The decade since Xi Jinping emerged as China’s leader has seen growing domestic repression, nowhere more adamantine than in Xinjiang, where most of the population are Sunni Muslims.

How I Survived a Chinese ‘Re-education’ Camp: A Uyghur Woman’s Story
GULBAHAR HAITIWAJI and ROZENN MORGAT
(CANBURY PRESS, 280 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • tel 020 7799 4064

The decade since Xi Jinping emerged as China’s leader has seen growing domestic repression, nowhere more adamantine than in Xinjiang, where most of the population are Sunni Muslims. The fist of the Chinese Communist Party has fallen most heavily on the largest ethnic minority group, the Uyghurs. This is a brave and graphic account of what they have suffered.

Beijing is nervous about a region which twice declared independence as East Turkestan in the last century, and discrimination against Muslims became acute after 2009, when rioting between Uyghurs and Hans led to mutual bloodletting. “Show absolutely no mercy,” was Xi’s reported response on a visit to the region in 2014. Two years later Chen Quanguo, former Party Secretary in Tibet, was appointed to the same post in Xinjiang.

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