In He Helped China Repress Uyghurs. He Says He’s a Victim, Too, NYT’s Li Yuan reports on a Han Chinese who was a full-fledged member of the machinery that China employs to force Xinjiang’s Uyghurs to abandon all aspects of their Muslim culture:
Halfway through a short speech he was giving at the German Bundestag, Zhang Yabo began to choke back tears.
Mr. Zhang had served for nine years as a police officer in Xinjiang, an enforcer in China’s campaign to surveil, detain and indoctrinate that region’s Uyghur population. At the campaign’s height, an estimated one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities were held in internment camps.
Tens of thousands of police officers carried out China’s state oppression in Xinjiang, but Mr. Zhang is a rare voice speaking out about it. Standing before German lawmakers and human rights activists in June, he described Xinjiang as a giant prison enclosed by an “ironclad wall.” “That wall imprisoned not only countless innocent Uyghurs,” he said, “but also the souls of those ordered to enforce it.”
Mr. Zhang related the pressure of participating in China’s security apparatus: endless shifts, sleeping in the office and constant fear of punishment. After he requested asylum in Germany last summer, Chinese authorities froze his bank accounts, he said, branded him a traitor and harassed his family.
By the end of the speech, he was sobbing “like a child,” he later told me. He hurried from the room and did not return.
“All the pressure, all the fear, all the emotions that he had carried with him” seemed to break loose, said Adrian Zenz, a Xinjiang expert who attended Mr. Zhang’s speech, “like a huge dam holding back a huge amount of water.”
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