The Chief Witness: Escape from China's Modern-Day Concentration Camps

A frontline account of China's tyrannical treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang -- where 3 million people are incarcerated in the largest surveillance state that the world has ever seen.

Sayragul Sauytbay, born in 1977 in the autonomous Kazakh district of Ili in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, studied medicine, initially worked as a doctor in a hospital, and was later hired by the Chinese government as the director of five kindergartens. When the government took massive action against Uighur and Kazakh minorities, her husband and children left for Kazakhstan in 2016, but she was denied an exit visa. She was interrogated several times, and was put under immense pressure to persuade her family to return to China, but she refused. She was arrested, and was forced to work as an instructor in a re-education camp.

Here, she had to teach the prisoners Chinese language, culture, and politics from morning to night. In the process, she gained access to highly secret information that revealed Beijing's long-term plans to undermine and subjugate not only its minorities, but democracies around the world. The conditions at the camp were horrific: brainwashing, torture, and rape, plus the forced ingestion of drugs that made the detainees apathetic or poisoned them. Every night, they had to stand for hours with their hands up against a wall and confess their 'sins'.

In 2018, Sauytbay managed to escape to Sweden, where she and her family were granted asylum. Although Beijing is trying to get Sauytbay back, and she is still threatened by the Chinese secret service, she sees it as her task to bear witness to China's crimes against humanity. And she wants to warn the world about Beijing's plans to seek the subjugation of the free world in the long term.