How I Survived A Chinese 'Re-education' Camp

The First Memoir of China's Internment Camps by a Uyghur Woman

'An indispensable account' – Sunday Times

'Moving and devastating' – The Literary Review

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

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.

It did not succeed.

This is her extraordinary story, vivid and uncensored.

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. – Christopher Harding, Sunday Telegraph

A true story, this book reads like a 21st Century version of George Orwell's 1984, set in modern China.

Extract

In the camp, I wasn’t Gulbahar, but Number 9. I was forbidden from speaking Uighur, or from praying.

There was something extra about the taste of the vile slop that filled our bowls. Were they drugging our meals to make...