THE CHIEF WITNESS: Escape from China's Modern-day Concentration Camps.

AuthorChurchman, Catherine

THE CHIEF WITNESS: Escape from China's Modern-day Concentration Camps

Author: Sayragul Sauytbay, Alexandra Cavelius (translated by Caroline Waight)

Published by: Scribe Publishers, Melbourne, 2021, 320pp, $35.

It has been almost five years since reports of internment camps for political indoctrination and forced assimilation of the Muslim peoples in Xinjiang began to filter out of the People's Republic of China to the rest of the world. Saybagul Sauytbay's The Chief Witness is a translation of her autobiographical account of her period of incarceration in one of these camps and her life in the heavily controlled Xinjiang of the 2010s. As most media reporting in English associates the camps with the Uyghur people who constitute the majority of those interned, it may come as a surprise to readers that Sauytbay herself is not a Uyghur, but rather a member of another closely-related Turkic speaking Muslim group, the Kazakhs, who have a population of around 1.85 million in Xinjiang, where they make up at present around 6.7 per cent of the population.

The first third of the book is devoted to an account of Sauytbay's family, her upbringing and education in the 1990s and early 2000s. This appears as a period in which despite restrictions on freedom of expression and discrimination by the majority Han, there was somewhat more room for non-Han peoples of Xinjiang to practise their religious and cultural traditions in a negotiated relationship to the state. This section covers Sauytbay's family life, her university years studying medicine, her subsequent work in a hospital, her decision to return to her hometown and retrain as a teacher to support her family and her marriage. This section of the book will appeal to those interested in the non-Han peoples within China on account of its descriptions of everyday Kazakh home life and culture, both of which are rather different from anything usually imagined as 'Chinese' by outsiders. However, these descriptions are set off against a darker background portending what is to come later in the book, specifically the activities of the People's Liberation Army of a nearby barracks, the increase in Han Chinese migrants and the industrialisation and exploitation of the natural environment around her childhood home.

In the third and fourth chapters, Sauytbay relates her experiences in the increasingly constricted and controlled world for Turkic-speaking Muslims in the 2010s with the state's commencement of a...

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