Unbroken

One Uyghur’s Fight for Freedom

Rushan Abbas

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780888903617
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Rushan's powerful memoir takes an unwavering stand against the CCP's brutality, not only exposing systematic oppression but empowering countless others to speak truth to power. Unbroken is an urgent call to action for policymakers, advocates, and all those committed to defending human dignity." – Rep. John Moolenaar, Chairman of the House Select Committee on China

What happens when a mother, a freedom fighter, and a former U.S. Department of Defence contractor dares to speak out against one of the world's most powerful regimes? In Unbroken, Rushan Abbas—an Uyghur-American activist and a leader of Campaign for Uyghurs, an organization twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize(2022-2025).—delivers a gripping memoir of personal loss, global advocacy, and moral defiance.

When her sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, was abducted by the Chinese regime in retaliation for Rushan's human rights work, it set off an international campaign to expose China's genocide against the Uyghur people. Abbas understood the cost of silence from her early work inside Guantánamo Bay as a translator to briefing U.S. military and intelligence officials.

She leveraged her voice when speaking to Congress, the European Parliament, and at the United Nations, where her advocacy helped shape global policy and compel nations to recognize the CCP's atrocities. Her fight led to the groundbreaking UN Human Rights Office report delivered by Michelle Bachelet in 2022, which formally declared China's treatment of Uyghurs may constitute crimes against humanity. Blending firsthand testimony with investigative insight, Unbroken exposes a state campaign of mass surveillance, forced sterilization, family separation, and cultural erasure.

But it also celebrates the resilience of women, diaspora communities, and grassroots movements across continents. Unbroken is a powerful blueprint for resistance—a deeply human story of how one woman challenged a superpower and built a global coalition for justice.

For readers of I Am Malala, Know My Name, and The Sun Does Shine, this memoir affirms that the fight for Uyghur freedom is not only a national cause—it is a defining struggle for the soul of humanity.

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One One Voice, One Step
• Chapter Two China’s Long Black Arm
• Chapter Three You Can Never Be a Singer
• Chapter Four What My Father Witnessed
• Chapter Five Resurrecting the Uyghur Identity
• Chapter Six The 1980s Student Protests
• Chapter Seven Tenacity
• Chapter Eight Guantánamo
• Chapter Nine Two Stars Depart from the Sky
• Chapter Ten In Search of My Sister: Kin Punishment and the CCP’s Transnational Repression
• Chapter Eleven Economic Colonialism and the Voice of Regret
• Chapter Twelve The Genocide Olympic Games and Our Genocide Report
• Chapter Thirteen The Light of Hope
• Index
• Copyright