Sayragul Sauytbay's memoir is about the injustices committed by the Chinese government against the Turkish population in the west of the country, including Uyghurs, Turkmens, Kazakhs, and other groups. The book can roughly be divided into three parts.

In the first part, Sauytbay recalls her idyllic childhood as the daughter of Kazakhs who used to be herders until they were settled in a town where they maintained a farm. Sauytbay recalls several near-death experiences that she had which seemed to give a mystic or pre-destined air to her as a child. During this time of her life, Han Chinese are increasingly moving to the west of China and Sauytbay paints them in a very poor light: they are greedy, making money at the expense of the environment and off the backs of Turkish workers, all the while treating the minority populations with disdain. Sauytbay works hard to become a doctor and then a teacher, but continues to blame the Han majority for her difficulties.

In the second part of the book, Sauytbay is imprisoned in a prison for Muslims. Her job is to teach other Muslims about how to behave in a Han culture, but she and her fellow prisoners are tortured for slight infractions of the inhumane rules. Although she admits to being treated slightly better than the other prisoners, it is a bleak, terrible existence. She occasionally gets to do paperwork in a prison office where a Han woman tells her that she and the prisoners are being given poisonous sedatives.

When she is released at the beginning of the third part of the book, Sauytbay plans her escape from China to Kazakhstan where her husband and two children are living. Through various smugglers and intermediaries, she develops a plan to leave the country and miraculously slips through a border post. Even in Kazakhstan, a country whose autocratic ruler maintains cordial relations with China, she fears that she will be remanded back to China and her family therefore flees again.

Like many contemporary memoirs, "Chief Witness" cannot be fact-checked; however, Sauytbay's account meshes with what is in reputable news reports coming from western China which mostly provide astronomical statistics about the number of prisons and camps, and the people who may imprisoned. Sauytbay provides a needed human context to what is happening to Muslims and ethnic minorities in the west of China. ( )

This is a tough book to rate. I don’t know how Sayragul survived. She is truly resilient.

Sayragul Sauytbay shares her life story, her oppression, and her escape from China in The Chief Witness, a very highly recommended biography. She was trained as a doctor but later retrained as a teacher and was appointed a senior civil servant. She was arrested and sent to a prison based only on her ethnicity. She managed to escape from China into Kazakhstan where she was reunited with her family who had fled there years before. Shockingly, she was then arrested by the secret police in Kazakhstan (with the CCP involved) and put on trial for entering the country illegally. It was during her trial that her courage to speak out over what was happening in China resulted in worldwide attention and support for her. Since Sauytbay shares her whole life story we get to know her childhood, her feelings, and the lifestyle of her family before the CCP and the camps threatened her life. She and her family now live in Sweden but still have the CCP calling and threatening her.

Sauytbay was born a Kazakh in what was called East Turkestan until China annexed the whole region in 1949. Later Mao Zedong renamed it the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang. The area is home to a predominantly Muslim population, chiefly Uighur, but there are also Mongolians, Kyrgyzstanis, and Tartars. The north-western province has also become home to over 1,200 penal camps which are called "reeducation camps" where all these minorities are being incarcerated beaten, raped, tortured, and used as subjects for medical experiments simply based on their ethnic heritage and religion. They are treated as slave labor or bodies to harvest organs from by the CCP. This Chronicles the deliberate extermination of an entire ethnic group. But the CCP ambitions are far beyond this as they have plans to conquer the whole world using the same nefarious strategies. As long as companies and citizens in the free world fail to hold China accountable and continue to value financial interests above human rights, we will be selling our souls to the devil.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Scribe Publications
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2021/06/the-chief-witness.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4042475080 ( )