This article is an adapted excerpt from Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized, which follows the Chinese security state’s oppression of its Muslim minorities from Xinjiang to the streets of New York and Washington, D.C. The book is available for purchase here. Serikzhan Bilash went sightseeing not long after he arrived in Washington, DC. It was a chill day toward the end of January 2021 and he and a friend met by the faded green of the National Mall and walked together a while. They saw the Capitol Building dome through a steel fence spiralled with razor wire. The distant White House behind its own layers of security. All 555 feet of the Washington Monument. He livestreamed his visit to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. “A great man,” he told anyone watching, “a great, great man”, and he panned his phone camera to where the great man’s likeness emerged cross-armed and stern from towering white granite. They made at last for the Lincoln Memorial and joined scattered tourists climbing the main steps. Bilash was quickly absorbed in the fluted columns and the carved wreaths and eagles and the vast marble statue, so it was a while before he noticed the man with the camera and long zoom lens stood across the other side of the memorial grounds. The man looked Chinese to Bilash and was taking pictures that seemed to be focused not on the memorial but on him. He turned toward the man and the man made as if to busy his lens elsewhere but swung back his way before long. It rattled him. The act was familiar, the kind of surveillance and harassment he had experienced for years at the hands of the Chinese security state, but he had never imagined it would follow him still. He had bumped down into Dulles Airport on January 20, 2021, and was soon presented with the extended hands of officials and activists of various kinds who spoke admiringly of his work to expose what the Chinese government was doing in the Xinjiang region to ethnic Kazakhs like him and to Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities besides: a process of systematic mass repression aimed at wiping out their religious and ethnic identities that the U.S. had called genocide and the United Nations later said could constitute crimes against humanity. Bilash had shaken the hands and marveled at finding himself at the heart of the democratic ideals he had long admired. Here, it had seemed, was freedom. Here was respect for human rights. Hurrying away from the memorial, he knew he had been wrong. He was staying at the home of an older couple who often helped religious refugees. It was a big place out of town and largely on its own and had felt safe until he started to notice strange cars and vans parked up on the road outside for hours and days at a time. His hosts told him not to worry, that he was in America so nothing could happen to him. He worried anyway and sometimes at 2 or 3 a.m. he would wake up with his heart going hard and head downstairs to make sure the windows and doors were locked. Bilash’s wife, Laila, and their three young sons were still in Istanbul, where they had fled together after leaving their longtime home of Kazakhstan. Istanbul had not felt safe for him either, and Laila had insisted he go to the U.S. He had, believing his absence would protect her and the boys, but she told him of men making their way around Istanbul’s Kazakh diaspora holding his picture and asking where he and his family were. He worried for them, and the usual onslaught of abusive calls and messages continued, untroubled by borders. One day, he opened his FaceBook inbox to the head of a Chinese student association in Kazakhstan threatening his life and the lives of his sons. Then he saw a video of a man talking to the camera and addressing him directly. “Maybe you don’t want your wife,” the man said. “But we do. I’m going to go to your wife in Turkey and if she’s short of money, I’ll give her some. If she ends up liking me, I can stay there for a few nights.” THE FIRST HOME Bilash left was among the mountains and rolling grassland of China’s Bortala Prefecture in Xinjiang’s north. His family were proud to be part of China’s ethnic Kazakh minority, and his father ran a rare Kazakh-language school. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, Bilash had never thought of himself as being Chinese. Nor had he seen many similarities between themselves and the Uyghurs that made up the plurality of Xinjiang’s population, though Uyghurs were, like them, ethnically Turkic, and, like them, Muslim. He knew he was a Kazakh and that he lived on the land where the grandfathers of his grandfathers were buried. Because that land and the people on it were tightly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, he moved across the western border to Kazakhstan and sought out the opportunities of Almaty, its biggest city. He had loved the avenues and tower blocks and busy markets there and decided to make it home. He got residency and a while later citizenship so relinquished his Chinese passport and set himself up as a businessman with import, real estate and livestock interests. A brother joined him. Eventually he met Laila. Xi Jinping’s appointment as president in March 2013 filled Bilash with vague dread. He periodically wrote social media posts about Kazakh identity and his foreign travels for a modest online following, and he began using those to call on Chinese Kazakhs to come to Kazakhstan and offer advice on how to find work and