Book by Uyghur Retiree Details Two Grim Years in Xinjiang Internment Camp

A France-based Uyghur woman’s trip back to Xinjiang to sign retirement papers in late 2016 turned into a 32-month ordeal of cold-iron shackles, interrogation and brainwashing sessions in one of the northwestern Chinese region’s notorious internment camps, detained by communist authorities as an alleged terrorist.

In her new book Rescapée du Goulag Chinois (Survivor of the Chinese Gulag), Gulbahar Haitiwajidetails her experience from her extralegal incarceration, wretched food, and brutal living conditions from her disappearance in January 2017 to her release and return to France in August 2019.

Haitiwaji disappeared in January 2017, around the time authorities began to detain what is believed to be 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities accused of “religious extremism” in a vast network of internment camps in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

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