In “He Recorded China’s Detention of Uyghurs. The U.S. Wants to Deport Him to Uganda,” the New York Times (Dec 16, 2025) reports:
In 2020, a Chinese citizen had heard reports about China’s mass detention and surveillance of Uyghurs. But he wanted to see if they were true for himself.
So the citizen, Heng Guan, 38, said that he made a hugely risky decision, driving across the country from eastern China to Xinjiang, where he tracked down and secretly shot video of hulking re-education and detention centers mostly holding Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic group. The footage later became rare visual evidence of the scale and forcible nature of China’s clampdown, despite Beijing’s claims that they were voluntary re-education camps.
In 2021, Mr. Guan fled to the United States, where he applied for asylum. Then, this August, as he was living in New York, he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His supporters and family members feared he might be sent back to China, where human rights activists say he would almost certainly face retribution from the government.
Perhaps it’s a good time to note how the camps have been described and documented in writing to date:
Survivor Memoirs
- How I Survived a Chinese “Reeducation” Camp: A Uyghur Woman’s Story by Gulbahar Haitiwaji (with Rozenn Margot), 2021: Chronicles three years of detention, including solitary confinement and brainwashing.
- Place of No Return: How I Survived China’s Uyghur Camps by Mihrigul Tursun, 2023: Describes torture, forced sterilization, and witnessing executions during her internment.
- Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: An Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil (trans. Joshua L. Freeman), 2023: Focuses on pre-arrest surveillance and family evasion of camps amid mass detentions.
Related Testimonies and Accounts
- In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony by Darren Byler, 2022: Draws from survivor interviews to expose camp life, surveillance, and forced labor.
- Confessions of a Xinjiang Camp Teacher, by Qelbinur Sedik and Sayragul Sauytbay, (2020) detailing guard perspectives and inmate horrors.
Fiction and Semi-Autobiographical Works
Few purely fictional novels center on camp inmate experiences, but Banu’s Redemption offers a semi-autobiographical Uyghur woman’s story of reeducation amid ethnic tensions. The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun evokes oppressive Uyghur life under surveillance, though not directly camp-focused.
Ethnic ChinaLit 