The New Yorker Radio Hour - What Is Happening in the Internment Camps in Xinjiang

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

In a special episode on the crisis in Xinjiang region of China, the staff writer Raffi Khatchadourian investigates Xi Jinping’s government’s severe repression of Muslim minorities, principally Uyghurs and Kazhaks. Accounts from a camp survivor and a woman who fled detainment show how, even outside the camps, life in the province of Xinjiang became a prison. The crisis meets the United Nations’ definition of genocide, and the U.S. State Department has also made that determination. With the 2022 Winter Olympics coming up in Beijing, what can the world do about Xinjiang? New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Over the last few years, something terrible has been happening in China, in the northwest province of Xinjiang, a thousand miles from Beijing. The government has constructed a network of internment camps and has been imprisoning ethnic minorities in huge numbers. Uyghur and Kazakh people are rounded up for expressing their religion, for speaking their languages. They're arrested on the merest suspicion of what China considers disloyalty. And that's a very broad umbrella. At least a million people have been sent to these camps. It's the largest attainment of civilians since the Holocaust in Europe.

The State Department has deemed it a genocide. And finally, the world seems to be taking notice. The International Olympic Committee is coming under criticism as human rights organizations call for a boycott of the Games because of China's human rights record, including the... You just talked to China's president. Yes, for two hours. What about the Uyghurs?

What about human rights abuses? We must speak up for human rights. It's who we are. We're devoting our entire episode today to Xinjiang. What's happened there and why, and what the world can do about it. I'm going to start with Rafi Khachudurian, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker,

who reported the story, surviving the crackdown in Xinjiang. There's been a long history of repression in this part of the country. In Mao's time, especially during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party attempted to solidify its control over the region by effectively diminishing the local culture and the institutions that support that culture. What is the threat that Beijing and the Communist Party react?

to, is it similar to, say, Tibet? You know, that's a very interesting and complicated question, because this is something that I wrestled with, because there is the threat and there's the perception of threat. But disunity, I would say, is a big concern. The Chinese government see these people or regard these people as insoluble to the body politic on some level and are pursuing a policy to change that? You know, in the Soviet Union, which of course cracked up in 1991, partly because of nationalisms all over the Union, it was always a great fear in Moscow of ethnic groups and

the so-called satellite republics. And it came to pass that Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Central Asian states all had their own. nationalist movements. Do the Chinese look at the Soviet example as something that they desperately want to avoid? Yeah, it definitely did elevate those fears and help motivate a series of policies that stamp down on ethnic feeling, on ethnic identity by weakening the use of the local languages, which had been during the 80s permitted and allowed to flourish, taking the similar attitude toward religion. There's one quote, David, that stuck out in my mind, which is that the project of stability would be enhanced by developing man and standardizing man.

And I think that's what we're seeing today. Rafi, sketch out the map of things. How many people are being detained? How many people are in these camps? And what are they like? Yeah, so there seems to be a startling, an amount of consistency in the accounts that we're getting of people who were put through the camp system. They are brought there. They are typically given instruction in the quote national language, which is Mandarin Chinese. Someone who's never spoken to language is now basically being told to speak only that language. And so they're consigned to silence in the camp until they learn a few basic words.

That happens intensively. They are put into a program of political indoctrination where they are required to basically regurgitate party propaganda, the sayings of Xi Jinping, and frequently profess their loyalty to the party to the state, to profess their gratitude to the party and to the state. So that's what happens in the camp. The scale of the camps themselves, the answer to that is a bit of a moving target,

because what's happening on the ground in Xinjiang province appears to be evolving. As of about 2018, there were a number of estimates emerging that upwards of a million people were being interned in these re-education camps. That's about 10% of the minority population, the non-hand population, the non-hand population, in that province, which is a startling number. Now, those estimates continue to rise after that time period, but at the moment, there seems to be a shift going on on the ground. And I should tell you, David, information is very hard to obtain

because the Chinese have made going to Xinjiang province so difficult. The Chinese government says that there are no people in the camps right now, that everyone is quote unquote graduated. But there are a number of people who are currently in communicato to their loved ones and to researchers who are trying to reach out to them and reaching out to people is very difficult because of the all-pervasive surveillance.

