything that might mark you out as a Muslim. 3

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VOLUME 6, NUMBER 4

AUGUST – OCTOBER 2021

CHINA

3 Robert Templer In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony by Darren Byler;

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

JOURNAL

4 Rian Thum

The desecration of Uyghur mazars

POEM

5 Muyesser Abdul’ehed Hendan ‘A letter to the prison’

POETRY

6 Dipika Mukherjee ‘Monsoon, Delhi’, ‘Sleep’, ‘Aphorisms from the Malay Archipelago’,

‘Keeping the faith’

HISTORY

HONG KONG

INTERVIEW

7 Yuan Zhu The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives by Timothy

Cheek, Klaus Mühlhahn & Hans van de Ven (editors)

8 Jessie Lau For the Love of Hong Kong: A Memoir From My City Under Siege by Hana Meihan Davis

9 Koey Lee

Nathan Law

NOTEBOOK

12 Thomas Kean

Myanmar on edge

MYANMAR

13 Phil Thornton

The Tatmadaw

THE STRAITS 15 Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh Separation POLITICS 16 Michael Reilly Made in China: Wuhan, Covid and the Quest for Biotech Supremacy by Jasper Becker

FIRST PERSON 17 Jim Weitz

Shutdown in Wuhan

ENERGY

VIETNAM

18 Tom Baxter

The end of coal

21 Hong Kong Nguyen Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

MALAYSIA

22 Marco Farrarese Ghost Lives of the Pendatang: Informality and Cosmopolitan

Contaminations in Urban Malaysia by Parthiban Muniandy

STREETFOOD Yishu Zhou

Home sweet hawker

SHORT STORY 23 Shih-Li Kow

Under the circumstance

FICTION

SOUTH ASIA

25 Patrick Allington

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

26 Sudipto Sanyal Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories by India’s Best Writers by

Nilanjana S. Roy (ed); Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir by Malik Sajad

TRANSLATION 27 Peter Zinoman Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and

Its Aftermath by Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock (translators and editors)

LITERATURE

POETRY

28 James Yu

29 Michael Freeman

In your face

A Gap in the Clouds by James Hadley and Nell Regan (translators)

ANTHOLOGY

30 Tse Wei Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet by Ann Ang, Daryl

Lim Wei and Tse Hao Guang (editors)

NEIGHBOURHOOD 31 Anjan Sundaram

PROFILE

FOOD

32 Louis Raymond

34 Mark Robinson

Street 390, Phnom Penh

Bao Vuong

Tokyo diners

PHOTOGRAPHY 35 Farah Abdessamad Welcome to Cambodia: From War Zone to Tourist Destination by Paul K. Cummings

TRAVEL

36 Emily Ding Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre by Tim Hannigan

POEM Ghojimuhemmed Muhemmed ‘Sometimes’ CULTURE 37 Marc de Faoite Good Morning Towel BOOKSELLER 38 Sean Chadwell Café of Knowledge, Luang Prabang

PUBLISHER & EDITOR Minh Bui Jones

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ko ko thett (poetry), Preeta Samarasan (fiction), Pauline Fan (translation), Abby Seiff (newsletter)

DESIGN Jess Barr WEBSITE Nicholas Lhoyd-Owen SUB-EDITOR Allen Myers PROOFREADER Izzy Souster

COVER Elsie Herberstein ARTISTS Damien Chavanat, Gianluca Costantini, Erica Eng, Paul Orchard

Mekong Review is published four times a year; next issue November 2021

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