In New York City, Guan Heng, who grew up in Nanyang, Henan Province, is not someone who attracts attention. He doesn’t have an impressive resume or political background. After graduating from university in 2011, he became a freelance worker – no fixed job, no title, but plenty of time. It was this free time that led him down an unexpected path.
He enjoys photography and browsing the internet. Initially, it was just to find movies and music, but when he managed to bypass the internet censorship of the Great Firewall of China, what he saw was not entertainment, but the truth – the history and reality that have never been mentioned in China, and even deliberately erased.
The Great Famine of 1960, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. These were stories he had never heard of before, striking him like lightning bolts, shattering the world view he had been indoctrinated with since childhood.
“I kept comparing the public information from the outside with the education I received, and found that many things were completely different,” Guan Heng said. “Many things were never mentioned by them. This sparked my interest.”
He began to gradually understand and realize that “the Chinese government has hidden so many shameful secrets, and has done many bad things to the people and the entire society.” He said the impact of this information on him was “very, very huge.”
Since 2018, Guan Heng has been publishing travel videos on YouTube, documenting what he sees and hears during his travels around China. He has been to many places, as well as Taiwan and Japan, and the contrasts brought by different social environments have left a deep impression on him.
In 2019, he rode a motorcycle from Shanghai all the way west, crossing deserts, mountains, and arrived in Xinjiang. He is not a journalist or investigator, just a traveler who finds it “fun.”
But the shock he experienced in Xinjiang far exceeded the scope of tourism.
Upon entering Xinjiang, he encountered numerous checkpoints. Police and armed police were everywhere, along with heavily armed “security personnel.” Refueling required showing identification, accommodation required repeated registration and facial recognition, and even walking on the streets required facial scans. Every corner felt like it was being watched by invisible eyes.
That level of strict control was a world apart from the mainland, Guan Heng said.
At that time, he was unaware of the existence of “re-education camps.”
During the lockdown in 2020, while stuck at home, he used VPN to access BuzzFeed News’ investigation reports, which showed satellite images and data analysis indicating the existence of a large number of suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang.
He was shocked, intuitively feeling that the report was “very likely true.”
Having been to Xinjiang, but knowing nothing about this, the cognitive dissonance made it impossible for him to turn a blind eye.
“Based on my understanding of the Chinese government, they love to cover up things they don’t want people to see,” he said. “I had been to Xinjiang and had no idea about this, which made me particularly eager to go again and see for myself what was going on.”
He was aware of the risks and consequences, but still chose to take action.
He rented a telephoto DV camera, prepared two SD cards – one for shooting, the other as a decoy; after shooting, he would immediately hide the SD card. Following the coordinates provided by BuzzFeed News, he drove himself along various counties and cities in Xinjiang to look for suspected facilities, choosing locations near highways where he could rapidly capture images while driving.
In Gaoke Road in Urumqi, he captured a large enclosed facility, with a clear view of the signs on the top of the building: “Labor Transformation” and “Cultural Transformation.”
In Korla, he found a military camp from the markings. In the depths of the camp, adjacent to military facilities, was another large-scale facility surrounded by high walls, barbed wire, and guard towers, with no public signs, requiring passage through the military camp to reach.
“Dormitories in military camps do not require this kind of configuration,” he judged. “This is a highly suspicious facility.”
One of the most memorable locations for Guan Heng was in the Dabancheng district, marked by BuzzFeed News as “highly suspicious.” It was a newly built large facility, standing alone in the wilderness, with no shielding, no properly constructed roads, clearly not a place tourists would visit.
To capture the internal situation, he climbed up a nearby hill. Recalling, he said the walls of the facility were high, and he was very nervous when pointing the lens inside the wall – fearing that if the staff on duty saw him, his intentions would be exposed, as “my actions were completely different from a normal tourist.”
After editing the video, he toyed with the idea of publicly releasing it – also facing the most difficult decision of his life.