There are definitely as evidence that a large fraction of people are being sentenced and they are being moved out of these re-education facilities and put into prisons. And then there is a third category in which it seems that people are being moved out of the camps and into conditions of forced labor. So that makes it very hard right now to know exactly what's happening and exactly how many people are in this system. And it's horrific. It's been reported that detentions in Xinjiang constitute the largest interment of an ethnic group since the years of the Holocaust, since the 40s.

Why is this happening now? That's an interesting question to try and wrestle with, and it was at the forefront of my mind while I was working on this piece. David, I think that it's useful to wind the clock back to the 2008 Olympics, because this was at a time when the Chinese authorities were obsessed with an idea that they called stability maintenance. As one academic pointed out at the time, the party was being haunted by a phantom of instability.

And it seems that the Chinese Communist Party just identified this phantom of instability sort of under every rock in Xinjiang province. In 2009, there was a kind of catalytic event. Two Uyghurs in southern China were killed in a toy factory by a Han mob. and this David just triggered some very large protests in Xinjiang that then became riots and then provoked a crackdown

they start demolishing historic buildings they start restricting publication of websites and literature in the local languages putting intense restrictions on faith and religion and there comes a point where their paranoia about instability becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because suddenly in 2013, we start seeing acts of political violence sort of emerging from Xinjiang province,

where there had been none for easily more than a decade, none that could be clearly defined as acts of terrorism. What happened that may have sparked the fury of Beijing? Two of these events come to mind, for me. One is a man from Xinjiang and two members of his family got into an SUV and it was packed with incendiary devices and they just plowed right into a group of tourists in Tiananmen Square

and there was another incident that occurred in Yunnan province where a group of assailants wielding knives went and attacked a bunch of tourists and there were some others as well And in Beijing, these events only seemed to validate the course that the party was already on. And so in 2014, Xi Jinping, who had just come to power, took a very radical turn by escalating these ideas into a people's war against terror that is really the starting point of what we see today. One of the most amazing things that you describe is the surveillance program that Beijing has put in place in Xinjiang.

It's extraordinary. Can you describe that? it is all pervasive. It touches every aspect of life. I mean, there are countless personal accounts corroborated by people who have worked on these systems, built them, and software from these systems that have been obtained and studied by different groups that show that if you walk out your door, from the moment you do that, you are being tracked based on facial recognition. The information in your phone is continuously being logged. And as a result of that, not having a phone or not going out is also not an option because those would be regarded as anomalous and cause for suspicion. Now, if I live there, is it possible for me as a Muslim to practice my religion in any way?

You can't really do those things without risk, risk to your personal safety. One of the really disturbing details in your piece is that in 2018, birth rates in the region fell by a third? What happened? Yeah, so that statistic was provided by the Chinese government with very little context, but academics and people who are studying this issue are trying to understand what is driving this precipitous demographic drop. One thing seems clear, and that's that the Chinese government is pursuing family planning policies in Xinjiang province. with the ferociousness, with a kind of zero-tolerance attitude

that we're just not seeing in other parts of the country. What that means is, for instance, is that an infraction that might result in a fine in another part of China could send you to the camps in Xinjiang. It's also worth considering, of course, that if you divide and segment the population by gender into fortified camps, that too will, of course, have some effect

on the birth rate eventually. Ruffy, of course, in the Holocaust Jews were not only put in camps and work camps, but they were killed. They were shot. They were put in, they were gassed. We know the story. So anytime you raise the specter of the Holocaust

and the specter of comparison, we should be detailed and precisely. here, are Uyghurs being executed, killed in these camps? No, no, that's not what we're seeing, and I'm glad you brought up that point. At the same time, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide in 1944, pointed out that the erasure of a people need not happen through the instruments of mass killings. and if you look at what's happening in Xinjiang province today, and you observe it to its ultimate endpoint,

