INVISIBLE DESERT
e-flux architecture, special issue: new silk roads (2019)
Map data: Shawn Zhang, “List of Re-Education Camps in Xinjiang.” Medium, May 20, 2018.
The “strategic invisibility” of desert spaces accommodate the pursuit of activities out of public view and beyond the realm of judicial and civic oversight. Hidden in the desert territory of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) in northwest China are massive, high-security compounds currently imprisoning over a million people. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which aims to mimic the transcontinental trade economy established through the original Silk Road, depends upon Xinjiang’s longstanding geostrategic role as a bridge between mainland China and Central Asian countries, Europe, and eventually, Africa. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is exploiting the region’s geographic remoteness, cultural isolation, and the insidious discourse of the global War on Terror to justify and obscure the control, mass surveillance, and internment of its minority-Muslim citizenry. It is estimated that there are at least 1,000 camps and re-education schools scattered throughout Xinjiang, holding close to 1.5 million Uyghurs. These new infrastructures fundamentally change the landscape of the region and redistribute the population away from urban centers and into these camps.
Taken between 2016 and 2019, satellite imagery show over time how the landscape is fundamentally transformed by the construction of the camp architecture, transportation networks, and security infrastructure necessary to conceal the imprisonment of the Uyghur population.
96 aerial images from Google Earth Pro of sites that have been identified as internment camps or re-education schools and are visual evidence of the existence of these sites, even as the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) has adamantly denied their existence.
