By CUS Editorial Team
For over a decade, the international community has watched the unfolding human rights crisis in East Turkistan (AKA the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). Through satellite imagery, leaked government documents, and harrowing accounts from camp survivors, a picture of systematic persecution, amounting to genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur and other Turkic peoples according to multiple governments and international assessments, has emerged. Yet the Chinese communist government has consistently sought to obstruct independent scrutiny, dismissing external findings as Western fabrications and portraying mass internment as voluntary “vocational training” or benign “counter-extremism” measures.
Beijing’s narrative has shifted over time. After initially denying the existence of the concentration camps, Chinese authorities sought to justify them as necessary counterterrorism and vocational-training facilities. In recent years, they have claimed or implied that the campaign has ended and that life in the region has returned to normal. To reinforce this false narrative, Chinese authorities have permitted carefully screened Uyghurs to visit the region, allowed a small number of Uyghurs to travel abroad, and arranged tightly controlled tours for foreign diplomats, journalists, and religious figures to visit staged scenes in the region. These efforts have been used to portray the region as being free from repression and to whitewash an ongoing genocide. Uyghurs in the diaspora have consistently rejected this portrayal, warning that repression has not ended but has instead become less visible and more deeply embedded. The testimony of Zhang Yabo provides powerful new evidence supporting their warnings.
A Witness from Inside the Chinese Security Apparatus
Zhang Yabo is a former Han Chinese police officer who served within the Chinese security apparatus in the Uyghur homeland for nearly a decade, from 2014 to 2023. Unlike camp survivors or outside analysts, Zhang observed and enforced the system from within, serving in various operational roles across Hotan, Aksu, and rural townships. In August 2025, Zhang joined a European tour group, defected upon arrival in Germany, and sought political asylum.
In April 2026, Zhang’s evidence was brought to international attention through groundbreaking research published by Dr. Adrian Zenz and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), with initial reporting by Foreign Policy and Der Spiegel. He subsequently provided granular accounts in an extended interview with Uyghur journalist Hebibulla Izchi for Uyghur Times and Uyghur Post, and was later the subject of an in-depth profile in The New York Times. Bringing internal government records, photographs, and operational knowledge, Zhang’s disclosures reveal the mechanical reality of how policy was executed day-to-day on the ground.
Inside the Detention Apparatus and Prisoner Convoys (2014–2017)
Zhang’s initial postings plunged him directly into the early ramp-up of the “Strike Hard” campaign. Working in detention facilities in Hotan and Aksu, he witnessed routine physical torture, severe beatings during interrogations, systemic denial of medical care, and deaths in custody. Zhang estimated that in his operational jurisdiction alone, up to 25% of the adult Uyghur population was rounded up and interned.
By 2017, as the internment campaign peaked, Zhang was assigned to massive security convoys transferring hundreds of detainees between facilities across the region. Bound in handcuffs and leg irons, with black hoods over their heads, detainees were moved in heavily armed, window-shielded bus columns under strict orders that treated ordinary citizens as high-security combatants. These transfers were designed not only to ease localized overcrowding in regional detention centers but also to isolate individuals from their home communities and prevent families from discovering where their loved ones were held.
Agricultural Coercion: Enforcing the Cotton Harvest (2018–2020)
Following his time in detention logistics, Zhang was deployed to oversee state-mandated agricultural labor transfers in southern parts of the region. Between 2018 and 2020, he was tasked with supervising thousands of Uyghur laborers mobilized to harvest cotton for Han-run state farms and private agricultural conglomerates.
His testimony details the coercive apparatus underpinning these harvests: laborers were awakened at 5:00 AM and transported under armed police escort to fields where they worked 10-to-12-hour shifts. Identity documents were systematically confiscated upon arrival to prevent any possibility of escape. Zhang and his fellow officers maintained checkpoints, ran daily roll-calls, and patrolled field perimeters with explicit orders to intercept and arrest anyone attempting to leave or express dissatisfaction. The labor was framed in government reports as “poverty alleviation” and voluntary wage-earning, yet workers had no power to refuse, negotiate pay, or return home without authorization. These were findings detailed in the VOC whistleblower report on intensifying forced labor.
