How I Survived a Chinese ‘Re-education’ Camp

Reviewed by: Mushtaq Ul Haq Ahmad Sikander, Srinagar, Kashmir

Published by: London: Canbury Press, 2022, 250pp. ISBN: 9781912454907.

Muslims all over the world decry that they are suffering at the hands of the West and its backed regimes, dictators and monarchs. It is a factual reality that most Muslims are suffering brutally at the hands of violent regimes and states. After the end of World War II, the two political conflicts that garnered the greatest support among Muslim countries were the Palestinian issue and the Kashmir conflict. Now, even these two seem to be lost causes and not a priority for most Muslim countries. At the end of the last decade of the cold war, the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR created a wave of sympathy in the whole Muslim world. This sympathy was encouraged by the US for its own vested political interests that led to the balkanization of the USSR. Most of the Muslim regimes want to ingratiate themselves to the US, and so they carry out its whims at the cost of the wishes and hopes of their peoples.

The dynamics of world politics are changing with each passing decade. In Asia, there is a rise of a new hegemon, China. It is a communist, godless dictatorship, where the public display of religion is prohibited, so are individual basic rights of freedom, justice, free expression and religion curtailed to a large extent. An ethnic Muslim minority community living in China is the Uyghurs. They are concentrated mainly in the Xinjiang area of China, where they lived for generations. Xinjiang is the region with the greatest surveillance in the whole world. The Chinese consider the Uyghur Muslims as a threat to their communist system, because they believe that Muslims have a tendency to be terrorists and, hence, containing, oppressing and brutally suppressing them is the solution as they are concerned.