The Chief Witness: Escape from China's Modern-Day Concentration Camps

by Sayragul Sauytbay, Alexandra Cavelius, Caroline Waight (Translator)

Overview

A shocking depiction of one of the world’s most ruthless regimes—and the story of one woman’s fight to survive.

I will never forget the camp. I cannot forget the eyes of the prisoners, expecting me to do something for them. They are innocent. I have to tell their story, to tell about the darkness they are in. It is so easy to suffocate us with the demons of powerlessness, shame, and guilt. But we aren’t the ones who should feel ashamed.

Born in China’s north-western province, Sayragul Sauytbay trained as a doctor before being appointed a senior civil servant. But her life was upended when the Chinese authorities incarcerated her. Her crime: being Kazakh, one of the China’s ethnic minorities.

The north-western province borders the largest number of foreign nations and is the point in China that is the closest to Europe. In recent years it has become home to over 1,200 penal camps—modern-day gulags that are estimated to house three million members of the Kazakh and Uyghur minorities. Imprisoned solely due to their ethnicity, inmates are subjected to relentless punishment and torture, including being beaten, raped, and used as subjects for medical experiments. The camps represent the greatest systematic incarceration of an entire people since the Third Reich.

In prison, Sauytbay was put to work teaching Chinese language, culture, and politics, in the course of which she gained access to secret information that revealed Beijing’s long-term plans to undermine not only its minorities, but democracies around the world. Upon her escape to Europe she was reunited with her family, but still lives under constant threat of reprisal. This rare testimony from the biggest surveillance state in the world reveals not only the full, frightening scope of China’s tyrannical ambitions, but also the resilience and courage of its author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950354528
Publisher:	Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	1,102,540
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sayragul Sauytbay was awarded the 2021 Nuremberg International Human Rights Award, and the US State Department’s International Women of Courage Award in 2020. Her key witness accounts have already created a stir on the world stage, and have been reported by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Alexandra Cavelius is a freelance author and journalist. She is published in renowned magazines, and is the author of several political nonfiction books. She was also the author of the bestseller Dragon Fighter, the autobiography of the Uighur political activist Rebiya Kadeer, who has been nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Caroline Waight is an award-winning literary translator working from Danish and German.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Ghosts of the Past 1

Chapter 2 Despite Chinese Invasion and Destruction: dreaming of a golden future and financial security 15

Chapter 3 Mouths Taped Shut 87

Chapter 4 Worse Than a Mental Hospital: the world's biggest surveillance state 129

Chapter 5 Total Control: interrogations and rape 145

Chapter 6 The Camp: surviving in hell 169

Chapter 7 Better to Die Escaping Than Die in the Camp 221

Chapter 8 Kazakhstan: Beijing's interference in neighbouring countries 253

Chapter 9 Viral: warning the world 281

Afterword Alexandra Cavelius 301

Photograph Credits 309

Editorial Reviews

04/19/2021

Sauytbay, a member of the Muslim Kazakh ethnic minority in China’s Xinjiang province, details her oppression by Chinese authorities in this harrowing account. In 2016, the Chinese Communist Party began a crackdown on the region’s Muslim ethnic groups, including Uighurs and Kazakhs. Sauytbay chronicles the loss of homes, herding grounds, and holy places, as well as constant surveillance, forced relocation, and internment in “reeducation” camps. After her husband and two children fled to Kazakhstan, Sauytbay, a civil servant who ran five local kindergartens before the crackdown, was ordered to report to one of the camps and teach Chinese language and culture to the inmates. She describes how Muslim detainees were force-fed pork, beaten for speaking their native languages, and subjected to medical experiments, and alleges that some were even “disappeared” for organ harvesting. Suddenly released after months in the camp, she fled to Kazakhstan, where she reunited with her family before she was arrested by the secret police in that country and put on trial for entering the country illegally. Her testimony about the camps resulted in an outpouring of international pressure on Kazakhstan and her family’s eventual relocation to Sweden. Full of disturbing evidence and visceral outrage at the failures of Western governments and corporations to hold China to account, this is a searing portrait of a still-unfolding tragedy. (June)

Publishers Weekly

The Chief Witness is a deeply disturbing insight into the dark heart of the Chinese Communist Party and its reign of terror in Xinjiang. It will rank historically along with the great literary exposés of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag. If you thought another Holocaust could never happen, pick up this book. Told with an aching honesty, Sayragul Sautbay’s account of her experience in China’s concentration camps in Xinjiang wounds the soul.”
—Clive Hamilton, author of Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“Sauytbay, a member of the Muslim Kazakh ethnic minority in China’s Xinjiang province, details her oppression by Chinese authorities in this harrowing account… Sauytbay chronicles the loss of homes, herding grounds, and holy places, as well as constant surveillance, forced relocation, and internment in “reeducation” camps… She describes how Muslim detainees were force-fed pork, beaten for speaking their native languages, and subjected to medical experiments, and alleges that some were even “disappeared” for organ harvesting… Full of disturbing evidence and visceral outrage at the failures of Western governments and corporations to hold China to account, this is a searing portrait of a still-unfolding tragedy.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher