One day in mid-March 2017, I had just finished giving my weekly lecture on film directing at Xinjiang Arts Institute in Urumqi when my wife called. She told me that our friend Dilber had arrived from Kashgar, in south-west Xinjiang, and that she was headed to the front gate of the Arts Institute to meet her. Dilber was the hospitality director of a famous Kashgar hotel. While shooting the television series Kashgar Story the year before, our film crew had stayed at the hotel for two months. We chatted often with Dilber and had a number of meals together; by the time we left Kashgar, we had got to know each other well.
Over the phone, my wife, Marhaba, told me that Dilber’s son, who was studying acting at Xinjiang Arts Institute, had been drinking and picking fights in his dorm, and that the institute was threatening to expel him for violating the code of conduct. Dilber had hurried to Urumqi to plead with school administrators for her son to be allowed to continue his studies.
When I reached the front gate, I saw Dilber standing alone. As I was greeting her, Marhaba arrived. We had barely begun catching up when Dilber burst into tears. Assuming that she was crying for her son, we tried to comfort her. But Dilber was not worried only about her son. She told us what had been happening in Kashgar the past few days.
Mass arrests had begun in Kashgar. The wave of arrests was so immense that existing detention facilities in the city – police station lockups, prisons, holding centres, labour camps, drug-detox facilities – had been quickly overwhelmed. Within days, numerous schools, government offices and even hospitals had been converted into detention and re-education centres hastily outfitted with iron doors, window bars and barbed wire. Rumours spread that, outside the city, construction was proceeding rapidly on multiple new so-called “study centres”, each meant to house tens of thousands. Fear reigned everywhere. People said the day of judgment had come.
According to Dilber, the primary targets of this round of arrests were devout individuals from Xinjiang’s mostly Muslim Uyghur population. In addition, any Uyghur who had been abroad, for whatever reason, was to be detained. Only last spring, the Uyghur owner of the hotel where Dilber worked had led a weeklong trip to Dubai for about 20 outstanding employees, including Dilber. For employees who had served foreign guests for years but had never been abroad themselves, this trip was marvellous and exciting.
Now, though, the trip seemed to have brought them catastrophe. Dilber had flown into Urumqi only the day before, but received a phone call from her local police station in Kashgar, ordering her to return at once. She planned to go back the next morning, after taking care of her son’s troubles. She was clearly terrified that she would be detained as soon as she returned.
We invited Dilber to lunch, but she had no stomach for it. “Next time,” she said forlornly. But no one knew when that next time would come, if ever. Marhaba and I took our leave. As I started the car, Marhaba wasted no time in calling my mother in Kashgar to ask how she was doing. My mother confirmed that my relatives in Kashgar were safe, at least for now.
After this, I began paying close attention to the way the mass arrests were unfolding.
Three days later, as I sat working in my office, I received a phone call from an old friend who had been “reformed” alongside me in a “re-education through labour” camp in Kashgar 20 years earlier. In 1996, I had planned to study abroad in Turkey, but I had been arrested at China’s border with Kyrgyzstan on spurious charges of attempting to take illegal and confidential materials out of the country. In an era when any Uyghur could be arrested under any pretext, it seemed my turn had come. After a year and a half in an Urumqi prison, I was sentenced to three years of reform through labour. Having already served half of that time, I was sent to serve the remaining year and a half of my sentence in the labour camp. By the time I was released, I had been fired from my job as a teacher. I had returned to Urumqi with no job, no money and no home.
After my friend and I exchanged pleasantries, he told me that in Hotan, the region south-east of Kashgar where he lived, other former inmates from our time in the camp had been arrested one after another over the last several days. His turn was coming soon, he said, and he was worried about me as well. He was relieved to hear that I was still all right. I thanked him and offered some feeble words of comfort. As the conversation came to an end, he spoke in a low voice. “OK, then. I entrust you to God.” While his words were a typical form of farewell in Uyghur, to me they felt like a more final goodbye.
A few days passed. I called him, but his phone wasn’t on. That week I called him several times, but his phone remained off. I called three mutual friends in Hotan to ask about him. Their phones were off, too. Hotan, 900 miles from Urumqi, suddenly seemed even further away. A strange feeling flashed through me that not a living soul remained there. If things keep on like this, I thought, soon it would be my turn to be “sent to study”.
