Professional Affiliation

Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Asian Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

Expert Bio

Darren Byler is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Asian Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder where he studies the effects of Chinese infrastructure and security technology as part of the China Made Research Initiative. His book project titled Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculine Violence in a Chinese City focuses on the effects of digital cultural production, surveillance industries and mass internment in the lives of Uyghur and Han male migrants in the city of Ürümchi, the capital of Chinese Central Asia (Xinjiang). He has published research articles in the Asia-Pacific Journal, Contemporary Islam, Central Asian Survey, The Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art and contributed essays to volumes on the ethnography of Islam in China, transnational Chinese cinema, travel and representation. In addition he has provided expert testimony on Uyghur human rights issues before the Canadian House of Commons Subcommittee on Human Rights and writes a regular column on Turkic Muslim society and culture for the journal SupChina.

Wilson Center Project

Chinese Technologies of Population Management on the New Silk Road

Project Summary

This project will tell the story of the way Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China have found themselves caught in webs of surveillance and biometric control that restrict their movement and cultural practices. It will also assess the way these technologies have traveled to other sites along the Belt and Road Development Initiative. Its main hypothesis is that we are witnessing the emergence of a new form of technology-enabled population management. This rise in human engineering as part of the Chinese model of global development, coincides with breakthroughs in face surveillance, voice recognition, and algorithmic assessments of digital social media histories.