apartments and residence papers once they did. Three years later, he heard that Chen Quanguo was to be the new Party secretary of Xinjiang and that dread hardened into something more definite. He opened some of the messaging groups that Chinese Kazakhs used to forward and share news and he began recording voice notes with anxious urgency. “A storm is coming, Chen Quanguo is coming,” he said. “He made a genocide in Tibet and now he will make a genocide in Xinjiang. Only one thing can be done. Run, just run and run now because if you delay by even a second it might be too late.” Chen had also been Party secretary in Tibet and had enacted a brutal and insidious extension of the state apparatus there aimed at stamping out any signs of what the government called separatist thought. Surveillance, oppression, control. There were mass arrests, re-education centers and unsparing responses to the slightest protest. People talked of the many disappeared, the unexplained dead. It was all hidden from the rest of China by censors and firewalls, but Bilash spoke good English and he read the reports by international newspapers and human rights organizations. He saw everything wrought by Chen Quanguo and knew it would come to Xinjiang. BILASH WAS WELL ENOUGH KNOWN that people in Almaty often approached him directly with charitable appeals, and in the summer of 2016 that included women who said they were struggling to get by because their husbands were gone. The husbands were Chinese Kazakhs long settled in Kazakhstan, but had returned to China to answer some demand for paperwork from hometown authorities, to visit family, or to work a cross-border job. Then they had disappeared. Bilash paid the women’s utility bills or gave them money for food but there were soon more women, more missing husbands, and stories with concerning new details. Men who managed to contact their wives said absurdly that they were staying in China to attend a government training course on Chinese language and politics. The relatives of others said they had been arrested but could name no reason why. The pattern revealed itself with each case, and Bilash realized that the things he had warned of were coming to pass. Chen Quanguo’s work had begun. A few months more and it was not just wives who sought him out but mothers and elderly fathers too. He recruited sympathetic friends to help but it was becoming clear that things were happening in Xinjiang on a scale even Bilash had not imagined. To Kazakhs and to Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities like the Hui and the Tajiks. Bilash and his friends wrote letters to the Kazakh foreign ministry asking for help and heard nothing. They wrote more that fared no better. He flew to the capital of Astana and told officials what he knew. He had been confident in his mission, sure that the Kazakh government would solve whatever was going on. Because did not Kazakhstan and China jointly abide by the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation? And had not Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev made supporting the Kazakh diaspora one of his foreign-policy goals? He quickly realized the extent of his naivety and of Xi’s power in Astana. The officials he spoke with said that it was not their place to interfere in internal Chinese issues. It had obviously been decided that Kazakhstan’s billions of dollars of trade with China must not be endangered. Bilash and around 20 others saw that they must do what the government would not. In the spring of 2017, they formalized their activities into an organization they called Atazhurt, homeland. They gathered evidence, held conferences, and rented an office. They started publishing simple videos on Facebook and YouTube showing the family members of the missing explaining their circumstances. Bilash was at the center of it all and so became a figurehead. The threats began, and Bilash was sure that it was because Chinese authorities wanted no one to know what they were doing in Xinjiang. Letters from Kazakh prosecutors arrived saying that he was organizing illegal meetings. Intelligence officers hauled him in for hours of questioning. One said that he was committing a crime by publishing fake news and that China was a friend of Kazakhstan. “If China is a friend,” Bilash said, “please tell them not to arrest our brothers and sisters.” There was a social media campaign against them, and men called from withheld numbers to try and get him to stop. They began calling his sister and his brothers and his father, too. By then it was obvious what was happening in Xinjiang: a massive operation aimed at wiping out the very identities of Muslim minorities. There were mass arbitrary detentions in re-education camps and prisons, torture, family separations, sexual violence, forcible sterilization programs, and ever-present surveillance. Atazhurt had hundreds of hours of testimony before long. Chinese authorities were obviously watching. Often, after one of Atazhurt’s videos went live, someone messaged or called the family members in Kazakhstan from a Chinese number telling them that they were putting their loved ones in danger and should keep quiet. Yet if the family ignored the warnings and persisted, word sometimes came that a wife or husband or child would be crossing back into Kazakhstan. They were watching Bilash, too. Detainees freed from the camps later reported having been asked about him during interrogations or ordered to write essays denouncing him. Some