The First Memoir about China's Internment Camps by a Uyghur Woman

'An indispensable account' – Sunday Times

'Moving and devastating' – The Literary Review

'An intimate, highly sensory self-portrait' – Sunday Telegraph (Five Stars)

Since 2017, one million Uyghurs have been seized by the Chinese authorities and sent to ‘re-education’ camps, in what the US Government and human rights groups describe as a genocide.

Few have made it out to the West. One is Gulbahar Haitiwaji.

For three years, she endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, freezing cold, forced sterilisation, and a programme of de-personalisation meant to destroy her free will and her memories.

This intimate account reveals the long-suppressed truth about China’s gulag. It tells the story of a woman confronted by an all-powerful state bent on crushing her spirit – and her battle for freedom and dignity.

Reviews

'Gulbahar's memoir is an indispensable account, which makes vivid the stench of fearful sweat in the cells, the newly built prison's permanent reek of white pain. It closely corresponds with other witness statements, giving every indication of being very reliable. Most impressive is her psychological honesty.' – John Phipps, Sunday Times

'Huge efforts have been made to obfuscate the realities of life in the camps (even speaking openly in Xinjiang about them can lead to incarceration). Although their existence has been well documented abroad and grudgingly admitted by the Chinese state, relatively few first-hand accounts of what actually goes on inside them have emerged. One is Gulbahar Haitiwaji's moving and devastating How I Survived a Chinese 'Re-education' Camp.' – Roderic Wye, Literary Review

'There follows an intimate, highly sensory self-portrait, created with the help of Rozenn Morgat (a journalist with Le Figaro), of an educated woman passing through a system that appears at turns cruel, paranoid, capricious and devastatingly effective. – Christopher Harding, Sunday Telegraph

A true story, this book reads like a 21st Century version of George Orwell's 1984, set in modern China.

Extract

In the camp, I wasn’t Gulbahar, but Number 9. I was forbidden from speaking Uighur, or from praying.

There was something extra about the taste of the vile slop that filled our bowls. Were they drugging our meals to make us lose our memories?

Physically and mentally, I became a ghost. My weight plummeted. The blinding light worsened my vision, and beneath my eyes, heavy rings made two pockets of shadow. My heart beat so weakly that I could no longer feel it when I pressed my palm to my chest.

Whenever I was deemed to have broken the rules, I was slapped or, on one occasion, shackled to a bed for a fortnight. I underwent hundreds of hours of nightmarish interrogations, until chaos gradually took over my soul.

Every week, women were taken away and we never saw them again.

At night, we’d wake to terrifying screams, as if someone was being tortured upstairs. We listened in silence, absolutely still, to howls that pierced the night. They were the cries of women going mad, begging guards not to hurt them any more.

Death lurked in every corner.

When the footfalls of guards woke us in the night, I thought our time had come to be executed. When a hand viciously pushed hair-clippers across my skull, I shut my eyes, thinking I was being readied for the scaffold, the electric chair, or drowning.

For two years, my husband, Kerim, and two daughters, Gulhumar and Gulnigar, had no idea where I was. They imagined the worst. They believed me dead.

I was born into a Uighur family that had lived in Xinjiang for generations. This jewel, more than six times the size of the UK, is at the far western end of China. Its riches include gold, diamonds, natural gas, uranium, and – above all – oil.

Since being annexed by China, we Uighurs have been the stone in the Beijing regime’s shoe.

Xinjiang is far too rich a strategic corridor for it to lose and President Xi Jinping wants it cleansed of separatist populations. In short, China wants a Xinjiang without Uighurs.

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