and if you imagine that the Chinese Communist Party has a long-term commitment to this policy, then it raises an interesting question about what a 21st century genocide might look like. Maybe the instruments of mass killing are not even necessary, if you can confine physically a population for such a long period of time, if you can leverage the instruments of mass surveillance so comprehensively. At the end of the day, you may still end up with the erasure of a people. Rafi Khach Dorian, his stories surviving the crackdown in Xinjiang, or ghost walls as it was titled, in the print edition, is it New Yorker.com.

One of the survivors of the men, by us the new churned one of the survivors of these camps is a man

named Yerbiket Uttarbae. He's singing the national anthem of China, the march of the volunteers, as he was forced to do

day and night in Xinjiang. We're up our one in ching mow the enemy

to the people of the power to march, man's the pow-ho, Chen-jin,

Chen-jin, Chen-jin. Yerbiket was detained in 2017. He told a story two years later in a small hotel room across the border

in Kazakhstan speaking to contributor Ben Mock. His account of the camp appears in a VR documentary that the New Yorker produced earlier this year

called re-educated. Here's Ben Mock. Urbiket was born in a small village in northern Xinjiang, close to the borders of Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia. His family roots were Kazakh, and like a lot of people in this part of the country, he grew up speaking both Kazakh and

Chinese. But he always felt closer to the Kazakh world in both language and custom than he did to, like, Beijing or Shanghai. In 2011, Yerbriket and his wife decided to move their family to Kazakhstan. But it wasn't actually such a huge decision, because at the time, the border, between China and Kazakhstan was fairly fluid. It wasn't that difficult to move back and forth for medical care or because you got a job in one country or the other. And so he decided to take a job in China working for a mining company. And he worked for this mining company through the summer of 2017,

and it was during this period that he was living in China, that he was pulled over by the police. The police told him that there was a problem with his household registrate. Then they drove him to his hometown six hours away to the police station where they started interrogating him. They brought him into an interrogation room and put him in a chair where his hands and feet were restrained. They said, do you know what you have in your phone? I said, what do I have? I have Wi-Chat.

I have phone numbers. I have WhatsApp that I use in Kazakhstan. They said, do you know we restruct. restricted WhatsApp in China. Why do you have WhatsApp in your phone? So having this messaging app on his phone that's restricted in China, that's his first mistake. And then the officer says, well, do you know what we found on your WhatsApp? And this is where Yerbiket realized is his second mistake. Because although he didn't consider himself to be especially religious, Yerbiket was Muslim.

And like a lot of Muslims in Xinjiang, he had images on his phone related to prayer and Islamic practice. But earlier, when he was first being questioned, he had told the police that he wasn't religious at all. They asked me, do you know what you have in your WhatsApp? I said, I know there are some religious teachings that say what to do to prepare for praying. I know it is there. He was taken to this pre-trial detention center, which was this really crowded, really kind of awful jail, where he was crammed into these cells with as many as 22 other prisons. He was beaten often because he would frequently shout at guards demanding his release,

and he was there for three months. Nobody interrogated me, and nobody told me what's happening. So I said, how long am I going to stay here? If I'm to die here, I should know what I'm dying for. Three months after he had entered the pretrial detention center, police officers came into the cell and they read aloud a list of prisoners would be transferred to what they call the political learning center. The Taicheng Regional Education and Training Center.

Yerbegat spent a lot of time in this center. He lived in a tiny cell that had eight bunk beds, but often it had 10 to 15 people sleeping in the cell, so people would share bunks or sleep on the floor. Usually we would have four hours of class in the morning. four hours in the afternoon and two hours in the evening. So, ten hours a day of class. Was he bored, though?

