He Risked His Life to Leave China. Then his actual problems started.

When Hasan Imam was a child, living on his parents’ farm, he would sometimes hide inside a haystack. The farm was scattered across a few acres of a small village. Behind the family house was a cowshed and, next to it, a hay barn. Inside the barn, each haystack was identical to its neighbor, and in the stack farthest from the door his father had arranged some bedding. It was invisible unless you went looking for it.

The village was in Kargilik, a rural county in Xinjiang, China, between the Kunlun Mountains and the Taklamakan desert, across the border from India and Pakistan. The family grew whatever the government told them to from year to year, mostly wheat and corn. There were many rules to follow. When Communist Party cadres from the village visited the house, Imam knew to take his younger brother and run to their hiding place. He tried to lie still and breathe slowly. The smallest movement would send spiders scurrying out from the depths of hay. Sometimes the cadres left quickly, and Imam could return to the house before the TV show he was watching ended. But sometimes the visits lasted hours, and the boys would fall asleep. When that happened, their father would carry them both to bed.

Visits from cadres were a frequent occurrence in southern Xinjiang. One objective of the visits was to discover unregistered Uyghur children. Although the region was exempt from China’s one-child policy, in 1988 the government issued a new directive limiting urban Uyghur families to two children and rural families to three. Parents who violated the policy were fined and could be subject to imprisonment or forced birth control.

When he was older, Imam understood why his family had kept him hidden: He was born a fugitive. He and his brother were the youngest of five children, and neither was registered with the government. Imam never received a birth certificate or the all-important household registration required for nearly every facet of life in China, like opening a bank account or obtaining a driver’s license. Because he was unregistered, he was never enrolled in an official school. He was educated at home until he was 10, when his father took him into town to live at an underground Islamic school, or madrasa. It was the only place where an unregistered Uyghur child could study.

For decades, the Chinese government had treated Uyghurs as a troublesome population with separatist tendencies. Leaders sought to increase Xinjiang’s ethnic Han population through settlement programs. After 9/11 and the start of the United States War on Terror, China declared its own “global war on terror,” which intensified the targeting of Uyghurs and other Muslim populations in Xinjiang. When the madrasa was shut down, Imam came home. He helped his parents plant crops in the spring and bundle and thresh the wheat during harvest.

By the time the village authorities became aware of him, he was almost a teenager. There was no immediate punishment, but families with unregistered children were easy to exploit. In 2005, when he was 13, Imam was sent to work on a land-development project in the Taklamakan, part of what was known as the hashar system, a forced-labor program targeting Uyghurs. For two years, he moved earth and built roads, working grueling hours for no pay. When the project was finished, the government gave the land to Han settlers.

Imam had a sharp mind, and his parents wanted him to become an alim — a religious scholar. They sent him to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, to study Arabic. Two years later, he moved to Hotan, a city famous for its jade industry and as a stop on the ancient Silk Road. It was also — unofficially — a center of Arabic and Islamic learning. Uyghurs from across Xinjiang traveled to Hotan to study in secret at the homes of private scholars, an Islamic revival enabled in part by the spread of wireless internet and smartphones.

It was a brief window of freedom. Not long after Imam left Urumqi, in July 2009, around a thousand people gathered in the capital to protest the mob killing of two Uyghur migrant workers in Guangdong province. The protests devolved into riots where at least 200 people, both Han and Uyghur, were killed. A brutal crackdown on Uyghurs and all expressions of Uyghur culture followed. The government set curfews and disrupted phone and internet services for nearly a year. In 2012, Xi Jinping came to power; he soon began saying in speeches that he would build a “great wall of iron” around Xinjiang. Billions of dollars were invested in surveillance and facial-recognition technologies. New laws turned nearly all Uyghur crimes, from simple theft to protests of land seizures, into acts of terrorism. In Uyghur-majority southern regions, the government deployed armed paramilitary forces with broad powers to detain civilians and search private homes. Raids and arbitrary arrests led to acts of resistance and in some cases violence, with groups of Uyghurs attacking Han civilians.

