Turson escaped torture in China’s vast Uyghur internment camp system.
When Mihrigul Tursun arrived in the United States, nothing around her made sense.
The food, clothes, and buildings that permeated her new life were unfamiliar and disorienting. Insomnia and anxiety haunted her. When she managed to sleep, she was plagued by nightmares of what she’d escaped. In moments of distress, she would withdraw to the bathroom to scream and weep in privacy, running the shower and playing loud music to conceal the noise from her young children.
Slowly, however, she adjusted. And while the trauma of her past life will never fully disappear, America has come to feel like home. “I am safe here,” she told National Review in a telephone interview. “Nobody can hurt me.”
Tursun, a Uyghur Muslim, fled China to escape the government’s relentless campaign of religious persecution. Her arrival in America came only after years of abuse in China’s vast network of Uyghur internment camps. And her story is emblematic of a broader crisis unfolding in China that the Western world seems reluctant to address. The Chinese Communist Party does not simply wish to exterminate the Uyghurs — it seeks to purge China of all forms of religious faith.
Tursun was raised in the province of Xinjiang. At age twelve, she was forced to attend a boarding school, where teachers sought to eliminate her religious identity and indoctrinate her into the ideology of communism. She proved resilient in her beliefs and moved to Egypt in 2010 to pursue a master’s degree. There, she married and had three children — two sons and a daughter. In 2015, the family flew to China, and Tursun’s husband was denied entry upon arriving in Beijing. Tursun and the children carried on, but they were separated soon after, and Tursun was detained in one of Xinjiang’s internment camps for almost three months. When she was released, she found that one of her sons had died in a children’s hospital.
Tursun was detained and imprisoned in the camps on two further occasions. According to some estimates, more than a million Uyghurs are held in these modern gulags. The Chinese government insists that the camps are merely used for education and vocational training. But investigations by media outlets including National Review have revealed the true extent of the barbarism contained within. Survivors have shared accounts of torture, rape, forced labor, and other acts of depravity. Tursun experienced similar atrocities firsthand.
At one time, Tursun was held in a roughly 45-square-foot cell with more than 60 other women. They were deprived of bathrooms, beds, food, and water; for Tursun, the smell is indelible. The women stood in silence — guards would berate them if they attempted conversation — and the wretched conditions led to several deaths. In one three-month span, Tursun recalls, she saw “nine women dead in the same cell.” The prisoners were frequently tortured. Tursun was once strapped to a chair and electrocuted. Others, she learned, were forcibly sterilized. Before she left China, Tursun was injected with a mysterious substance. She fears that it may eventually kill her.
Although some of China’s Christians have also been imprisoned in camps, Bob Fu believes that the CCP primarily seeks to eliminate Christianity by other methods. As a young man in the province of Shandong, Fu converted to the faith. Facing persecution, he was granted asylum in the United States in 1997. Today, he manages ChinaAid, an organization that aims to defend China’s oppressed religious groups. The CCP, he said, considers all independent religious practice to be an “existential threat to the regime.”
It is illegal, for instance, for children under 18 to participate in religious activities — a ban that extends to church services, Sunday schools, and summer camps. Parents have even been forced to sign pledges affirming their lack of faith. Underground churches, which operate outside the official supervision of the state, have become frequent targets of government raids. According to Fu, the CCP has fabricated evidence to justify imposing severe prison sentences on pastors and church leaders. “Even government sanctioned church pastors,” he said, have been incarcerated “just because they refused to take down the cross from the rooftop of the church building.”
Other religious groups, such as Tibetan Buddhists, have faced similar crackdowns. The CCP has targeted Falun Gong, a new religious movement that emerged in the 1990s, with particular aggression. Like the Uyghurs, many Falun Gong practitioners have been detained and tortured in forced labor camps, prisons, and psychiatric facilities. In 2019, an independent tribunal in London concluded that thousands of such detainees have been victims of forced organ harvesting.
Fu believes that religious persecution in China has reached “the worst level since the end of the Cultural Revolution 50 years ago.” Under Mao Zedong, the CCP criminalized all religious activity, forcing believers to practice in secret or face certain imprisonment. When Deng Xiaoping became China’s leader in 1978, he loosened these restrictions. Now, however, Xi Jinping has recommitted the state to the eradication project Mao began.
Yet despite the horrific scale of China’s anti-religious crusade, Western politicians have seldom addressed the subject. Sam Brownback, who served as the United States ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom during President Donald Trump’s first administration, hopes to change that. This year, he published China’s War on Faith, a book that explores the lives of Tursun and others who have suffered under the CCP for their beliefs.
For many in the West, Brownback told National Review, confronting the CCP’s persecution would mean acknowledging “an inconvenient truth.” In the eyes of America’s leaders across the country’s major sectors, China is simply too entangled with our interests to be challenged effectively. “We have a huge economic relationship with them that’s built up over decades, over bipartisan administrations,” Brownback said. “Once you go to breaking those ties, that’s a very costly process.” Hollywood, sports leagues, universities, and businesses would all be disrupted by such a shift in relations. “I think people are just going, ‘I would just really rather not know if I don’t have to know.’”
According to Brownback, President Trump is aware of the China’s persecution and has followed the struggles of certain Christian figures. But Brownback believes that the CCP’s actions demand a far more forceful response than the president has pursued. “I would take religious freedom out of the human-rights box, and I would put it in the national security strategy box,” he said. “I would say: This is going to be a key piece of our theater engagement strategy with the Chinese Communist Party and the new Cold War that we’re in with them.”
Such a strategy would involve educating the public about the situation and encouraging other Western countries to hold the CCP accountable for its crimes. Religious organizations, such as the Vatican, could also speak out on behalf of oppressed groups, while smaller faith communities could spread the word among their members. “This is really about saving Western civilization,” Brownback said, adding that the threat posed by China to freedom and democracy should be emphasized by candidates in the coming presidential race. For change to occur, he continued, we must force the public to confront the cruel reality of China’s oppression by “rubbing [their] faces in the actual facts of it.”
As grim as the situation in China may appear, Brownback still sees cause for optimism. There are tens of millions of practicing Christians in China, and religious movements have endured despite the government’s aggression. Moreover, he is confident that the CCP’s model will prove unsustainable. Communist regimes, he argues, eventually become too “long in the tooth” to avoid unrest among their people, after which they soon collapse. “It’s certainly not revolutionary anymore,” he says of the CCP’s ideology. “And it hasn’t worked.”
Even among victims of China’s abuse, there are those who remain optimistic about the country’s future. One such example is Peter Xu, a Christian pastor who was repeatedly tortured and detained by the CCP for leading a house church movement. When Xu came to America in 2001, he was struck by its abundance.
Xu is deeply grateful to America’s government and religious institutions for granting him a new life, and he hopes that the United States will continue to support believers in China as they struggle against tyranny. His confidence that things will improve is rooted in the Book of Genesis: Speaking through a translator, he observed that “there will be a morning after the current night” for the CCP’s victims. Until that new beginning arrives, his request for the Western world is simple: “Please pray for us, please care for us. Don’t stop.”