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

Gulbahar Haitiwaji's memoir is an indispensable account of life in a Chinese re-education camp. It vividly describes the stench of fearful sweat in the cells, the newly built prison's permanent reek of white pain, and the psychological honesty of the author.

Format: Hardback
Length: 280 pages
Publication date: 03 February 2022
Publisher: Canbury Press

An essential account – Sunday Times

Moving and devastating – The Literary Review

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

FIRST MEMOIR ABOUT CHINA

A ‘RE-EDUCATION CAMPS BY A UYGHUR WOMAN

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.

Extract

‘In the camps, the ‘re-education process applies the same remorseless method to destroying all its victims. It starts out by stripping you of your 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 to repeatedly 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 the 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.

- Gulbahar Haitiwaji

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 correlates the experiences of the Uyghur people with those of the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the ongoing human rights crisis in China and the urgent need for international intervention.

Weight: 454g
Dimension: 163 x 368 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781912454907