My Multiple Renegades Conferred by Anthropology

By Huai-Tse Yang

Erbol is the interlocutor whom I last got to know. 

He hunted me down as he heard that there was a student in Central Asia collecting stories from different Turkic people who have experiences with the internment camps located in Northwest China. I was not in Kazakhstan anymore then, so we managed to chat online, just a few days before the Lunar New Year. The person he wanted to talk over is his cousin, Zharqyn Audygan. 

Both for visiting relatives and applying for Kazakhstan’s green cards for his family, Zharqyn passed the border from Xinjiang, the Chinese official name of the vast region inhabited by indigenous Turkic peoples (mainly Uyghurs and Kazakhs), to Kazakhstan in January 2017. He was in his late forties, serving in his home county, Koktogai, as an ordinary official. Weeks later, according to Erbol, as Zharqyn returned to China through the same Jeminay land border, his laptop was confiscated and from which, after hours of search, unauthorized materials were allegedly found. The Domestic Security Police (Ch: Guobao) came and took him away. He was charged with espionage and, in the summer, sentenced to seventeen years in prison in a closed trial. 

The whole event appears more like a frame-up to Erbol and Zharqyn’s family: the laptop was not being examined on site, however the Chinese authorities claimed that Zharqyn carried a vast amount of secret documents aboard. “What kind of secrets would he obtain as a local cadre dealing with farming and irrigation?” Erbol scoffed at the accusation as we discussed different scenarios of why, if any was true, the authorities would allow him to bring the materials to travel around for weeks before arresting him (“He did not even remember to delete the files!”). “There is no way that all people in the government go nuts, isn’t it?” He bitterly said so as he could strive to retain some hopes that someone wise in the system could review the case and realize this misconduct. But he did not receive any responses from the Chinese authorities after many attempts. Actually, Zharqyn’s family has not seen him during the past eight years except for the telephone talks arranged by the prison every several months. His only brother, Qairat, a local teacher in the same county, made an international money transaction of around 2,000 RMB (est. 2,700 SEK) from Xinjiang, which was accused of illegality and led to his six-year sentence in the same year. In 2021, their father died in grief after appealing to different sectors for his sons for years. 

The incarceratscape and the shift of il/legality

The notorious Xinjiang internment camps operated since late 2016 are now well-known due to the wide coverage by Western media. The camp system is indeed the key component, but not the sole one of the apparatuses that I call incarceratscape in Northwest China. The incarceratscape is a racial-techno layout, comprising internment camps, digital enclosures,^[1] the expansion of prisons, and the intensified Central Asia-Sino border control in the region. By the claim of launching a “de-extremification” campaign, at least a million Turkic individuals, mainly Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyzs, are arbitrarily detained for having foreign ties, Islamic practice, or frequent travel. They were handled by the authorities into two treatments: confined in the so-called “Vocational Educational Training Centers” for years or in prisons for longer sentences. Zharqyn belongs to the latter now.

Colonized by the Russian and Qing (and its Chinese successor) empires since the 18th century, Kazakh people are one of the largest ethnic groups living across the Central Asian-Sino border region. Nowadays, over 1.5 million Kazakh people live in Xinjiang, while more than 180,000 have been naturalized from China to Kazakhstan since its independence in 1991.^[2] The thing that happened to Erbol and Zharqyn is not a rare case among the communities in Kazakhstan which have connections to Xinjiang. Yet, the ones who are willing to voice for their relatives’ disappearance are relatively rare. And I am fortunate to know many of them through my study of knowing the long-term consequences of the Xinjiang internment camps in this border region. When the mass incarceration first occurred, like Zharqyn’s sentence, the Chinese authorities in fact did not have the legal tools to juridically justify their power and conduct. Until March 29th, 2017, the regional People’s Congress eventually completed the legalization of the laws.^[3] The internment’s illegality was hence amended into legality according to the authorities’ need.

For those on the Kazakhstani side of the border looking for their relatives who had disappeared in incarceration, the whole thing became a chronic ordeal. All of them are originally from Xinjiang, having families there, yet they would not risk losing their freedom to visit their hometowns. Plus, they were truly appalled by the telephone harassment and threats regularly delivered to them. Chinese authorities labelled them as transgressors, or the “Crime and Evil” that must be eliminated (Ch: Heieshili). Which implies that whoever ought to subject to China, from their perspective, yet have not, including Erbol and probably me, a Taiwanese fieldworker in Central Asia, all should be seen as renegades by the shifting definition of legality. 

However, except for the il/legality with Chinese characteristics, there are other senses of being a renegade proliferating within me through my ongoing phase of crafting anthropological knowledge as a PhD student in Sweden.

