Settling Xinjiang

Where everyday governance transforms hospitality, dress, and time into instruments of colonial ruleMass detention camps and forced labor in Xinjiang have garnered global attention. Settling Xinjiang reveals a broader—and less visible—system of control shaping everyday life in the Uyghur homeland. Drawing on years of fieldwork in Uyghur communities and an innovative digital ethnography of Chinese government sources, Timothy Grose reconstructs how policy campaigns operate on the ground. Party cadres enter homes, monitor daily routines, regulate religious practices, and impose new linguistic and cultural norms. These seemingly mundane interventions, repeated across neighborhoods, aim to reorganize Uyghur society and identity in the image of the Han Chinese majority.Grose situates these acts within the framework of settler colonialism, demonstrating how state power works not only through spectacular violence but also through subtle, cumulative pressures on culture, belief, and language. Surveillance technologies, ideological campaigns, and bureaucratic oversight converge to produce what he calls “conditioned compliance”—a system that demands outward conformity while reshaping social life from within.By exposing everyday mechanisms of domination, Grose offers a powerful account of contemporary colonial governance and its profound consequences.