I’m currently working on a book titled Fear, Hope and Survival in Xinjiang: Uyghur Life in China’s Military Police State.

Here is a little bit more about my research, how I got interested in the topic, and what I found: 

Let’s take a step back to the summer before my junior year of college. It was 2009 and I was getting ready to move to China for a year. Deadly riots had broken out in a place I had never heard of, Xinjiang, a province on the border of China about the same size as Alaska.

Xinjiang is the home of the Uyghur people, a Turkic people who practice Islam.

Uyghurs are indigenous to the vast Taklamakan Desert that bridges China to the rest of Eurasia along the ancient Silk Road, a string of oases that once connected traders between China and Europe.

When I first arrived in China in 2009, Han Chinese people told me: “Xinjiang is dangerous, full of Uyghur terrorists who will stick you with a syringe full of HIV.”

Five years later, I was a doctoral student at CU-Boulder. The challenge, the danger, and, this sounds childish now, but the exoticism of the Silk Road appealed to me. In 2014, I started doing fieldwork in the same place where the riots happened, this time as a researcher of politics and culture.

My research question is: What happens when the map says “China,” but it doesn’t match up with the cultural realities on the ground? The Uyghur people live in China, but are clearly members of the Turkic world. Such questions intrigue geographers like me.

I wanted to better understand what it means to live as a Uyghur in Xinjiang today. I lived in the capital city for 2 years.

I learned Uyghur. I lived, dined, laughed and cried with my Uyghur neighbors.

What I found was heartbreaking. China’s economy is a toxic mix of dictatorship and capitalism. It increases inequality and decreases the quality of life for minorities. Life was increasingly defined by police surveillance and discrimination.

One method of control was an endless maze of government paperwork. Every six months, rural migrants had to register with the city. Each round required ten different permissions signed by different people in different offices. Sometimes these offices were next to police stations. If people needed access to social services, they were subject to surveillance. It made people mistrust the government.

The second method of control was policing and incarceration. There are police stations in the Uyghur neighborhoods on every block. Police pick up rural migrants for small offenses, like not carrying ID or praying.

Like in the US, Uyghur people move to the city for jobs and education that are not available in rural areas. Unsurprisingly, the urban Chinese greet rural Muslim newcomers with hostility. This hostility has given new migrants access to few opportunities. Police shut down even informal street markets run by Uyghurs.

Still, Uyghurs practice everyday resistance. People subvert rules in places the state can’t reach. The biggest places of such resistance are people’s homes and bodies.

For example, unregistered migrants hid in back rooms when the police came to inspect. Despite state regulations, women had children outside the state’s permission by going into hiding. Street hawkers sold small items hidden under large coats on the street when the police weren’t looking.

I learned that state territory is an all-encompassing net—controlling and pervasive, yet with holes where people can slip through.

Beginning in 2017, I witnessed policing that increased dramatically. My friends started disappearing. I heard stories—in whispers, or where there was background noise—of my friends’ relatives being taken and disappearing in the middle of the night.

At the time, we didn’t know what was going on. It was confusing and scary. The rules kept changing and escalating. First, newcomers were not allowed to rent homes in the city. Uyghur shops were demolished.

Then, all Uyghur migrants were not allowed to rent homes. The ultimate purpose was to force poor Uyghurs to go back to the countryside where they would be met with forced internment. A dear friend told me once, “We are all just waiting for the knock on our door.”

Now, a year later, we have satellite images of large internment camps and analysis of government documents that tell us the Chinese government holds more than 1 million Uyghurs without trial.

Those Uyghur neighbors—the friends I broke bread with and shared my heart with—I don’t have contact with them anymore. Their phones are monitored and censored. Their passports are confiscated. Nobody is safe from the state paranoia that any contact with foreigners means potential ISIS infiltration.

Why? Because many people see Uyghurs as dangerous. They are seen as dangerous because they are poor, Muslim, and look different.

The Uyghurs don’t fit into the Chinese vision of a homogenous national landscape.

What happens when a group of people don’t fit in to the vision of the people in power? The people in power make room for the people who do fit into their program by incarcerating those who do not.

Stereotypes about dangerous places matter because such ideas cause isolation, erasure, and incarceration. I believe a more just and inclusive world is possible if we connect with so-called dangerous people and places rather than avoid them, and listen rather than silence.

The story is not so different in our own country.