For brides around the world, their wedding day is meant to be a magic moment, often filled with family, friends and fond memories.
But for Gul, then a 23-year-old model in Shanghai, it was among the darkest of days.
‘When I had the wedding, it felt like a funeral to me; and when I signed the marriage certificate, it felt like I was signing my death certificate,’ she told me.
‘I did not wear the dress. I did not receive greetings from family members. I did not say anything to my friends. I did not even share a picture on social media.’
The reason for her misery? She had been forced into matrimony with a man she loathed by the Chinese dictatorship which, as we shall see, insisted it was the only way she could save herself and her mother from incarceration in a hellish concentration camp.
The marriage was consummated in the cruellest way imaginable: she was raped as she lay on their bed, while recovering from a savage beating by her drunk new husband that left her unconscious with a broken jaw and nose.
For Gul is a Uighur – and the ruthless Communist regime is trying to wipe out the culture, language, religion and traditions of this Muslim minority from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang using some of the most sinister methods of repression on our planet.
In the cause of what they call ‘ethnic unity’, police pressurised her to marry a Han Chinese man – a member of the country’s majority ethnic group – and she felt powerless to resist. Her mother was freed on her wedding day from one of the camps that hold an estimated one million Uighurs.
Gul is a Uighur who was forced into matrimony with a man she loathed to save herself and her mother from incarceration in a hellish concentration camp
‘We all knew what happened if you said no to them,’ said Gul. ‘We all knew of people being arrested and sent to the camps and the bad life they suffered, feet shackled together and being tortured.’
Gul can only tell me her story because she managed to escape both her husband and China, taking her five-year-old daughter with her. And what she relates is a shocking exposition of the barbarities inflicted by Beijing on the 12million-strong Uighur population.
Her revelations follow a political storm that this week forced Energy Minister Ed Miliband into a U-turn on the use of solar panels linked to forced Uighur labour in the Xinjiang region.
Labour had earlier blocked a House of Lords legal amendment that would have forced state-owned GB Energy to make sure solar panels that Britain imported from China were not among the many produced by slave labour.
But such was the outcry from campaigners and Labour MPs over the Government’s decision to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses in its dash for Net Zero, that the Government has now had to make a humiliating reverse.
Fresh concerns over the sinister role of the Communist state after the attempted closure of British Steel’s Scunthorpe site by the Chinese firm Jingye, with warnings to ministers over Beijing’s influence over Britain’s critical infrastructure, may also have influenced the decision.
Under China’s reign of terror in the Xinjiang region, entire villages have been sent to ‘re-education’ camps, which often contain factories within their walls for forced labour.
A facility, believed to be a re-education camp. Under China’s reign of terror in the Xinjiang region, entire villages have been sent to the camps, which often contain factories for forced labour
Survivors tell of gang rape and torture, while the regime has destroyed mosques, imposed rigid surveillance on Uighurs and inflicted mass sterilisation of women – as I have heard from several victims.
This all follows the mass migration of Han Chinese people into Xinjiang, a movement orchestrated by Beijing to dilute minorities and plunder natural resources. China has been promoting and incentivising mixed ethnicity marriages in Uighur regions since 2014, sparking claims and rumours about the use of forced marriage.
But Gul, now 31, is the first Uighur woman subjected to this atrocity to speak out publicly. She is hiding her full identity to protect relatives still in the country.
She fled to Switzerland last year and we spoke for almost five hours. Clearly traumatised from the abuse she suffered, and frequently breaking into tears, she said she wanted the world to know about ‘the evil of their system’.
The first ten years of Gul’s life were blissfully happy. She had been adopted and lived with her mother and grandparents close to the fabled Silk Road city of Kashgar in southern Xinjiang.
Then came a hostile new stepfather, school bullies and years of struggle. At 16, she went to live in Urumqi, the regional capital, and later met a woman who ran a modelling company.
‘She said my face and figure was good, so I could work with them – and after about three months, offered me training in Shanghai,’ Gul said.
So the young Uighur woman went off to live in the world’s third-biggest city and learn modelling. She posed for clothing companies, attended shop openings, stood in front of malls to entice customers and even picked up some walk-on film roles.
There are thought to be one million Uighurs held in the camps
‘Life was enjoyable. It was hard work because we had to stand for a long time, wear very high heels, sometimes change into hundreds of clothes, so it could be tiring – but I earned a good salary and could buy what I wanted. It was a good time.’
She made friends and went to nightclubs in the pulsating metropolis. But there was endless harassment from police officers.
They would stop her at checkpoints for her identity card, repeatedly question her about her activities and acquaintances and even force her to move flats.
‘The police told me that places should not be rented to Uighurs and that they should not be allowed to live in proper China, nor allowed to have property or shops in China.’
Gul’s move to Shanghai had taken place in 2012 – the year Xi Jinping took power and ramped up repression in Xinjiang. He ordered officials to show no mercy after anti-government protests and attacks. The huge network of concentration camps was introduced along with forced labour programmes and the world’s most intrusive surveillance system to clamp down on Uighurs.
‘They think all Uighurs are terrorists,’ said Gul. ‘Even now I feel stressed whenever I see someone in uniform; even here in Switzerland I feel the same.’
In 2016, she returned to Xinjiang on a visit and noticed ‘everything was changing’. Permits were suddenly needed for Uighurs even to visit nearby towns. There was a proliferation of checkpoints, facial recognition cameras and security forces across the region.