It was in 2015 that I had first seen Uyghurs forcibly detained under the euphemistic pretext of “study”. In late May of that year, I had driven to Turpan, a city near Urumqi, to take care of some business. The next day, a poet friend of mine there had invited me to dinner at a local restaurant. He asked me to meet him in front of Turpan’s new human resources and social services building, to the north-east of the city. I drove over.
Just a few years earlier, this area had been an empty, gravelly steppe. Now buildings had been constructed here for city offices and administrative departments, alongside a number of residential complexes. I met my friend in a large courtyard flanked by office buildings. He was carrying a large plastic sack, which looked to contain clothing and personal hygiene items. “This will just take a minute,” he told me. “I’m here to visit my older brother. All I need to do is get these items to him. Wait in your car.”
The gate to the offices was bolted shut; in the guardhouse next to it sat a Uyghur man in a police uniform. My friend spoke to the policeman and signed the register. The policeman opened my friend’s bag, looked thoroughly through the contents, and put it aside to deliver to his brother. My friend and I headed for the restaurant in my car.
According to my friend, after those offices had been constructed on the edge of town, the old offices in the city centre hadn’t had a chance to relocate before a “study centre” had been opened in the new complex. From four villages in Turpan District, all Uyghurs who had received religious education at any point in their lives were to be sent to the centre for 60 days of training. Their food and accommodation would be provided on site by the government. Except in special circ*mstances, they would not be permitted outside the centre. My friend’s older brother was a gentle farmer. Because he had received religious education for a period in his youth, he had been sent to the centre.
I asked my friend how the authorities determined whether “graduates” of this study centre had sufficiently reformed themselves. According to him, each neighbourhood’s security cadre kept tabs on the graduates and evaluated their degree of reformation. A neighbour of theirs, after completing his “studies” at the centre, had travelled to a nearby village on some business. While there, he said his Friday prayers in the village mosque. The cadres responsible for that mosque immediately informed the security officer in the man’s neighbourhood that he had entered a mosque where he wasn’t registered. The neighbour was taken away to an even stricter “study centre” housed in the city police department’s detention facility.
These detention centres opened in Turpan two years earlier must have been a trial run for the ones now being constructed in Kashgar, Hotan and other southern areas on a much vaster scale. Perhaps that was why people were optimistic that the detentions would last only a few months. The government’s posture, however, gradually made it clear that this campaign would not be so simple.
Although mass arrests had not yet begun in Urumqi, and while some predicted that Urumqi’s status as the capital would prevent such things happening there, the internment campaign under way in the south began to affect life in Urumqi as well.
The change was first felt by the countless Uyghurs who had, over the decades, moved from their home towns to the regional capital, where they had worked in various professions and trades, started families, bought houses and come to consider themselves Urumqi folk. Now they were summoned back to their home towns by the local police stations where they were still registered. In the Dawan neighbourhood, where we lived, the naan bakeries at every crossroads were being boarded up; the fruit sellers’ carts were disappearing from the streets; the crowds whose bustle brought the neighbourhood to life were dwindling.
Around then, Marhaba observed that our older daughter, Aséna, usually quite lively, had been coming home from school in low spirits and heading straight to her room, where she would stay silently for long stretches. When we asked Aséna what was wrong, she told us that over the past week, each day a few of her classmates had quietly disappeared, forced to return with their parents to the towns where they were registered. Several of her good friends were among them. We did our best to comfort Aséna, telling her that her friends might be able to return if the situation improved. Her eyes, brimming with tears, made it clear she didn’t believe us.
A few weeks passed, and it was almost May. The Urumqi weather grew warmer. One Monday morning I drove to the office a bit later than usual. When I passed by the Bahuliang police station, I noticed an unusual commotion in the station courtyard.
Slowing down, I peered through my car window at the yard. About 100, or perhaps 200 Uyghurs stood there in silent uncertainty, while armed special police, clad in black, loaded them on to two buses parked in the courtyard. A few of the people boarding the buses looked longingly out of the yard. I felt a chill come over me. The mass arrests had reached Urumqi.
