The Democratic People's Republic of Tankiejerk

Members of Sabit’s residential committee constantly interfered with her life—trying to mold her into the state’s idea of a good citizen. They urged her to take a Han husband. There was money in it for her, they said; in an attempt to alter the ethnic balance of Xinjiang, the state had launched an aggressive campaign to encourage indigenous women to marry Han men. (Darren Byler, an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University who studies repression in Xinjiang, recently uncovered evidence that some Han “relatives” in Uyghur homes had coerced women into such marriages.) When Sabit demurred, the officials told her that Muslim men were chauvinists—adding, with a laugh, “Han husbands dote on their wives!”

The residential committee urged her to work, and then made it impossible. Sabit found a job teaching English, but on her first day the committee called her in for an unscheduled meeting with officials from her camp. She could not tell the school why she had to leave, fearing that she would be fired if her employer knew that she was a “focus person.” At the meeting, she asked if she could speak first, so that she could return to her job. One of the officials responded with a threat: “I can send you back to the camp with one phrase. Stay!” She lost the job, and decided that it wasn’t worth looking for a new one.

By January, 2019, Sabit understood that this kind of attention was causing her uncle’s community anxiety. Fearing that she was endangering her relatives, she moved into a hotel. One night, she returned to her family’s home for a meal, and posed with them for a photo. She shared it on social media. Immediately, Zhang texted her about an embroidered portrait that was on the wall. “Who’s in the picture?” he wrote.

The portrait showed a bearded man in traditional dress: the Kazakh poet Abai Qunanbaiuly. “I was afraid that this would bring me and my uncle’s family doom,” Sabit recalled. She deleted the photo and sent Zhang a Chinese encyclopedia entry on Qunanbaiuly.

“You were quick to delete,” he wrote.

“You scared me,” she said.

“Just asking,” he said. “Don’t be nervous.”

She told him that she was no longer living in her uncle’s home, and planned to move again. She had found an inexpensive rental apartment, owned by an elderly Kazakh woman, in an adjoining community.

The Spring Festival was again approaching, and Sabit and the other former detainees were compelled to rehearse for a performance at the residential-committee center. As the festival neared, Zhang told Sabit and the other women to hang chunlian—holiday greetings on red paper—outside their homes, a Han tradition that Sabit had never practiced before. Returning to her apartment, she hung the scrolls beside her front door. Fearful of being disobedient, she photographed them and texted Zhang the evidence. “I have put up the chunlian,” she wrote. “I wish you good luck and happiness.”

“Same to you,” he wrote.

That night, two men pounded on her door—a police officer and the secretary of the local residential committee. “When did you move?” one asked. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Stunned, Sabit told them that she had informed Zhang. But the men said that this didn’t matter, that she had to leave their community—“tonight.”

The men ushered her to a nearby police station, for further questioning. There, Sabit ran into her Kazakh landlady and her husband. As officers escorted them into an armored vehicle, the landlady glared at her with terror and contempt, and screamed, “Just look! Because of you, we’re going to school!”

Racked with guilt, Sabit asked an officer if they were really being sent to a camp. He told her that they were only being taken to another police station for questioning. Still, Sabit was aghast that she could provoke such fear, just by existing. “I cried a lot that day,” she recalled. “I was like a virus.”

Not knowing where to go, she called Zhang, who told her that his residential-committee center had a dormitory. She moved into it that night with a few of her possessions, and texted him, “Lucky to have you today.”

“You can live here,” he told her.

She shared a room with two other Kazakh women. Later, one of them told Sabit that Zhang had instructed them to monitor her: he wanted to know what she did, what she said, whom she met—“basically all the details.”

VIi. ESCAPE At the time that Sabit was released from the camp, leaving China seemed unthinkable. Then she learned of a Kazakh detainee who had contracted TB, and in the hospital had bemoaned his inability to see his family in Kazakhstan. Eventually, he was permitted to go. Stories like this gave her the idea that leaving might be possible.

