Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized - by John Beck (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A tender, compassionate examination of how ordinary lives in Xinjiang are torn apart by the Chinese government's ruthlessly efficient campaign to destroy the way of life of the region's Uyghur and Kazakh people. Fast-paced and engaging." - Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign-affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal

"In Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized, John Beck offers a powerful and heart-wrenching exploration of the hardships, brutalities, and injustices the Uyghur community has endured - and a crucial investigation into its resilience in the face of it all." - Patrick Strickland, author of You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave

"A devastatingly powerful account of China's brutal high-tech campaign to enchain its ethnic minorities in the name of 'stability maintenance.' Beck is not just a first-rate investigative journalist but a fine writer, one whose spare prose and gentle cadence haunts even as it informs. An exceptional work." - Scott Anderson, author of Lawrence in Arabia

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, Amnesty International Media Awards, among others. Based in New York, he is a Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting grantee.