Kazakh citizens traveling into China said there had been questions about him at passport control. THE MEN CAME to the Atazhurt office late on the afternoon of March 9, 2019. A group of them who showed neither identification nor the slightest remorse for their intrusion but busied themselves with silent intimidation. On a normal day, 150 people might pass through the office, but these men were like none of them. They were tall and stocky and hard-faced with hair cropped close at the back and sides, and they carried matching black Nokias with hands-free earpieces. They sat themselves down on some free chairs and said nothing to repeated questions but showed particular interest in Bilash when he went to have a look at them. He thought they planned to arrest him but they stayed where they were and eventually left at some invisible signal. Bilash decided he should not go home and checked into a hotel under a fake name. His room was on the 18th floor, and he went straight up then fastened the door’s thick security chain and succumbed to a troubled sleep. He woke in darkness to bodies and voices in the corridor and was fast out of bed. Whoever it was must have had a key card, because they already had the door open and were scrabbling at the chain. Thugs come to kill him on the orders of the Chinese government. To shoot him as he lay in bed. It had to be. Bilash squared his shoulder to the door and he cried out for anyone who could hear him. He tried in Kazakh and in Russian. “Help.” he shouted. “I am innocent, help me.” He heard nothing in return but the men on the other side gave up on the chain and started kicking the door. Big, heavy blows that Bilash knew he could not hold. He looked for another way out and found none, so he set his shoulder and fought for the last moments of his life. Those moments were hours. His thoughts came quick and ordered. “There is no God but Allah,” he repeated to himself, the words that would hasten the passage of his soul to paradise. He saw his childhood, his parents, the school, the mountains. He thought of his own children growing up without the love of their father. He thought of Laila. He thought of the decisions that had led him there. He thought all kinds of things. A crash and the security chain tore loose from the frame and the fast opening door slid him back across the carpet. Then the men were in the room and they were not some rabble of toughs but security officers with body armor and long guns and ballistic glasses. “Who are you?” Bilash asked. “We are from the government,” they said, and he knew why they’d had a key and why no one in the hotel had answered his calls. They were arresting him, they said, for harming relations between Kazakhstan and China. They took his phones, they let him dress in the bathroom and they led him downstairs to a waiting car and told him he would be flown to Astana. Dawn was approaching as they landed and the officers took him on to a hulking old building that had once belonged to the KGB. They led him down through windowless corridors and he prepared himself for what was to come. Kicks, baton blows, electric shocks. At first it was only an interrogation room but they put him in a cell with two beds and a hole in the ground for a toilet. There was another inmate in there. A man, they said, who had drunkenly stabbed another man. Bilash knew that was a threat and a plausible one. If he turned up dead, authorities could say that he had got into a fight with his cellmate. It was March 11 when his lawyer reached him and told him of charges that could mean 10 years in jail. She brought more bad news. Police had raided Atazhurt’s office and confiscated computers, hard drives, printers, cameras, and whatever paperwork they could stuff into bags. Bilash saw China’s hand in all of it. They held him under house arrest at a friend’s place in Astana and then in Almaty. Government men came to him. They showed him videos of himself shot clumsily between shoulders at press conferences and pictures of various members of his family, and they talked always of a plea deal that would see him released in exchange for accepting his guilt and promising not to lead any form of political group for seven years. He relented and signed toward the end of the year but intended to abide by only the letter of his deal. So he saw out his probation and made a video detailing his plans to get back to work as a translator or driver for Atazhurt. The same government men who had plagued his house arrest came to him once more and told him to stay quiet and to shut down Atazhurt completely. Bilash thought complying with the deal’s terms would be protection enough and he refused. His visitors began talking of underground cells with no record of arrest. One of them nonchalantly suggested something worse. “We told you over and over to stop and you did not stop,” the man said. “So what should we do? Arrest you? That didn’t work, and all that publicity would only begin again. Let you go free? That didn’t work either. What if there was an accident? What if a Kamaz,” he said, talking of the big six-wheeler trucks, “crashed into that [car] of yours? That would be that and your wife and your children would be left crying and alone.” New cases were opened against him. Vehicles and watchful eyes lingered outside his home. His bank accounts were frozen. In February, police arrested an activist named Dulat Agadil who had supported Atazhurt since the beginning. Video showed a crowd of plainclothes officers leading