Tahir Hamut Izgil is a well known Uyghur poet who fled his country in 2017, just ahead of his almost certain arrest, torture, and internment in a Chinese concentration camp.  With the help of his friend and translator Joshua L. Freeman, Izgil has written a detailed account of his and his people’s continuing persecution and internment.  It is a story that most Americans would do well to read because it reveals irrefutable evidence of the ruthless and brutal nature of the situation in communist China today.

Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide is a remarkable book.  It is simple, direct, compelling, and informed by a lifetime of experience.  In basic chronological order, it recounts the experience of Izgil and his family, friends, and associates through the years as the Chinese authorities instituted tighter and tighter control over the Uyghurs.

What began with the arrest and internment of outspoken critics of the communist party, especially those with strong religious beliefs, soon evolved into a pervasive system of informants, listening posts, block captains, and spies controlling every word and movement and punishing not just those “terrorists,” as they were called, who spoke out, but those who simply had contact with “foreigners,” and the family and friends of those who had contact.

Every phone call, every conversation, every piece of mail, every publication past or present was scrutinized and made the excuse for that midnight knock on the door.  Especially for those who had traveled overseas, as had Izgil, or had overseas contacts, persecution was inevitable.  It was only by way of perseverance in obtaining visas, government permission to travel “for medical purposes,” and luck that the author and his family managed to escape and make their way to the United States.  Once here, life has not been easy — Izgil worked for years as an Uber driver in D.C. — but it has been free and full of opportunity.

What Izgil tells us about the persecution of the Uyghurs, and of others such as followers of Falun Gong, should send a chill up the spine of every Westerner, because what the CCP has done to these people, it would do to us.  The persecution began with anti-Muslim propaganda and interference, such as raising the Chinese flag at all mosques and forcing Muslim clerics to dance to the beat of the song “Little Apple,” a favorite of the regional ruler.  But it soon transformed into a total crackdown on the spoken and written word, including publications from 30 years prior.  A special Propaganda Department examined every Uyghur-language publication and broadcast to find “any materials that contained ethnic separatist or religious extremist content.”  Anyone associated with this material was then in danger of being arrested and sent to “study” — in other words, to survive, if possible, the daily beatings, torture, brainwashing, and long hours of manual labor in  conditions not unlike those in Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s and 1940s.     

The numbers are staggering. Some three million Uyghurs, up to one million members of Falun Gong, Hong Kong dissidents, Christians, and other so-called terrorists have been arrested and interned.  In addition, the China government has pursued a policy of resettlement in Xinjiang, the Uyghur center of China, by deporting Uyghurs to concentration camps or other regions and importing ethnic Hans loyal to the CCP.  This sort of ethnic cleansing is all too familiar from the past, but Americans should be highly concerned that it is taking place at this moment.

Tyrants have always had a penchant for euphemism, twisting language to conform to their wishes.  Not unlike Joe Biden, with his declarations that “the border is secure” or “the national debt has declined $2 trillion under my administration,” the Chinese authorities seem intent on hiding the truth even when they are engaged in the most blatant abuses of human rights.

As the persecution in Urumchi, Xinjiang’s capital, mounted, police stations manned with officers with machine guns were constructed at the entrance of every Uyghur living area.  These threatening police stations were called “People’s Convenience Police Posts,” much as the authoritarian nation of China itself is called the “People’s Republic of China” — as if prefixing everything with “People’s” makes it all right.

The most important takeaway from Izgil’s book is just how far China’s control over its population extends. Even the most innocuous activities, such as dining with friends on the weekend or publishing an abstract poem like Izgil’s “Somewhere Else,” a work that makes no mention of China or of religion, are recorded and scrutinized as potentially damning evidence of disloyalty.

In the Uyghur region, as Izgil depicts it, every neighbor or work associate or even family member can be an informer, everything overheard can be evidence, every movement proof of anti-government intent.  Americans need to think about our own system of state control, what with 57,000 additional IRS officers checking on taxpayers and thousands of government officials collaborating with social media companies just before elections.

In China, a vast bureaucracy exists, backed up by policemen on every corner, that collects data from forms like the “Population Information Collection Form,” which is fed into the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, a bureaucratic system that has contributed to the arrest of millions of Uyghurs.  Based on information from the  Population Information Collection Form, individuals are rated as “reliable,” “average,” or “unreliable.”  “Rumor had it that people with a check mark next to ‘unreliable’ or even ‘average’ were sent to ‘study,’” Izgil writes.

If Izgil’s report is accurate, conditions in Xinjiang have reached a level of oppression beyond anything that most Americans could imagine.  Izgil provides evidence, mostly based on his own and others’ personal experience, of a totalitarian state bureaucracy exercising control over every man, woman, and child — even the young and the very old — and punishing those who are even suspected of disloyalty.  Millions are suffering at this moment, and tens of thousands at least have perished as a result of Chinese government policies toward its minority populations.

American corporations continue to fuel the CCP with trillions of dollars in trade.  Now it is time to reconsider all of our policies toward China with the purpose of restricting its growing power.  What Izgil describes in Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is a nightmare.  Only an aroused American people can stop it from arriving on our shores.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Image via Pxfuel.