In this book Sam Tynen, one of the last Uyghur-speaking ethnographers to do embedded fieldwork in Xinjiang, chronicles the Chinese government's escalation of state terror and political control over the region and its citizens, describing the increase in surveillance, securitization, and militarization of everyday life.

Using government documents, and their own observations and interviews, they describe neighbourhood-level policing and a bureaucracy that systematically tracks and records the poorest and most vulnerable people, and has led to the detainment of members of the native Uyghur community for mass internment. Tynen also delves into the everyday lives of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang – describing how they have found spaces of resistance and freedom amidst state oppression. Tynen also shares groundbreaking insight into minority experiences amongst the Uyghurs themselves – particularly women and queer people – who face exclusion and marginalization, not only by the Chinese state, but also by Uyghur society itself.

The rich ethnographic detail of this study presents a story of how a people united and divided by inequality, and driven by fear and hope, resist and endure in a military police state.