(to feel) Being renegade to my interlocutors and anthropology

As the content of legality is appropriated by the authoritarian government, and I am doing something shady (meeting former camp detainees and sentenced people’s relatives) in their view, the legitimacy of my anthropological inquiry is then mainly pondered by ethics. But what ethics, and by whom?

Bekzat is a sturdy and amiable man, and a core active member of the grassroots organization, Naghyz Atajurt, in Almaty. The organization campaigned and recorded the evidence of mass incarceration from the former detainees and their relatives since 2018. For every occasion as I was introduced to others, I would mention my background and asked their expectations of me, I also would, as felt obligated to do so, inform the persons I met that I am not a journalist, so their stories would be discussed and published in a rather slow manner, and that academic writing might not bring any rapid changes to them. Yet, I would definitely try to help them with my capacities and stay in touch with them. Generally they would still want their stories to be noted down in some form, although documenting these stories could not disband the fact that they faced various difficulties caused by experiences of the camps, physically, economically, and mentally. The longer I stayed in the field, the more I sensed that there cannot be any pure observation aside in the strict sense. Holding a distance without reactions after listening the stories is somehow problematic, and I keep reflecting on if there is anything I can contribute to than my anthropological task.

One time, near the end of my stay, Bekzat and I sat in a random teahouse (Kz: Shayhana) where we had a pause between visits. He was in the bustle of his daily phone communication, but he quietly ceased and looked at me when I shared this reflection with him. That was a bright afternoon, so I could see his eyes’ color and found he looked solemn. “In fact, I do not mind whether you really use these stories or not, you may just keep them, leave them or whatever after this. But what I felt these years is that these people are really suffering for the consequence of the camps […] and I think they really need some help as anyone realizes these, so I take my part.” He finished. I deeply know what he meant. The working ethics, not the definitive one, seem only showing up itself in the process of engaging in.

Anthropological knowledge production requires a sophisticated array of moments of engaging in and distancing from the people we study; we are trained to capture and then reflect on the intensities of these processes of zooming in and out. In which, at least in my case, the imperatives I was immersed in make the necessity of turning people into the position of partial (and probably temporal) research subjects appear unethical. Anthropology has lavish intellectual grounds to think and include these together, even though its process of production is usually against what it claims. Producing anthropological knowledge makes me feel like a renegade to the people I work with in Kazakhstan, because I have to decide to prioritize their imperatives or my research tasks.

During and after the fieldwork, I found myself spending much time to carry out acquaintances’ needs: some of them are seeking opportunities in the western world, so they ask for information; some of them trust me to help them explain the strange things that occurred in their susceptible lives molded by the past long-term confinement with proliferating fear; some of them, like Erbol, rather perseveringly seek exposure to media, believing this will bring up some changes, although I keep mediating that the world is chaotic now, people are busy with other wars stirred by other assholes like Xi. So pitches were written to human rights organizations and media, to those journalists who had covered the issue of Xinjiang internment camps (some of them visited Kazakhstan before the pandemic; some even won the grand prize in journalism for covering the people I work with). And the reality becomes quite clear for us: the world has lost interest in the issue.

Meanwhile, I have to honestly hold up the voices from the academia of turning these as the materials in any senses of activism or coordination (for instance, one of my Asian friends suggested, “That’s great to have these engagements! You can later write them up as great journal articles”). That is not the reason why I spend time for the requests from my interlocutors, but because of our encounters that I take them seriously. Listening and conversing with them in and after the fieldwork, some working ethics surface, making me believe that I should do this and that, despite that my mental condition is unexpectedly worn (slowly worn at least, as I have been addressing the camp issue in public before this PhD studies), and that there are always more NGOs and activisms crafted to do more things (or not to do) in efficient ways than me a student in anthropology.

Do I go native? Certainly not. In these years, the times that I have to procrastinate their requests are tremendous as well for my academic duties, my ethnographic writing, for sustaining my own health.

Vice versa, the working (literally) ethics of being a PhD employee in Sweden is that I should finish the project on time. That is undoubtedly my very job as I enjoy the benefits in the university system sponsored by taxpayers, while I am not sure if those not-so-activist (but very imperative) things could be considered as the discharge of my job duties. The renegade to be felt is sparing my working hours to help out my acquaintances in the field, and is postponing responses to the urges from them thus to save more energy for my tasks in the university. I am oscillating. The guilt of being unable to fulfill the expectations and of being renegade to both bring out the effect of ambivalence in me. It slows me down toward everything.

Requesting items keeps accumulating, writing progress becomes lingering, two working ethics are all in me, entangling and forging my multiple renegades. Is this new to anthropology? Definitely not. Is there any literature in anthropology about any similar dilemma? Tons of them, yes. But they seem to exist only on paper. To be clear, I am well-supported by my supervisors and home department, yet the situation is beyond the education or training provided in any general sense. None of my PhD peers talk about any similar struggle; there also seems to me not much other occasions to discuss this in my academic environments, unless it can be somewhat turned into a certain form of publication. 

