Victim, Scholar: Two Perspectives on Chinese Atrocities against the Uyghurs and the Kazakhs

Both these books are concerned with the Chinese government's massive assault on the Muslim ethnic minorities of western China, especially the Uyghurs, and the gigantic concentration camp system built up since 2017—the largest internment of a religious and ethnic minority the world has seen since World War II.The first book, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony, is an account by the American anthropologist Darren Byler, one of the foreign scholars who, until recently, had been deeply involved in ethnographic research in the targeted region. The other, How I Survived a Chinese “Re-education” Camp, is by Gulbahar Haitiwaji, herself a native Uyghur and one of the few camp survivors who managed to get away from China to tell her story.Byler's rapid-fire account begins with a Chinese Muslim (Hui) student who was detained, to her surprise, apparently for accessing her email account in Seattle, where she had been studying. The rawness of the shock and agony of discovering the unforgiving reality of the new gulag is also captured by Haitiwaji's story. This shock was widespread; it arose from how—despite long-standing Chinese discrimination against Uyghurs and Kazakhs—almost nobody was prepared for the massive scale of the 2017 rupture with the past: the widespread, arbitrary lawlessness of the mass sweeps filling up the camps, the intensely dehumanizing brutality of the violence inside, the mass family separations, and so on. (In a sense, China observers are all reeling from the discovery; all this has certainly changed my own view of China.)As Byler moves to render the experiences of Uyghur and Kazakh interlocutors, he also expertly sketches the history of the region, especially how the shock assault of 2017 was preceded by the buildup of an intrusive, high-tech surveillance machine. Like the camp system, this has demanded huge investments, and like many aspects of the overall campaign, the surveillance was developed for profit by Chinese companies which, in symbiosis with state planning, have been getting very rich in the process of developing all sorts of biometric and tracking surveillance.In a second book, Byler develops a fuller interpretation of this enterprise as “terror capitalism,” which China now is exporting around the world.1 But already in this work, he traces the development back to Microsoft, which aided the face-recognition startup Megvii—now one of the outsized players in the Chinese surveillance machinery (124–35).The strongest focus of In the Camps is still, however, on the experience of the surveillance inside and outside the camps. Some of the most heart-wrenching parts concern male non-Han Chinese minority foot soldiers of the machine, forced to take part in mass sweeps, including of obviously innocent elderly women and girls—and obeying orders, since they would otherwise themselves be sent to the camps: They were openly told that “if you quit . . . you will end up in the camps, too” (57). They had seen former guards like themselves being sent in, and they knew these were not “re-education” or “training” camps (the official euphemisms)—but a horrible penal colony (57–58).Inside the camps, the surveillance can be even more intense: one employee described a command center where everybody in every cell could be monitored; round-the-clock staff could instantly discover even small talk in the dark (78–79). Any such infractions were often severely punished. A Kazakh survivor who never figured out why he was taken described a permanent state of hunger, fear, and, above all, the unbearable uncertainty about the future (101–2). Byler usefully compares this to Primo Levi's famous account (If This Is a Man) of the slow but dramatic breakdown of inmates inside Nazi camps (102; see also 28).The book is a highly commendable achievement. The gripping interview accounts are especially well told and are backed up by numerous sources; it provides compelling analysis of the unfolding story. It is a must-read on the early years of China's genocide, 2017–21.In my own view, the surveillance, databases, and internment camps were only the first steps of a master plan, not just for oppression and dispossession but for the elimination of Uyghur culture as such—that is, genocide. First, Uyghurs are identified and sorted, with large numbers going to concentration camps for accelerated de-Uyghurification. Then, a second sorting: nonthreatening able-bodied survivors are transferred to forced labor, while any cultural leader capable of reasserting Uyghur identity is imprisoned (or killed) and harmless but weak individuals are sent home.2 Among all those left outside the camps, across society, an overall de-Uyghurification campaign continues, including the eradication of outward signs of Uyghur culture and religion.3 Further, scholars point to evidence that, in order to further these same goals and to prevent future generations of Uyghurs, drastic measures like mass sterilizations and mass family separation (as well as the separation of male and female young workers) are being enforced.4 To me, the trajectory as a whole appears very close to what the Nazis planned for Europe after their final victory—to Germanize the Germanizable and to enslave or eliminate the rest. Just like in Germany and elsewhere, the current cleansing of China of threatening ethnic others has much to do with the ongoing Chinese political shift, adopting a narrow, intolerant nationalism and a Han Chinese supremacism as state policy.5 That shift forms the larger context for the racist attitudes of some Han Chinese (including in the Uyghur region, as illustrated several times in Byler's book; see, e.g., 96–97).In Gulbahar Haitiwaji's book, we learn how she and her family had chosen exile in France much earlier, in 2006, long before the actively enforced genocide was launched in 2017. This was due to the persistent, long-standing discrimination and injustice against her Uyghur community, something she felt daily despite being relatively well off. Then in 2017 she, like many others, was lured back to China—something about her pension from the Karamay oil company, where she once worked as an engineer. Even Gulbahar's husband, long wary of the Chinese government, had said that there was “no reason to worry” and she would soon be back in France (43).Many fell for similar lures and, like her, were instantly thrown into the camps. Gulbahar was arbitrarily detained, her initial protests ignored. She writes