Tuesday May 27, 2025
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
A shocking, on-the-ground investigation of the Chinese government’s brutal oppression of its Muslim citizens — the Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and others — from Xinjiang to the streets of New York and Washington, DC . . .
Award-winning journalist John Beck recounts China’s persecution of the predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and its relentless pursuit of the few who escaped beyond its borders. Through intertwined literary narratives combined with snippets of original source material, including official directives and speeches, he pieces together the individual stories of what consecutive American administrations have described as genocide.
The narrative moves from China to Kazakhstan, Turkey and the US, incorporating the tensions, discrimination, and occasional violence that characterised life in Xinjiang for decades. But when Xi Jinping is appointed President in 2013, the creeping repression quickly escalates into a crackdown of unprecedented scope and severity.
Beck follows 4 characters: a Kazakh writer and an Uyghur nurse who survived re-education camps before ultimately escaping abroad, a human rights advocate involved in securing their release, and an inadvertent exile spied on by Chinese authorities as his family back home was used as leverage against him.
Through their stories, the book explores identity, dehumanization, and censorship, the force of literature in dark times, and an all-pervasive apparatus of repression able to exist within miles of the White House.
John Beck lived in Istanbul for a number of years, where he was in close contact with the city’s Uyghur diaspora and wrote on the crackdown and related issues for publications including Harper’s and National Geographic. Some of that work forms the basis of this book along with further reporting from Almaty, Kazakhstan, Virginia, and New York.
About the Author.
John Beck is an award-winning journalist focused on conflict and human rights issues, whose writing has appeared in GQ, Harper’s, Wired, Businessweek, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and The Sunday Times Magazine. He won the 2017 Kurt Schork Memorial Award as well as the 2019 Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism fellowship, and has been shortlisted for the Bayeux-Calvados Awards for war correspondents and the Amnesty International Media Awards, among others. He is based in New York.
About the Moderator.
Omer Kanat is the Executive Director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP). Mr. Kanat
regularly meets with members of US Congress to brief them on Uyghur human rights and policy
responses, and has testified before the Senate Human Rights Caucus and the U.S. Atrocity Early
Warning Task Force. He has published op-eds for media outlets including the EU Observer, The
Diplomat, The Globe Post, The Geopolitics, and the Bangkok Post. His comments and
interviews have been featured by PBS NewsHour, The New York Times, The Washington Post,
CNN, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, and Politico, among others. Previously, he worked for two
decades as a broadcast journalist and news editor for the Tajik Service of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty and the Uyghur Service of Radio Free Asia.