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ivassavi's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.5
marilu's review against another edition
informative
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Be aware of the content warnings, some parts are important to tell and show the world, but very hard to take.
Graphic: Rape and Police brutality
Moderate: Mental illness, Racial slurs, Suicide, Torture, Violence, and Deportation
scribepub's review against another edition
The Chief Witness is a deeply disturbing insight into the dark heart of the Chinese Communist Party and its reign of terror in Xinjiang. It will rank historically along with the great literary exposes of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag.
Clive Hamilton
Clive Hamilton
scribepub's review
The Chief Witness is a deeply disturbing insight into the dark heart of the Chinese Communist Party and its reign of terror in Xinjiang. It will rank historically along with the great literary exposes of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag.
Clive Hamilton
Clive Hamilton
scribepub's review against another edition
The Chief Witness is a deeply disturbing insight into the dark heart of the Chinese Communist Party and its reign of terror in Xinjiang. It will rank historically along with the great literary exposes of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag.
Clive Hamilton
Clive Hamilton
careinthelibrary's review against another edition
4.0
The Chief Witness: Escape from China’s Modern-Day Concentration Camps by Sayragul Sauytbay is such a necessary piece of writing. This covers an ongoing genocide of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim ethnic groups in China's northwesternmost province, East Turkestan (also known as its colonized name, Xinjiang). So packed full of information that has given me the knowledge to feel confident in my perspective and to advocate for the victims of this crime against humanity and hopefully spread the word so others learn and resist it as well.
Sauytbay covers everything from her childhood before the majority of the prejudice to her young adulthood facing some discrimination, travel restriction, and religious practice oppression all the way to complete surveillance, detention, torture, medical experimentation, all the trademarks of a genocide.
If you're not convinced by the absolute necessity of reading this to better inform yourself on this preventable violence, the memoir itself is good *shrugs*. If that's what you needed to hear to want to pick this up.
content warnings for: cultural genocide, physical and mental torture, starvation, Islamophobia, sexual violence, gang rape (described on page), sexual coercion, medical experimentation, poisoning, authoritarian government regime.
Sauytbay covers everything from her childhood before the majority of the prejudice to her young adulthood facing some discrimination, travel restriction, and religious practice oppression all the way to complete surveillance, detention, torture, medical experimentation, all the trademarks of a genocide.
If you're not convinced by the absolute necessity of reading this to better inform yourself on this preventable violence, the memoir itself is good *shrugs*. If that's what you needed to hear to want to pick this up.
content warnings for: cultural genocide, physical and mental torture, starvation, Islamophobia, sexual violence, gang rape (described on page), sexual coercion, medical experimentation, poisoning, authoritarian government regime.
zainub_reads's review against another edition
5.0
Incarcerated in a Chinese concentration camp for her crime of being born a Kazakh, an ethnic minority in China, Sayragul has become an important eyewitness bringing to light the unimaginable horrors unfolding in the camps, to the Muslims jailed within, in the form of severe torture, unbearable abuse, brutality, rape, and even murder for minor infractions like being unable to answer in correct Chinese, answering incorrectly, questioning their imprisonment, refusing to eat pork, drink wine, or even speaking out of turn!
They are being killed, used for medical experimentation, murdered so that their organs can be harvested and sold in a booming industry for “Halal organs”!
They are being ethnically cleansed so that nothing of their identity and culture remains in a Country that is hell-bent on stomping out any dissent or differences in order to create a homogeneous community of bots that will blindly obey the Chinese. Communist. Party rules.
To begin with the region of East Turkestan was violently annexed by China in 1949, a land that has always been home to the Uyghur’s, Kazakhs, Tartars, and Mongolians among others, and then began the process of systematically oppressing the Citizens by taking away their land, property, culture, and now their religion, and their right to live.
This book is a difficult read but an essential read that I implore you to read.
“In footage secretly recorded, the Chinese Head of a department for internal security in Xianjian puts the dire situation of muslims in the region in a nutshell: “Their human rights aren’t being violated, because they have no rights.”
With every passing minute the world keeps silent about these atrocities, more innocent people die.”
They are being killed, used for medical experimentation, murdered so that their organs can be harvested and sold in a booming industry for “Halal organs”!
They are being ethnically cleansed so that nothing of their identity and culture remains in a Country that is hell-bent on stomping out any dissent or differences in order to create a homogeneous community of bots that will blindly obey the Chinese. Communist. Party rules.
To begin with the region of East Turkestan was violently annexed by China in 1949, a land that has always been home to the Uyghur’s, Kazakhs, Tartars, and Mongolians among others, and then began the process of systematically oppressing the Citizens by taking away their land, property, culture, and now their religion, and their right to live.
This book is a difficult read but an essential read that I implore you to read.
“In footage secretly recorded, the Chinese Head of a department for internal security in Xianjian puts the dire situation of muslims in the region in a nutshell: “Their human rights aren’t being violated, because they have no rights.”
With every passing minute the world keeps silent about these atrocities, more innocent people die.”