Much of what the world knows about the catastrophe befalling the Uyghur people, a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, comes from satellite imagery and leaked government police files. Over the past five years, they revealed that China has forced more than 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities into camps to destroy their national identity, language and religion, and to brainwash them into being loyal subjects of the Communist Party of China.
The satellite photos and government documents, including the pathbreaking work of scholar Adrian Zenz, portrayed an expanding chain of bleak prisons surrounded by barbed wire. A few eyewitnesses also came forward with disturbing accounts. China initially denied the camps existed, then said the facilities were for vocational education, which was untrue.
Now, there is a profoundly intimate and chilling first-person account from Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman who survived more than two years in the camps. In a 2022 memoir written with Rozenn Morgat, “How I Survived a Chinese ‘Reeducation’ Camp,” she depicts a cultural genocide in progress. “China wants to make us disappear, and make us afraid, and make us obey,” she told us last week in an interview while in Washington, where she also testified before Congress. read more