In the month after, news of the arrests spread. Each day, from every part of the city, hundreds of Uyghurs were called into dozens of police stations and sent to “study”. We understood by then that the “study centres” were concentration camps. People were summoned by phone to the neighbourhood committee office or the police station, told simply that they would be going to study, and taken away. One after another, I heard of friends and acquaintances who had been taken.
One afternoon in late May, I was heading to the Xinjiang Television station’s offices to take care of some business when I received a phone call from a young writer I had worked closely with. He told me he had been called in to the police station, where he had been told he would be sent to study. The police also told him that if an officer would vouch for him, he could avoid detention. Now he was calling everyone he knew to help him find a police officer.
“I only know the cops who arrested and questioned me,” I told him. He was silent for a moment. “OK, then, sorry to bother you.” He hung up. The next day I heard he had been detained.
From what I understood, in Urumqi as in Kashgar, the mass arrests first targeted devout individuals, people who had been abroad, and those with livelihoods outside the state system. The scope of the arrests then gradually expanded to other targets as well. It remained a mystery, though, how the authorities determined who would be taken. Anyone who asked the police why they had been arrested was told only that “your name was on the list they sent down”. There was no way to know if or when your name would show up on the list. We all lived within this frightening uncertainty.
While I was chatting with some friends one day, the conversation turned to the lists. One of our friends, a bit of a computer whiz, told us these forms were very likely generated by a specially designed computer program. And it was true that there had been much talk lately of a terrifying networked police system.
We had heard that, beginning in late 2016, everyone’s data was being entered into a system known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP). On the basis of this data, the police – and especially the neighbourhood police – marked the file of each individual they considered dangerous. Since everyone’s ID cards were linked via the internet to the IJOP, anyone with a mark in their file would set off the siren when they scanned their ID card at the ubiquitous police checkpoints, and would be apprehended on the spot. Uyghurs called these marks “dots”. If someone was detained due to their file being marked, people would say they were “arrested because they had a dot”. More and more people had been discovering of late that these dreadful dots had been applied to them as well.
Typically, if the police arrested someone, the authorities were required by law to inform the person’s family. If, as often happened, this legal requirement was ignored, family members would inquire at the police station as to why the individual had been detained and where they were being held. If the individual was being held for a political crime – a category that, for Uyghurs, had been expanding year after year – the police would not acknowledge it, but they would at least relay where they were being kept. With the permission of the police, family members would send the detained person necessities such as soap, towels, underwear and toilet paper. They could even meet with the prisoner. But as the mass arrests progressed, it became apparent that things were different now. There was no way to learn which study centre detained people had been sent to. They simply vanished.
After the mass arrests began, every time I drove past the police station I made a point of looking in at the courtyard. I couldn’t drive too slowly without arousing the police’s attention, so I would catch only a glimpse of the Uyghurs waiting in the courtyard to be taken for study. I would feel the urge to take a closer look, to see if anyone I knew was among them, but I was afraid to open the car window. Although the arrests had been going on in Urumqi for more than a month at this point, none of my close relatives had yet been taken. At this point, my direct experience of the arrests was only these cautious glances out of my car window.
The younger brother of a friend of mine was a technician at the TV station. According to my friend, the police arrived at his brother’s home after midnight to take him away. No one knew where he was being held. He was an outstanding technical worker, a core member of the team. His relatives pleaded with the TV station’s executives to make inquiries about him with the police. The station’s executives refused, telling them that in the present delicate circ*mstances, they could not get involved in matters of this kind.
If such things could befall employees at important government organs like the TV station, no Uyghur could truly be safe. Those who thought that the wind would not touch them found their confidence shaken. I found myself thinking of an old Uyghur proverb: no wall can stop the wind.
It became clear that it was only a matter of time before I would be detained. My wife and I started planning to make our escape. We bought tickets to the US – round-trip, to allay suspicion – but in April, before we could leave, Marhaba and I were suddenly summoned to hand in our family’s passports.
I begged the neighbourhood policewoman to leave us our passports, on the pretext that our daughter was suffering from epilepsy and needed urgent treatment in the US, but she said her orders came from “on high” and there was nothing she could do. Our plan had been to leave for the US with our daughters during the summer vacation. I felt sick. There was no one to turn to, to help us get our passports back. “Passport” had become a frightening word. Numerous people had been taken to the camps simply for having one. Some Uyghurs had been so scared that they had voluntarily turned in their passports to the police or the neighbourhood committee without even having been asked. There was nothing for us now but to abandon all hope of leaving the country and await our fate.