Total Village Surveillance: The Yurushqa Post (2021–2023)
From August 2021 until his departure from the police force in 2023, Zhang was stationed in Yurushqa, an administrative village of roughly 1,700 inhabitants in Haneriq Town, Hotan County. According to previous revelations, Haneriq was home to the largest concentration camp across Hotan. There, the nature of his work shifted from overt internment facility logistics to micro-level community policing, illustrating how the police state systematically dissolved the boundary between public life and private domestic spaces. About 40 percent of adult villagers had spent time in internment camps, leaving numerous households comprised solely of elderly grandparents and young children.
In Yurushqa, grassroots police and stability-maintenance cadres operated under strict weekly quotas to identify potential “ideological threats.” Officers were tasked with tracking households, enforcing mandatory attendance at weekly flag-raising ceremonies, and investigating automated system flags generated by the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP). Mundane occurrences triggered intrusive scrutiny: sudden spikes in household electricity consumption prompted mandatory home inspections to interrogate why residents were awake, while even private jogging or exercise could be flagged as suspicious physical conditioning.
When explicit security risks could not be found to satisfy surveillance or detention quotas, ordinary personal and religious behaviors were systematically criminalized:
- Possessing legally published Islamic literature or an inherited copy of the Qur’an was recorded as early-stage radicalization.
- Having a modest beard, abstaining from alcohol, or praying at home was treated as an indicator of “extremist” inclination.
- Educated community leaders, teachers, and elders were automatically categorized as latent sources of ideological resistance.
When Ordinary Religious Practice Becomes “Extremism”
As Zhang observed in his interview with Uyghur Times, transforming ordinary expressions of Islamic faith into evidence of political danger served a broader objective. Grassroots officers were instructed that reading the Qur’an and praying represented the “first step” toward terrorism. The Chinese authorities’ heightened security architecture was calibrated to measure whether an individual had been completely subdued and rendered totally obedient to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The Ma Xingrui Era: From Mass Camps to Decentralized Permanent Control
A pivotal contribution of Zhang’s testimony is his explanation of how the security apparatus in the region evolved following the late 2021 replacement of regional CCP Party Secretary Chen Quanguo with Ma Xingrui. While the Chinese officials declared that the “vocational education centers” had closed, Zhang’s firsthand experience corroborates reports that the repression was not dismantled, it was decentralized and institutionalized into everyday life.
Under Ma Xingrui, long-term camp internment was largely replaced by two interlinked mechanisms:
- Short-Term Punitive Detentions: Rather than sending individuals to visible re-education centers, authorities instituted a system of 15-day administrative detentions under punitive, high-stress conditions. These short detentions served as swift disciplinary shocks for minor infractions, resisting labor commands, or displaying “uncooperative attitudes.”
- Coercive Labor Transfers at Industrial Scale: Instead of being held in isolated camps, working-age Uyghurs were funneled directly into centralized labor transfer networks feeding manufacturing plants, solar polysilicon facilities, and textile mills across the region and other Chinese provinces. Refusing a state-assigned labor transfer was logged directly into the IJOP as an “ideological abnormality,” immediately triggering interrogation or renewed detention.
By dispersing control into factories, agricultural cooperatives, and village administration, the Chinese authorities created an invisible prison wall that operates within the open economy, allowing the regime to project an image of normal life to foreign visitors while maintaining absolute control.
Defection to Germany
After years inside the security machinery, the moral weight of enforcing arbitrary cruelty took a severe psychological toll on Zhang. As chronicled by The New York Times, he eventually resolved to escape. In the summer of 2025, after paying tens of thousands of yuan and navigating strict exit regulations, he secured a spot on an authorized European tour group. Upon arriving in Germany, he broke away from the group and formally requested political asylum. Zhang later made the decision to speak out publicly.
Forced Labor Behind the Appearance of Normalization
Zhang Yabo’s testimony reveals how coercion persists beneath the appearance of ordinary economic life in the region. Workplaces have become extensions of state control, where the threat of detention leaves Uyghurs with little room to refuse or resist.
His disclosures prove that the Uyghur genocide has entered a dangerous new phase: institutionalized, quieter, and woven directly into global supply chains of cotton, solar energy, and aluminum. The international community must recognize that superficial “normalization” is the intended disguise of CCP’s permanent totalitarian control over the Uyghur people.
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