A former prisoner who made it to America with his family days ago tells NR about his harrowing ordeal inside China’s detention-camp system.
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A former Xinjiang prison-camp detainee who escaped to America just days ago described his harrowing imprisonment in an extensive interview with National Review, including details of forced injections that he and others were given of an unknown substance that caused painful and debilitating reactions — as well as obedience.
The survivor, Ovalbek Turdakun, spoke with NR through a translator during a sit-down at a Washington hotel late Tuesday evening, following a busy day in the nation’s capital. These are among the most extended comments he’s made on the ten months he spent in the Xinjiang prison camp in 2018, since he arrived in Washington on Friday with his wife and their eleven-year-old son. Their escape followed a years-long ordeal that took them from Xinjiang, China, to Kyrgyzstan, and at last to the United States.
Turdakun is understood to be the first Christian detainee of the Xinjiang camp system to reach the U.S. and to speak publicly about the experience. He is expected to testify before Congress about his time in the prison, and his recounting of Chinese officials’ continued harassment after his family’s escape to Kyrgyzstan will likely bolster an ongoing effort to bring Beijing’s atrocities in Xinjiang to the International Criminal Court. The family’s arrival is also noteworthy because it may be the first time that an entire family was able to leave Xinjiang for the U.S. together, Ethan Gutmann, a scholar who researches China’s atrocities in the region, told NR.
Specifically, Turdakun’s testimony is expected to reveal new aspects of China’s mass atrocities against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Turdukan said he and other detainees had been beaten with batons and tortured in what’s called a “tiger chair” — and shocked with an electric wand for falling asleep during that torture — on multiple occasions. He also detailed, at length, the practice of injecting prisoners with an unknown substance which, in his case, rendered him unable to walk for a period of time.
“A lot of people were sick because everyone received the same injection,” Turdakun said, referring to his observation that an increasing number of other detainees grew ill in the camp as his detention unfolded. He also said he believes malnutrition, homesickness, anxiety, and lack of sunlight contributed to illness.
Turdakun said he received the injection sometime after his first four months in the camp. He had been moved to a new cell at least twice and said the injection came during his time in the third cell. The guards had injected detainees before his arrival, he said, based on his furtive conversations with other prisoners. Turdakun also said he believes the guards injected everyone in the camp, though the prison’s population was so large they likely couldn’t inject them all on the same day.
Detainees were not permitted to speak among themselves, but they had an approximately 20-minute window while they showered — usually in groups of 50 to 60 people — during which the noise of the water drowned out their conversations.
“They talked about it because everybody’s arm was painful from that injection, wherever they put the injection, that area was horrible. Stomach was painful, your ears were painful, everything was painful,” he said.
Leading up to his injection, he said he heard sounds of the inhabitants of other cells receiving the shot through his cell door’s window. When it came time for him to receive it, he said, the guards told him “these are for immunities to help people not get sick.”
The symptoms appeared the same day. Immediately, he was uncomfortable and came down with a fever. His ear ached, he couldn’t hear, and he didn’t have any strength when he stood. He also said he needed to go to the bathroom — according to other documents about his experience seen by NR, he seemed to be referring to diarrhea and vomiting.
A memo obtained by NR listed additional symptoms that Turdakun mentioned during 14 hours of interviews with Conor Healy, of the video-surveillance trade group IPVM. That document, which Healy submitted to the State Department to gain approval for the family’s entry, described “an as-yet unknown substance that caused (what is thought to be) cerebral spinal fluid to leak from their ears, and caused him to lose the ability to walk, among many other complications.”
Turdakun needed help to get to the hospital in the camp. There, they gave him a different injection to relieve his body’s aches, but they handcuffed one arm. “There were a lot of people there, and you weren’t allowed to talk. They had another method, where they would handcuff your thumb to the ceiling to make it so that you couldn’t do anything dangerous.”
Turdakun also reported a curious additional side effect of the initial injection.
“When people are showering, they share that they” were “really peaceful” after receiving the shot, he said. “You couldn’t get angry. You were really obedient. It’s just like that.”
Healy wrote that his team was consulting with medical and toxicology experts who preliminarily found that the injection caused brain inflammation that led to the feeling of submissiveness.
The nature of the substance remains unclear.
The camp was located in Turdakun’s home prefecture of Kizilsu, which borders Kyrgyzstan. He said the Chinese authorities took him there after a monthlong period during which they either knocked on their door or called their home every evening because his wife, Zhyldyz, is a Kyrgyz citizen, and their family regularly made trips to Kyrgyzstan.
Turdakun and his son hold Chinese passports, but they are all ethnically Kyrgyz Christians. While most international attention has focused on the plight of Xinjiang’s ethnic Uyghurs, many of whom are Muslims, a number of other minority groups, including Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, and others, have been targeted by the Chinese government’s campaign, suspected to be clearing the region for ethnic Han Chinese settlers.
In January 2021, the State Department concluded that Beijing is carrying out genocide against Uyghurs, on the basis of new evidence showing that the Chinese forcibly sterilized women and carried out mandatory abortions. The department also found that the Chinese government is carrying out crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and a number of other minority groups there.
Turdakun’s comments corroborate prior accounts and offer evidence of previously unknown aspects of China’s campaign.
That they are even in the United States is itself remarkable. After his release, the family was able to get out of Xinjiang for Kyrgyzstan, where they faced continued harassment by the Chinese authorities. While they were in the country, Chinese officials forced their friends who remained in Xinjiang to call them to ask them to return, according to documents seen by NR. The Chinese government froze their bank accounts as well.
Gutmann said his research on the deportation of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples from Central Asian countries bordering China put him in contact with Turdakun in 2020. He met Healy the following year and explained that the family was facing the threat of repatriation to China, where they were almost certain to face harsh punishment for leaving Xinjiang.
In November, when the two spoke again on the phone, Gutmann explained that the family’s visas in Kyrgyzstan were set to expire the following month. They knew that they had to act.
After consulting more people, Healy realized that the only feasible option would be to send Westerners into the country to help the family get past customs “to try to film the thing, to try to make an enormous scene if [customs agents] separated them to presumably send them elsewhere,” Healy told NR.
On December 15, two days before their visas expired, the Turdakun family, accompanied by Healy and six Americans, boarded a plane to a third country, which remains undisclosed due to safety concerns.
While the family was in that country, Healy, Gutmann, and a number of government officials petitioned the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department for a special immigration enforcement status on the grounds that the family faced the threat of deportation back to Xinjiang and that Ovalbek in particular could provide valuable testimony on the Chinese Communist Party’s atrocities against minorities in Xinjiang. In March 2022, the U.S. government permitted Turdakun, his wife, and his son to travel to the U.S. under a special exemption. Their arrival in the U.S. was first reported by Axios.
His testimony “will fill in gaps in our knowledge of the ongoing genocide in the Xinjiang region, as well as with regard to the use of technology provided by Chinese companies such as Hikvision to facilitate gross violations of internationally-recognized human rights by the Chinese government,” wrote Representative Chris Smith, co-chairman of Congress’s bipartisan Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, in a letter reviewed by NR.
“His testimony is key because there are very few survivors of these camps who make it to the safety of the United States to tell their story,” Smith continued in the letter, which he addressed to Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.