It's almost an whole other type of torture. Of course we were bored, but they wouldn't leave us along. There was a thick book in Chinese, and every day we were told to copy five-pancholy. of the book in our cell. It was our homework. We also had a TV set, but it would only broadcast

Communist Party things like speeches from Xi Jinping, that bastard. So we'd be ordered to watch the TV for two hours, and then write our impressions of what we watched and what we gathered from it.

What would he write? We'd write the Chinese excellent. The Chinese great. Of course you can't write something negative, then you'd be in prison forever and they will kill you. Did you ever feel at any point like you were being brainwashed, like you were losing your critical thought or you were starting to believe what you were being taught? Yeah, yeah, both of both. Yeah. When I was watching those speeches, there were a few moments when I thought, wow, I'm so stupid.

Look how our Chinese state has developed since I moved to my Chinese state. since I moved to Kazakhstan. But of course, when I got out, I realized it wasn't true. So on the 1st of January, 2018, they went to class. And every week they had this flag-raising ceremony. There was a Chinese flag outside in the yard of the camp, and the students in the class sang the anthem out loud as the flag was being raised. And while Yerbiket was singing the anthem,

he started to feel acute pain in his right side. The pain was. intolerable. So he gets taken to this hospital and is immediately told by a young Chinese doctor that his appendix has ruptured and that he needs immediate surgery.

They took me to the surgery room. I went in, they undressed me, and then they laid me naked on the bed and gave me an anesthetic. They shouted at me. Don't talk. Keep your back straight.

Ten minutes after the injection, they put a needle in my appendix area. It was very painful. I said, wait, I still feel the pain. But they said, no, we have to operate immediately. It's too late. I was shouting, screaming, still in pain when they started to cut. But since I was moving, they handcuffed me. The operating room was bright, and there was this metal thing above me, you know, like a mirror,

and in it because they had cut me white open, I could see my appendix. It was red, they cut it. So I was crying, shouting in pain. They actually had two armed guards standing in the operating room guarding me, and one of them was a senior guard who were used. used to call the fascist. He was a bloodsucker. Like in movies about World War II, he was like a German character from those movies.

And he said, why are you shouting? If you die here, no one is going to know about it. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Our story continues in a moment. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. For the past four years, the government of China has been pursuing an aggressive campaign of forced cultural assimilation against Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and other minorities in Western China.

More than a million people have been swept into what China calls re-education centers, but are in fact internment camps. Before the break, we were hearing from one victim of the camps about the abuse and the medical neglect that he endured. But outside the camps, throughout the province of Xinjiang, daily life came to resemble prison. Beijing's crackdown on Kazakhs and Uyghurs became ever more intrusive and ever more repressive. Contributor Ben Malk picks up our story.

So if you were just a normal person living in a city in Xinjiang, you would have seen surveillance cameras and police checkpoints going up, and it seemed like every house had a Chinese flag on it, and often a QR code that contained information about each family member inside. Beijing started what it called the Becoming Family Program in 2016, which has seen more than a million Communist Party civil servants, or cadres, be placed into the homes of minority families in Xinjiang. The first time I met him, he introduced himself. He said to my husband, I will become your younger brother. I heard about this experience from a woman named Shulpan Amirkin.

Shopan is a hairdresser who lived in Xinjiang until 2018 and who had a cadre assigned to her house. Each time the cadre came to our house, he came for three days at a time, five days at a time. He brought luggage. The longest he stayed was for two weeks. When he was there, he spent the whole day telling us what to do. Don't practice religion, throw away anything having to do with Islam.

So he came to spy on us. Of course, the cadre isn't necessarily volunteering for this job. They don't want to stay with you either, but they have to. They have to make video calls from the house and report that they are with you. They are also doing it unwillingly. The local authorities were especially suspicious of Shulton's family because they were really prominent Muslims in their town. Our family was very religious.

In our village, we have people who drink alcohol, who don't respect their parents or who are criminals. My brother-in-law helped guide these kinds of people to more religious life. Her brother-in-law was an Imam and Islamic scholar, but he had registered with the government for permission to continue preaching and translating texts, and so for a while they were okay. Everything was good until 2017. Suddenly, in June 2017, my brother-in-law was detained.