about her experiences in the jail, and later in the camp, in a diary-like form, revealing her feelings in highly personal terms and with a French touch (such as musing about the lingering whiff of her favorite French perfume Narciso Rodriguez [73, 76, 79], her crying with her cellmates, her escapes into her own memory-world, and much more). It is deeply moving.Gulbahar describes her initial ignorance in hoping to be sent to “school” (to the camps) rather than to “prison”; school sounded so much better. But just days after arriving in a (prison) camp, she was getting used to fellow women detainees collapsing, never to be seen again: “Sometimes one of us would faint. If she failed to come to on her own, a guard would yank her onto her feet and slap her awake. If she collapsed again, the guard would drag her out of the room and we would never see her again. Ever, at first I found this shocking. Before long it was just business as usual” (77–78). (More echoes of Primo Levi.)While focusing on surviving, Gulbahar begins to wonder about invisible threats: “I was visibly losing weight. I think they put something in the food. There was something strange about its taste, its consistency, as if someone was sprinkling invisible seeds onto our plate. Were they drugging our food?” (103). Soon after, there is a session of forced medications described as “vaccinations”—perhaps a sterilization drug, or drugs “leaching out” each person's memory. Younger women detainees, she says, many engaged to be wed, dreaded the prospect of having been sterilized (107–10).Gulbahar also describes conversations with other women and describes their fate, with their names. She mentions hiding such conversations from the cameras, but also how the prisoners' sheer exhaustion slowly killed all such initiatives and even the sense of time passing (81).She includes interludes on how, in 2018, the world outside, unbeknownst to Gulbahar at the time, began to hear about the camps. Above all, she points to the German anthropologist Adrian Zenz uncovering the situation from Chinese state documents,6 as well as the Chinese student Shawn Zhang, originally from Beijing but based in Canada, who published his crucial observations of satellite imagery of camps across Xinjiang.7Gulbahar's family members in France increasingly believed she might be dead after two years, yet her daughters also spoke on French television and tried to alert the French government. Somehow, Gulbahar also began to imagine that help could be found. In the camp, she was told she would stand trial, and in November 2018, in a camp “courtroom,” she was handed a seven-year prison sentence on unclear grounds. However, soon she was reinterrogated, producing a lengthy false confession on camera (170),8 in which she branded her own daughter and husband as terrorist sympathizers, begging them to quit the France Uyghur Association and instead support China. She was then told she was “free.” But as frequently happens in China, “free” does not mean free—it only referred to a change in her official status. No longer formally a detainee or prisoner, the government would still tell her what to do. Thus, even after she was “released,” the police forced her to rewrite her confessions and also to sit through multiple telephone conversations with her husband and family in France, in which Gulbahar had to pretend she was making the calls herself (185–90).In the end, the epilogue says, arriving in France felt “bitter” because of all the hurt, including among her friends, who now feared she was being monitored by the Chinese state (232). Thus the poison of the hateful regime continues to poison people long after any direct confrontations and camp violence.A note on the two epigraph quotes from the Uyghur quisling Shohrat Zakir (the top ethnic Uyghur official in the region at the time), right at the beginning of Gulbahar's book (11). Profoundly Orwellian, they speak about the great rewards of concentration camp “training,” despite Zakir knowing full well that in the minds of the great majority of his compatriots, the camps are forever associated with horror. The choice to include the statements is hard to interpret. Will every reader understand the irony?Finally, readers may also note that there are few comparable books reporting on the ongoing atrocities in Xinjiang from the ground up. This is due to China's severe crackdown both on research and on news reporting in the region, in addition to severe restrictions on native residents' freedom of expression and travel, including those not interned in camps but who nevertheless are all subjected to intense surveillance.Even so, more accounts from native writers may come out in the future. A number of genocide survivors appeared as witnesses in the Uyghur Tribunal in London in 2021. One of them, Sayragul Sauytbay, a member of the Kazakh minority who was forced to teach Chinese to detainees inside the camps, also published a book-length account of her ordeal.9 Some of her experiences facing “students” overlap with those of Qelbinur Sedik, a teacher of Uyghur-Uzbek origin who was interviewed by Byler.10Language has been one challenge. Although many East Turkestan natives are multilingual (including in Chinese, sometimes Turkish), few knew European languages before their exile. Thus, Gulbahar Haitiwaji's account was composed in French and Sayragul's account first appeared in German, and both involved careful translation work.We should be very grateful to all the translators as well as, above all, to the brave authors telling their story to the world—reportedly from a sense of obligation toward their fellow camp inmates, who are unable to escape and still suffer in the camps and prisons of western China—despite the tremendous personal risk to the authors themselves. (Almost all face threats of retaliation by Chinese authorities, including to any remaining family.)The two books under review are among the very best on China's twenty-first-century concentration camps, capturing the horror afflicting those affected and providing a visceral sense of the horror behind the walls. They could fruitfully be assigned together as course readings—one (Haitiwaji's) providing a harrowing account in the first person (as if you were really there), the other (Byler's) capturing the experiences of many along with a powerful first analysis of why all this is happening. For scholars, they remind us that this will remain the number one question in China studies for years to come: “Why?”

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