Friends started disappearing into the newly established ‘study’ camps. A 90-year-old family neighbour also vanished.
Gul told how friends started disappearing into the newly established ‘study’ camps. A 90-year-old family neighbour also vanished
‘I wondered, how can that be? What can he do at 90 against the government? I felt very angry for him,’ she said.
There was less surveillance back in Shanghai, but Gul still had to endure endless visits and calls from local police who were monitoring her.
‘Sometimes they would phone three times a day. I’d say even my mother does not call me three times a day, asking: “What are you doing?” ’
In January 2018, Gul was ordered back to Xinjiang for a new identity card. Police took blood for DNA records, scanned her iris for high-tech surveillance systems – and then told her she needed to go into a camp to study Chinese and the law.
Gul played for time. She said she would love to go but had to return to her job, then tried to bribe the officers with alcohol and cigarettes. But she could not board her flight home without permission from police – and they refused it.
Then came the chilling threat that would change her life.
‘They said: “Now we are promoting ethnic unity, so Chinese and Uighur become one family. It is better to find someone to get married. Then we can allow you to leave and your street administration [local surveillance] will not call you all the time or arrest you. It is better for you.” ’
Gul had heard rumours about Uighurs in rural areas being told to give their daughters to Chinese officials for marriage. Now they were urging her to get hitched to a Han man – and she knew refusal would be dangerous.
‘They said: “We can help you, we can find someone.” I thought if I said yes, they wouldn’t push me. So I said yes and left, thinking that would be it.’
Survivors of the camps tell of gang rape and torture, while the regime has destroyed mosques, imposed rigid surveillance on Uighurs and inflicted mass sterilisation of women – as I have heard from several victims
Before they agreed to let her go, they told her to call her police monitoring contact in Shanghai. The contact held a long conversation with the Xinjiang officers and they exchanged numbers. Then Gul went back to Shanghai.
It was about one month later that the police contact phoned to invite her for dinner. When she arrived at the venue, she was surprised to find it was a very expensive restaurant.
She was filled with nerves. ‘I thought maybe they would trap me, selling me to high officials as a sex trade.
‘I had heard about this happening to Uighur girls, entrapped by police and forced into sex. I thought maybe if I drink a lot and sleep with them, maybe I can save myself.’
She relaxed when she saw the officer sitting alone. But then, during the meal, he called to another man seated nearby and invited him over to join them –pretending their companion was a friend, although he later turned out to be a relative of the officer.
I asked Gul what this man was like.
‘Very ugly,’ she replied instantly. ‘And he was drunk.’
The police officer, after rhapsodising about the beauty of Uighur women, told Gul that she could be good friends and ‘maybe lovers’ with the man, who worked as a cocktail waiter.
Gul dismissed the idea, not seeing the reality of events unfolding in front of her.
‘I said that if I had a boyfriend like him my parents would put me in a pen and feed me like a dog,’ Gul said.
‘The policeman asked: “What are you talking about? We are promoting ethnic unity and he is handsome, like a Korean movie star.”’
She was told to make contact with the man on WeChat, a Chinese social media platform. So she did, and the pair talked a bit, had a few meals together and went to a couple of films.
But after he kept bothering her, demanding to be her lover and husband, she deleted him from her network.
Watchtowers on a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp
‘After that the local administration in Xinjiang began contacting me to ask why I was not coming back to go to school – they meant the re-education camp. I said I had permission to be in Shanghai. So they put my mother in the camp instead of me.’
A relative working for the government explained that this was because of her refusal to agree to the marriage being arranged by officials.
‘I felt so hopeless at such misfortune,’ said Gul, who finally accepted her fate.
After she signed the marriage contract, her mother was released. She persuaded her new husband – who was from a poor background – to accept a sham marriage that boosted his status without them living together. But when police discovered this artifice, they ordered her to move in with him that very night. Since he shared a small flat with four other men, she had to take him to her home.
‘At first sight I did not like him and this only grew stronger,’ said Gul. ‘He was very smelly and did not clean himself or his clothes.’
Her husband was often drunk and abusive, stealing alcohol from his workplace.
‘When I didn’t agree to sleep with him he would force me – and when I resisted, he became more excited to do that,’ she said hesitantly, tears flowing down her face.
After three years, the miserable woman – by now a mother to her husband’s child – planned to divorce him. But her own mother, terrified of returning to the camp that she described as being ‘like a grave’, came to Shanghai with an aunt to plead with Gul to remain married. Then, in desperation after a failed suicide attempt early last year, she managed to establish contact with a Uighur activist in the United States.
‘I said I can’t save myself so I will die, but I don’t want my daughter to stay in China. Can you find someone in the US to adopt her? She can never live like a human being in China.’
Instead, the activist instructed her on how to flee the country. Thanks to her marriage, she could obtain a Chinese passport – then, in May last year, she sent her possessions to a friend in Germany, then flew to Dubai and freedom.
Gul told me she decided to live in Switzerland since she had loved watching the film Heidi as a child with her grandfather. And now she has shaken off the evil Beijing propaganda that taught her to be ashamed of her culture.
‘I have learned about our history, that we once had our own land and country – and about all that the Chinese government is doing to the people in Xinjiang,’ she said defiantly.
‘Now I am proud to be Uighur.’
