The Camp Fix: Infrastructural Power and the Re-education Labour Regime in Turkic Muslim Industrial Parks in North-west China

Abstract

Industrial parks in north-west China occupy a liminal space between labour camps and private industry. Drawing on worker interviews, government documents, industry materials and images this article shows that for-profit public-private industrial parks have been built as part of a camp fix mechanism centred on detaining and re-educating Uyghurs and Kazakhs at the periphery of the nation. It argues that these industrial parks concentrate forms of repressive assistance and dormitory labour regimes that operate at other frontiers of Chinese state power and point these strategies of disempowerment towards a seemingly permanent, ethno-racialized underclass, producing a re-education labour regime. It further argues that the material infrastructures of these surveiled and policed spaces themselves are productive in enforcing the goals of the camp fix: the creation of high-quality, underpaid, docile and non-religious Muslim workers who are controlled through the built environment.