How I Survived a Chinese “Reeducation” Camp

Description

The first memoir about the “reeducation” camps by a Uyghur woman, describing the insidious nature of oppression, the dehumanizing effects of torture and brainwashing, and the human drive to survive—and resist—under even the most horrific circumstances.

“I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.”
— Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match

For three years Gulbahar Haitiwaji was held in Chinese detention centers and “reeducation” camps, enduring interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, rats, and nights under the blinding fluorescent lights of her prison cell. Her only crime? Being a Uyghur.

China’s brutal repression of Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide and reported widely in media around the world. In 2019, the New York Times published the “Xinjiang Papers,” leaked documents exposing the forced detention of more than one million Uyghurs in Chinese “reeducation” camps. The Chinese government denies that these camps are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism” and calling them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter, with the help of the French diplomatic corps. Others have not been so fortunate.

In How I Survived a Chinese “Reeducation” Camp, Gulbahar tells her story, describing the insidious nature of oppression, the dehumanizing effects of torture and brainwashing, and the human drive to survive—and resist—under even the most horrific circumstances. This new paperback edition includes a new introduction by the author.”The book is most valuable as testimony. For Uyghurs, Haitiwaji explains, the camps are “a kind of urban legend,” made mythic by silence: “If no one talks about them, then the camps aren’t real.” Her memoir, dedicated “to all those who didn’t make it out,” contributes to a rich and painful body of memory-keeping that grows all the time.”
—Jamie Fisher, The New York Times

“[A] powerful, heart-wrenching memoir.”
—Elizabeth M. Lynch, Commonweal

“A viscerally affecting memoir from a Uyghur woman who “endured hundreds of hours of interrogation, torture, malnutrition, police violence, and brainwashing. . . . A taut, moving, powerful account of an ongoing human rights disaster.” 
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“After being imprisoned for nearly three years, Haitiwaji, a member of the Uighur community, details in this rousing and courageous debut the brutal treatment she survived in one of China’s “reeducation” camps. Structured like a diary, her narrative begins in August 2016 at her daughter’s wedding in Paris, a celebration that’s tinged with sadness because those in attendance are living in exile, having left China after a crackdown against a growing movement for Uighur autonomy. A few months later, Haitiwaji was summoned to China, ostensibly to resolve a pension matter, and detained by government authorities. With her daughter accused of terrorism (she was seen holding a flag representing Uighur independence at a Paris protest), Haitiwaji was imprisoned, shackled to her bed for 20 days, and relentlessly interrogated. Her story grows more disturbing when she recalls the repeated violence and 11 hours of daily “education” she received over the next two years once she was sent to “school”: “this was brainwashing, whole days spent repeating the same idiot phrases.” Haitiwaji’s forthright descriptions of her harrowing experience at a modern-day concentration camp—before she was released in 2019 with the help of her daughter—offers a sobering look at the horrific ways genocide is still being enacted today. This urgent testimony will serve as a wake-up call to Western readers.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Of this urgent first memoir about the ‘reeducation’ camps by a Uyghur woman, the author confirms: ‘I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.'”
—Ms.

“A current and deeply disturbing personal account of being targeted as a Muslim Uyghur . . . This memoir puts a much-needed face on abstract world news about the upwards of one million men and women estimated to have been taken from their families and jobs, imprisoned in camps, and ‘reeducated’ in western China. . . . Gulbahar’s is a brave and important voice; her choice to lay her name and face bare to speak as loudly as possible calls us, in turn, to witness, to amplify, to not look away.”
—World Literature Today

“Gulbahar’s story is a truly powerful representation of resilience. As the Chinese Communist regime is actively seeking to undermine the values of freedom and democracy across the globe, we need only read testimonies like this one to know what the future world order will look like if the Chinese Communist regime is allowed to continue unchecked. Despite her suffering, her courage in the face of genocide shines through. May every person who reads it be inspired to confront these modern-day horrors and be an upstander just as Gulbahar has been.”
—Rushan Abbas, Executive Director, Campaign For Uyghurs

“Gulbahar Haitiwaji’s beautifully written account of brutality in the Chinese government’s “reeducation camps” is a remarkable feat—accessible to all readers, deeply human despite the inhumanity detailed, and unsparing in its details of bleak efforts to destroy Uyghur identity. One constant throughout the book, and clearly throughout her life: Haitiwaji’s extraordinary courage.”
—Sophie Richardson, China Director, Human Rights Watch.  Born in 1966 in Ghulja in the Xinjiang region, GULBAHAR HAITIWAJI was an executive in the Chinese oil industry before leaving for France in 2006 with her husband and chil dren, who obtained the status of political refugees. In 2017 she was summoned to China for an admin-istrative issue. Once there, she was arrested and spent three years in “reeducation” camps. Thanks to the efforts of her family and the French foreign ministry, she was freed and was able to return to France, where she currently resides.

ROZENN MORGAT is a journalist at Le Figaro and a specialist reporting on the Uyghurs. Working directly with Haitiwaji, she gathered together her account of her experiences in Xinjiang, and together they turned Haitiwaji’s story into this book.

A 2021 Guggenheim fellow, EDWARD GAUVIN has translated in various fields from film to fiction. His work has twice won the British Comparative Literature Association’s John Dryden Translation Competition and been shortlisted for several major awards, including the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and the National Translation Award. The translator of over four hundred graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders.US

Additional information