Top Quotes: “No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs” — Nury Turkel

Introduction

“In June of 2017, a Uyghur man in his late thirties sat in a Chinese police station, strapped into a “tiger chair.” He was attached to the metal chair by straps that went around his throat, wrists and ankles, so he couldn’t move an inch. To even turn his head made it hard to breathe. He had been sitting there for three days, released only for brief, closely supervised bathroom breaks.

The man knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. The police also knew that no crime had been committed. His “crime” was that he had a foreign passport, even though he had been born in Xinjiang, the vast, mineral-rich region in the far west of China, where the steppes of Central Asia roll out all the way to the steppes of Russia, which eventually merge with the plains of Eastern Europe. When the man had come home to visit his ailing parents, he had been automatically flagged as suspicious by the Chinese security forces.

The police asked him a lot of questions, but they already knew all the answers. Where had he lived? Who had he met? Did he have any illicit contacts abroad? He answered honestly, knowing he had nothing to hide. He had broken no laws.”

“We now know, through leaked official Chinese documents, that there were twenty thousand names on the list. That summer in 2017, Chinese police officers managed to track down and arrest almost seventeen thousand of the people in the course of just ten days. The detainees — among them university professors, doctors, musicians, athletes and writers — had no idea why they were being rounded up.

Perhaps more shockingly, the police officers themselves didn’t know why they were arresting so many thousands of people. They were simply following orders that had been pre-programmed by an artificial intelligence algorithm.”

“The offenses that were listed sound almost cartoonish to the Western ear. They ranged from “having a long beard” to “having WhatsApp on their phone,” or “using the front door more often than the back door” or “reciting the Koran during a funeral.”

But there was nothing cartoonish about what happened to those people once they had been arrested by the Chinese authorities.

That vast roundup was the first known instance of a computer-generated mass incarceration, and its victims were almost all Uyghurs, the Turkic Muslim population whose Central Asian homeland, Xinjiang — or as we cali it, East Turkistan — was handed over to Mao Zedong by Stalin in 1949, after a very brief period of independence.

Labeling almost all Üyghurs as potential religious extremists and a threat to the Communist Party’s authority, the People’s Republic of China has rounded up as many as three million of them, as well as other Muslim ethnic groups, into what it euphemistically calls “reeducation camps.”

These arrests are extrajudicial, based on an individual’s race, ethnicity and religion, the same criteria used by Nazi Germany to round up Jews and Roma. On paper, the reason given for the arrests was “de-extremification.” Since 9/11, China has used the Uyghurs’ Muslim faith as an excuse to portray the population of eleven million as potential Al Qaeda terrorists — all of them, men, women and children.

But the real reason is this: Beijing does not consider the Uyghurs to be “Chinese” enough. The authorities perceive their centuries-old ethnonational identity, religion and cultural heritage as disloyalty to the party and a source of future political threat to the state. Uyghurs have their own language, literature and history, formed over thousands of years at the point where Buddhist, Manichaeism and Muslim identities have historically overlapped. The Communist party, under General Secretary Xi Jinping, has tried to label anyone who tries to oppose China’s crackdown as “separatists” or “terrorists,” designations punishable by life imprisonment or the death penalty, just as they did with pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and peaceful Buddhist monks in Tibet.

China’s main interest in Xinjiang is, however, the land. Located on the fringes of Central Asias vast steppes, the region – the largest in China, roughly the size of Alaska – contains huge tracts of natural resources and minerals (petroleum, natural gas, coal, gold, copper, lead, zinc) and long stretches of fertile agricultural land. In fact, Xinjiang produces about 20 percent of the world’s cotton supplies. To keep this supply chain going, China has assigned “work placements” — essentially forced labor — for Uyghurs to toil in these cotton fields, as well as in local factories that get contracts to manufacture goods in the West. Top brands such as Adidas, H&M and Uniqlo have been identified as having used cotton from Xinjiang, and the US has recently announced human rights-linked sanctions against eleven Chinese companies that have supplied material or parts to Apple, Ralph Lauren, Google, HP, Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss and Muji.

For the first time since the heyday of the antebellum South, cotton slavery is once again polluting the global economy on an industrial scale.”

“Closed-circuit cameras, spying on phone apps and logging credit card information are used to determine what is known as a person’s “social credit score,” a Black Mirror-style grading of how worthy a citizen is. Littering, buying too much alcohol – or too little, if you are a “suspicious” Uyghur, Kazakh or other Turkic Muslim in Xinjiang – can lead to a Chinese resident being denied the right to buy a plane ticket or even to board a train. If you flee abroad and speak up, the People’s Republic will track you down, spy on you, harass you and vanish your family into its prison camp system, or lean on your host country to send you back.

China’s ability to combine this dystopian level of Al spying with Chairman Mao-style totalitarianism is a terrifying threat. What is even more bizarre and unprecedented is the hundreds of thousands of Chinese spies sent to live with Uyghur families – often sleeping next to the family members in their cramped bedrooms. They call themselves the “Becoming Family” program, and the spies live in homes to report on suspicious Muslim-related activities. Imagine if the East German Stasi were not just spying on you, but had their spies living inside your flat, pretending to be your family and using your own children to spy on you. That’s where we are in this region. Spies’ reports are fed into computers and as a result, parents are sometimes carted off in the middle of the night to the camps, their children treated as orphans and sent off to their own Chinese “schools” where they are indoctrinated in Mandarin Chinese against their culture and their own missing parents.”

“I often meet with Uyghur parents who have been forced to flee their homes without being able to take their kids with them. Together, we lobby to get their children out. I sit in on the most chilling video calls: desperate mothers and fathers calling home to speak to their kids, only to see a video image of their child sitting on the knee of a Chinese cop. Quite often the children, who have been brainwashed by these officers, will act coolly toward their own parents. It’s hard to describe how heartbreaking it is to see parents, afraid they may never see their kids in person again, unable to connect emotionally with their own children.”

“These are Uyghurs who have witnessed torture, waterboarding, rape and beatings. We know about dozens of women who have testified to undergoing forced sterilization in a camp before being released – what we now see is a brutal but effective effort to slash the Uyghur population. Having more than the allotted number of two children is a common cause for arrest among Uyghur women. There are only a handful of individuals who’ve managed to escape from China, and those largely because they were married to foreign nationals whose governments offered them some support. But even that support was often limited, because most governments are too afraid to offend Beijing. Some, such as Egypt’s, have even begun deporting Uyghurs at China’s request, despite their longstanding claims of “Muslim solidarity” when it came to the occupied Palestinian territories.”

“Now it is herding millions of its own citizens into camps, using slave labor to bolster its economic strength, bulldozing mosques and Muslim cemeteries in Xinjiang, and building parking lots and theme parks where ancient cultural monuments once stood.”

“One truly frightening aspect of countries not denouncing China’s action is this: they might actually want to copy the lessons learned there. China’s burgeoning model of capitalism without democracy will appeal to many authoritarian rulers and will come to shape the ideological struggle of the coming century.

Already, India is building camps that can house up to two million Muslims in the state of Assam, people whom it has deemed to be noncitizens even though many were born in India or lived there for decades. It intends to hold them there until they can be deported to countries like Bangladesh, where India’s nationalist government claims they belong. Worryingly, the government intends to expand the program of mass camps to the rest of the country.

“Never again?” It’s already happening,” Anne Applebaum wrote in the Washington Post. She is right: What was supposed to happen “never again” is now being carried out in China, and on an industrial scale.”

“Although Uyghurs refer to our homeland as East Turkistan, for the sake of consistency and ease of recognition I will use the official Chinese name of Xinjiang throughout.”

Childhood

“And that is why China still uses my mother to torture me, even though I have lived in Washington, DC, as a free Uyghur for more than twenty years. I have not seen her since 2004. I have been able to spend only eleven months — six months in California and five in Washington, DC — with my parents since I left China twenty-seven years ago.

Mom was first arrested when she was about five months pregnant. She was just nineteen years old at the time. Her crime: she had opened the door to some of her father’s guests when they used to visit our home in the late 1960s. While the 60s were a decade of cultural upheaval in the West, in China they were an era of extreme repression, when Chairman Mao and his Red Guards were attempting what his late Russian counterpart Joseph Stalin had once described as the “engineering of human souls.”

My mom’s name is Ayshe. She came from an influential family. Her father had once been a fairly important official in the ministry of culture in the Second East Turkistan Republic, a short-lived and now mostly forgotten country that flourished briefly in the 1940s. It had been backed by the Soviet Union but then ceded by Stalin in post-war horse-trading to China’s newly victorious Communists in 1949. The Chinese reverted its name back to Xinjiang in 1954, which in Chinese means “New Frontier,” a colonial name that dates back to the mid-eighteenth century, when generals of the Chinese Qing dynasty conquered the region to their far west, a vast area of desert oases, mountains and glacier-fed lakes.”

“My grandfather, a jeweler by trade, used to keep up with his old contacts from those heady days of independence, and they would pay social visits to his house. This obviously marked him in the Communist Party’s eyes as a highly suspect person. So he was carted off to a camp and his daughter was sent for “reeducation,” accused of being “intoxicated with separatist ideology.” Guilty by association.

While my mother, with me in her belly, was being “educated” into the joys of Mao’s workers’ paradise of collectivization and labor camps that cost the lives of millions, my father, Ablikim — who had been raised in the north of what we Uyghurs still call East Turkistan — had been sent to an agricultural labor camp. A math teacher, he knew little about working in the fields from dawn till dusk. But he had cousins who, during the Chinese reannexation of our land, had ended up on the other side of the border, in the Soviet Union. By the late 1960s, China and the USSR were no longer friends. My father’s crime was listed as “intoxication with Soviet ideology” and having relatives in a hostile country. And so it was, just about a year after they were married, that both my parents entered the vast Communist penal system.”

