Escaping a CCP Reeducation Camp
Udumbara
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A former teacher recounts witnessing rape, torture, sterilization, and fabricated crimes inside a so-called reeducation camp in China.
Dr. Sayragul Sauytbay, a 58-year-old ethnic Kazakh from the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of East Turkestan, which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls Xinjiang, described the years she spent working as a Mandarin instructor in a reeducation camp in the region.
“I witnessed rape, including gang rape, and other inhumane atrocities with my own eyes,” Sauytbay told this author.
Originally, she had been the director of five kindergartens. In 2016, amid a CCP mass-internment campaign, she was forced to work as a Chinese-language instructor inside one of the reeducation camps.
She explained that the camps were officially referred to as vocational training centers, but detainees were locked inside and not allowed to leave. Unlike a prison sentence, there was no judicial process, no charges, and no fixed term. People had no idea how long they would be held, or if they would ever be released. She said this uncertainty created constant fear.
“That’s the most tragic part,” she said. In a normal prison system, even someone sentenced to many years knows when their term will end and lives with that hope. “But in the camps, nobody knows when you are going to be released.” She said many people died in detention, and others lived daily with the fear that they might die the next day.
The camp where she was forced to work held about 2,500 people, both men and women, young and old, including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uyghurs, and other Turkic peoples. There were security cameras everywhere, both inside and outside the camp.
“Surveillance cameras monitored every corner, every activity, everything that was being done in the camps, 24 hours a day,” she said. “The only place without cameras was a room they called the ‘black room.’” This was where torture took place.
“Even when I was teaching in the classroom, security forces would come in, pull out selected people, and take them into the black room,” she said. “During lessons, we could hear screaming from that room. People screaming, ‘Please help us. Please save us.’”
When asked why she believed the CCP carried out these practices, Sauytbay explained that Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uyghurs, and other Turkic peoples were the native inhabitants of East Turkestan, and that the camps were part of a long-standing policy to eliminate the native population. According to her, those detained were innocent and had committed no real crimes. Once inside the camps, authorities began fabricating charges to justify their detention.
For Uyghurs, she said, the most common accusations were terrorism or separatism. “If they had any religious affiliation, they would say that was religious extremism,” she explained. “If they tried to maintain their identity, they were labeled as separatists or terrorists.” These labels were routinely used as blanket justifications for detention.
Sauytbay noted that for Kazakhs, authorities cited ties to Kazakhstan as grounds for detention. This included having relatives there, traveling to Kazakhstan, holding a Kazakh residency card, or even communicating with someone across the border. She said similar accusations applied to anyone connected to what authorities internally labeled as 26 “terrorist” countries.
She explained that there were roughly 30 official categories of accusations used to justify detention. Even minimal contact could trigger suspicion. “If you received a phone call from one of those countries, or if you had a relative there, you were a suspect,” she said. These policies, she emphasized, did not apply to Han Chinese.
According to Sauytbay, once a person was detained, authorities examined their background and lifestyle to construct a charge that fit the state’s narrative. Businesspeople were accused of threatening state security through foreign ties. Artists and musicians were also targeted. She cited cases in which Kazakh singers were accused of separatism simply for performing songs in the Kazakh language. References to ancestry, heritage, or homeland were treated as evidence of anti-state sentiment.
“This is how they did it,” she said. “They looked at who you were, what you did in life, and then they found a crime that fit their narrative.
“These people were already in the camp, and then the government tried to find a reason to blame them.
“They could not endure the psychological and physical torture they were subjected to in the camps.”
The situation was so hopeless, according to Sauytbay, that some people would have taken their own lives, but even that was impossible due to the constant 24/7 surveillance.
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As an instructor, she said she was not tortured, but her life was only marginally better than that of the prisoners. They were given three small meals a day, usually a bowl of watery rice and mantou (a Chinese steamed bun), with no opportunity to obtain additional food. Like the inmates, she was not permitted to have any contact with the outside world.
In 2018, after witnessing what took place inside the camp, authorities released her but refused to restore her position as a kindergarten director. Soon afterward, she was warned that the CCP intended to send her back to the camp, this time as a prisoner.
“If I were sent there again, I knew I was not going to come out alive,” she said.
Faced with detention, she took the risk of escape and fled across the border into Kazakhstan, where she was arrested for illegal entry and faced possible deportation back to China. After months of fear, appeals, and uncertainty, she ultimately obtained refugee status and was resettled in Sweden in July 2019, where she has lived with her family since.
Through Sauytbay’s testimony and that of other refugees, the CCP’s crimes have been well documented. Nevertheless, detentions, torture, sterilization, and organ harvesting continue.
