By East Turkestan — or Xinjiang, as it is known in Chinese — is a border region where ethnic minorities are subjected to the Chinese regime’s stifling repression.
Subjected to arbitrary arrests and forced labor, sterilizations to torture, more than one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minorities are estimated to have been locked up in so-called “re-education” camps and prisons in the region over the last decade, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
While China contends it is fighting ‘terrorists,’ to others it seems the objective is to annihilate any cultural and religious particularism which could be seen as an impediment to the ethnic purity component of the “Chinese dream.”
The United Nations has warned that what is happening in the region may amount to “crimes against humanity,” while others, including the US State Department, have gone further, labeling it a genocide in 2021, especially due to measures intended to reduce the number of children being born.
This repression is not confined to China, but takes on a transnational dimension: even beyond the country’s borders, Beijing persecutes those who have been designated as its political opponents. In Central Asia, the former Soviet republics, heavily economically dependent on their Eastern neighbor, are home to a pervasive interference that extends the repression.
China has built hundreds of detention centers in its Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region along the eastern frontiers of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, making those countries a common landing spot for refugees fleeing Chinese repression. Image: Screenshot, The Xinjiang Data Project, Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Winter Trip
In the winter of 2023, I decided to go to Kazakhstan to document what was happening to survivors of the camps who had fled across the border. I went with my photojournalist colleague Robin Tutenges, and the support of Slate France, an online current affairs magazine. As Chinese territory itself would be impossible to access for an independent investigation into the subject, we needed to shift our attention to where many survivors were living in exile.
While much of the reporting on the camps is being done remotely — and focuses on the crimes committed against the predominant Uyghur population — it is still vital to go in the field, and to remember that this repression affects a number of minority groups across the region.
Ethnic Kazakhs — who have Chinese citizenship — are the second most impacted group by population, yet their hardships remain largely overlooked by both the international community and their own country.
We found that the region between China and Kazakhstan had become a border of tears, where many families mourn the loved ones who have never returned from the Chinese camps, and where the survivors of the camps who managed to make it across the border have carried with them the trauma of the experience.
Many of them still fear for their lives, under the threat of another deportation. In fact, leaving the camps is rarely a liberation, but often the beginning of a new ordeal. Barely acknowledged as victims, even in some cases by their relatives, survivors must learn to live again, and are expected to return to a daily life where their traumas go unrecognized — and untreated. Kazakh authorities, bound to China through strong business partnerships, remain silent, and try to stifle the protests of the few local activists there are.
Our challenge was therefore to trace the story of this violence — and its evolution — by weaving individual portraits and testimonies with a geopolitical analysis of regional power balances. The fieldwork and investigation were incredibly complicated since on-the-ground access remains extremely complex due to the close surveillance to which many witnesses are still subjected. That same surveillance also puts them in great jeopardy.
Protecting Vulnerable Sources
This investigation, first published on Slate.fr as a text-photo series, almost didn’t get published. The main reason: the accessibility of the sources. Because the repression in Xinjiang is still ongoing, a single wrong word can lead to deportation, imprisonment, or death for witnesses and their relatives if they are identified by Chinese or Kazakh intelligence.
In those conditions, most survivors are terrified to be acknowledged as such, and not likely to speak to journalists. Building a network of contacts within persecuted communities therefore requires a great deal of time, caution, and trust.
My colleague and I were already well anchored in various diasporas originating from East Turkestan — and this ultimately enabled us to find survivors.
We took time to assemble different networks of local and international researchers, activists, human rights defenders, and artists. The difficult part is unlocking the primary contact who will allow you to unlock another one, and another, and so on.
One of our most valuable resources was Atajurt Partiasy, an organization that has strong local roots and has helped many family members in their efforts to demand the release of their relatives. As such, Atajurt had already collected numerous testimonies from survivors.
