In the Camps

A revelatory account of what is really happening to China's Uyghurs

'Intimate, sombre, and damning... compelling.' Financial Times

'Chilling... Horrifying.' Spectator

'Invaluable.' Telegraph



In China's vast northwestern region, more than a million and a half Muslims have vanished into internment camps and associated factories. Based on hours of interviews with camp survivors and workers, thousands of government documents, and over a decade of research, Darren Byler, one of the leading experts on Uyghur society uncovers their plight.

Revealing a sprawling network of surveillance technology supplied by firms in both China and the West, Byler shows how the country has created an unprecedented system of Orwellian control. A definitive account of one of the world's gravest human rights violations, In the Camps is also a potent warning against the misuse of technology and big data.



Darren Byler is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He writes a regular column for SupChina and his work has appeared in

The Guardian,

Foreign Policy,

Prospect Magazine,as well as many academic journals. He received his PhD in anthropology at the University of Washington.



Intimate, sombre and damning... These varied personal accounts tell of pervasive confusion and fear as, starting in 2017, a previously small-scale "re-education" programme suddenly became a sprawling system of internment camps where anyone suspected of "extremist thoughts" or "pre-crimes" was sent without trial.



Harrowing and intensely human. A devastating account of the incarceration of almost an entire population by the all-knowing Chinese state, aided by sophisticated technology, much of it devised in the West.



Inside China, a monstrous crime is being committed. This book tells the dark story of how the Uyghur people are being smudged out. Read it.



This important book takes us directly into the dystopian world of Uyghur dispossession, infrastructural power, and terror capitalism. Byler shines a piercing light into the darkness of Xinjiang's Surveillance State.



A heart-breaking, brilliant and thought-provoking read. We all need to educate ourselves on how great injustices are being perpetrated against the innocent because of their religion and culture.



Chilling... To be ethnically Uighur, or even notionally Muslim [in China], is to live in a state of permanent suspicion and fear... horrifying.



Darren Byler's

In the Camps blends first-hand reports from former internees - including one who heard her desperate fellow inmate hit the floor of the cell above - with research into the public-private partnership that underpins the system.



In The Camps is one of the most shocking books you'll read in any year.



Byler's interviews... helpfully illustrate the use of surveillance technology in and beyond the camps.