Source: Based on reporting by Li Yuan - The New York Times, from Germany, July 28, 2026.
(Note: Li Yuan examines China’s growing influence on the world.)
TURKISTAN TIMES | SPECIAL REPORT
BERLIN / WASHINGTON — In a rare and damning inside account of Beijing’s systematic oppression in occupied East Turkistan (so-called "Xinjiang"), a former Chinese police officer who spent nearly a decade enforcing state repression has spoken out before European lawmakers, corroborating the horrific reality of China’s mass internment camps, forced assimilation, and total surveillance state.
Zhang Yabo, a Han Chinese police officer who served from 2014 to 2023, fled China and requested political asylum in Germany. In a testimony delivered at the German Bundestag, Zhang provided granular evidence and extensive documentation—including official police identification, pay slips, and interrogation photos—detailing how Chinese security forces methodically track, detain, and destroy the lives of innocent Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim populations.
The Machinery of Oppression
Zhang’s account offers an unvarnished look into how Beijing built its machinery of terror in East Turkistan. Initially moving to the region in 2006, Zhang entered the security apparatus in late 2014 as a guard at a detention facility in Hotan—a region where over 90 percent of the population is Uyghur.
There, he witnessed firsthand the brutal reality of Chinese incarceration: screams echoing from interrogation rooms, severe beatings, sleep deprivation, and broken batons left behind in interrogation chambers.
By late 2016, as Beijing escalated its genocidal campaign under Xinjiang’s former Communist Party chief Chen Quanguo, Zhang officially joined the police force. He participated in brutal nighttime raids on Uyghur homes to confiscate Qurans and religious items, charging into private residences under state-indoctrinated hatred. He was also deployed in bus convoys transporting thousands of Uyghur hostages to prisons and concentration camps scattered across the vast occupied territory.
By 2021, Zhang was stationed in Yurushikai, a village where 40 percent of adult Uyghurs had been swept into concentration camps, leaving whole neighborhoods populated only by vulnerable children and grandparents.
Digital Totalitarianism and Quotas for Arrests
According to Zhang, the Chinese regime turned East Turkistan into a open-air prison governed by automated surveillance systems. High-tech monitoring generated automatic alerts for "abnormal" behavior—such as a sudden rise in household electricity use, missing the regime’s mandatory weekly flag-raising ceremonies, or even simple physical exercise like jogging.
Worse still, police officers were subjected to arbitrary quotas. Beginning in 2023, officers were forced to generate at least one lead per week to justify new detentions, forcing the police machinery to constantly hunt for fresh victims to feed into China’s camp and prison systems.
A Perpetrator’s Defense: The "Double Victim" Narrative
While Zhang’s detailed testimony provides invaluable corroborating evidence for the international campaign against China's genocide, his public statements have drawn mixed reactions from human rights advocates and the Uyghur diaspora.
Before German lawmakers, Zhang attempted to portray himself not merely as an enforcer, but as a "victim" of the regime, claiming that the "ironclad wall" in East Turkistan imprisoned "not only countless innocent Uyghurs, but also the souls of those ordered to enforce it." He claimed that lower-level officers suffered under grueling shifts, strict quotas, and abusive superiors.
However, East Turkistan activists and human rights experts emphasize the vast moral asymmetric between the oppressors and the oppressed.
"No matter how much you suffer at work, you can still go home, eat a good meal, and imagine a future," noted Uyghur activist Mr. Kuerban, highlighting the stark contrast between police officers and their victims. "You do not live with the constant, paralyzing fear that something you said 10 years ago will make you disappear tomorrow."
Unlike the millions of Uyghurs facing arbitrary detention, forced labor, torture, and cultural erasure, Han officers chose to join the force for financial gain and social privileges, and retained the ability to leave.
Facing the Past
After resigning in early 2024, Zhang used a VPN in southern China to bypass Beijing’s internet firewall, discovering for the first time that the facilities he guarded were recognized internationally as concentration camps. Seeking personal redemption, Zhang converted to Catholicism and was baptized in April 2025 before defecting to Germany during a tour in August 2025.
While Zhang insists he never personally tortured detainees, experts note that performing administrative or logistical roles within a genocidal system does not absolve an individual of responsibility.
Nevertheless, for the East Turkistan national cause, Zhang’s defection represents a significant crack in Beijing’s wall of silence. His testimony stands as a powerful, first-hand admission from within the Chinese state apparatus itself—proving that despite Beijing’s denials, the campaign against the Uyghur people is nothing short of a calculated, state-sponsored atrocity.