“In these gloomy confines, I came into the world in 1970. Food was scarce and my mother suffered terribly, both physically — there was little nutrition for anyone, let alone the mother of a newborn baby — and mentally due to her worry over me. She wasn’t quite sure what she had done to offend the rulers in Beijing, but she could see quite clearly the effects of her incarceration on her baby. I was badly malnourished because she was malnourished. When she tried to breastfeed me, almost no milk came out and she would cry in pain. I was a scrawny infant, lacking calcium and vitamin D because so little sunlight came into the prison. The only times she was allowed outside were for the raising of the red flag at dawn and the singing of songs about the glory of Chairman Mao at sunset, after eating the scraps that passed for dinner.

Between those tiny cracks in the boarded-up window, she could just steal glimpses of Kashgar, a city that was already a trading post on the Silk Road two thousand years ago. The onetime desert oasis now blended timeless markets and twisting alleyways with modernist monstrosities like the one she was trapped inside. If you have ever seen the movie The Kite Runner, then you have seen old Kashgar, before the authorities knocked it down and built a new Disneyland-like heritage site to attract tourists and spy on the residents: Kabul was considered too dangerous to shoot the movie in, so Kashgar became the Afghan capital’s stunt double.”

“When I was about five months old, we were released from prison. We had both survived, but my mother never made a full physical recovery. When I was growing up, on cold winter days she’d struggle to find a comfortable position to sit in the evenings as we gathered around the coal stove in our living room. When we went out walking in Kashgar, I would notice her limp as we walked downtown. We would often pass the building where I’d been born. She’d point up at a second-floor window and say, “That’s the one, that’s where we were locked up.” It was hard to miss the building: it loomed over the entrance of the old bazaar where two of my uncles had shops selling Chinese products to tourists from Central Asia. At weekends I would help them out in their stores and would pass the place where I was born. As I got closer to my teen years, my mother would tell me about how I was barely able to open my eyes when she was allowed to take me outside, because I was so accustomed to living in the gloom of the prison.”

“The 1980s had seen something of a cultural renaissance for the Uyghurs. After the genocidal excesses of Chairman Mao, whose efforts to completely reshape China in the “Great Leap Forward” and then the “Cultural Revolution” cost the lives of tens of millions of people, came a more reformist leadership under Deng Xiaoping, who introduced some free market elements to revive the devastated central-command economy. Deng’s right-hand man, Hu Yaobang, who was the first top Chinese leader to dispense with the Chairman Mao uniform and wear Western business suits, allowed the Uyghurs more breathing space in their cultural life and education, triggering a flourishing of the Uyghur region while I was at high school.”

“In April of that same year, Hu Yaobang died. The reformist had been forced out as secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party a couple of years earlier by party hardliners who blamed him for anti-Communist student protests. The hardliners wanted to shut down the reforms he had led, so they gave him a very low-key funeral. Thousands of pro-reform students in Beijing took to the streets demanding a state funeral, centering their protest on the Monument to the People’s Heroes, on the capital’s Tiananmen Square.

Already alarmed by the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Chinese regime cracked down hard on the Tiananmen Square protesters, killing hundreds if not thousands. The subsequent bloodshed in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, turbocharged by long-suppressed ethnic rivalries and resentments, further spooked the Communist leadership. The Uyghur renaissance came to an abrupt halt.”

“In 1944, Uyghurs made up three-quarters of the region’s population of less than four million people, and the Han — that is, the ethnic Chinese — were less than two hundred thousand. But after Stalin delivered the Uyghur homeland to Mao on a silver platter in 1949, there was a concerted, state-controlled push to “settle” the region with Chinese people. By 1975, there were almost five million Han in Xinjiang. Today, there are around eleven million Uyghurs and 8.2 million Han Chinese living there. And resentment has been stoked by the fact that almost all the best jobs go to the Han, even if the position of regional governor is held by a Uyghur loyalist handpicked by Beijing. These same tactics were laid out in Tibet.”

“Terror”

“At that time, President George W. Bush was already preparing to invade Iraq and was scrambling to build international backing for his “global war on terror.” There was growing skepticism about the US plans, however; which were based on clearly unreliable intelligence. For Beijing, which had far friendlier ties to Washington at the time, this represented a golden opportunity to crush any separatist leanings that decades of heavy-handed colonialism in Xinjiang had inspired. The Communist leadership quickly grasped that a handful of Uyghurs swept up in the US dragnet for Al Qaeda operatives might allow them to rebrand Uyghurs as dangerous Islamic extremists.

The Chinese authorities started insisting that any act of violence in Xinjiang was motivated by Al Qaeda sympathies. They also offered up a murky group called the East Turkistan Islamic Movement as the culprits behind such attacks, and offered to join Washington’s crusade against Islamist terrorism. Years later, Richard Boucher, who was a top State Department spokesman under the Bush administration, said that China had been asking Washington for years to designate the ETIM a terrorist organization. “We’d say, ‘Who are these guys? We don’t see an organization, don’t see the activity… It was done to help gain China’s support for invading Iraq.””

“They had been captured by Pakistani bounty hunters in the winter of 2001 as they fled on foot across the Afghan border from the US bombing raids that had killed dozens of other people in the village they had been living in. As well as dropping bombs, leaflets advertising the reward were flying off the US military airplanes with promises such as “You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and schoolbooks and housing for all your people.”

They initially did not tell their captors they were Uyghurs, terrified that they might be sent back to China. They had fled several years before, after taking part in the Ghulja protests on February 5, 1997. From there they had been forced from country to country across Central Asia — each place they sought refuge eventually bowed to Chinese pressure and the men had to flee, in fear of arrest and deportation. Eventually, they found their way to Afghanistan, which they described as “the end of civilization.” There was a remote village where they heard they would be accepted, no questions asked.

Despite strong anti-American sentiment shared by others in Afghanistan at that time, the Uyghurs perceived the US as a natural ally in the decades-old struggle against the Communist Chinese regime. Qassim later told the Wall Street Journal, after his release, that he had told the Pentagon tribunal examining his case that he believed the US should have helped the Uyghur people, “and now they are saying we are the enemy… We Uyghurs have more than one billion enemies and that is enough for us.”

The first US bombing raid wiped out around two-thirds of the village — the US military would later describe it as a training camp, but the Uyghurs said it was more of a run-down village. As Sabin argued in court, the presence of a gun range transforming a “village” into a “military training camp” would mean half of Northern Virginia could be defined as a camp.

Fleeing across the border into Pakistan, they were caught by the bounty hunters who sold them to US forces for five thousand dollars a head — the promised “millions” would have only applied for the capture of Osama bin Laden or one of the other high-value targets.”

Beginnings

“By chance, one of my brother Mamutjan’s best friends was dating Ms. Kadeer’s adopted daughter at the time, and he arranged a date between him and Ms. Kadeer’s daughter Akida. After dating for a year, they got married in July of 2007.

My brother’s marriage to the daughter of such an outspoken human rights critic as Ms. Kadeer only added to the pressure on my family. After their engagement was announced, Chinese security pressured my parents to stop my brother’s marriage to Ms. Kadeer’s daughter. It was a beautiful spring morning in DC and I was enjoying my coffee while checking emails. Mom called and said there was someone there who wanted to have a word with me. Of course, it was some goon from the security services, waiting at my parents’ home for me to call. He told me to tell my brother not to marry the daughter of someone who had “harmed” China.”

“The last time I saw my mother was when she and my father managed to get to the United States for a visit in 2004, close to twenty years now. Since that time, we have only been able to speak by phone, with Chinese police listening in on our conversations. Sometimes they are waiting at my parents home when I call, wanting to take the phone and taunt me or try to order me to relay threatening messages to other Uyghurs living in exile.”

“The first sign came in 2015, when my parents received one of their regular visits from the security forces. I hesitate to say they were used to such frequent harassment visits, because you never get used to systematic abuse. But it had become somehow standard after so many years.

This time, however, there was something markedly different. The police weren’t arresting or browbeating them. Instead, they insisted on cutting a snippet of hair from each of their heads.”

“Around that same time, aside from the regular harassment of my family, I started to hear stories from other Uyghurs that something was afoot. A Uyghur friend of mine, a successful businessman who lives in one of the southern states, went home to visit his family in Urümchi. When he went to the apartment block where his sister lived, he was surprised to find a locked gate and a guard. There was a facial recognition camera on the gate that refused him entry, but the guard took pity on this visitor with a US passport and phoned up to his sister’s apartment. My friend was shocked when she refused to come down, or even acknowledge the existence of an American relative. He left, confused and saddened.

A steady stream of these stories started to leak out of Xinjiang: people being arrested for no apparent reason, more and more security cameras and checkpoints appearing in the streets, mosques being demolished and strange directives issued by the authorities over what people could say to each other, where they could go or even where they could live. People were reluctant to talk But he was drawn back to Xinjiang in 2009, when the bloody riots broke out in the summer in Urümchi. These protests have become so well-known in the story of my homeland that people simply refer to them as “July 5,” the way Americans talk about 9/11. They were sparked by an incident in southeastern China, where Han workers in a toy factory had set upon hundreds of Uyghurs who had been sent to work there.

