How I Survived A Chinese 'Re education' Camp

'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.

The First Memoir of China's Internment Camps by a Uyghur Woman 'Moving and devastating' – The Literary Review 'An indispensable account' – Sunday Times 'An intimate, highly sensory self-portrait' – Sunday Telegraph In November 2016, Uyghur mother and petroleum engineer Gulbahar Haitiwaji answered a routine call from her former company in Xinjiang. "Just paperwork," they said. She flew from Paris to Karamay — and vanished. Her passport was seized; months of interrogations followed; after a year in custody she endured a nine‑minute "trial" without judge or lawyers and was sentenced to seven years in a Chinese "re‑education" camp. How I Survived a Chinese 'Re‑education' Camp is her lucid, courageous account of what happened next. From the first cold night in Karamay County Jail, Haitiwaji invites readers into Cell 202, where the lights never dim, cameras never blink, and a wall poster lists rules that forbid speaking Uyghur or praying — while promising a hollow "right to worship." She is chained to a bed for days, fed thin congee and stale bread, and taught how fear erases time. The details are precise and unforgettable, rendered with the restraint of a witness who will not look away. Transferred to the Baijiantan "school" on the desert outskirts of Karamay, Haitiwaji meets a new, meticulously engineered routine: military drills, silence at meals, and eleven hours a day reciting Communist Party slogans under the watchful portrait of Xi Jinping. The window shutters are bolted; the outside world becomes rumour and memory. One morning, a cellmate named Nadira is simply called by her number and taken away — never to return. In this world of numbered bunks and numbered women, Haitiwaji fights to keep her name. Beyond the razor wire, her daughter Gulhumar is knocking on doors in Paris — reporters, lawyers, diplomats —refusing to let her mother's story be buried. The book's preface situates Gulbahar's ordeal within Xinjiang's transformation into a surveillance state and the spread of "transformation‑through‑education" camps that would swallow over a million lives, illuminating the machine that ensnared an apolitical mother because of a photo of her child at a peaceful rally. Written with journalist Rozenn Morgat and translated into English by Edward Gauvin, this memoir balances stark testimony with startling tenderness: a family wedding in Paris before the phone call; a remembered strand of perfume that keeps two bunkmates human; the first phone home after months of silence. Haitiwaji's voice is both intimate and composed—refusing sensationalism, insisting on dignity. Why you'll love this book A rare inside view of a modern indoctrination camp, told by a survivor with an engineer's eye for systems and a mother's heart for people. Vivid scenes—being hooded for interrogation, marching in socked feet across linoleum, counting the bolts on the shutter—show how ordinary lives are ground down by policy. A story of resistance that is quiet, stubborn, and deeply humane: the refusal to forget one's language, memories, or name. Meticulously crafted prose that feels both urgent and timeless, ideal for book clubs and readers of narrative nonfiction. Perfect for readers of memoirs and human‑rights narratives who appreciate elegant, emotionally resonant storytelling—those moved by titles about political imprisonment, survival, and a family's fight to reunite. Buy the book and start reading