Parts of Xinjiang, northwest China, have been under a secretive and draconian lockdown for more than 40 days. 

Rehima, a Uyghur woman living in Istanbul, Turkey, whose name has been changed to protect her family, spoke to her husband in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, last week. “They’re trying to kill us,” her husband told her, before saying he felt too hungry and weak to continue talking. “I don’t have the energy to speak,” he said. Rehima described how her husband — who spent three years in one of Xinjiang’s notorious “reeducation” camps before being released earlier this year — was now “devastated” by the lockdown. He has been shut inside his apartment for more than a month and his food supplies are dwindling to nothing. 

As China pursues its zero-Covid policy, Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic group native to the region, are growing increasingly desperate as they report running out of basic needs including medical supplies.  Bypassing strict controls on communication and risking their livelihoods by doing so, Uyghurs have been posting videos on Douyin — the Chinese domestic version of TikTok — highlighting the bleak conditions and the lack of food. 

One video shows a young man lying on the floor. The woman filming him says “he just passed out, saying he was starving, he lay down in the yard and has stayed here ever since.” According to Radio Free Asia, as many as 22 people “died of starvation or a lack of medical attention” on September 15 in Ghulja, the third largest city in Xinjiang.