The attacks started out after false rumors circulated of Uyghur men sexually harassing a Han woman — the classic trigger for lynch mobs in racially segregated societies, such as the old American South. Chinese police later charged a disgruntled Han former worker with spreading fake allegations and inciting the fight, in which a mob of Chinese men attacked the dormitory where the Uyghur men were sleeping at night and killed two of them. The massive brawl — awhich came on the back of years of open discrimination against Uyghurs in the workplace — brought thousands of people onto the streets of Ürümchi, demanding a full investigation.

The authorities in Urümchi responded instead with heavily armed riot police, equipped with live ammunition, billy clubs, tear gas and Tasers.”

“By nightfall, there was a fully-fledged race riot in the city, with cars being torched and bystanders attacked. It took almost two days for order to be restored, by which time a significant number of people were dead and hundreds more injured. There were reports of police gunning down groups of rioters in the streets. It was a dark day, and in the aftermath, thousands of Uyghurs were arrested, the internet and phone lines were cut, mosques were shut down and dozens of people were ultimately sentenced to be executed.”

“But in 2017, the menus started to change. Traditional Uyghur food was vanishing, replaced by generic kebabs and Chinese rice dishes. When Gene asked why, he was told that the Uyghur cooks and staff living in inner China were being ordered back to Xinjiang en masse, a three-to-five-day train journey from which most did not return, most likely disappearing into the camps.

Usually when Gene visited a restaurant, the owner and staff would want to take a photo with this exotic-looking blond foreigner, but as 2017 wore on, the selfies became fewer and fewer as the fear began to seep in. In May that year, he was talking to some Uyghur friends in a city in eastern China and telling them he was planning on going back to live in Kashgar — the men told him it was not a good idea to be in Xinjiang right now.

But he did go back. When his train pulled into the station at Ürümchi, there was a huge line of people showing their ID papers to police as they exited the station, not upon entering. Outside, there seemed to be police and sentry posts every hundred yards or so.”

“When Gene went to Kashgar’s night market, where food stands offered cooked meals just across the street from the main mosque, there was only one chef cooking large vats of pilaf rice (polo in Uyghur), where before there had been at least three or four. A few days later, that last man too disappeared. His wife took his place for a week, before she vanished as well. His favorite pilaf restaurant was suddenly staffed entirely by women — all the men had disappeared.

Another friend of Gene’s happened to be a bookseller — his shop was now closed. It opened again briefly in November, but was now run by his daughter-in-law. She told him the bookseller had been jailed for seven years in Aksu, another prefecture in Xinjiang. Then her husband was taken off to a camp, too. Eventually, she had to shut the bookshop down — too much of the old Uyghur literature she was selling was now deemed “unsuitable” by the authorities, and they could only sell the state-approved books that nobody wanted.

Gene noticed that a training center near his hostel had been abruptly transformed into a prison camp: the fence became a high wall topped with razor wire, the gate was permanently shut and a police checkpoint was set up.”

“Some Kazakh activists were mobilizing to rescue relatives on the other side of the border who had disappeared into the camps and prisons. Gene hooked up with a group called Atajurt, which had started tracking down Kazakh citizens whose relatives across the Chinese border had been detained, and getting them to make video testimonies that they then released online in order to pressure China into releasing them. They had thousands of people, many of them poor farmers, sit down with pictures of their relatives, and talk about where and when they had been arrested. Eventually, their efforts put enough pressure on the Kazakh government — which lived largely in fear of its powerful neighbor — to petition Beijing for their release. Amazingly, hundreds of ethnic Kazakhs were freed from the camps and fled across the border into Kazakhstan.”

“She had an extraordinary story to tell, and which she began to share with the local Kazakh media. Sauytbay said she had been forced to work as a teacher of Chinese in one of the newly built concentration camps in Xinjiang, so that the prisoners — all of them ordinary people, all Muslims — could be better indoctrinated in Communist propaganda.

In the camps, she had witnessed utter horror: mass arrests, gang rapes, brainwashing, beatings and torture. She recalled an ethnic Kazakh woman had been executed merely for sending a short video clip of a Chinese flag-raising ceremony — something the Uyghurs and other Muslim groups were by then being forced to attend every week — to a relative in Kazakhstan. Her testimony in court sent shockwaves across Kazakhstan, and finally caught the attention of the international press. For the first time, here was eyewitness testimony of what was going on behind the razor wire in Xinjiang’s camps.”

“As the scale of what was going on started to become apparent, Gene decided to build an online database to list Xinjiang’s missing — their names, ages, where they vanished, what they were charged with and where they were thought to be. Most important, the site had photos of many of the missing, something that brought the victims to life and humanized them, stopped them from just becoming another horrific statistic. Over the summer of 2018, Gene built the Xinjiang Victims Database, which to date has the details of more than thirteen thousand people — some of them as young as three years old —who have been “vanished” by the authorities, a fraction of the number who have actually disappeared to be sure, but a concrete base from which to gauge the staggering scale of the tragedy unfolding in Xinjiang.”

“Zenz’s search focused on the government recruitment of teachers; instead, what he found online was a massive increase in job ads for police and security services. In 2007, before the protests in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, that demanded more autonomy the Chinese authorities had advertised two hundred and sixty police-related positions. Between 2011 and 2016, that number shot up to 12,313.

Intrigued, Zenz started looking at government construction bids and contracts, and managed to unearth a huge construction program for police stations, jails and surveillance operations in Tibet.”

“Zenz once again began scouring the internet, looking for specific construction bids: the telltale elements like high walls, watchtowers, razor wire and surveillance systems to be installed. With his background in scrutinizing Tibet’s job opportunities based on educational qualifications, he also spotted what appeared to be suspiciously low educational requirements for staff in camps that purported to be offering “vocational training.” That raised the question of what the camps were really for.”

“In 2019, he was able to make an estimate based on his meticulous research, and it was stunning. As many as a million people had been detained and sent off to China’s concentration camps. His calculation quickly became universally accepted, with the United Nations formally adopting it in March of that year.”

“He searched on Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, for terms such as “reeducation center” and came up with pictures of newly built facilities, often featuring a gate or a wall or a sign, together with their GPS coordinates. He then went a step further and plugged these coordinates into Google Earth and found there were actual satellite images that showed the size and layout of the compounds.

When he first started mapping and identifying them, Zhang had been skeptical of reports that so many Uyghurs could have been detained. What he saw now convinced him it was all too feasible. He downloaded and stored the pictures, and in the coming months went back to the same coordinates on Google Earth: that was when he realized the facilities were getting bigger and bigger.

He shared the images online, on his blog and Twitter accounts, and soon journalists from major news outlets were knocking on his door for help researching their stories about Xinjiang.”

“(Tibet proper was sliced up after Mao invaded in 1950 — otherwise it would be the 10th largest country in the world). And that was where he made his mark, rolling out massive recruitment of impoverished local Tibetans into low-level security forces, mimicking what many European colonial powers had done in the nineteenth century by using “native” troops to keep order in their sprawling overseas domains.

With those extra security forces, Chen built up thousands of local “convenience police stations, concrete or prefabricated huts with no more than five hundred meters between them, inside Tibet’s towns. This was known by the party as “grid-style social management,” segmenting communities into very small sectors overlooked by police, security guards and a dense network of surveillance cameras. In place of naked brutality, Chen planned to crush the Tibetan spirit methodically, almost mechanically.

Soon, Tibet’s dissenting voices had been once again stifled, and Chen — the rising star of the party — had been dispatched to Xinjiang to do the same, crushing any group that failed, in the paranoid imagination of the Chinese Communist leadership, to conform to its image of “unity” in the vast nation.

“Round up everyone who needs to be rounded up,” he ordered when he arrived in Ürümchi. He was there, he said, to “gnaw bones.”

Within the space of that first year, he had recruited more than ninety thousand new security agents — often low-level assistant police officers, more brute muscle than actual law enforcement officers — and deployed them in some seventy-five hundred new convenience police stations. Xinjiang’s transformation into an open-air prison camp had begun and Chen — who has been compared to Adolf Eichmann, the man who engineered Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution” — had won himself a coveted place on Chinas Politburo, one of only twenty-five members at the core of Chinese power.”

“Rumors first filtered into Xinjiang’s cities from the countryside that something was wrong, detailing roundups that almost emptied remote villages. These were relatively easy for residents of Ürümchi and Kashgar to ignore, given China’s periodic crackdowns on any organized group that wasn’t the Communist Party, such as the Falun Gong spiritual movement, political dissidents or religious organizations. “These things happen sometimes in authoritarian regimes,” people thought. “It won’t happen here.”

Many were simply oblivious. For young Uyghur students living overseas, the first they knew of the dawning era of repression was when they flew home to see their families during summer break of 2017. They were met at the airport not by joyful parents but by state officials, who greeted them with chilling, robotic speeches, like the scripted spiels you get from fundraisers in the US, only these were informing them that their mother and father were “in a training school set up by the government.””

“Qelbinur lived in what was technically a gated community, though she had all but forgotten the fact because the gates were never closed, and had become rusted and overgrown. Now, though, the gates were suddenly shut, some of them permanently — people coming in and out were funneled through one building entrance. Strange, but a minor inconvenience. Then new surveillance cameras were installed, some with facial recognition devices. Razor wire suddenly topped the walls. A nearby community of lower-class residential homes was rapidly demolished and replaced almost overnight by apartment blocks, with guards, security cameras and locked front doors. Several years later, when Qelbinur saw the video footage of Chinese hospitals being built in just a few days in Wuhan as the coronavirus spread across the country, she was reminded of the speed at which these new neighborhoods had mushroomed in her hometown.

