Opinion | Let the Tragedy in My Homeland Be a Lesson

For those who have never been through something like this, our tragedy is probably difficult to imagine. A decade ago, I couldn’t have imagined it myself. When catastrophe came for us, it crept up so gradually that at first we couldn’t see it for what it was. That’s how it often comes.

I was born in 1969 in Kashgar, an ancient city in the southwest of our homeland. After attending college in Beijing, I returned to the Uyghur region to work as a teacher, and in my free time continued writing poetry — my lifelong passion. When I attempted to go abroad for master’s studies, I was arrested on an absurd charge of “attempting to take illegal and confidential materials out of the country” and imprisoned in a labor camp. After three years, when I was finally released, I began a new career as a film director in Urumqi. Although the heavy hand of the state could be felt in every corner of our homeland, things were somewhat better in the regional capital.

After large-scale inter-communal violence broke out in Urumqi in the summer of 2009, new forms of repression gradually made themselves felt in the city and throughout the Uyghur region. Even locals, though, could not foresee the magnitude of the approaching danger.

Little attention was paid as, in the early 2010s, surveillance cameras were installed in every nook and cranny of our cities. When the police began random cellphone checks on the street, people were alarmed at first, but gradually grew used to it. Not long after, when highway checkpoints expanded and multiplied, folks privately expressed concern but ground their teeth and bore it. When, in 2016, police posts were constructed every 200 meters along city streets, people ignored them and hurried past.

As time passed, we adapted to these changes and to this new, more authoritarian way of life.

When the first internment camps were constructed in 2014, people took note. But at the time, the camps were only for Uyghur Islamic leaders, and we comforted ourselves knowing that the clergy members were all released after a month or two.

In the end, many of us — even intellectuals like me, who think of ourselves as being highly attuned to politics — failed to see what it was we were becoming inured to.