Two accounts of surviving and escaping Chinese repression

TAHIR HAMUT IZGIL’S friends were shopkeepers and booksellers, lovers of Uyghur poetry who recited it to one another over lamb soup and fresh naan in teahouses and private dining rooms. Police appeared at one of their gatherings in 2016. The poets ordered baijiu, Chinese liquor meant to signal that they were good citizens—not religious separatists—and invited the officers to drink. The police collected their identity cards anyway. Later, many of those poets disappeared into a web of internment camps meant to eradicate their cultural identity and consolidate Chinese power. Only Mr Izgil escaped to tell the tale.