Most Uyghurs didn’t know it at the time, but the reason for this sudden acceleration in security surveillance was that in August of 2016, Chen Quanguo had arrived in Xinjiang, with the aim of subjugating the Uyghurs in the same way he had crushed the life out of Tibet. His arrival was quickly felt across the region. Qelbinur, possibly because she is an ethnic Uzbek, would not feel its full impact for another six months. But for Zumrat Dawut, the Uyghur wife of a Pakistani trader and a mother of three, it resulted in a quick summons for her and her family — indeed, her whole block — to the offices of the local neighborhood watch committee.

These committees are all over Xinjiang. They are mostly made up of party loyalists or people trying to elevate their status in the community, but also by foot soldiers ordered to keep an eye on their neighbors, reporting any strangers in the streets or suspicious activity. They have existed across China for decades, but recently have taken on a more formalized, aggressive behavior: neighborhoods have been carved up into a tight grid pattern, with some fifteen to twenty households in each, and assigned a dedicated monitor to report back to the committee on everything that goes on.

“The basic task of the grid monitor will be to gain a full understanding of the situation in the grid,” a Communist Party directive sent out in 2018 and leaked to Radio Free Asia said. The monitors’ task would be to snoop on their neighbors, intervene in any disputes and carry out “psychological intervention” if needed. And of course report anything suspicious to the committee.

Zumrat Dawut, a sturdy, savvy businesswoman in her late thirties who prided herself on knowing how the world works, knew that not all the committee’s monitors were willing snoops or party loyalists, since her own brother was one of the unwilling conscripts. He made a decent salary working for the committee (although much less than his Chinese counterparts), but he did not like it. Soon, as nightly house raids and arrests began, he would come to dread his work, but could not leave it or criticize it for fear of being denounced as “two-faced” — a state servant who dares to question his orders. Several high-profile Uyghurs ended up in the camps for being “two-faced,” including the president of Xinjiang University, Dr. Tashpolat Tiyip.

Once summoned to the local committee offices that winter of 2016, Zumrat and her neighbors were ordered to hand over their phones for data scanning. This scan allowed the authorities to download all their personal data — call history, apps and the data these contained, personal photos, messages and emails, right back to the point of factory settings. This was unsettling, to say the least, but Zumrat knew she had done nothing wrong. What she didn’t realize yet was that innocence would be no defense against punishment.

This quickly became clear to people who had bought their cell phones secondhand: data from previous users could get you locked up. That might include some long-deleted apps that Beijing had deemed unacceptable, such as WhatsApp or Facebook. The state wanted its citizens to use Chinese apps only, which it could easily monitor. For that same reason, iPhones were suddenly banned: they are too hard to hack. Many people started using “dumb phones,” but even that simple change aroused police suspicion: What were these people trying to hide by using such outdated technology?

Zumrat’s cross-border business with Pakistan and with China’s bustling coastal cities had been doing well, and she had treated herself to a new iPhone for three thousand RMB, or around five hundred dollars. Now, she replaced it with a Samsung and tried to sell her old smartphone, but the ban had caused the iPhone market to collapse. She was lucky to offload it for just five hundred RMB, a fraction of what she had paid. Other people she knew, including some of her relatives, were unable to sell theirs and took the dramatic precaution of smashing the expensive phones with a hammer.”

“When they got them back, Zumrat noticed a new app had been installed. It was called “Clean Internet Security Soldier.” This, she was told, was an advanced spying device that would log all her calls, text messages, internet browsing, online purchases and even her GPS position: if Uyghurs left their home, they were expected to have their phone with them so the authorities knew where they were at all times. It was also linked to bank accounts, so the state could see what they purchased and where. Two weeks after the app was installed, Zumrat casually greeted a friend with her habitual “Essalamu eleykum,” a common expression across the Muslim world that literally means “peace be upon you” but mostly just means “hello.” Shortly after, a security official approached her and told her the Arabic phrase now was banned. She had to stick to the “national language”-the new official term for Mandarin.”

“The house raids began, seemingly at random from early 2017. State security forces and neighborhood watch members would show up at an apartment complex, usually later in the evening after families had had their dinner, rushing through the front and back doors to sweep entire buildings for banned materials: prayer mats, Korans, long dresses for women, but also axes and any extra knives. Since the spate of deadly knife attacks in 2014, Uyghur households had been allowed only two knives each: one chopping knife and one smaller one for preparing vegetables. Both had to be fitted with QR barcodes so their users could be traced, and the larger one had to be affixed to a kitchen counter with a chain. Failure to comply, or possession of other knives, could suddenly land you in prison. These raids became known as the “Strike Hard Campaign,” and triggered the first wave of widespread arrests in Xinjiang.

How were people to know what was banned and what was still permitted? That vital information was transmitted through the Monday-morning flag-raising ceremony in Xinjiang, which quickly became a weekly ritual for the Uyghurs. These longstanding ceremonies began at 8:00 every week, and attendance was obligatory, come rain or shine. In Urümchi, the temperatures can plunge to forty degrees below (Fahrenheit) in winter, and the people standing in the snow for two hours were forbidden from wearing any form of head covering that could be taken as a sign of religious devotion.”

“The Uyghurs were issued little booklets in which their attendance was stamped each week: these are a pretty pink, adorned with postcard-like images of the Great Wall and Beijing’s Forbidden City on the cover. But the pretty cards could get you interned in a “reeducation camp” if your flag-raising attendance record dipped below 90 percent.

As well as issuing instructions on what you could keep in your home or what you were allowed to say to your friends and neighbors, these gatherings also served as mass experiments in brainwashing, a foretaste of the camps that so many of the attendees would soon end up in. As the red flag of China was rising above the crowd, the neighborhood watch members would lead chanted slogans about the greatness of the party and its secretary — general, Xi Jinping, and the need for Uyghurs to abandon their faith in anyone but him.

Zumrat recalled with a shudder the first time she was forced to renounce her religion. The party apparatchik leading the meeting shouted out to the assembled Uyghurs, “Is there a God?” The shocked crowd paused, before answering, “No.” They had to — other members of the neighborhood watch were scrutinizing their reactions as they stood around the flagpole. Zumrat moved her lips without saying the words that first time.

“Who is your new god?” the meeting leader called.

“Xi Jinping,” the crowd dutifully chanted back.”

“The university was shut down as millions took to the streets to protest against the decades-old authoritarian rule of Hosni Mubarak. China dispatched planes to evacuate its students — partly for their own safety, but partly out of fear they would be exposed to the contagious ideas of revolution. It was nine months before Mihrigul returned to Egypt. When she did, Mahmoud was delighted to see her again. He always called her Mihri, which was easier for him to say than her full Uyghur name. They became very close. Gradually their friendship blossomed into a romance.

All was not well at school though. It quickly became clear that when the Chinese students and workers returned to Egypt, a large number of spies and police informers had infiltrated the Chinese community there. Some of them approached Mihrigul and ordered her to start keeping tabs on fellow students enrolled at Al-Azhar University, a religiously conservative seat of learning that held great sway over the Muslim Brotherhood, a long-banned Islamic political organization that had risen to prominence after the revolution. The idea of spying appalled Mihrigul and she tried to put them off. They told her that if she didn’t cooperate, she would have visa problems with the Egyptians.”

“His son — Mihrigul’s older brother — was a bit of a tough guy who had always dreamed of joining the police, but to do so, he had to change his name from the Uyghur “Ekber” to the Chinese “Wang Guo,” and also change his official ethnicity in all his documents to “Chinese.” Dozens of Mihrigul’s friends who had found government jobs were forced to do the same thing.

Rather like Orthodox Jews, Uyghurs try to preserve the cultural integrity of their precarious nation as much as possible. Marrying outside the community is frowned upon.”

“For many years, when the Communist Party had restricted the number of children that Chinese people were allowed to have to just one — a policy that has been rolled back since 2013 — Uyghurs were allowed to have two. Even that policy was under lax enforcement, and a wily woman with some financial means could usually find a way to get around it and have what is considered in Uyghur tradition to be a proper-size family.

Even before the crackdown, a Uyghur woman who had given birth to two children —by law, the two births had to be spaced out by three years, otherwise the fetus would be forcibly aborted — was obliged to have an IUD inserted to prevent her getting pregnant again. Zumrat had done that, but she experienced bleeding and back pain. She persuaded a doctor to remove the birth-control device, and when she did get pregnant she knew which palms to grease to get the certificates necessary for her third child to have access to schooling and health coverage.”

“To enter a building, you had to pass through a turnstile like something you’d see on the New York subway, and which used facial recognition technology to only allow residents to enter. If a relative wanted to come and stay for a night, both of you had to go to your local police station and register the “event,” even though the tracking device on your phone was already telling the authorities where you were. In the streets at night, there were trucks parked outside homes with sophisticated listening devices. People started to talk in whispers in their own homes, away from the windows.”

“That winter of 2016, Qelbinur and her fellow teachers at the Ürümchi high school were tested on their proficiency in the Chinese language. As a Mandarin teacher, this presented no problem for her. But for several of her colleagues with different specialties, the test was challenging. Several failed and found themselves swiftly reassigned to menial jobs at schools for Han Chinese students. Despite their professional qualifications, they were sent to work in mailrooms or as receptionists; some were ordered to serve in the neighborhood watch committee, where they were told to monitor mosques and report on who attended and how long they stayed. Others were sent to the new “reeducation camps” to work as support staff. They were all replaced by Han Chinese teachers, and no more classes were held in the Uyghur language.