My other brothers-in-law were religious as well, and it was too dangerous for them to ask about him. Otherwise, they would end up like him. Being a woman, I thought that they will show some kindness to me. I went there over and over again, but when I went there, I was also threatened. They told me, if you keep asking about him, you will end up in the camp as well. There were two guards in the room, one Chinese and one Kazakh. I told them that my brother-in-law is there, but that the place is cold and he is freezing.

They replied, well, your worship, your God, God is the one who helps you. God fits you. So what can we do to you? Then I started to cry. Around a year after her brother-in-law, Nirlon, was detained, Sholpon finally found out that he had been sentenced and she was able to attend the trial.

The trial was in July 2018. Shopan attended it with Nerlund's sister as and with a few other of her relatives. They brought him to the courtroom and they had rifles. Two people were carrying him in a chair. When he was brooding, he was filthy. He was wearing a uniform and plastic slippers. He had soiled himself, so he couldn't sit.

They put a microphone in front of him, which he had to speak into. But all he was saying was, What? What? He couldn't hear. They shouted at him. Don't speak so loudly.

Even though he was disabled, he was sentenced to 17 years in prison. During the trial, we were not given the chance to speak. Are you angry at the government or at the people who did this? Of course I'm angry. I'm angry. I am especially angry with the government, but I am not angry at those people who are implementing it,

because they have to. There are many people who didn't want to do it. But because of the pressure, they committed suicide. Shulpan decided that she needed to get her family out of the country because otherwise she felt they would themselves be detained. And they left so quietly and so suddenly, and we're so worried about the risks to their families, that they didn't even tell their mothers.

She didn't say anything to them. They just fled one day. Do you see any future for yourself and your family back in China? Is it ever possible? Can you envision or have you lost hope of making your home there again? I can't imagine going back. I hadn't even thought about it until you asked me just now. I also don't see a future for my relatives.

there. We can't practice our religion. We have to learn Chinese. I am shocked by how people there have already been brainwashed. It's become very easy for people to betray you. Everything's different now. At the end of 2019, under increasing scrutiny from the outside world, China announced that all the detainees and its re-education programs had, in their words, graduated. But accounts from former detainees and their families and independent investigations, suggests that this is a lie. A BuzzFeed news analysis of satellite images shows that the footprint of detention centers across Xinjiang

has been growing well into 2020. And at least 135 of those centers now also have factories attached to them. I asked Yerbikin about this. In November of 2018, he was transferred back to the camp where he had started his detention and a clothing factory had been built on the site of the camp.

The factory was for children's garments, like this. We were taught how to work on the equipment. We were told there would be an inspector coming in from the outside. They would ask what we were doing there and we should respond that we were there of our own free wheel, that we were there to study and to work at the same time. If you didn't say that, we'd been imprisoned forever. Can you tell us if not in the factory, but when you were in these camps, did you get any job training at all? And did you feel that it was, did you ever feel it was voluntary that being in this camp?

That's total crap. They only told us to stay that when reporters started showing up. They came to each class and said, If you snitch and don't tell people that you came here of your own accord to study Chinese culture and to work, don't even think about getting released from this place. Many large companies use supply chains that have ties to Xinjiang, including Coca-Cola, Nike, and Apple. But China says that all work happening in such factories is voluntary, and those companies have repeatedly rejected the idea that their products were made with forced labor.

but it's notoriously difficult to audit in Xinjiang. On December 23, 2018, at 3 in the morning, and without any warning at all, Yerbriquet was released from detention. His release came just a few months after he'd been sentenced to seven years in prison. He had no idea why he was let up. But we know that across the border in Kazakhstan, several people were making public statements on his behalf. After Yerbiket's release, he spent another six months under house arrest and Taicheng.

