An interview with Nathan Law ASIAN LITERATURE AUGUST – OCTOBER 2021 Robert Templer Anjan Sundaram Terror in China Street 390 Jessie Lau Phil Thornton Losing Hong Kong The Tatmadaw 32 9 772016 012803 VOLUME 6, NUMBER 4 AUGUST – OCTOBER 2021 CHINA 3 Robert Templer In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony by Darren Byler; The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain JOURNAL 4 Rian Thum The desecration of Uyghur mazars POEM 5 Muyesser Abdul’ehed Hendan ‘A letter to the prison’ POETRY 6 Dipika Mukherjee ‘Monsoon, Delhi’, ‘Sleep’, ‘Aphorisms from the Malay Archipelago’, ‘Keeping the faith’ HISTORY 7 Yuan Zhu The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives by Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mühlhahn & Hans van de Ven (editors) HONG KONG 8 Jessie Lau For the Love of Hong Kong: A Memoir From My City Under Siege by Hana Meihan Davis INTERVIEW 9 Koey Lee Nathan Law NOTEBOOK 12 Thomas Kean Myanmar on edge MYANMAR 13 Phil Thornton The Tatmadaw THE STRAITS 15 Sudhir Vadaketh Thomas Separation POLITICS 16 Michael Reilly Made in China: Wuhan, Covid and the Quest for Biotech Supremacy by Jasper Becker FIRST PERSON 17 Jim Weitz Shutdown in Wuhan ENERGY 18 Tom Baxter The end of coal VIETNAM 21 Hong Kong Nguyen Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu MALAYSIA 22 Marco Farrarese Ghost Lives of the Pendatang: Informality and Cosmopolitan Contaminations in Urban Malaysia by Parthiban Muniandy STREETFOOD Yishu Zhou Home sweet hawker SHORT STORY 23 Shih-Li Kow Under the circumstance FICTION 25 Patrick Allington Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So SOUTH ASIA 26 Sudipto Sanyal Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories by India’s Best Writers by Nilanjana S. Roy (ed); Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir by Malik Sajad TRANSLATION 27 Peter Zinoman Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath by Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock (translators and editors) LITERATURE 28 James Yu In your face POETRY 29 Michael Freeman A Gap in the Clouds by James Hadley and Nell Regan (translators) ANTHOLOGY 30 Tse Wei Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet by Ann Ang, Daryl Lim Wei and Tse Hao Guang (editors) NEIGHBOURHOOD 31 Anjan Sundaram Street 390, Phnom Penh PROFILE 32 Louis Raymond Bao Vuong FOOD 34 Mark Robinson Tokyo diners PHOTOGRAPHY 35 Farah Abdessamad Welcome to Cambodia: From War Zone to Tourist Destination by Paul K. Cummings TRAVEL 36 Emily Ding Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre by Tim Hannigan POEM Ghojimuhemmed Muhemmed ‘Sometimes’ CULTURE 37 Marc de Faoite Good Morning Towel BOOKSELLER 38 Sean Chadwell Café of Knowledge, Luang Prabang PUBLISHER & EDITOR Minh Bui Jones CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ko ko thett (poetry), Preeta Samarasan (fiction), Pauline Fan (translation), Abby Seiff (newsletter) DESIGN Jess Barr WEBSITE Nicholas Lhoyd-Owen SUB-EDITOR Allen Myers PROOFREADER Izzy Souster COVER Elsie Herberstein ARTISTS Damien Chavanat, Gianluca Costantini, Erica Eng, Paul Orchard Mekong Review is published four times a year; next issue November 2021 2 CHINA Technology and terror Robert Templer DARREN BYLER In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony Columbia Global Reports: 2021 GEOFFREY CAIN The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future PublicAffairs: 2021 n 6 February 2021, the full story of what is happening to minorities in Xinjiang was briefly available to a small number of people Oin China. The audio chat room Clubhouse held a discussion on the detention of Muslim minorities. Moderated by Uyghurs and eventually including about 4,000 people, the discussion centred on the question ‘Are there concentration camps in Xinjiang?’ With what one commentator described as ‘an absence of … “Hansplaining”: Chinese-language discussions of Xinjiang which privilege Han perspectives’, the group had a mostly open discussion of the abuses against fellow Chinese citizens. A number of Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang described the environment there, with one calling the prisons for Uyghurs ‘smaller concentration camps inside a larger concentration camp Gianluca Costantini that encompassed the entire province’. Other Chinese from across the country described their horror at what they learned from their compatriots. Two days later, China claims that it is providing education to attacks across China, but most of these occurred after Beijing blocked Clubhouse. Uyghurs, teaching them to speak Mandarin, learn job crackdowns by the government. As Sean Roberts has You can still access the site using a virtual private skills and shed any proclivity to religious extremism. The demonstrated in The War on the Uyghurs, most violence is network, but doing that in Xinjiang is enough for you reality is that the camps are places of dehumanisation in response to state terror, and little