him out toward a waiting car, snow streaking in its headlights. Authorities announced Agadil’s death a few days later and blamed it on suspected heart failure, though he was only 43. So in September, Bilash left again. To Istanbul with Laila and the boys. Turkey seemed sensible because the government had long supported Xinjiang’s Muslims, but Bilash found that same government had begun buying Chinese Covid-19 vaccines and welcoming Chinese investment. He heard police had taken some Uyghur activists from their homes or picked them up in the street. A few were said to have been deported to Tajikistan, a close Chinese ally. One man who told journalists of how he had been coerced into spying for the Chinese government was shot in the back outside a friend’s home. It was easy for Bilash to imagine something like that happening to him. Laila told him to leave and this time to the U.S. He had an unused visitor visa that was still valid, but she did not and neither did the children. He was reassured when a Texas-based organization named China Aid that advocated for religious freedom in China said Bilash would have a good case for asylum and that family re-unification should not take long afterwards. THE MAN AT the Lincoln Memorial made Bilash think that he would be safer in another city, so he made for New York but still did not feel safe enough to keep an address for more than a month or two. It was not much of a way to live, but it bothered him far more that his asylum claim and reunification papers had stalled. A year passed, another, and he had missed so much of his children’s lives. Birthdays, outings, first days at school, countless tiny moments of joy. The boys were already so different from how he remembered, and when he thought of Laila, her face no longer came easily to him. At least she and the children had left Istanbul and claimed asylum in the Netherlands. Every day around noon he recorded a livestream. He spoke about Xinjiang and about democracy and freedom of speech and many more things besides. Tens of thousands watched. He was animated then. Forceful and confident in his cause and in himself. Afterward, that spirit sometimes left him. There were moments he felt lucky and would look at the hundreds of messages of thanks from camp survivors and their families and know that it had been his duty to expose the crimes of the government that had once been his. Then there were days passed in deep depression where he worried that the Kazakhs were alone and the Uyghurs were alone too. That the grand speeches politicians in the U.S. and Europe had made condemning the Chinese government had meant nothing and the democratic ideals that he spoke of on his livestreams were hollow. He longed for Almaty and returned to its avenues, trees, and parks often in his dreams. How good life had been when he was just a businessman and there had been no court cases, no ceaseless fear of arrest or attack. That fear was always with him. He knew Kazakh and Chinese intelligence were on him still and the online harassment, the death threats were unending. He found it difficult to trust new people and refused invitations to events held by sympathetic organizations because he did not wish to be exposed. On subway rides home, he would sit looking unconcerned right until the doors were about to close at some intermediate stop and jump up and out of the train watching to see if anyone did too. Sometimes he saw the same face one too many times in the street and began to panic. He would tell himself not to be so sensitive, that it was surely just someone who lived nearby but found he was unconvincing. A SUMMER’S DAY in Brooklyn’s Marine Park and Bilash followed the asphalt paths between the oaks and lindens and Japanese zelkovas. Shouts and thwacks echoed from the basketball and tennis courts, blending with the lively racket from the playground. All around were joggers and sightseers, picnickers and dog walkers enjoying the sun and acres of green. Bilash walked briskly until a phone call waylaid him and he slowed to a stroll. It was only after pocketing his phone again that he became aware of a persistent presence behind him and stopped and turned. A man was there and the man stopped when he stopped. The man was certainly Chinese, Bilash thought, and he had the body of a wrestler. The man did not move and kept his fixed eyes right on Bilash with a look so horribly implacable that Bilash started fast away. The man started walking too and kept easy pace 30 or 40 feet back. Bilash took a right and the man did as well. He took a left and so did the man. He started to walk even faster and when he glanced back the man was still there and his eyes still held him. Fear rose in him. This man was not like the man with the camera in Washington, D.C. There was no pretense with him. This man might mean violence. Bilash kept moving and called a friend who lived nearby. It was an emergency, he said, and he needed a ride. He started to run when he saw the car on the edge of the park a few minutes later and threw himself in. Distance and time to calm himself, he saw that if the man had wanted to attack him he could have. That was not the point of it. The point was to deliver a threat. We know where you live, what you do, and where you are at any time at all. We can reach you anywhere. The above excerpt has been adapted from the book Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized, written by John Beck. © 20025 John Beck, permission granted by Melville House.