Then he was finally allowed to go home to Kazakhstan. It was more than two years since he'd entered China. My health was destroyed. First of all, my memory fails me often. My eyesight has gotten much worse and my hearing is much worse than it used to be. My semen is not, I can't reproduce. I'm sterile.

My semen is dead. I've got two children. The older one is nine and the young one is four. Both of them are very naughty. But now I never tell them of, no matter what they do. Almost all of the furniture is broken now, but I never scold them, because I really understand what prison is.

I want them to be free of everything. And I used to tie my dog up, and now I never do. He's in the yard, free as well. Do you have a favorite Kazakh song that you wanted to sing but were not able to because it was Kazakh? There is a song called Home Town. That's Yerbighamid, Tohungan jerry Nau

That's Yerbikut Uttarbae, Singing the song he calls hometown. He spoke with contributor Ben Mock. At New Yorker.com, you can find a VR documentary called Reeducated. It's based on accounts by Yerbukot and other former prisoners. Whenever I sing such songs, it reminds me of the camp. So it makes me sad. You can see the tears in my eyes.

I don't want to think about it. Everything is over now. Finished. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We've been talking this hour about the humanitarian crisis in Xinjiang. And that's the subject of our entire program today. While China was sweeping Muslims and ethnic minorities into internment camps,

in the largest civilian detainment since the Second World War, most of us outside of Xinjiang, almost all of us in fact, were barely aware of it. In the United States during the convulsive and chaotic Trump years, international news rarely got the attention it deserved. On the very last day of that administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a determination that genocide was taking place in Xinjiang. Now the Winter Olympics are coming up in Beijing and the eyes of the world are on Xinjiang and international pressure is beginning to mount. The question is, what is the world going to do about it? I used to joke that I felt like the skunk at the garden party when you went into interagency meeting and you were the one who had to bring up the human rights issues.

Susan O'Sullivan was a program director at the State Department until she recently retired. She helped craft the first sanctions in the world that were imposed on China because of this issue. O'Sullivan talked with a staff writer Rafi Hauch-Dorien, who's been reporting on the John Crisis. I'm curious to know when you in the State Department began to receive news of this escalation and what it was like. What were you hearing? Well, you know, I had a number of contacts in the Uyghur American community, some of whom

I first started talking to in the 1990s, and as they began to hear things from family members and their worries increased, they were coming in and talking to me. And I remember the first time a contact told me that people had been at his family home taking DNA from his parents. I think people were horrified and, you know, everybody's first reaction, can this really be true? It was my initial reaction. A lot of these reports that I was getting from contacts in the United States were later confirmed by our own research and intelligence. So there was a lag between when I first heard these reports and when we were able to take action based on the reports. Yeah, let's come to the president for a moment because one of the few continuities between the Trump administration and the Biden administration is a policy on this issue, it seems.

Both Secretary Pompeo and Secretary Blinken have used the term genocide. Both administrations have issued sanctions that the Biden administration, most recently last month in coordination with Europe and Canada. China's reaction to last month's sanctions was much different. Why do you think it differ from its reaction to the first round of sanctions last year? Well, I think the sanctions that were imposed in March of this year were done in coordination, as you mentioned, with the EU, the UK, Canada. I mean, this is not what China wants to see. I mean, I think it's one thing to push back. on us when it's just the United States.

They can characterize it as we're doing it for political reasons. But when other countries are on board doing the same thing, I mean, that's much harder for them to deal with. But I think it's essential now that we move beyond the obvious partners to some Asian countries, some Muslim majority countries. I mean, we really have to broad. and the group of countries that are willing to speak out about the atrocities that are taking place. We haven't talked about the Olympics.