After 18 people were killed during an apparent attack on a police station, authorities in Hotan began targeting any gatherings of young Uyghur men, even in private homes, and Imam resolved to stay away from trouble. But he was detained one afternoon while walking home from an internet cafe. During an all-night interrogation, police officers showed him printouts of conversations he’d had online in which he discussed moving abroad. They showed him messages from his phone containing references to Islam. When he tried to deny the messages were his, they beat him and made him sign a confession in Chinese, a language he could not read.

Imam was released, but in the coming weeks, the officers began to call him, asking for information about local religious schools. He didn’t know what to do. Hotan had become impossible to live in. The government had divided the city into zones and erected fences and checkpoints around each one. Without an ID card, he couldn’t take a bus, see a doctor or even cross between districts. After his landlord sold his property and fled the country, Imam came home to Kargilik, but by the end of 2012, checkpoints and full-body searches had arrived there too. His parents’ neighbors were selling their homes. He realized he had to find a way out.

By the time Imam made arrangements to leave, thousands of Uyghurs were fleeing China each month. It was the height of an exodus that would soon be cut short by a mass internment drive in Xinjiang in which it is estimated that more than a million Turkic and Muslim people were detained in extrajudicial detention facilities. The borders hardened, and escape became all but impossible. But for a few years before the camps appeared, some families sensed the rising danger.

There was a word for what they were doing: hijrah, sometimes translated as flight or exodus. Most Uyghurs who fled China were trying to reach Turkey, a Muslim country with a large Uyghur diaspora. Until 2012, the path out of Xinjiang led them over mountains through Central Asia, but security agreements that China made with Pakistan and Afghanistan led to arrests and deportations. Around 2013, a new route was established, taking Uyghurs on a dangerous overland crossing through Southeast Asia to Malaysia, where a network of smugglers helped them obtain or forge travel documents to Turkey.

Chinese authorities branded all such migration as “hijrah terrorism” and demanded that other countries arrest and repatriate Uyghur asylum seekers. Their demands have become increasingly difficult to refuse. In the years since the exodus began, China’s influence in Southeast Asia — in the form of investments, aid and military agreements — has grown considerably, and with it the ability to pursue Uyghurs wherever they may go. As a result, more than a decade after leaving home, many have found neither safety nor refuge. Hundreds have been forcibly returned to China, and hundreds more have been imprisoned or detained for years. They believe the world has abandoned them.

From Guangzhou to Bangkok

In February 2014, Imam used a friend’s ID card to travel to Urumqi, where he bought a same-day train ticket to Guangzhou. It was a 55-hour journey. The train was filled with Han travelers, but there were a few Uyghurs onboard, too. Uyghurs who lived outside Xinjiang had a bad reputation. Imam had heard that most of them were involved in illegal activities: drugs, human trafficking, prostitution. And no matter the reason for traveling, plainclothes police officers were known to follow them. Imam pretended not to notice anyone.

When he arrived, Guangzhou was cold and damp. At the station, he bought a burner phone and a SIM card and called a number his former landlord in Hotan had given him. A man directed Imam to a hotel a short walk away. He checked in and waited.

For 10 days, he left his room only to get food. Every noise outside his door made him jump. On the 11th day, a smuggler whom Imam thought of as the middleman appeared. The middleman told Imam he would be traveling with a group of 20 Uyghurs, all of them guests at the hotel. Imam paid him 30,000 yuan in cash, or about $5,000, which the middleman said would take him as far as Cambodia. Then he would pay more. The middleman cautioned Imam that if he was caught after crossing the border, he should claim to be a citizen of Turkey. The travelers threw away their identity cards and cut away clothing tags with Chinese writing.

The group left Guangzhou that afternoon in two large cars and arrived 10 hours later in Nanning, near the Vietnamese border. The cars were swapped for a large van with no seats inside, only rows of upturned plastic buckets. The smugglers were Han Chinese and spoke no Uyghur, but there was little to say. Somewhere in the night, they began to ascend a mountain. It was raining hard. Halfway up the dirt road, the van got stuck in the mud. They continued on foot into Vietnam. Far beneath them, Imam spotted a border sentry post at the mountain’s base.