Qelbinur survived this first purge. She managed to keep her job until the spring semester started in February 2017, when she was summoned by her school principal. Several of her colleagues, including some Han Chinese teachers, were also there. The principal, a woman, was very polite and friendly. She informed them there was a new job for them, teaching the “national language” —Mandarin — to a bunch of illiterate, uneducated people. Under no circumstances were they to talk to anyone about what they might see or hear in their new workplace.”

“It was a gray building, four floors high, and clearly not a school in any sense she could understand: there were guards with semiautomatic rifles at the gate and the walls were hung with razor wire. Her police escort swiped an ID card to enter the compound and Qelbinur entered a lobby where more armed guards registered her arrival. Then she was led to what she was told was her “classroom.” The room was a large cell, gloomy, with one overhead light next to a wheeled whiteboard. That was where she was to stand and teach. There were half a dozen prison guards with rifles standing around the walls, and iron bars separated her from the “students,” who sat in the semi-darkness, perched on small stools. Spy cameras peered down on this depressing scene from numerous angles. Most of the “students” were men, still dressed in their own clothes and sporting the longer beards you’d normally expect in traditional rural communities. But there were also a half dozen women, in long, conservative dresses — some were in their seventies, Qelbinur guessed. All of them had shackles around their ankles and wrists. Clearly, these were detainees rounded up in far-flung villages. Several of the men appeared to be religious leaders, local imams maybe, and Welbinur noticed how shy the women were around them — in a conservative society, women do not usually approach male religious leaders. There was a sound of sobbing coming from the murky depths of the room. In all, Qelbinur estimated there were around one hundred people in that first “class.”

Trying to stifle her shock, she began the lesson. Their knowledge of Chinese was almost nonexistent: these were people who had had almost no interaction with the Chinese state, living their own reclusive, religious lives far from towns and cities and the Communist Party. Given their age and their level of fear — and the fact that Mandarin is, after all, one of the hardest languages to learn at any age — it took her a week to teach them just the basic vowels and elementary letters.

Then, at the end of the first week, she went into the same class and struggled to recognize the group: their civilian clothes and beards were gone and they were all wearing prison uniforms. Their heads had been shaved, even the elderly women, who seemed mortified to appear in front of their religious elders without their modest head coverings. But then, the Muslim elders had lost their beards too, and they too looked confused and lost.

At the end of the hour-long lesson, the guards escorted her to another floor, where she again faced a large class in a different cell. Here, the people seemed better educated and with more proficient Chinese. Some of the younger ones worked hard in her classes, apparently believing that study would win them their freedom. But when Qelbinur heard the guards speaking in the canteen at lunchtime, she got the impression they had no intention of freeing anyone.

Every day, she would teach for four hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, with an hour for lunch at midday. Sometimes, as the prisoners were being herded into their next session, chains clanking, she would catch a glimpse into their fetid cells. The smell was overpowering since each cell had only one bucket to serve as a toilet and the inmates could never shower. Rolled-up mats lay on the floor, the prisoners’ only bedding. Although the inmates were hard to recognize with their shaven heads and identical uniforms-and the sheer, swelling numbers of them during the months she worked in the camps — a few stood out.

One was an energetic man in his fifties called Osman.Before prison, he had been a successful businessman, running his own dried fruit company — a staple Uyghur appetizer, served with tea-that supplied Ürümchis hotels and restaurants. He spoke excellent Chinese and stood out at first because of his positive outlook. But sleeping on a cold concrete floor, with just a thin mat as bedding, took a toll on his body. He started to limp and grew thinner every time she saw him. Eventually, he vanished, like several other of her students. One lunchtime, when she had a chance to talk to one of the guards, Qelbinur asked what had become of Osman. The guard said he had died of a urinary tract infection, a common complaint among the prisoners, who were only allowed to use the bucket three times a day, and then only for a minute. She asked the guards what happened to the bodies of “students” who died. They said they had no idea.

It is worth noting here that the most famous victim of the Nazi death camps, Anne Frank, didn’t die in the gas chambers. The Dutch Jewish teenager died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen just weeks before the camp was liberated at the end of World War II.”

“Suddenly finding herself in a small prison cell with twenty-eight other women, crammed so tight they had to sleep on their sides like sardines and in two-hour shifts because there wasn’t enough space for them to all lie down at once-it was not only terrifying, but utterly unfathomable.

Every morning, they were woken at 5:30 and told to line up for the solitary bucket in the corner of the cell where they could relieve themselves. There was no toilet paper, no running water, and in all the months she was incarcerated, she never once got to wash. The place stank, and everyone was filthy. They had to fold the thin mats they slept on with military precision, then line up for the cell inspection.

Then they were marched out into a yard and drilled while chanting slogans about the greatness of the Chinese Communist Party. “The CCP gives us new life and prosperity!” and “If there is no Communist Party, there is no new China!” They would do this for hours before returning to the cell to sit in silence until 9:30 p.m., when the lights would go out and they would all take turns trying to sleep — two hours on the floor, two hours standing in the dark, and so on through the night.”

“Outside the prison gates her father was waiting for her. He’d been there for five hours, having been summoned early so he could pay his daughter’s “bill” for being housed in a state prison — two dollars a night, almost one hundred and fifty dollars in total, a huge sum for a rural truck driver. It was the first time Mihrigul had seen him in years.”

“One day, soon after her return, she was standing in the kitchen cooking with her stepmother and felt overcome with grief.

“Mum,” she said, “my heart is so full of pain. I need to talk to you.”

Her mother didn’t look at her. “Can you pass that jug, please?” she said, then carried on cooking. It was like living in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers: family members looked the same, but were no longer themselves. They simply couldn’t afford to be.”

Becoming Family

“Some of the Becoming Family “relatives” do make an effort to learn Uyghur, but only so they can spy on your family more effectively. Otherwise, you and your family are obliged to speak Mandarin to each other when they are around, so they can understand what you are saying. If your Mandarin isn’t great, as some Uyghurs find, you will have to hold stilted conversations in your home, with your kids, in what is effectively a foreign language.”

“Frequently a male “relative” will be billeted in a house where there are only Uyghur women: perhaps the husband has had to go to China proper to seek work or has been sent to the camps already.

That has led to numerous cases of sexual harassment and even rape. Mihrigul says that in 2016 she heard a widow in her neighborhood who lived with her twelve-year-old daughter stabbed her “relative” to death after the man sexually abused both her and her daughter. She could not go to the police to report the sexual abuse, because the state was complicit. So she stabbed the man, a defensive act that was likely registered as a knife-wielding religious extremist attack. The woman and her daughter disappeared without a trace.”

“One night the man showed up with a bottle of liquor. This is a common technique used by Becoming Family spies to test whether a host is adhering to Muslim abstinence from alcohol. Offering cigarettes is also used to the same end: observant Muslims are supposed to refrain from smoking or otherwise abusing their bodies. Qelbinur doesn’t drink, and her husband had suffered for years from alcohol abuse. But they felt obliged to take a glass, just to avoid receiving a black mark in their ledger.”

“She was careful to always buy the same amounts of food at the same shops: if you bought more or less than usual, the shopkeeper had a button he could press to alert the authorities. What extra mouths might you be feeding? Likewise with gas for your car: if you used more, it looked suspect, like you were driving somewhere new. If you used less, you would get a phone call from the neighborhood watch after a few days asking why you were lurking at home. Lots of the family photos and selfies on Zumrat’s cell phone from that time were in fact snaps she had been ordered to take when the committee would call her while she was out and demand to know where she was, accompanied by photographic proof.”

Prison

“The policewoman told her she had been sent to look into reports of rampant and systematic sexual abuse at this particular camp. What she had learned made her sick to her stomach, as a Uyghur woman working for the Chinese police. It was not just that the guards and police were raping women for their own pleasure, though they were. It was also that they were inserting batons — even electric batons — into their vaginas, and in the case of men, into their rectums. Prisoners were forced to perform oral sex on their captors, who would violate any orifice on a prisoner’s body — even their ears, the policewoman said. Because so many of the prisoners were young women, this camp had become a very popular posting with the guards. They had been bragging so much about how many women they had raped or abused that the police department overseeing the camp had gotten wind of it. Qelbinur’s police acquaintance had been sent to look into it, but she realized her mission was a mere whitewash: the camp authorities had ordered her to conduct the interviews not inside an interrogation room or an office, but inside the cells where the guards themselves were monitoring the conversations. No prisoner in their right mind would confirm the stories. It was a cover-up, and she as a Uyghur woman had probably been selected to make the whitewash seem more credible.”

“The black room, she said in an interview conducted in Sweden, where she had eventually escaped to, was where prisoners were made to sit on a chair of nails, or had their fingernails pulled out. They were hung from walls and beaten with electrified truncheons.”

“With rape and sexual abuse rife, it was no surprise that some of the women got pregnant, despite the white pills and the gynecological “exams.””

“The man, who must have been around seventy, started complaining that the guards were deliberately trying to make the taller, stronger and prettier women pregnant. When they became pregnant, he said, the babies were claimed by the state to be raised as pro-Chinese Uyghurs, who would think, speak and act like ethnic Chinese.

Could such a thing be possible? That’s the thing about secretive authoritarian states: we just have no way of knowing. Who would have thought the Nazis were experimenting on twin children, injecting brown eyes with blue dye or removing organs from one child and then killing the other to dissect them for comparison, or immersing prisoners in tubs of freezing water until they died to study the effects of hypothermia on the human body. Certainly China has a well-documented and shameful history of harvesting organs from executed prisoners — some of them prisoners of conscience, or members of the oppressed Falun Gong spiritual group — and selling them to foreign patients in need of transplants. China said it had phased out that practice in 2015, but human rights groups and Falun Gong members insist that it still goes on, with many of the latter describing blood and organ tests similar to what the Uyghurs have undergone, to test for compatibility with ailing foreigners who can fly in to China for transplants timed to coincide with executions.”

