How I Survived A Chinese 'Re-education' Camp: A Uyghur Woman’s Story

Gulbahar Haitiwaji is the first Uyghur woman survivor China's barbarous re-education camps to give a personal account of life inside their walls.

The camps – redolent of Stalin’s gulag – are ‘home’ to one million Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group in the western region of Xinjiang. The Chinese Communist Party covets Xinjiang because it is on the ‘new silk roads,' the flagship project of President Xi Jinping.

The Chinese Communist Party says the camps are part of ‘the total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism.’ The US Government says that China’s treatment of the Uyghurs amounts to ‘genocide.’

Gulbahar recounts how she was tricked into returning to China and thrown into a nightmare of brainwashing and forced sterialisation, that is wiping a culture off the face of the Earth. Very unusually, she made it out to the West, and has decided to tell her story. This rare account of life in China’s gulag is visceral and internationally important.