Sayragul Sauytbay Speaks: Xinjiang, China, and Fighting for Justice

“I believe that, eventually, the Chinese government will pay the price for its actions.”

When Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese citizen, fled to Kazakhstan in 2018, the world knew little about what was happening inside Xinjiang.

What the Chinese government called “education” or “training” centers more closely resembled internment or concentration camps, and Sayragul knew it. She had been taken from her job at a kindergarten and made to work in one such camp, teaching Chinese to detainees. Her family had earlier fled to Kazakhstan, which generally welcomed ethnic Kazakhs with quick paths to citizenship. But Sayragul was prevented from joining her family for years as she toiled in the camps, witness to the terrors therein.

In April 2018, she made a daring escape and crossed the border with Kazakhstan. One ordeal was over and another had begun: Since she’d crossed the border with false documents, Sayragul was arrested and put on trial. Although she was convinced, she was released with a six-month suspended sentence and not deported back to China. Although she applied to for asylum in Kazakhstan, Kazakh authorities – caught between their obligations to ethnic Kazakhs and their economic and political relations with China – declined to grant it.

Eventually, Sayragul and her family left Kazakhstan, settling in Sweden, which granted them asylum.

In the years since, China claims its “education” and “training” centers have closed; a number of governments, including the United States in 2021, have called China’s actions in Xinjiang a “genocide.”

Sayragul, elected in 2023 to the vice presidency of the East Turkestan Government in Exile