One evening in mid-August, I met my friend Almas, a translator, at his convenience store, along with three of our other closest friends. The five of us spent the night talking. Our conversation was deeply distressing. All of us were shaken by the mass arrests that had been going on since March. In particular, there were whispers of Uyghur intellectuals being arrested one after another. At that point it was impossible, though, to know what was true and what wasn’t.
When we heard someone had been arrested, we would invariably ask what the reason had been. Each time we asked the question, though, we realised immediately how absurd it was. We knew perfectly well that the vast majority of the arrests were based on fabricated crimes. We all lived in fear, aware that we could be arrested at any time, on any pretext.
We didn’t gather to solve the problems confronting us, but to exchange ideas and share our burdens. There is a Uyghur custom that when a parent dies, people pay visits to the bereaved. Each visitor will ask the host how their father or mother died. The host will patiently relate the very same account to each guest. The more this is repeated, the more the host’s grief will subside. Our conversations in Almas’s store were like that. Lately it was as if we were addicted to sharing our troubles.
That evening, as we parted ways in front of Almas’s store, I dearly wished to say a heartfelt goodbye to each of my friends, but I had to suppress the desire. A slight policy change had given us hope of getting our passports returned; if we could get them back, the journey before us would be a one-way trip. It was clear that if I made it to the US I would request political asylum, and in doing so become an enemy of the Chinese Communist party, an enemy of the state. Experience told me that if the police learned any of my friends had known I would be going abroad or had said a final goodbye to me, they would be in trouble: at the very least, weeks of interrogation; if they were less lucky, the camps. I couldn’t let my friends face that danger on my account. If I left, I would have to go without a word.
We finally got our passports back from the city administrative office in August. Within three days we had bought plane tickets, sold our car and packed up our belongings. I did not dare go and say goodbye to my parents in Kashgar. According to my mother, the neighbourhood committee had installed a camera by the front door of each apartment in her complex. The residents had to pay for the cameras; my parents handed over 280 yuan (about £30) to the neighbourhood committee to have a camera installed in front of their door.
These cameras monitored the people entering and exiting each apartment. Since a fair number of people were needed to watch so many video feeds, the neighbourhood committee hired a bunch of young lowlifes from the neighbourhood at a minimal salary. Fancying themselves policemen, they took to the job with relish. Practically everyone in my parents’ complex knew I had spent time in prison. If we visited my parents’ apartment, the goons monitoring their apartment camera could recognise and report me. Or someone at the neighbourhood’s mandatory nightly political meetings could fulfil their denunciation responsibilities by informing on me. My parents and I would be in trouble.
This time, likely the final time, I was leaving without saying goodbye to my mother and father, without their blessing. In this life, perhaps it is my fate to leave those closest to me with no goodbyes.
Early the next morning we called my parents-in-law and asked them to come over. When they arrived, we told them we were leaving for the US that day, so that Aséna’s illness could be treated. They knew perfectly well that Aséna wasn’t sick, but they knew equally well how serious the political situation had become. They grasped immediately that for us to make it out of the country, we needed to hold fast to this pretext.
Around noon, the taxi we had called stopped in front of our building. My father-in-law helped me stuff our suitcases into the trunk; we placed our knapsacks on the back seat. My mother-in-law emerged from the building and fell, sobbing, on Marhaba. Fortunately, the courtyard was practically empty; still, I worried that tearful goodbyes might draw people’s attention. With the excuse that we would miss our flight, I hurried Marhaba on. We urged her parents to return to the apartment without delay. Then we climbed into our taxi. Marhaba’s face was still wet with tears.
We drove out of the gate and on to the access road in front of the complex. Along the sidewalk, people were passing this way and that. Among these Uyghurs – their shoulders bowed with worry and their daily toils – were people we knew.
“Are we going to abandon our people here?” Marhaba asked sadly.
At the airport, watching the planes on the runway through the enormous windows, I turned to Marhaba. “Take it all in. These may be our final moments in this land.”
Adapted from Waiting to be Arrested at Night: a Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L Freeman, published by Jonathan Cape on 3 August and available at guardianbookshop.com