is driven by ideology to disappear into a high-tech gulag. Having an old- and injury: one witness told Byler that they were forced or religion. Even if it were, there is no reason to believe fashioned Nokia phone is sufficient for you to end up to sit for so long without moving that people suffered that Beijing’s approach is useful. Few credible links have there too. Unsmart phones are more difficult for the prolapsed intestines. They are bombarded with mindless been established with global Salafi jihadist organisations. state to monitor, and so they are now discouraged. Not propaganda: party songs and endless loops of Xi Jinping’s Even if Isis or al Qaeda had gained a foothold in this part submitting to the panopticon culture might mean you speeches and tours. What real training there is focuses on of the world, their reach would not extend to such a large end up in a camp; being off the grid is in itself a cause getting them ready to work in prison factories. proportion of the population. of suspicion. The Clubhouse episode showed how any The very peril of gathering information under the The Communist Party has viewed Xinjiang through emerging form of social media has only the briefest life scrutiny of the Chinese state and the risk of a ferocious a security lens since the People’s Liberation Army took before the government shuts it down. Anything that backlash make the books both astounding achievements control of the province in 1949. From the start, there exposes the brutality of the Chinese state against its and illustrate the courage of those who have spoken were efforts to promote the ideas of permanent Chinese Uyghur citizens is rapidly closed off or countered by up or leaked documents. By gathering the testimony of rule extending far back into history. The core policy the vast and dedicated propaganda force protecting the those Muslims of various ethnic backgrounds who have line was to promote economic growth by increasing the Chinese Communist Party. been imprisoned or worked in the growing gulag across population of Han Chinese. Development was driven by In what is the largest mass detention of people from western China, Byler and Cain explore the intersection a paramilitary state organisation known as the Xinjiang a religious or ethnic group since the Second World War, of physical and mental abuses with the worlds of Production and Construction Corps, or Bingtuan for the persecution of the Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs and the technology, global business and Chinese neocolonialism. short. This organisation still dominates the economy of Chinese Muslims known as Hui brings together four The stories are familiar but nevertheless devastating. Xinjiang and has been closely involved in the internment strands of contemporary life: the surveillance society Hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens with no system put in place since 2016. The high-tech genocide and its facilitation by smartphones; the use of big data; connection to crime or extremism have been rounded is as much about the colonial domination of the global supply chains; and the idea that governments can up on the most absurd pretences and subjected to region as anything else; it echoes the US destruction take any actions against what they define as extremism. months or years of torture, hunger and deprivation. of its indigenous people and the colonial genocides of US policies after the attacks of 9/11, including secret The entire force of the Chinese state and its growing European powers from the nineteenth century. prisons, disappearances and renditions without legal mastery of technology have been brought to bear on Rather like Native Americans in the nineteenth process, opened the door for governments like that in a tiny proportion of the population in an attempt to century, Muslims in Xinjiang are confined to Beijing to apply the same policies without restraint. erase them as a people: from compulsory birth control reservations, albeit enforced by the digital might Beijing Two new books, by the academic Darren Byler and to the removal of children to ‘kindness kindergartens’ can bring to bear on the region. Step outside your the journalist Geoffrey Cain on what Uyghurs call ‘the away from their parents; from the imprisonment of designated area and a checkpoint will pick up on it. situation’, tie together these threads, exposing practices intellectual figures to the elimination of mosques and Attend a mosque and a camera will identify you and log that will send a chill through any reader. Big data and other physical manifestations of culture. The digital your presence in an enormous database. Travel and you AI are facilitating the eradication of Uyghur culture and genocide does not require the actual killing of Uyghurs will be identified and checked. Any sign of resisting this life in a digital genocide. This time they are not being as long as their language, culture and religion disappear.