A month after her release, Sabit returned to the police station to obtain her passport, and was told that there was a new procedure: she had to be interviewed, and then a transcript would be sent for approval to a legal commission in Kuytun.

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Shop Sabit sat for the interview, but months went by with no news. She was still anxiously waiting when she moved into Zhang’s dormitory. One day, a senior Party official who had stopped by the center told her that he had heard she was approved to travel. When Sabit ran into Zhang, he said, “I heard you can go. If you get your passport, when do you plan to leave?”

“Right now!” Sabit said, excitedly.

He frowned. “It looks like your education was incomplete,” he said. “Do you want to be sent to study again?” Alarmed, she told him, “No!”

Not long afterward, a member of the legal commission called Sabit to say that he had seen her file and thought that she could help a local import-export company. The firm, he said, had business with Uzbekistan, and needed someone with language skills. “Can you work there?” he asked.

Sabit struggled to make sense of the call. Did it mean that she wasn’t cleared to leave? And, if the whole reason she had to go to the camps was that work had taken her to countries like Uzbekistan, then why was the state introducing her to this job? She suspected that she couldn’t turn it down. Later, she reached out to the Public Security Bureau, and was told, “Go do it.”

Sabit took the job. Every time she had to call an overseas client, or write an e-mail to one, she contacted the bureau. “Can I?” she asked. Each time, the question had to go to superiors. The officials told her to stop calling.

After a few weeks, Sabit learned that her passport was ready. She rushed to the police station, where she signed a pile of papers, including an agreement that she would never publicly discuss her time in the camp, and then she retrieved her passport. Fearful of the airport, Sabit bought a ticket for an overnight train to the Kazakhstan frontier. She said goodbye to her uncle and left.

Just past daybreak, she arrived at a town in the far west, where she had to catch a shuttle bus to cross the border. Entering the bus station, she swiped her I.D., and silently urged the scanner, “Don’t go off. Please.”

No alarms sounded, and she went in. The bus ride to the border took ten minutes. As Sabit gazed out the window, her phone rang. It was Wang Ting, the Public Security Bureau official. “If you see anyone with religious or separatist ideas, you need to report it,” he said. She had no interest in spying, but, knowing that he could block her departure, she murmured, “O.K.”

At the border, Sabit could see the Kazakh steppe: wind-strewn grass among patches of snow. Behind it was a mountain range, wild and pristine. Everyone disembarked into a Chinese border station, where each passenger was called for an interview, until Sabit was waiting alone. Finally, in a windowless chamber, three officials, one with a camera mounted on his shoulder, interrogated her for forty minutes. Then they told her that she, too, could go. Crossing into Kazakh territory, she felt a wave of relief. She thought of the border guards as family. People were speaking Kazakh freely. With barely any possessions, she sailed through customs. A cousin was there to pick her up and return her to her mother. A strong wind blew as she walked to his car, and she took in the crisp air. After a year and eight months as a captive, she was free.

This year marks an important anniversary in the history of human-rights law. A hundred years ago, a Polish attorney named Raphael Lemkin began following the trial of a man who had gunned down the Ottoman Empire’s former Interior Minister—an official who had overseen the near-complete eradication of the Empire’s Armenian population. The assassin, an Armenian whose mother had died in the massacres, stopped the former minister outside his home in Berlin and shot him dead. During the trial, he proclaimed his conscience clear, saying, “I have killed a man, but I am not a murderer.”

As Lemkin read about the case, he was struck by a conundrum: the gunman was on trial, but his victim, who had orchestrated the slaughter of more than a million people, had faced no legal reckoning. How could that be? “I felt that a law against this type of murder must be accepted by the world,” he later wrote. In 1944, as Lemkin, a Jew, witnessed the horrors of Nazism, it occurred to him that the vocabulary of modern law was missing a word, so he coined one: “genocide.”

Over the years, the term has taken on a specific legal definition, but Lemkin had a broad understanding of it. “Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings,” he noted. “It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.” Such a plan is unfolding now in Xinjiang. As in the cases that inspired Lemkin, it is happening under a shield of state sovereignty.