The two working ethics from the encounters with my interlocutors and from my Swedish employment make me realize that the feeling of being a renegade toward the incoming requests and requirements does modulate my anthropological practices. It urges me to act in the way as if I can respond, since I have to. The identities of a truly devoted fieldworker and a post-fieldwork solitary writer are penetrating, collapsing, sometimes troubling each other.

Ongoing renegade

Actually, Bekzat did ask something else about what I would do in the future. 

In a driving trip to a town near the border, he shared his interesting theory that Genghis Khan was a Turk, not a Mongol, by the contemporary sense, then he asked me what I plan to do after these. His face looked flying high as the path we drove at the end of the Ili Valley shone alongside the summer pasture. “Become a teacher at a university probably?” “Oh, Teach what?“ They were always curious why my fieldwork and writing took such a long time. “Contemporary Central Asian societies, maybe? I will verify your grand theory of Genghis Khan, but certainly I will talk about Kazakhs and Uyghurs and the camps.” I joked with his theory and took the latter promise seriously. My fieldnotes do not show me how and what Bekzat’s reaction was; I cannot remember it as well.

——

Last semester, I started to have partial teaching tasks in my department, and I did blend their stories from Central Asia into my teaching shares.

During the same period, last November, at least four of my acquaintances, including Bekzat, were arrested in their orchestrated protest near the border from the Kazakhstani side for another case like Zharqyn’s. Alimnur Turghanbai, a 47-year-old Kazakh man naturalized to Kazakhstan from China in 2017, was taken away by Chinese authorities as he passed the border last July.^[4] His family has not known his whereabouts ever since. The protestors flamed a Chinese national flag and a portrait of Xi with chants. And later, they were illegally detained. This act infuriated Chinese authorities so much that, according to Radio Free Europe’s coverage,^[5] the Chinese Consulate in Almaty sent a diplomatic note, urging Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to “take appropriate measures.” In January, the activists were prosecuted with the crime of “incitement of ethnic or national discord,” which is unusual for a rather small gathering without conflict and could carry up to ten year’s imprisonment. The case is still under legal procedure.

There is no conclusion for this essay. I do not know how to do so as the very reality is that things are ongoing and do not converge. This unconcludableness seems intrinsic in the anthropology if it still attempts to somehow deal with the difficult topics in the world, struggling with renegade anthropology, the il/legal and the un/ethical. A remark that I could cite here is the one by anthropologist Rune Steenberg, who has been working with Uyghur communities around the globe to address the crises for decades. He once suggested, in a conference that I attended, how an anthropologist positions his relationship with people in critical situation as he reflect on it: a possible way is try to treat the stories shared by them as gifts in reciprocal exchanges; different from the commodity one, trying to let the relations grow toward a reciprocal one involved care and personal relationship.^[6] It should not be another imposition in a cohesive manner, but an opportunity that the one who received it is obligated to think further and find a way to respond to this giving through the principle of reciprocity.

This little inspiration, perhaps, with my growing working ethics, could be my intermittently continuing response as I keep writing. Any renegade anthropologist committed to the people s/he studies should not be dismissed by any easy conclusions.

---

^[1] Byler, Darren. 2021. In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony. New York: Columbia Global Reports.

^[2] Азаттық радиосы. 2019. СІМ: 4500 этникалық қазақ Қытай азаматтығынан бас тартты. https://www.azattyq.org/a/30273495.html. Mukanova, Zarina. 2024. Kinship and Gender in Patrilineal Descent in Rural Area of Southeastern Qazaqstan. PhD Dissertation, University of Zurich. https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-254719

^[3] Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Regulation on De-extremification https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/xinjiang-uyghur-autonomous-region-regulation-on-de-extremification/

^[4] Freedom for Eurasia. 2025. ‘We Just Want Him Home’: Fears Grow For Kazakh Citizen Detained In China. https://freedomforeurasia.org/we-just-want-him-home-fears-grow-for-kazakh-citizen-detained-in-china/

^[5] Radio Free Europe. 2026. China’s Diplomatic Pressure Looms Over Case Against Xinjiang Activists In Kazakhstan. https://www.rferl.org/a/kazakhstan-china-xinjiang-activism-uyghur-xi-atazhurt-rights/33654001.html

^[6] Steenberg, Rune. 2024. No Charity. XUAR camp survivor testimonies and interviews as gift exchange. Conference paper at Central Eurasia Studies Society (CESS) annual conference, Almaty.

About the Author