‘Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized' Review: A People Persecuted
In 2017, satellite images, leaked government documents, online tenders for prison construction and guards, as well as social-media posts of ribbon-cutting ceremonies revealed a network of prison camps used to detain, torture and politically indoctrinate Turkic Muslims in China's far-western region of Xinjiang. The following year the U.S. State Department cited estimates that between 800,000 and 2 million people were interned in these camps.
Initially the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) denied the camps' existence. One official insisted that China was the target of vicious lies and claimed that Xinjiang's Muslims were the 'happiest in the world.' As shock and revulsion spread around the world, however, officials put forward another line: The camps were 'vocational education and training centers' providing instruction in Mandarin language, civic education and even hairdressing. Meanwhile, across Xinjiang, mosques were being razed and intensive surveillance imposed; officials were deployed to monitor the population, some by living in their subjects' homes and sharing their beds as part of the 'Join Up and Become Family' program.
In 'Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized,' John Beck illustrates the brutality of China's repression through the experiences of four individuals. Saira is a Kazakh writer and entrepreneur; Tursunay is a Uyghur nurse. Both women survived the re-education camps. Adiljan, a Uyghur, fled Xinjiang after a brief detention and settled in Istanbul, where he sought out and confronted Chinese agents spying on the Uyghur exile community. Serikzhan, a Kazakh national based in Almaty, sounded the alarm about his fellow Kazakhs being persecuted in China; for this he earned the wrath of his own government.
Driven to recover territories lost at the fall of the Qing empire in 1911, China's People's Liberation Army took control of Xinjiang in 1949 and then Tibet, to Xinjiang's south, during the 1950s. Together these two regions constitute an enormous swath of territory along China's frontiers, sparsely populated by inhabitants with close cultural and religious ties with neighboring India and parts of the Soviet Union that would later become the independent Central Asian republics.
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