After nearly 10 years carrying out Chinese government repression in Xinjiang, a former police officer is now seeking asylum in Germany.
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Halfway through a short speech he was giving at the German Bundestag, Zhang Yabo began to choke back tears.
Mr. Zhang had served for nine years as a police officer in Xinjiang, an enforcer in China’s campaign to surveil, detain and indoctrinate that region’s Uyghur population. At the campaign’s height, an estimated one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities were held in internment camps.
Tens of thousands of police officers carried out China’s state oppression in Xinjiang, but Mr. Zhang is a rare voice speaking out about it. Standing before German lawmakers and human rights activists in June, he described Xinjiang as a giant prison enclosed by an “ironclad wall.” “That wall imprisoned not only countless innocent Uyghurs,” he said, “but also the souls of those ordered to enforce it.”
Mr. Zhang related the pressure of participating in China’s security apparatus: endless shifts, sleeping in the office and constant fear of punishment. After he requested asylum in Germany last summer, Chinese authorities froze his bank accounts, he said, branded him a traitor and harassed his family.
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By the end of the speech, he was sobbing “like a child,” he later told me. He hurried from the room and did not return.
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Mr. Zhang’s account of his time in Xinjiang corroborates what has long been documented about the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal repression of the Uyghurs while adding detail and an inside perspective to that record. It also reveals what an ordinary man pursuing upward mobility could gain, and lose, by helping to carry out those repressive policies.
Mr. Zhang provided extensive documentation of his service history, including copies of his police identification and pay and social security records, as well as photos of him at interrogations and political propaganda sessions. But I could not corroborate exactly what he did or did not do in Xinjiang; I relied on his telling of the story, and there may have been things he did not share.
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With China’s record of retaliating against citizens in exile, Mr. Zhang has shown considerable courage in coming forward as a witness to injustice. But he is asking for something more than praise; he wants to be recognized as a victim himself — a victim of the apparatus he participated in for nearly a decade.
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A Grim Path Out of Poverty
For Mr. Zhang, moving to Xinjiang, and later joining its police force, offered a way to move up in the world. Born in 1986 into a poor rural Han Chinese family, Mr. Zhang lived in a village in central Henan Province that did not have electricity until he was 8. He moved to Xinjiang for college in 2006 and stayed to teach mathematics at a rural primary school. He married a woman from his home province, and they had a son in 2011.
In late 2014, he left teaching for better pay as a guard at a detention center in the Hotan region, where about 90 percent of the population was Uyghur. His monthly wages rose to about $650, from $400 as a teacher.
For nearly two years, he said, his duties included monitoring surveillance footage, distributing food and medicine and gathering incriminating information from detainees, most of them Uyghurs. He heard screams from the interrogation rooms and saw detainees beaten up and deprived of sleep. He sometimes found broken batons when picking up the detainees. At the time, he said, he accepted the government’s claims that the men being interrogated were terrorists and separatists.
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In early 2017, Chen Quanguo, the new Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang, called for a “smashing, obliterating offensive,” including, according to leaked government documents, the detention of anyone who displayed “symptoms” of religious radicalism or antigovernment views. Those symptoms could be the wearing of long beards, studying Arabic and praying.
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For much of 2017, Mr. Zhang traveled in bus convoys transporting hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of Uyghur detainees to prisons across Xinjiang, which is nearly four times the size of California. The detainees were handcuffed, hooded and ordered to use plastic buckets as toilets during the journey. Mr. Zhang distributed bread and water.
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In late 2018, when he was assigned to a police station, he began to grow despondent. His colleagues brought in Uyghur prisoners at all hours, he said, and he was responsible for searching them and helping determine where they would be sent. His sleep was constantly interrupted, and his superiors were short-tempered.
He was pleased to be briefly reassigned to supervise about 3,000 Uyghur laborers who had been sent to pick cotton for Han Chinese farmers. They rose at 5 a.m., traveled for hours to the cotton fields and were not returned to their dormitories until late at night.
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He learned of the international criticism of forced labor in Xinjiang through statements by China’s foreign ministry and accepted the government’s claim that the accusations were false and intended to vilify China. “I didn’t think much about it,” he said. “I never paused to consider whether it was true or not.”
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The government’s surveillance system generated automatic alerts for “abnormal” activity. If a household’s electricity use rose, he said, the officers would visit and ask what had kept the family awake.
Police work brought Mr. Zhang money, status and privileges: expedited treatment at hospitals, free parking. By 2023, his monthly take-home pay had risen to about $1,250.
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The overtime was relentless, and he was separated from his family for long periods. He had not celebrated Lunar New Year with his parents since 2017 and was denied leave for his sister’s wedding. On average, he could visit his wife and his son once a month.
There were also quotas to meet. Starting in 2023, he was required to produce one lead a week that could be used to justify a detention. Mr. Zhang said he had frequently failed to hit the quota and had to submit self-criticism reports and work 24-hour shifts as punishment. Working closely with the villagers began to challenge the stereotypes he had absorbed about Uyghurs. He became increasingly reluctant to enter their homes or search their private communications, even as he continued to carry out the surveillance his job required.
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[Now] he has applied for asylum and lives in a shelter in southern Germany, where his son is staying at a foster facility not far away. Over a dinner of pasta, the 15-year-old told me that he missed Xinjiang’s spicy stir-fried rice noodles. Mr. Zhang’s wife remains in Xinjiang, and the couple have filed for divorce.
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“Of the millions of Chinese police officers, he is the only one who has come forward to speak the truth,” said Haiyuer Kuerban, an official at the World Uyghur Congress who has been helping Mr. Zhang settle in Germany. He said his organization had initially viewed Mr. Zhang with deep skepticism, but that its doubts had begun to ease after reviewing his documents.
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Mr. Zhang insisted that he had never personally tortured or mistreated any Uyghurs. He described himself as a small cog in the state machinery who filled out forms, guarded facilities and handled logistics. Responsibility lay with senior officials and with the Uyghur police assistants who, he said, carried out many of the most direct and abusive tasks. Low-level Han Chinese police officers like him, he insisted, were innocent.
It is unclear whether Mr. Zhang’s self-exoneration is a form of self-protection, an inability to bear what a fuller recognition would mean or simply a habit of mind formed by years inside the system. Haiyuer Kuerban [an official at the World Uyghur Congress ] said he did not believe the blindness was deliberate. After repeatedly pressing Mr. Zhang, I had come to a similar conclusion: He seemed genuinely unable to see his role in the wider context of the immense injustice inflicted on the Uyghurs.
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Working inside an abusive system did not automatically make someone a monster, Mr. Kuerban said. But neither did performing a minor function, or not personally carrying out the worst abuses, eliminate responsibility.
Mr. Zhang said his faith had taught him that his responsibility now was to speak out.
“If you stay silent,” he said at the end of his Bundestag speech, “you’re part of the problem.”
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