Wake up, Westerners – the evils of Xinjiang are a taste of the future

Telegraph

08-05-2025

John Beck's Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized is not merely a book. It is a reckoning. The stories this award-winning journalist tells, of the violence faced by ordinary Uyghurs, testify to how the Chinese regime has systematised surveillance, criminalised belief and mechanised repression. For now, it may seem merely to be a window upon Xinjiang, but it's also a vision of the totalitarian future that China's Communist Party has rolled out in Hong Kong, is threatening Taiwan with, and will soon be selling to the world: efficient, paranoid and absolutely ruthless.
Beck doesn't moralise, he documents. His narrative, a tapestry of firsthand accounts, Party memoranda and state propaganda, lays bare the architecture of a modern gulag. We read of teenagers hauled into 'tiger chairs' for constraint and torture, of children taught to fear books, of scholars imprisoned for writing in Kazakh. We are introduced to a place where growing a beard or teaching a Koranic verse is treated as terrorism, and classification by race and religion is the law. This isn't ancient history. This is 2025.
In Parliament, and in this newspaper, I have long argued that Britain must confront the reality of China's government, and not be distracted by trinkets. Beck's book is not about policy – but it demands one. For, as we debate trade deals and supply chains, his pages remind us that our choices have consequences. Consider this: many of the cotton garments sold on British high streets today pass through Xinjiang. The solar panels Ed Miliband visited Beijing in March to source, in order to power our so-called 'green transition', are built, in part, by detainees in factories powered by coal. And the very chips in our smartphones are manufactured using rare earths mined from land stripped from Uyghur hands. We are, however unknowingly, underwriting slavery. How does that meet anyone's environmental, social or governance principles?
The scale of the repression in Xinjiang is staggering. Beck meticulously traces its implementation, from the Party documents authorising mass detentions to the way everyday life changes under constant surveillance. The descriptions of China's 'vocational education and training centres' – a euphemism for detention camps – reveal to us facilities fringed with barbed wire, guard towers equipped with machine guns, and interrogation rooms where torture is routine. As one Party official is quoted saying, Uyghurs must 'break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins'.
The Chinese state weaponises basic human instincts. Family ties become vulnerabilities to exploit. Cultural identity becomes evidence of 'extremism'. Even the desire for economic advancement becomes a trap, as Saira, a Kazakh from Urumqi who buys into the Chinese dream even joining foreign trips promoting the government's commercial interests until she discovers her business success marks her as a threat to the state.
Beck captures something essential about totalitarian systems: they don't just imprison the body, but also colonise the mind. We witness this in the trauma of Tursunay, a Uyghur woman who is imprisoned for her life overseas on the grounds of suspected foreign affiliations and ideological deviation upon her release, she initially refuses to speak out about her experiences, having internalised the regime's threats. We see it in the way camp survivors struggle with basic tasks after their release, their concentration and memory permanently damaged by what they endured.
The book gives voice to those who refused to remain silent. There's Tursunay, who survived unspeakable trauma only to face intimidation from Chinese state authorities across multiple countries; Saira, whose literary aspirations were buried alongside her books when authorities burned them in her garden; Serikzhan Bilash, a Kazakh activist and founder of Atazhurt, who risked everything to document his compatriots' disappearances. Their courage in speaking out, despite the regime's relentless efforts to silence them, is humbling.
China's efforts at silencing not just critics but different minority groups, are terrifyingly advanced. Beck's narrative uncovers the methods of control being perfected in Xinjiang: digital surveillance through mandatory apps, biometric data collection disguised as healthcare. Particularly chilling is the documentation of how the tentacles of Chinese state security reach far beyond national borders. Uyghur and Kazakh diasporic communities in Kazakhstan, Turkey and even America face surveillance, intimidation and the agonising knowledge that speaking out could result in reprisals against family members still in Xinjiang. The Chinese embassy protests described in the book's final pages – where survivors such as Tursunay stand in silent witness as diplomatic vehicles with tinted windows roll past – serve as a powerful metaphor for the global community's failure to meaningfully confront these abuses.
What struck me most about Beck's account is how effectively it dismantles China's official narrative. Beijing insists these are simply vocational schools, yet the book documents forced sterilisations and systematic rape. The Party speaks of lifting ethnic minorities from poverty, yet we read of prosperous business owners such as Saira having their assets seized. Officials claim to fight terrorism, yet their own documents reveal targets for arbitrary detention that include anyone who prays regularly or applies for a passport.
The contrast between the Party's propaganda and the lived reality is nowhere more apparent than in the official press conferences Beck documents, where 'graduated trainees' mechanically recite their gratitude for being 'cured' of religious 'extremism'. These Orwellian spectacles, in which victims are forced to thank their tormentors, reveal a system that demands not just obedience but the complete surrender of truth itself.
And yet, as Beck describes, China has successfully leveraged its economic might to silence international criticism. Kazakhstan, Turkey and even some Western democracies have yielded to pressure, deporting refugees back to certain persecution or muting their criticism in international forums. Britain cannot look away. The Modern Slavery Act must be strengthened to mandate full transparency in supply chains. Companies must audit their inputs. Import bans should be enforced on goods linked to forced labour. And the Foreign Office must lead a coordinated, values-based approach with our allies to challenge China's narrative at the UN and beyond.
We must also wake up to the deeper threat. What is happening in Xinjiang is not just an assault on a people. It is a prototype: a test run for a surveillance state powered by AI, justified by nationalism, and perfected in the absence of dissent. Beck holds a mirror to that future, and the reflection should chill us into action. As legislators, we owe it to those already lost. As Britons, we owe it to our values. And as free people, we owe it to ourselves.