The Democratic People's Republic of Tankiejerk

Given the scope of China’s global power, it seems likely that only a severe and coördinated international response would have significant impact. Swiftness also matters. The longer a genocidal policy is in place, the more it provides its own rationale; as the Ottoman minister explained to an American diplomat who implored him to stop, “We have got to finish them. If we don’t, they will plan their revenge.” It is easy to imagine that China, after years of systematically punishing Xinjiang’s Turkic minorities, will adopt a similar attitude. Changes on the ground, including newly built infrastructure, suggest a commitment to a long-term process.

In December, 2019, the chairman of Xinjiang’s regional government announced, “The education trainees have all graduated.” Even as he said it, estimates of the number of detainees were at their peak. Although some people were indeed released, many others have remained incommunicado. Evidence suggests that a large fraction of the people in the camps have been formally imprisoned, or pressed into labor. Last year, an Uyghur woman in Europe told me about her brother, who was released from a camp and then vanished—she suspected into forced labor. Some of his last posts on TikTok showed photos of him moving piles of boxes. “To be honest,” she told me, “I am scared for my family.”

Fear permeates the émigré community. As a recent Freedom House report notes, “China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.” Its tactics have ranged from digital intimidation and threats of lawsuits to unlawful deportation. Recently, Xi Jinping’s government took an unprecedented step: sanctioning Western academics whose work on Xinjiang it found objectionable. “They will have to pay a price for their ignorance and arrogance,” the Foreign Ministry declared. A number of émigrés who have spoken out about the crackdown describe relatives in Xinjiang who have been targeted for retribution and forced to denounce them.

Ilshat Kokbore, an Uyghur activist who immigrated to America in 2006, told me that some men recently drove up to his home, in suburban Virginia, and overtly began to photograph it; they tried to go through his mail, until they noticed a neighbor watching them. On another occasion, he was attending a protest at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, when a woman he did not know approached him and began speaking in Mandarin. “She said, ‘If you get poisoned, do you know how to treat yourself?’ ” he told me. “I said, ‘Why should I know that?’ And she said, ‘You know, the Chinese government is very powerful. You could die in a car accident, or get poisoned.’ ”

For years, Kokbore has been separated from his family: two sisters, a brother-in-law, and a niece are in the camps, and the rest are incommunicado. The last family member he was able to contact was his mother, in 2016. “Don’t call again,” she told him. “And may God bless you.” Her fate remains unknown.

Sabit, as it happens, was confined with Kokbore’s sisters. She thought that the women seemed thoroughly broken. One day, the deputy director of the camp turned to them in her presence and said, “Your problem is your older brother. Unless your older brother dies, your problem cannot be resolved.”

Sabit told me that, for many months, she feared coming forward, but that Chinese propaganda about the camps had caused her to set aside her fear. “I was thinking, You have done this. I should talk about what happened to me.”

In October, 2019, half a year after gaining her freedom, she began putting her recollections into writing. She found that it helped her overcome her trauma. Seeing a therapist helped, too. But she still feels severed from the confident and purposeful woman she once was. Nightmares trouble her sleep. “I have one where I’m in the camp, in different forms,” she told me. Sometimes she is in a cell. Once, she was confined in a chicken coop. Another time, she was in a massage parlor, getting a massage; she looked over and saw people imprisoned, then was with them. “For almost a year, I had this dream every night,” she told me. “Many times, I would wake up crying, feeling very scared. That was torture, I would say, because even if you are in a safe place you are reliving the experience.”

With therapy, the nightmares subsided for a time, but recently they returned, in a different form. Sabit now dreams that she is in Xinjiang. “When I try to leave, the police tell me I can’t,” she told me. “I’m at the border, I’m at the airport, they stop me, and I start asking myself, ‘Why did I come? How am I in China?’ ”