So it must be explained again: the Uighurs are Turkic Muslims who live in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang; in the past 50 years this region has been transformed from their homeland to one that hosts equal numbers of Han Chinese and Uighur; Uighurs have become second-class citizens; this state of affairs led to dissent, violent protest and may have motivated a handful of terrorist attacks; and the Chinese Communist Party’s response to these attacks was to initiate an enormous state project to destroy the Uighur way of life.
The CCP’s zeal for control has not been limited to China. In 2016 Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uighur woman and the author of this bracing new memoir, was living peacefully in Boulogne when she received a phone call from her former employer, a Xinjiang-based oil company. There was a problem with her pension. She would have to come back to sign some papers.