How I Survived a Chinese "Reeducation" Camp A Uyghur Woman’s Story

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.

This new paperback edition features a new introduction by the author.

“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.

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.