Now, in the back of the van, she felt herself losing control in a wave of fear. She screamed, tears streaming down her face, “Why are you doing this? Doesn’t our country protect the innocent?” It seemed to her like it was a cruel joke, like she had been given a role in a horror movie, and that if she just said the right things they might snap out of it and realize it was all a mistake.

Eventually the commanding officer told her, “It would be better for you if you shut up.” Then she began to sob silently, looking out the window, looking for the lights of her boyfriend’s car, watching the steppe rush by in the early morning light. After several minutes, the window she was looking out of began to fog over. When none of the other police officers were looking, the young police contractor leaned over and silently cleared the condensation off the window with a swipe of his hand. Vera said, “I’ll never forget that moment. Although he could not show any sympathy, through his gesture he showed me that at least some of the people who are responsible for this are still human.”

Yet, despite the banal everydayness of these technological and material systems, this book also considers how humans still have the capacity to refuse, to denarrativize their existence, opening up space for thinking with, and acting against, incomprehensible violence. These moments of refusing to let go of humanity—whether caring for other humans by clearing the glass, or shedding a tear—punctures the façade of this inhumane system. It is these actions that make the machine of reeducation stutter. They are what keep people living despite the banality of unfreedom. As Primo Levi put it in his reflections on his time in Auschwitz, besides being in good health, knowing the language of the police, and having international allies, surviving camp systems is often based primarily on “sheer luck.” But this luck is shaped in turn by a willful stubbornness and the refusal to deny their own humanity. As I have written this book, I have thought often about the continuities and ruptures between this camp system and the ones that came before. From the perspective of those who survive with their humanity intact, much remains true to Levi’s experience. Vera, and many of the other figures who narrate the processes of the camp system in this book, found that by persisting, by refusing to give up, chance occasionally opened up to sympathy and gaps in the midst of unprecedented high tech surveillance.

The guards told her that she was not in jail, but rather at a “centralized controlled education training center.” The term they used for centralized (jizhong) can also mean “concentrated,” a connection that was not lost on Vera. She told me, “I learned almost right away that it was a kind of concentration camp. The guards knew we were not guilty of anything. Everyone in my cell was innocent of any real crime. They just took us because the leaders said to detain the Muslims.” During her first days in the camp, she whispered the stories she had read about the Holocaust back in her high school in Portland to her fellow detainees. She told them, “What is happening to us is just like what happened to Anne Frank.”

When she first arrived, a camera system had not yet been installed in the cell. It felt to Vera like the authorities were still in the process of converting the old police station into the camp—seven months after the mass detentions began. “They didn’t even have enough bowls for everyone to eat out of, so we had to share.”

The lack of preparedness also had its advantages. Whenever the guards were out of earshot, the detainees could chat with each other. Vera learned that a young Kazakh woman in the cell spoke perfect Mandarin and had also studied abroad in the Pacific Northwest at a university in Vancouver. Over the first few days, they talked about everything. “We talked about food, her job experience as a doctor, books, movies, restaurants, about whether or not we had been to the Space Needle. It was as if we were not in the camp. It was as though the camp was just a bad dream.”

The others in the cell listened in on their conversations as best they could, though most of the elderly Uyghur and Kazakh women did not really understand Mandarin since their native languages were so different from Chinese. Their lack of understanding was made painfully obvious when the guards attempted to make them memorize ten rules that were posted on the wall of the cell. Vera recalled how they stumbled over phrases like, “Only speak the language of the country; Love the motherland; Oppose harm to the motherland; There is no religion in this room; Do not damage the TV or anything on the walls; No fighting; No one is allowed to speak secretly; No one is allowed to speak to students in other cells; Sit on your stools.”

At night, staring up at the extraordinarily bright lights, which were never turned off, it was hard to forget what was happening. Vera still remembers the sound of muffled crying, a sound that moved through the crowded cell like a contagion. “It took me about a month to get used to having the lights on.”

Around the time that she was just beginning to sleep with less difficulty, they were moved into a new cell that had a state-of-the-art camera and audio recording system that monitored their movements. The guards’ voices would boom out of a speaker mounted on the wall if they covered their eyes with a hand or blanket to block out the bright light. They also received warnings if they tried to sit on their beds except during prescribed sleep time or spoke anything other than Mandarin. During the day, they were only permitted to stand or sit on plastic stools while they watched “reeducation” TV programs on a monitor mounted on the wall.

Around January 2018, after a new wing of the camp was completed, there was a dramatic increase in new detainees. Although she was not able to see into each room, Vera estimated that by that point at least six hundred people were detained in the camp—more than 10 percent of the total adult population of Kazakhs and Uyghurs in Kuitun. She imagined that by that time nearly all Uyghur families and most Kazakh families in town were missing a parent. “They brought so many Uyghur and Kazakh people at that time,” Vera remembered. “Three or four people every night. Whole families were brought in together. They had to sleep on the concrete floor.” One of the women they brought in was a young mother. In a small gesture of sympathy the guards had allowed her to keep a picture of her baby boy, who she was still breastfeeding. “At night she kept looking at her son’s picture and crying. Since the guards could see this on the camera, they yelled at her over the speaker, ‘If you look at your son’s picture and cry again, we will take it away.’”

The dehumanizing discipline of the camp repelled detainees, pushing them to fear each other. In a grotesque parody of the Chinese education system, during a private meeting with her cell’s “life teacher”—a Civil Affairs Ministry employee who took on the role of “class advisor,” as is common in the Chinese education system—Vera was secretly assigned the job of a “class monitor.” “She asked me to spy on other people,” Vera recalled. “I tried really hard not to say anything bad about others in my cell, but every week our ‘life teacher’ would ask me about others in the cell. If someone did not do well the previous week with following the rules or reciting Chinese, I would just say this or that person was sick.”

The life teacher asked each detainee to write a self-confession, or “thought report,” every week. “These were some of the scariest moments of life in the camp,” Vera recalled. She knew that every week she had to show “progress” or else she would never be allowed to leave, but if she admitted to too many thought crimes it could result in her being given a prison sentence. “Once per month the life teacher would arrange for us to talk to the warden for one hour. You had to tell him what you think you did wrong. He would ask, ‘Why did you do this?’ I would say, ‘I know I used a VPN and that this did not protect the security of our country.’ He would say, ‘Think deeply why you did this, tell me why from the deepest part of your heart. Why would we put you in the camp instead of others? Tell us the reason. Do you love our country?’ It was so intense. Even now it makes me shake thinking about it.”

Back in the cell, Vera helped her Uyghur and Kazakh cellmates write their “thought reports.” She wrote about their “pre-crimes” in different ways each time. But they didn’t understand the Chinese characters and did not know what to say to the life teacher, so they never even got their chance in front of the warden.

As the months wore on, Vera became more and more despondent. She was demoted from her role as class monitor because she refused to report a detainee who was passing notes to others. The male guards marched the Uyghur note-writer away. They never saw her again. The mindless recitation of rules, the first grade–level Chinese lessons that played on the TV monitor while they sat on their plastic stools, and the party-state anthems they were forced to sing before their meals became an endless looping soundtrack of the camp. “The most terrifying thing about being there was not knowing if you would ever be released,” Vera said.

Several months into her detention, police officers marched Vera out of the facility with bayoneted automatic weapons pointed at her back. They shackled her hands behind her back and sat her down in a cold minibus. After what seemed like hours, they removed the hood and led her into a hospital where a doctor gave her a cursory exam. Then the guards took her back to the camp. Initially it appeared that our attempt to introduce the fear of “abnormal death” and to imply the potential of a violation of “strict secrecy,” terms used by Chinese state authorities to describe prohibitions on detainee death and leaking classified secrets about the extralegal conditions of the camp, had failed.

Then around a month later, without warning, Vera and several other detainees were released on the provision that they report to local social stability workers on a regular basis and not try to leave their home neighborhoods. When she got out of the minibus at the government office in her neighborhood, her probation officer said, “‘Oh, we finally got you out.’ I thought, ‘How could she say something like this? She was one of the people who put me in that place and now she was pretending she was my friend.’”

Every Monday, her probation officer required that Vera go to a neighborhood flag-raising ceremony and participate by loudly singing the Chinese national anthem and making statements pledging her loyalty to the Chinese government. By this time, due to widely circulated reports of detention for cyber-crimes in the small town, it was known that online behavior could be detected by the newly installed automated internet surveillance systems. Like everyone else, Vera recalibrated her online behavior. Whenever the social stability worker assigned to her shared something on social media, Vera was always the first person to support her by liking it and posting it on her own account. Like everyone else she knew, she started to “ spread positive energy” by actively promoting state ideology.

After she was back in her neighborhood, she felt that she had changed. She thought often about the hundreds of detainees she had seen in the camp. She feared that many of them would never be allowed out since they didn’t know Chinese and had been practicing Muslims their whole lives. She said her time in the camp also made her question her own sanity. “Sometimes I thought maybe I don’t love my country enough. Maybe I only thought about myself. Maybe I wasn’t careful enough. I think we all started to think about this to a certain degree. Maybe I didn’t help the Party and the country. I just helped my family. I didn’t take my responsibility.”

But she also knew that what had happened to her was not her fault. It was the result of Islamophobia being institutionalized and focused on her. Although she could pass as Han, she now always thought, “What if . . . ?” And she knew with absolute certainty that an immeasurable cruelty was being done to Uyghurs and Kazakhs because of their ethno-racial, linguistic, and religious differences. By comparison, Hui people like her had it easy.

She noticed that her father was also more careful. Before, he would argue with the local social stability officers. Now he always greeted them effusively. During their visits to monitor her progress “he always agreed with them,” she remembered. “He told them ‘studying was good for me.’”

Like all 25 million permanent residents of Xinjiang, before Vera was taken to the camp she had been subject to a biometric data collection process called “physicals for all.” The police had scanned Vera’s face and irises, recorded her voice signature, and collected her blood, fingerprints, and DNA—adding this precise high-fidelity data to an immense dataset that was being used to map the behavior of the population of the region. They had also taken her phone away to have it and her social media accounts scanned for Islamic imagery, connections to foreigners, and other signs of “extremism.” Eventually they gave it back, without any of the US-made apps like Instagram, which she had used before.

For a short period of time, she began to find ways around the many checkpoints. Since she could pass as Han and spoke standard Mandarin, she would simply tell the security workers that she forgot her ID and would write down a fake number. Or sometimes she would go through the exit of the checkpoint, “the green lane,” just like a Han person and ignore the police. One time, though, when going to see a movie with a friend, she forgot to pretend that she was Han. At a checkpoint at the theater she put her ID on the scanner and looked into the camera. Immediately an alarm sounded and the mall police contractors pulled her to the side. As her friend disappeared into the crowd, Vera worked her phone frantically to delete her social media account and erase the contacts of people who might be detained because of their association with her. “I realized then that it really wasn’t safe to have friends. I just started to stay at home all the time.”

Eventually, like many former detainees, Vera was f...