No Escape: The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs

Summary

A powerful memoir that lays bares China’s repression of the Uyghur people by Nury Turkel, cofounder and board chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project and now a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

In recent years, the People’s Republic of China has rounded up as many as three million Uyghurs, placing them in what it calls “reeducation camps,” but what most of the world identifies as concentration camps. The tactics are reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, but the results are far more insidious because of the technology used, most of it stolen from Silicon Valley. In the words of one Uyghur who fled to the United States after his father vanished into the camps, China has created “a police surveillance state unlike any the world has ever known.”

As a human rights attorney and Uyghur activist who now serves on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Nury Turkel tells his personal story to help explain the urgency and scope of the Uyghur crisis. Born in 1970 in a reeducation camp, he was lucky enough to survive and eventually make his way to the US, where he became the first Uyghur to receive an American law degree. Since then he has worked as a lawyer, activist, and spokesperson for his people.

The Uyghur crisis is turning into the greatest human rights crisis of the twenty-first century, a systematic cleansing of an entire race of people in the millions. Part Ishmael Beah and part Samantha Power, No Escape shares Turkel’s personal story while drawing back the curtain on this historic injustice that is still happening today.