'An indispensable 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
corresponds with other witness statements, giving every indication
of being very reliable. Most impressive is her psychological
honesty.' - John Phipps, Sunday Times 'Huge efforts have been made
to obfuscate the realities of life in the camps (even speaking
openly in Xinjiang about them can lead to incarceration). Although
their existence has been well documented abroad and grudgingly
admitted by the Chinese state, relatively few first-hand accounts
of what actually goes on inside them have emerged. One is Gulbahar
Haitiwaji's moving and devastating How I Survived a Chinese
'Re-education' Camp.' - Roderic Wye, Literary Review 'There follows
an intimate, highly sensory self-portrait, created with the help of
Rozenn Morgat (a journalist with Le Figaro), of an educated woman
passing through a system that appears at turns cruel, paranoid,
capricious and devastatingly effective. It begins with the
confiscation of Haitiwaji's passport and a police interrogation
during which she is shown a photograph of her daughter attending a
Uyghur demonstration in Paris. One of the interrogators starts
bawling at her - "Your daughter's a terrorist!" and before long
Haitiwaji is plunged into a bewildering world of shackles, bunks
and beaten-earth floors; grey gruel and stale bread served up by
deaf-mute cooks selected for their silence; the sounds and smells
of the communal toilet-bucket; and the buzz of security camera
motors as they scan the cell.' ***** - Christopher Harding, Sunday
Telegraph Translated from the French book Rescapee du goulag
chinois (Equateurs), How I Survived a Chinese Reeducation Camp is a
riveting insight into an authoritarian world. A true story, it
reads like a 21st Century version of George Orwell's 1984 set in
modern China.
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