I think that's another thing. All these things put China on the defensive. I think they still very much care about their international reputation. And that provides us with leverage. We've been talking about the governmental response to what's happening in Xinjiang province. but there's the private sector as well and a number of companies have taken a position on that I think H&M for instance

made an announcement that it wasn't going to use distributors from Xinjiang and it was quite a public reaction to that in China. What is the corporate responsibility side of this? Well, I mean, companies are going to have to make some hard decisions about how to go forward. I think in June of 2020, you know, we, the State Department, along with Treasury, commerce and homeland security, put out the Xinjiang supply chain business advisory, which was kind of

the first step in trying to inform them exactly what was going on in Xinjiang, making the point that doing due diligence of supply chains would not necessarily be able to determine with confidence that no human rights abuses were taking place. I think corporations have a lot of leverage if they choose to use it. What do you think is going to happen with the Olympics? You know, I assume that the Olympics will go forward. I certainly would like to see, you know, let our athletes go but not have high-level people attending the Olympics.

You know, and I think that other countries should take similar steps. I mean, genocide is taking place, in my view, to do anything that would signal that we in some way are willing to ignore that would be a grave mistake. Susan O'Sullivan. She recently retired from the State Department as the director of East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and labor. The night, a light, a

night, the in the wall, through light to be darked t'y-e

the tree-e-e chateau-e chloe-e every night, as to the

the name of this poem is Night Watch, and it was written by a woman named Anar Sabit, and it's about her experience in an internment camp. Sabit had been living in Canada, and she was imprisoned when she traveled back to Xinjiang after her father's death. It was suspicious that an ethnic Kazakh had traveled so much on business,

or that's as close to a reason as she was given to understand. For Sabit, as for so many others, The persecution was as inexplicable as it was cruel. I had many nights sitting alone, watching through this barbed wire window. And through the window, I can see a vegetable filled, and there is a very small poplar tree, which is very common in my hometown. Further away, there is a highway, and then behind the highway is the night view of my hometown. This poem describes a specific moment that you experienced when you were in the camps.

Tell us a little bit about what that moment was. That moment was that every one of us in the camp was assigned to do night watching. And that means that everyone had to wake up in the middle of night, stay awake for one or two hours while other people were sleeping. So yeah, it's real and that's the truth. Night again. Peach black gloom. The searing light in the cell would burn through the barbed wire to grasp freedom in outstretched hands. In an instant, darkness devours them,

And that stunted popular by the vegetable-filled trumbos. Night watch Imposed alertness at an appointed hour, The only companions an unforgiving glare, And the fit for sounds of resentful sleep, Tormenting me, inflaming fibril nerves. Night watch, The stirrings of weak for women, inmates interrupt my silent reveries for liberty.

Night watch. Pungent orders, abuse and threats, the common fare of our lives, but it's these relentless nights that gnaw away at faith and hope. Night watch. The barbed wire can't keep out the chill wind. that flicked through the Chinese language textbook to reveal a confession, mocking evidence of impotent submission.

Night watch. I turned towards the darkness and its wanton torment of the feeble poplar. Wow. What was your thinking when you decided to sit down and try to process your feelings about your experience in the camp through poetry was that an immediate decision or did it come to you in some slow way?

I wouldn't say it was an immediate decision. So first I started to write down my testimony. And then I was, but I was not sure when or if I will really publish that. And then I started to follow up what is going on in my hometown. And then I saw a lot of Chinese propaganda that's trying to deny what has happened, what has happened to me. So in a way, I wanted to speak out. One day I was just, you know, thinking about the night watch time.

And some words just came to my mind. and I had an idea why don't I start to write on something. Since now I have told my stories, it feels like I have taken out a big burden on myself. It's a big relief. And I hope from now on that I can start a new chapter in my life. and that one day if I look back, that I can be proud of myself. Anar, thank you so much. Thank you.

Anar Sabit eventually left China, and she's living now abroad. Her poem Nightwatch was translated for us by Jeremy Barmei. You can read Rafi Khadjtjorn's extraordinary reporting surviving the crackdown in Xinjiang at New Yorker.com. That's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour today. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm David Remnick. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon-Corbie, Cala, David Krasnau, Gau-Fennon and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabelle Bacon, and Stephen Valentino. with help from Alison McAdam, Mengfei Chen, and Emily Mann.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.