Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized
China's Relentless Persecution of Uyghurs and Other Ethnic Minorities
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A shocking, on-the-ground investigation of the Chinese government’s brutal oppression of its Muslim citizens — the Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and others — from Xinjiang to the streets of New York and Washington, DC . . .
Award-winning journalist John Beck recounts China's persecution of the predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and its relentless pursuit of the few who escaped beyond its borders. Through intertwined literary narratives combined with snippets of original source material, including official directives and speeches, he pieces together the individual stories of what consecutive American administrations have described as genocide.
The narrative moves from China to Kazakhstan, Turkey and the US, incorporating the tensions, discrimination, and occasional violence that characterised life in Xinjiang for decades. But when Xi Jinping is appointed President in 2013, the creeping repression quickly escalates into a crackdown of unprecedented scope and severity.
Beck follows 4 characters: a Kazakh writer and an Uyghur nurse who survived re-education camps before ultimately escaping abroad, a human rights advocate involved in securing their release, and an inadvertent exile spied on by Chinese authorities as his family back home was used as leverage against him.
Through their stories, the book explores identity, dehumanization, and censorship, the force of literature in dark times, and an all-pervasive apparatus of repression able to exist within miles of the White House.
John Beck lived in Istanbul for a number of years, where he was in close contact with the city's Uyghur diaspora and wrote on the crackdown and related issues for publications including Harper's and National Geographic. Some of that work forms the basis of this book along with further reporting from Almaty, Kazakhstan, Virginia, and New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Innocent people face imprisonment, exile, and worse in this grim debut. Journalist Beck recaps the conflict between the Chinese government and Uyghurs and other Turkic nationalities in the province of Xinjiang, starting with late 1990s riots by Uyghurs over discrimination, a political current the Chinese government increasingly cast as an Islamist separatist movement, and continuing through the government's establishment of vast detainment camps. Beck follows four people caught in the vise, among them Adiljan, a Uyghur businessman who went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, an act that Chinese officials considered an Islamist red flag, and was compelled to remain abroad when he learned authorities were seeking his arrest; and Saira, a Kazakh businesswoman detained on nothing more than official paranoia, which was heightened by the discovery of Kazakh literature in her possession. Their stories convey how Xinjiang was gradually inundated with checkpoints and surveillance; some of the profile subjects were locked up in "education and training centers" where they were subjected to anti-Muslim propaganda and violence, including the use of "shock batons" on detainees. Throughout, Beck creates a vivid panorama of chilling brutality mixed with Kafkaesque absurdism. ("Saira said she did not know why she had been taken. ‘In that case,' the Chinese woman said unhurriedly. ‘You'll probably be in here for something like ten years. Maybe twenty.' ") It's a searing indictment of repression in Xinjiang.