“The bland routine of incarceration was interrupted one day when her guards informed her that she was going to be executed in a month, and was allowed to choose the way in which she died. She could be shot, but that would take three bullets to make sure she was dead. Each bullet would cost her family a staggering six hundred RMB, or ninety dollars. Or she could choose to be hanged, or to die by lethal injection: in the latter case, she was informed matter-of-factly, “You’ll be contributing to the medical doctors who can study your body.” It was unclear if they meant her organs would be removed and — used for transplant, or whether her body would be dissected and studied.

It was too hideous a choice to make, and choosing might even signify her own complicity. If they wanted to kill her, let them decide how. She refused to sign.”

“One day the guards burst into her cell. They were flustered and angry and told her she had to sign some new papers. These ones testified that her children were born in Ürümchi and had a Uyghur father. They showed her a fake birth certificate for both her surviving kids, which listed neither a mother nor a father. Mihrigul assumed they were planning to send her children to a state orphanage for kids aged under four years, what the Chinese state euphemistically calls a “Little Angels Garden.” Again, she refused to sign.

“These documents are fake!” she said. “My children are Egyptian citizens, they have an Egyptian father!” That sent the cops into an even greater fury. For all their brutality, they were slaves to a vast bureaucracy, and there is nothing that sends the bureaucrats into a tailspin like inaccurate paperwork. Her tormentors, members of the state security apparatus, appeared to be enraged that the local police might have faked the birth certificates, creating a paper trail that could land them all in hot water. Mihrigul had noticed in the past that the local police were quite capable of mistaking her kids’ Egyptian passports for copies of the Koran, so poorly educated were they. It struck her as quite possible that the local Cherchen police had not known what to do with her children’s real IDs and had tried to bypass the problem by issuing new, but false, birth certificates.

There was no way of knowing for sure. She later heard that the bumbling local cops who falsified the birth certificates were jailed for sixteen years for their forgery.”

“The kids could not now legally remain in China, as their only legitimate documentation was foreign passports without valid visas. So they contacted the Egyptian embassy, and asked them to contact the children’s father so that he could take custody and remove the problem. On their birth certificates, Mihrigul has listed Mahmoud, her Egyptian ex-husband, as the children’s father, not the Uyghur man she had entered into a marriage of convenience with (and who had since disappeared into the camps himself).

And that is how Mahmoud, now working as a real estate agent in Dubai, found out not only that the mother of his children was in jail in China but that he was also the father of two small children. It was quite a shock, but he had always loved the woman he called Mihri. He couldn’t abandon her or his kids.”

“She went to live with Mahmoud’s parents in Cairo — he’d had to return to Dubai for work, to cover the huge expenses of getting Mihrigul out of China. But she was still not quite free. Police in Egypt are notoriously easy to bribe, and the government itself has been known to bow to Chinese pressure. Many Uyghurs have been arrested in Egypt, accused by the authorities of being illegal immigrants, while many more have fled the country to avoid being deported back to China. Mahmoud started getting phone calls from Egyptian police officers at his apartment in Dubai, telling him to control his wife, make sure she didn’t speak to anyone, or ordering him to return. That made him nervous — the military had returned to power in Egypt after the revolution, and arbitrary torture and imprisonment were common. He warned Mihrigul she was probably in danger, so she applied to Turkey for a visa. It was denied. That was when she decided to tell her story to the world: she spoke to a journalist working for Radio Free Asia just in case she suddenly disappeared. Luckily, the journalist happened to have contacts in the US State Department, which was already on the alert for cases of Uyghurs facing persecution. After a few months, in September 2018 Mihrigul landed at Dulles Airport in Virginia with her two surviving children to apply for asylum. Mahmoud could not come with her — his visa to stay in Dubai had expired and he was afraid of returning to Egypt. In a legal limbo, he was stuck.”

“All Uyghur women between eighteen and fifty-five had to have the device inserted.

She had to comply: the neighborhood watch committees kept tabs on whether women showed up to their appointments. In the clinic she saw scores of Uyghur women, lined up like sheep in the corridors to have the device implanted to prevent them from having more children. Again, she suffered pain and bleeding, but no one seemed to care.”

Cultural Destruction

“Bahram came across online chatter that China had begun demolishing mosques across the region, including one particularly beautiful structure that he had himself visited in the town of Karghalik.”

“When Bahram approached the Uyghur Human Rights Project for help in getting the news out, the organization was able to give him an assistant, and later to publish his devastating findings as a report. By Bahram’s calcu-lation, as many as 80 percent of Xinjiang’s mosques had been either destroyed, damaged or retooled as secular buildings.

“In the town of Changji, I found three mosques completely demolished and 12 mosques with their domes and minarets removed,” he wrote in his final report, entitled “Demolishing Faith.” “All of the mosques in this small city were affected. I believe that if you take a conservative estimate that 80 percent of the mosques around the Uyghur region have been affected, that would mean that as many as 10,000 to 15,000 mosques have been affected by the campaign.””

“Despite the authorities’ frequent claims that the land was needed for redevelopment, many of the plots now stand empty.

This has been particularly devastating in rural areas. When a village’s mosque is demolished, the local population often lacks the means to travel to a far-off town where there might still be a surviving place of worship. They are cut adrift from their faith, just as the Communist leadership intended.

It was not just mosques that were vanishing, either. The imams who led the prayers and tended to their congregation’s spiritual needs were also disappearing at a disproportionate rate.”

“The only flaw in the analogy is that the CCP was too savvy to touch the most famous mosques in Kashgar and Urümchi, aware that such violence would be glaringly obvious to the world, including to its own tourists who visit these exotic western cities but rarely stray off the beaten track. As we will see, one thing the Communist Party really fears is that its own people will find out the truth about what it is doing.

Instead, what it has done in Kashgar is slowly knock down the ancient buildings of the historic old city and replace them with modern, tourist-friendly replicas while also installing mass surveillance equipment everywhere. It has turned what was once a unique jewel of Uyghur history into a police-state theme park.”

“Ablajan Ayup was simply a singer who drew heavily on Uyghur cultural themes, and became so popular among young people that he earned the reputation as “the Uyghur Justin Bieber.” He told the BBC in an interview in 2017, just as the crackdown was taking off, that his dream was to build bridges between his community and the Han Chinese.

A year later, in February 2018, he was returning to Ürümchi from a concert in Shanghai when he vanished.

As is often the case, his family had to assume he had been arrested, although the police said nothing at first. His detention was eventually confirmed, though the reason remained unclear at the time. Was it because he had once traveled to Malaysia? Because he had spoken to foreign journalists, even in the most mild-mannered way? The closest he had ever come to making a political statement was in 2014, four years before his disappearance, when the authorities canceled one of his concerts following the July clashes between Uyghur protesters and police that left one hundred people dead in Kashgar. Ayup had billed the gig as a display of ethnic unity between Han and Uyghur, but less than an hour before showtime the authorities pulled the plug. Ayup hit back by posting a picture of himself on social media with the caption: “I am not a terrorist!”

As we now know, it was all of the reasons above, and none of them: he was a prominent Uyghur artist, and that was enough.”

“In its efforts to control Tibet, the Chinese authorities in 1995 kidnapped the six-year-old Panchen Lama, the second-most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism, shortly after the boy had been named as the reincarnation of the recently deceased Panchen Lama. Since the Panchen Lama is one of the key figures in identifying the new Dalai Lama, that also was meant to give Beijing key leverage over the succession when the current Dalai Lama, now in his eighties, eventually passes away.”

“Studies that Abduweli had come across in the US showed that if a language is not used in a country’s education system, it will die out in just three generations.”

“The China Statistical Yearbook 2020, which is compiled by the National Bureau of Statistics, put the birth rate in Xinjiang at just 8.14 births per 1,000 people. That is only a little over half the figure for 2017, when the birth rate was 15.88 births per 1,000 inhabitants.

During that same period, Xinjiang’s population growth rate — which takes into account deaths as well as births — had plummeted even more steeply, by 67 percent.

In southern areas of Xinjiang, which are more heavily Uyghur-populated than the Han-settled north, that drop-off has been even more spectacular.”

“According to Chinas own statistics, birth rates in the predominantly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plummeted by more than 60 percent from 2015 to 2018.

Across the whole Xinjiang region, birth rates are plummeting, falling nearly 24 percent in 2019 alone.

Compare those figures to the nationwide decline in the birth rate across China of just 4.2 percent. That relatively modest drop-off has been enough to sound alarm bells in China that its own population is shrinking, and the government has launched a campaign to encourage Han Chinese citizens to have more children.

Extrapolating from these figures, Zenz calculated that the natural population growth rate in Kashgar and Hotan fell by 84 percent between 2015 and 2018, from 1.6 percent to just 0.26 percent.

It is, in essence, an updated version of the eugenics practiced first by European colonial powers and then by the Nazis, aimed at breeding out elements of society that were deemed “undesirable.””

Genocide

““The intention may not be to fully eliminate the Uighur population, but it will sharply diminish their vitality,” Darren Byler, the expert on Uyghurs at the University of Colorado said at the time. “It will make them easier to assimilate into the mainstream Chinese population.”

