Departing the oasis of Shihezi and crossing the Gobi Desert tor about a hundred kilometres, I saw another great oasis, namely, another land reclamation base of the Xinjiang Production Construction Corps — Kuytun City. I made no stop over there but proceeded tor a hundred fifty kilometres, staying overnight in Jinghe County, which derived its name from the Jinghe River in its domain.
In the city of Kuytun, controversy caught up with me... matters finally came to a head. The police got me... took me in for questioning. It was a roadside checkpoint, Uyghur people being ordered from their trucks, cargos searched, guns pointing all too casually about the place.
2020 January 23, Josh Rogin, “Opinion: China’s camps now have survivors, and their ordeals aren’t over”, in Washington Post[4], →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 24 January 2020, Opinions[5]:
Twenty-four-year-old college student Vera Yueming Zhou came to the United States in 2008 and is a U.S. permanent resident. She also happens to be a member of the Hui, a largely Muslim ethnic group. In October 2017, she used a virtual private network application to file her University of Washington homework while visiting her father in the city of Kuytun, China. That infraction was enough to get her arrested and sent to a “reeducation camp,” where she spent five months in a small, crowded cell with 11 other Muslim women. She never had a hearing or trial. Despite having recently undergone cancer surgery, she was denied necessary medical treatment in the camp. She was allowed only one highly supervised visit with her father during her imprisonment, for 15 minutes. The prisoners were forced to sing patriotic songs, forbidden to speak their native language or practice their religions, kept under constant surveillance and encouraged to report on each other to their jailers. After being released from the camp for unknown reasons, Zhou remained trapped in China because authorities kept her passport and green card. She was placed under extreme surveillance in Kuytun, where she lingered in limbo for 18 more months.
