Both these books are concerned with the Chinese government's massive assault on the Muslim ethnic minorities of western China, especially the Uyghurs, and the gigantic concentration camp system built up since 2017—the largest internment of a religious and ethnic minority the world has seen since World War II.
The first book, In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony, is an account by the American anthropologist Darren Byler, one of the foreign scholars who, until recently, had been deeply involved in ethnographic research in the targeted region. The other, How I Survived a Chinese “Re-education” Camp, is by Gulbahar Haitiwaji, herself a native Uyghur and one of the few camp survivors who managed to get away from China to tell her story.
Byler's rapid-fire account begins with a Chinese Muslim (Hui) student who was detained, to her surprise, apparently for accessing her email account in Seattle, where...