The 1948 Genocide Convention states that genocide occurs when specific acts are committed “with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Beth Van Schaack, a professor of human rights at Stanford Law School, argues that this “intent” can include “conditions of life that are calculated to eventually destroy the group” that has been targeted.”

“China does not want to drive its Uyghurs outside the country: it fears they will stir up anti-Chinese sentiment abroad, and maybe find ways to reintroduce such dangerous ideas as democracy back home. So it locks up Uyghurs when they return home from foreign travel.

Likewise, it appears they are not interested in Nazi-style death camps — so far, at least, although the camps it builds clearly qualify as concentration camps.”

Industry

“On July 1, 2020, Us Customs and Border Protection made a grim announcement. Its agents at the Port of New York had seized thirteen tons of human hair products, worth an estimated eight hundred thousand dollars, that they said had been made by forced labor in Xinjiang.

The CBP said the shipment was “suspected to be made with human hair today that originated in Xinjiang, China, indicating potential human right abuses of forced child labor and imprisonment.”

The implication of where the hair originated was clear to anyone watching what is going on in Xinjiang. Hundreds of thousands of Uyghur women with long, dark hair go into the camps and come out months or years later, shaven-headed.

The question is: How many women’s heads would need to be shaved to produce thirteen tons of hair? And that was just one shipment that the border police actually found. How many others might have slipped through the shell companies and third parties that Chinese businesses use to hide their use of forced labor?

Black hair products are in huge demand in the United States, largely among the African-American community. The market is estimated to be worth around 2.5 billion dollars a year, and has come to be known as “black gold.” Many Black women, cognizant of their people’s own painful past with slavery, were horrified when the news broke.

Nothing screams “concentration camp” like human hair stolen from its owners. In the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, a huge display of hair shorn from the heads of exterminated Jewish men, women and children takes up half of a hall known as Block 4. The Nazis used human hair to make a kind of coarse fabric, samples of which are also on display as a warning to future generations in the camp-turned-museum just outside of Cracow, Poland.

By comparison to the thirteen tons of human hair intercepted by the US customs agents, after World War II almost two tons of human hair that had been rolled into fabric were found at a factory belonging to the German car parts maker Schaeffler, that is still in existence to this day. Historians estimate that this much smaller amount corresponded to about forty thousand people. Jacek Lachendro, a researcher at the Auschwitz memorial site, said the hair was tested after the war and found to contain traces of hydrogen cyanide, an ingredient of the Zyklon B gas used to kill Jewish prisoners. Schaeffler has denied the accusation.

If two tons of hair is the equivalent of forty thousand people, then thirteen tons would take roughly a quarter of a million people.”

“Modern China has always had forced labor camps, prison camps or black site jails where it locks up opponents of the regime.

Less than a year after declaring victory, Chairman Mao set up the notorious laogai, his “reform through labor” camps, as a pretext to herd tens of millions of Chinese into backbreaking agricultural work as part of his agrarian reform campaign. That coincided with a number of other campaigns ostensibly enacted to crack down on corruption, inefficiency and waste. The first purges are estimated to have killed between one and three million people, and were followed by a series of other crackdowns that culminated in the destructive frenzy known as the Cultural Revolution in 1968, the horrors of which are echoed in what is happening today in Xinjiang.

The Cultural Revolution was in large part a struggle for power between Mao, whose 1958 “Great Leap Forward” had led to a famine that killed as many as thirty million people and left him politically weakened, and saw the rise of more moderate figures in the party like Deng Xiaoping, who would ultimately succeed him and usher in an era of economic reform and more political freedom. Seeing his power slipping, Mao whipped up battalions of youthful Red Guard zealots to wreak havoc across the country, beating, tormenting and often killing their own teachers, as well as writers, artists and other cultural elites. They burned books and destroyed paintings, musical instruments and old manuscripts in their frenzy to erase the old world. After the wave of destruction had dissipated (Mao banished the Red Guards to the countryside when they became too powerful), five thousand of Beijing’s seven thousand registered historical monuments were gone.

So China has a clear record on this: it is ruled by the very same Communist Party that carried out these horrors.”

“The term “concentration camp” comes from the tactics adopted by the imperial Spanish forces fighting an insurgency in Cuba in 1895. Rebel guerrillas were refusing to confront the superior Spanish forces in open battles, instead launching ambushes and raids and then melting into the local population again. So the Spanish decided to clear the countryside, burn all the crops, kill the livestock and move the peasantry into towns, to live behind barbed wire stockades guarded by watchtowers. No one could leave the urban areas without permission.

The Spanish military called this model “reconcentracion” and it proved disastrous for the people swept off their lands. Without any means of sustaining themselves, and lacking the skills to find work in the towns, they starved in droves. The enormous suffering — combined with a mysterious explosion that sank the Maine, a US warship anchored in Havana harbor to safeguard US citizens — triggered a war with America that led to a US occupation of Cuba and the Philippines.

In the latter territory, the US soon found itself facing a guerrilla insurgency by rebels fighting for independence from their new occupier. To combat that resistance, US commanders introduced the exact same system of population concentration that had so repulsed the US public in Spanish Cuba.”

“Just as the insurgency in the Philippines was being crushed by US concentration camps, the British Army in colonial South Africa started herding tens of thousands of Boer women and children in what it called “refugee camps” as its troops battled settlers of Dutch origin in the autonomous regions of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Both ministates had nominally been under British control before the war, but when gold was discovered in the territories, the British started exerting more direct control, sparking a rebellion. British forces under Lord Kitchener — who would later loom large as the commander on the Western front in World War I — copied the scorched earth tactics of Cuba and the Philippines, cutting Boer women and children off from their menfolk fighting the imperial forces.”

“Sometimes, governments actually manage to keep a lid on these far-flung atrocities. Until recently, few British people were aware of the horrors of the British camps in 1950s Kenya, where around a million civilians were locked up as British forces fought the Mau Mau independence guerrillas. In these camps, men and women alike were raped using glass soda bottles filled with hot water, while men were castrated with shears, or used in forced labor projects on white settlements. When Kenya gained independence in 1963, the departing colonial administration hid many of the files they were supposed to have handed over, and it wasn’t until survivors of the atrocities filed claims against the British government in 2009 that the full extent of the colonial brutality came to light.”

““You don’t have to hold everyone the way you did in Nazi Germany now,” Pitzer told me. “If you have good enough surveillance, and only have to track and bring in the people you are targeting for certain things and at certain times, whether it’s for labor or interrogation. With this model you can torture a really small number of people, you can kill an even smaller number of people, even though it’s still quite huge on this scale — but as a percentage of the whole you can terrorize a whole population through strategic just-in-time measures using modern surveillance.”

In effect, you can turn a whole region into a vast, open-air camp.

Already, some of the large camps built in 2016 and 2017 are going dark on the satellite images. “Re-educated” Uyghurs are being moved out to work as forced labor in factories that supply vast amounts of goods and materials to the global economy. Some of the camps are closing, but the Uyghurs are no closer to freedom. In fact, they may be further away than ever.”

“Dilnur said she was forced to sleep in the factory dormitory, with one trip home a week to see her children and parents. After complaining that she suffered from poor eyesight, which made it hard for her to do the complicated embroidery her employers required, they made this trained nurse clean the factory floors instead.

As Shawn Zhang the Chinese satellite tracker noted, some of the camps have recently started going dark in images captured at night. The Communist leadership built these camps at huge expense, so it is unlikely that it will not seek to recoup its costs. And it seems it is doing so by sending Uyghurs who have been “reeducated” into forced labor at factories whose products — from the region’s highly prized cotton and minerals to its vast production of tomatoes — reportedly feed into the supply chain of some of the largest companies in the world, such as Apple, Nike, Dell, Heinz, Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola and scores of others.

Sometimes, this is done hand in glove with the camps. By chance, Shawn Zhang found an image taken as a satellite happened to pass directly over a known “reeducation camp” just at the moment when the inmates were filing out of the gates of the camp and into a factory that had been built next door. Some 135 camps have factories either inside them or in close proximity, researchers have established.”

“A report in March 2020 by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) noted that many Uyghur workers have been transported in special segregated trains to factories in China proper, where they live under what is called “military-style management.” That means they are forced to live in dormitories segregated from the other workers, with razor wire, watchtowers and government minders assigned one for every fifty workers. After work — for which they are paid less than their Han Chinese counterparts — they are forced to continue with the Mandarin classes and Communist Party indoctrination that started in the camps. If they refuse to comply, they are reminded by local CCP officials that they will be sent back to the camps, or to a traditional prison, and there will be immediate consequences for their families back home.

One of the most shocking aspects of this forced transfer of workers is that local governments and private brokers are paid by the head for each Uyghur worker they pack off to de facto slavery in a factory in China.”

“Arranging “surplus labor” transfers can prove quite lucrative: a 2018 Xinjiang government notice said it would pay twenty RMB (three dollars) for every worker transferred to a plant inside Xinjiang — but for transfers outside Xinjiang, to plants in China proper, they would pay three hundred RMB (forty-seven dollars) a head. The Xinjiang regional government was also offering to pay Chinese factories one thousand RMB (156 dollars) for every Uyghur on a year-long “contract” and five thousand RMB (784 dollars) if they kept them for three years.”

“This has led to some adverts that read like something out of the slaveholding past of the American South. A company called Qingdao Human Resources stated on its website it could supply one thousand Uyghur workers aged between sixteen and eighteen “who have already passed political and medical examinations.”

“The United States is the fastest-growing export market for goods made in the Uyghur lands. The market grew by more than 250 percent between April 2019 and April 2020, and includes many industries such as clothing, footwear, hair products, metals and plastic.

