The Chinese police arresting Saira made straight for her books. She had well over a thousand. Novels, poetry and works of history, along with the printed manuscripts of two she had written herself. The officers yanked out a few volumes. They wanted to know why she had a copy of the Quran and pointed at a black-and-white photo of a poet with a long beard and traditional skullcap, calling him a terrorist.
“He died 100 years ago,” she told them. “At that time everyone had beards and terrorism did not even exist.” One of the police officers wrote something in his notepad about her not co-operating.
The officers carried the books to a patch of wasteland. One stood on each side of Saira — not her real name — while another poured out a can of petrol and put a cigarette lighter to them. The flames were fierce and Saira had to choke back sobs.
Earlier that day in June 2017, Saira had been summoned to her town’s police station in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. She was not alarmed; she was well known locally as a businesswoman and writer, so did not suspect anything was wrong.
But officers took her passport, phone and jewellery, then handcuffed her and drove, sirens wailing, to her house. After the books were burnt to ashes they took Saira away, and so began a year and a half of humiliation, violence and indoctrination in a re-education camp, which would leave her almost broken.
Saira is part of China’s ethnic Kazakh population, one of a number of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, including Uighurs, that President Xi Jinping has targeted with systematic mass detention, torture, family separation, forced labour and sexual violence. In 2022 the UN said in a report this could constitute crimes against humanity. The US, Canada and the Netherlands have called it genocide, something Britain has declined to do.
A million people or more may have been held in camps and prisons but only a very few have escaped abroad because of widespread travel restrictions. For my new book, Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized, I interviewed a number of these survivors in Kazakhstan, Turkey and the US.
As well as abuses in Xinjiang itself, they described a vast campaign of transnational repression that extends far beyond the country’s borders and is aimed at preventing survivors from discussing their experiences using threats to themselves and their loved ones, as well as face-to-face harassment and violence. Similar methods are employed to silence criticism from other dissidents in the UK, US and Europe, including Hongkongers and Tibetans. It is a campaign that continues even as the British government seeks closer economic ties with Beijing.
Beatings and torture
The crackdown intensified towards the end of 2016 with Xi’s appointment of hardliner Chen Quanguo as party secretary for Xinjiang and grew to permeate nearly every aspect of life in the region. The authorities say this is aimed at combating religious extremism and terrorism, but one leaked government document lists reasons for detention including applying for a passport, accessing a foreign website or having once worn a headscarf.
The people I spoke to were held in different facilities around Xinjiang but all described a similar system of detention and mistreatment. Cells were overcrowded, conditions appalling and indoctrination constant. The most minor infractions were punished by beatings and other forms of torture, including the “tiger chair”, a metal restraint device into which detainees were strapped painfully for long periods of time. A young woman from Saira’s cell was held in a tiger chair for 72 hours after saying a few words to her boyfriend, a detainee in the same camp.
Baqitali Nur, a Xinjiang vegetable seller, said he was regularly beaten with fists, boots and batons so badly that by the time they let him go, he vomited blood on most days and could not walk on his own. Others described systematic sexual violence. Tursunay Ziyawudun, a Uighur who now lives in the US, told me men in surgical masks would take women from their cells and return them bruised and catatonic. When the guards took her, she said they raped her.
Survivors escaped by different routes and methods, often only because they had a foreign spouse or after campaigning by human rights organisations. However, leaving the country did not end their persecution. Each reported receiving phone calls from police officers and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres urging them to return to China and not to discuss the situation in Xinjiang for the sake of their family still living there — a tactic of surveillance and repression that targeted nearly every member of Xinjiang’s minority diaspora and weaponised family members in China against them.
Saira was able to reach neighbouring Kazakhstan by obtaining temporary travel permission to collect money one of her businesses was owed there. But when she did not return to China, she began receiving calls and messages from her mother and sisters. She understood that if she did not obey, retribution could be visited upon them.
Adiljan Abdurrahim, a Uighur who had been pursued by police in Xinjiang and fled to Turkey, caught another Uighur man he knew taking pictures of him in an Istanbul café. He managed to take the man’s phone and found conversations that appeared to be from Chinese handlers demanding that he spy on different people and locations.
Abdurrahim later discovered that his wife and father had been detained and his young children sent to live with his mother-in-law, so he posted a video on Facebook talking about what had happened and urging others to speak out.
A few days later he received messages from an unknown number that included pictures of his three children and a video of them playing to the soundtrack of a saccharine ballad. They were sent by a man who said he was a CCP cadre. “I’m responsible for [your family] now,” the man wrote. If Abdurrahim co-operated, the man said, he would have a chance of seeing his children again. Abdurrahim refused. He knew co-operation would probably lead to him being coerced into spying too.
Sometimes threats took different, more violent forms. Nur, the vegetable seller, said that after he spoke out about his time in the camp, a group of men assaulted him in the street and told him to keep his mouth shut. A man who told journalists in Turkey that he had been forced to report on fellow exiles was shot and seriously injured by an unknown assailant.
Chinese efforts to silence dissidents in the UK have been just as extensive and sometimes employed similar methods. In October 2022, as protesters gathered outside the Chinese consulate in Manchester, men emerged from the grounds and attacked them, tearing down posters and dragging one demonstrator through the consulate gate, where they beat and kicked him.
Chloe Cheung, 20, who is based in London and is a member of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, is one of several activists the Hong Kong police have targeted with a HK$1 million (£95,000) bounty for information leading to their capture. She told me recently that she is now subject to a torrent of online sexual harassment and, along with other participants, is photographed and threatened when she attends protests.
After taking part in a lunar new year’s event in London this year, she said thatmen she believed to be Chinese followed her and some friends to a restaurant a short walk away. The men sat watching them until Cheung and her friends noticed, and eventually left the restaurant and disappeared into a hotel. Cheung has continued her activism but says she now varies her travel routes and schedules. “I’m always looking around,” she said. “When there are mirrors, I look at the mirrors to make sure no one’s following me.”
Neighbours of other exiled Hong Kongers targeted with bounties have received letters urging them to turn the activists in to the Chinese embassy.
The Chinese authorities were reported by the human rights organisation Safeguard Defenders to have established a network of more than 100 overseas police outposts across the globe to watch and harass dissidents, including in the UK. In June 2023, Tom Tugendhat, then the security minister, said the British outposts had been shut down.
Others were set up in the US, including one in New York’s Chinatown, which was run by two men who have since been charged with operating as agents for the Chinese government.
The US authorities have made increasing efforts to counter Beijing’s transnational repression but it remains a major issue. One camp survivor in the Washington area who went public about her experiences said that a brick was thrown through her window, and when she moved apartments a note threatening her children was pushed under her door. She and others, including Ziyawudun, have been denounced at Chinese government press conferences and by state media.
An activist who had studied at an American university was attacked one night after getting into a dispute with a Chinese student organisation. Others said that they had been photographed, followed and confronted in New York and Washington.
When I met Saira in Kazakhstan, she told me she had emerged from the camps no longer herself. She felt a continuous deep fatigue, and with it a mental haze that had settled in her and never left. Sirens and screeching tyres made her jump. When she saw groups of people that she thought might be Chinese she shied away from them in case they meant to attack or spy on her.
She knew that she needed peace and safety to heal, but she was not free to find it because the fear of kidnap by China’s security state was with her constantly. She suspected that it always would be.
Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized: China’s Relentless Persecution of Uyghurs and Other Ethnic Minorities, by John Beck, is published by Melville House at £25