But with investigations like these, security has to be a top priority. Most of the people who testified in this series of reports did so under full anonymity, because they often still had family members living in China who might be incarcerated if any unsolicited attention came to them, or they had family members already in camps or prison, who might never be released. The very few who agreed to speak openly did so because their family had already left China or they were desperately hoping that, by making their story public, they might help their loved ones, as media attention has, paradoxically, sometimes led to the release of prisoners.
An elderly Uyghur man and woman walk along a street in Yarkant near Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Many Uyghur refugees refuse to publicly speak out about their detention for fear of government repercussions for their relatives still in China. Image: Shutterstock
Our responsibility, then, was to find the right balance in what we could, and could not, reveal to ensure their safety, while knowing that we could never predict the Chinese government’s arbitrariness.
Each piece of sensitive information was discussed with interviewees, and we sometimes published less than they would have liked, considering that some sources might not necessarily be fully aware of the ramifications if things took a turn for the worse.
As Chinese and Kazakh intelligence agencies are extremely efficient, we had to take the usual precautions, encrypting all our devices and keeping as little information on us as possible, in case the authorities intervened. This meant not recording witnesses’ locations on maps, nor their contact details. Instead, we hid sensitive information on a single random piece of paper — very poorly written, and in approximative French — which could not be hacked. We also made sure our cellphones were always using VPN or airplane mode, never kept compromising photos, and always had some sightseeing-like footage saved just in case, while we’d also prepared our best dazed-tourist face for any interaction with authorities.
When it came to conducting interviews, I always told witnesses at the very beginning that if they felt uncomfortable with a question, they could just skip it and we would move on to something else or take a break. Above all, in our interviews we strived to not re-traumatize the victims.
I usually like to start and finish each interview with open-ended questions, which give witnesses space to broach the most sensitive or important subjects for them, without drawing attention to what I might imagine to be the worst part of their story. As far as scenes of torture are concerned, and there were many in this investigation, I usually waited for witnesses to mention them on their own before engaging on the subject, and asked them more about their feelings, fears and memories, than about the corpography of physical abuse, which is a way of returning agency to those who have been hurt.
Naturally, some people don’t spontaneously address these subjects. In this case, I asked if they had witnessed or heard about different types of violence that I listed, which could help us to approach the issue from a different angle, leaving the door open for them. Sexual violence is obviously the trickiest subject to raise. I strongly suspect that, in several cases, the survivors I’d spoken to had been victims of sexual violence, but were unable to talk about it, for various reasons — a husband present in the room, too much shame to bear, or the memory is just too painful.
But my job is not to force victims to talk about their traumas. Doctors can report that part to me, as can lawyers or researchers. My work is about gathering facts and making sense of them in a vivid story. I always have to keep in mind that when I leave a victim’s house, they’re left behind with their thoughts, and I have to make sure that these will be as minimally painful as possible.
Freelancers Without Money
The other reason this investigation could have remained a mere wish is money. Funding is what allows stories to be told — but a lack of it often becomes a story killer, especially for freelancers. It took us several months to construct this project, and while a number of outlets expressed interest in the topic, not a single major French newspaper agreed to support it.
Ultimately, Slate.fr offered to finance it and gave us a wonderful platform to carry out the investigation, resulting in an eight-part, longread feature series. We conceived it as a narrative, starting with the situation in the Chinese camps, moving across the Kazakh border, and ending in Europe, and more specifically in France, where we turned the focus on the international community’s inaction.
The series won the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s 2023 Kurt Schork Freelance Award, the 2024 European Press Prize’s Distinguished Award, and was nominated for the 2023 Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for War Correspondents.
Strangely enough, several news outlets seemed much more interested afterwards, although of course, that was a little too late. Winning prizes is gratifying, yet it’s not sufficient for freelancers to continue the work started, especially on this type of highly demanding and subject matter terrain, where the outcome can never be guaranteed in advance.
This past winter, we decided to continue the investigation in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, an even more sensitive reporting environment. That journey was marked by many failures, until the Pulitzer Center decided to lend its financial support to this project. Its backing will enable us to publish a new chapter of this long history of China’s transnational repression of the East Turkestan ethnic minorities.