The European Union was not far behind, with imports from Xinjiang rising year-on-year by 131 percent in the first six months of 2021 and totaling more than $373 million, according to the South China Morning Post’s calculations based on Chinese customs data. Britain was even hungrier for Xinjiang’s products, with imports up by 192 percent for the same period.”

“I also point out their legal liability, and remind them of the German industrialists who stood trial alongside Nazi leaders at Nuremberg after World War II, some of them for unwittingly using slave labor from concentration camps.

These companies have certainly started to take note, if only because of growing consumer awareness. Nike and Coca-Cola promised to root out forced labor in their supply chains using third-party audits. But when slavery is involved inside a police state that is itself the actual driver of the forced labor, a simple audit is completely inadequate. Authorities in Xinjiang have blocked auditors from carrying out their work without undue interference, and foreign companies have no say in the local hiring practices of their Chinese subcontracting firms.”

“Nike, for example, claimed that an audit confirmed that its Qingdao subcontracting factory had no Uyghur workers in 2019. But ASPI researchers took a closer look at Chinese state media — again, basic open-source information — and found that the factory still employed about eight hundred Uyghurs at the end of that year, and produced more than seven million pairs of shoes for Nike every year.

Were your sneakers made by slaves?

In a report in March 2020, the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China listed Nike and Coca-Cola as companies with suspected ties to forced labor in the Uyghur region. The list also featured Adidas, Calvin Klein, Campbell Soup Company, Costco, H&M, Patagonia, Tommy Hilfiger and others.”

“China provides some 22 percent of the world’s cotton, and 84 percent of that comes from the Uyghur region. It is estimated that one in five garments produced globally contains Xinjiang cotton.”

“Those who speak up pay a high price. The Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), a collaboration between fashion giants such as H&M, Nike and Gap, together with farmers, human rights organizations and environmental groups, has been working for years to make the industry more equitable and sustainable. When the BCI publicly questioned the use of Uyghur forced labor in the cotton industry, and H&M said it would stop using Xinjiang cotton, China immediately declared total war on the Swedish garments giant.

Overnight, it erased all H&M adverts from leading e-commerce sites and even from its map apps. Suddenly, it was impossible to get a ride-hailing service to an H&M outlet: the drivers’ maps simply couldn’t recognize the stores as a valid destination. If a customer wanted to find one of the company’s four hundred stores on Baidu Maps, the Chinese equivalent of Google Maps, it just wouldn’t show up. Trying to buy online also drew a blank.”

“Chinese state television even went as far as blurring out the names of Western brands of clothes worn by contestants on reality TV shows when those companies have questioned the use of Uyghur forced labor.

At the same time, China led calls for a boycott of the boycotters, across all its social media platforms. It immediately whipped up users to rant against H&M and a host of other multinationals. As soon as companies publicly state they will stop using Xinjiang suppliers, celebrities started denouncing the big-name brands like Hugo Boss and H&M on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, saying they would no longer endorse or wear their products.”

“In October 2012, for example, a woman in suburban Portland, Oregon, was setting up a Halloween-themed birthday party for her five-year-old daughter and was dusting off some old decorations when a hand-written note slipped out of the packaging of a Styrofoam gravestone. It was an SOS letter, written in English, from the prisoner who had made the toy. The note said that thousands of members of the Falun Gong were being held without trial and forced to work fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, in a labor camp that had been around since the 1950s. The letter begged whoever might find it, out there in the free world, to alert governments and human rights organizations to the plight of the prisoners, jailed because they adhered to an organized spiritual group that the paranoid Communist Party had branded a threat to its security.”

“Their cheap, mostly involuntary labor — combined with the below-market-price coal China produces and the government subsidies provided by Beijing — has allowed for the dumping of solar panels on foreign markets. And that has brought down the cost of this vital energy resource by as much as 75 percent in the past decade. It has also allowed China to corner a vital market, throwing the West’s plans for a green energy revolution into doubt. International competitors have been seriously undercut by the Chinese production, or completely driven out of business: in 2014, the Japanese solar panel manufacturer Sharp cut its workforce in Europe and the United States, while in 2021 another industry leader, Panasonic, said it was scrapping its own solar cell manufacturing because of the competition from China.

That has left the world largely reliant on China’s solar panel production for the future.”

Conclusion

“As was working on this book, Germany announced it was paying 1.3 billion dollars in compensation for its own previously unacknowledged genócide in Namibia. Many people may have found themselves asking: When had Germany even occupied Namibia? It was an obscure moment in the brutal colonial history of Africa, when German troops systematically exterminated the Indigenous Herero and Namib people who had rebelled against their loss of freedom and land in 1884. Tens of thousands of people were killed in what was then known as German South West Africa. It has aptly been called “the forgotten genocide” by historians.”

“That debate has led to some technologies, like facial recognition software, being banned in certain places such as California. It is a discussion being held all across the free world.”

“The extent to which Chinese censors were willing to crack down became evident when a Chinese student was actually imprisoned for tweeting a popular meme comparing Xi to Winnie the Pooh, the portly children’s character whose resemblance to the Chinese leader had been widely remarked upon online during a state visit to Washington. The twenty-five-year-old student, who had been studying in the US, was arrested on his return to China and sentenced to six months for posting “comments and inappropriate images insulting to the leader of this country.””

“If you jaywalk, facial recognition cameras scan your face and flash a picture of you, together with your name, on a giant billboard by the roadside. This is not only a public humiliation: the misdemeanor knocks points off your credit score. If it falls too low – and you do not work to get the points back by doing something for the party or your local community – you can be banned from flights and high-speed trains, or have trouble getting a loan for a home.”

“China calls its intensive spying on the Uyghurs “predictive policing.” The idea, they say, is for its advanced Al systems to pick up on patterns of behavior and arrest people who are liable to commit a crime before they actually commit it.”

“In some Chinese cities, police officers are already wearing facial recognition glasses to spot known criminals; in others, the vast databases linked to ubiquitous networks of cameras – which have been used to round up millions of Uyghurs – are being used to pick known criminals out of crowds as they buy food from street vendors.”

“Not far north of Greece, in the tiny Balkan country of Montenegro, the government took a billion-dollar loan from China to have a Chinese company build a two-hundred-and-seventy-mile highway from its Adriatic port of Bar to Belgrade, the capital of neighboring Serbia.

However, after building only twenty-five miles, Montenegro ran out of money, leaving the road unfinished and Podgorica owing China a sum equivalent to a quarter of its economy. As part of the deal, the Chinese state bank that granted the loan can seize land in Montenegro in case of a default. Final execution of the deal will be decided by a Chinese court of law, a serious blow to Montenegro’s sovereignty.”

“Xi was the first foreign head of state to be invited to Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago, in April 2017. Looking back, the timing was highly significant: that was the month that the CCP launched its first mass roundups of Uyghurs into the camps. But in Palm Beach, the real estate mogul hoped to woo the Chinese Communist leader to push through a trade deal to close the US deficit.

But Xi was a cunning operator, a man who had survived the purge of his father, a onetime acolyte of Chairman Mao, and returned from his own “reeducation” in the rural hinterlands to work his way up through the ranks of the Communist Party, all while never showing his hand. It appears Xi quickly realized that Trump was a man who admired authoritarian leaders and knew little about the complex issues at play. He played Trump so well that even four years later, when China was unleash- ing the coronavirus pandemic on an unsuspecting world and trying to hush up its spread, Trump was still reluctant to turn on his old “friend.”

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump said on Twitter on January 21, 2020, right before America was engulfed by the pandemic. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

Just as bad, Trump’s new secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, the former head of the Exxon oil company who also had zero government experience, was playing right into China’s hands.

At his Senate confirmation hearing, he praised China as “a valuable ally in curtailing elements of radical Islam” and even added that “we should not let disagreements over other issues exclude areas for productive partnership.””

“In an attempt to draw attention to what was going on, I helped to organize a Uyghur cultural gathering in Rayburn House, a government building right next to the US Capitol. I served as a master of ceremonies. We had men and women in traditional Uyghur dress, and a large spread of home-cooked Uyghur food. James McGovern of Massachusetts, the chair of the Congressional-Executive Committee on China, attended, and a number of Uyghur leaders, including Dolkun Isa, the president of the World Uyghur Congress, delivered speeches. As I was seeing one of the guests out, I spotted Jon Stewart leaving the building. I went up and introduced myself, saying I was a big fan. He said he had been talking in another committee room on behalf of New York firefighters battling for extra health care after suffering terrible side effects from inhaling toxic dust on 9/11. He was very friendly, so I asked him: “Would you do me a favor?” As a celebrity, he probably gets asked that a lot, but he graciously listened as I asked him to say a few words to the assembled Uyghurs and their guests upstairs.

Remarkably, he agreed, and delivered a short speech expressing his admiration for the culture on display, and saying he couldn’t believe that China’s Communist Party would want to eradicate such a rich heritage. For me, that generous display of kindness – in response to what was essentially an act of desperation on my part – symbolized all that is good about America. Jon left the gathering with a huge bag of Uyghur food that some of the women had pressed on him for his drive back to New York City.”

“At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, disturbing videos popped up online of Uyghurs in prison uniforms being herded onto buses or trains, apparently being sent off to work in Chinese factories to keep the economy running when Han Chinese people were too afraid to return to work. What happened in the packed camps when the pandemic ripped through them? How did those undernourished prisoners, denied medication or sanitation, survive the disease that killed millions worldwide?

Will we ever know the death toll, or will the CCP cover that up, too?”