How I Survived a Chinese Re-education Camp: A Uighur Woman Speaks Out

Book by Gulbahar Haitiwaji and Rozenn Morgat) - available for pre-order here.

For three years, she endured hundreds of hours of interrogation, torture, hunger, police violence, cold, and rats. Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uighur woman survivor of Chinese re-education camps to give a connected and detailed account of what happens there. Gulbahar's testimony is chilling: she starkly recounts her experiences in the Chinese camp system and how she was saved thanks to the intervention of her daughter and the French foreign ministry. This rare account of life inside China's gulag is visceral and internationally important.

"In the camps, the re-education process is systematic in that it applies the same remorseless method to destroying all its victims. It starts out by stripping them of their individuality. It takes away your name, your clothes, your hair. There is nothing now to distinguish you from anyone else. Then the process takes over your body by subjecting it to a hellish routine: being forced by teachers to unendingly recite the glories of the Communist Party for eleven hours a day in a windowless classroom. Falter, and you are punished. So you keep on saying them same things over and over again until you can't feel, can't think anymore. You lose all sense of time: first the hours, then the days."