If he publishes it, he might get caught; if he doesn’t publish it, it would feel like betraying himself.
“I shot and produced these videos to let them be seen, which is exercising my freedom of speech,” he said. “If I don’t publish it, it’s like someone is covering my mouth and not letting me speak, or I’m silent out of fear. For me, that is also torment. If I have something to say, I must say it.”
He chose to leave China.
The lockdown due to the pandemic made him wait for a year. In the summer of 2021, he traveled to Ecuador and the Bahamas, visa-free to China, and in early October, bought a small inflatable boat and an outboard motor for $3,000 in the Bahamas. He set off from Freeport in the Bahamas alone, relying only on a mechanical compass, smartphone GPS, and observing cloud formations to determine the direction. After drifting at sea for nearly 23 hours, he arrived in Florida.
He brought food and water, but only drank a can of cola throughout the journey – not because he wasn’t hungry, but extreme nerves prevented him from eating. The rocking waves, uncertain direction, spilled gasoline filling the cabin, the whole boat permeated with a pungent oil smell.
He said the most dangerous part was actually refueling. Because he couldn’t afford a closed fuel tank (which has a dedicated hose that automatically supplies fuel from the tank to the engine), he had to open the small external fuel tank of the outboard motor and manually refuel with a fuel canister. But with the small tank capacity, he had to refuel almost every time the boat rocked in the waves. “I was indeed a bit afraid at that time, because once there was a fire, I would never make it to the United States,” he recalled.
Guan Heng had initially planned to land at night, but eventually arrived on the Florida coast in the early morning. He saw an elderly couple walking towards him, worried about being reported to the police, immediately choosing a farther place to land, items scattered on the ground from the boat. He grabbed his bag and ran towards the shore, hiding in the bushes.
The video was released on October 5, 2021 (youtube.com/watch?v=cI8bJO-to8I). Guan Heng recalled that he had scheduled the release of the video before going to sea, setting it for a “timed release.” “Because I didn’t know if I could safely reach the United States, I couldn’t wait until I arrived in the United States to release it. I could only set a time that I might reach the United States.”
After arriving in the United States, Guan Heng began applying for political asylum, striving to rebuild his life in a foreign land. It wasn’t until two years later that he learned from his mother that his relatives, both close and distant, in China were facing systematic harassment by the national security system. “This is what my mother told me. I believe the police must have also contacted my friends. To protect them, I have never contacted my relatives and friends in China directly since then.”
According to Mrs. Luo, Guan Heng’s mother, the investigation began in early January 2022, about two months after the video was released. At that time, simultaneous actions were taken in three cities in Henan Province – Zhumadian, Nanyang, and Zhengzhou. She was questioned by the national security and public security authorities about her sisters in China, Guan Heng’s father and paternal family, and even rarely contacted relatives.
Mrs. Luo and Guan Heng’s father divorced early on, and she later moved to Taiwan. During the incident, amidst the epidemic, she had not returned to the mainland to visit family for two to three years. It wasn’t until the end of 2023 when she returned to Henan to visit her mother with dementia for the first time that she heard about her family being harassed – because no one dared to mention it in WeChat or over the phone.
She recalled feeling a sense of tension as soon as she stepped into her younger sister’s house. “They were afraid that I would be detained at the airport.” Her sister pulled her into the room and quietly revealed the experiences that had been hidden from her for two years.
The police continuously questioned Guan Heng’s family members: the last time they met, how they normally contacted each other, if they knew what he was doing, if they had any information, and warned: “If there is any information about Guan Heng, it must be reported. If you know but don’t report, you know the consequences.”
Even more serious was the situation with Guan Heng’s father. He was interrogated twice. At the end of January 2022, four policemen suddenly appeared at his doorstep, without explanation, only saying they wanted him to “cooperate with the investigation.” He was taken to the police station, his phone was confiscated, and they said they needed to send it to the Nanyang Public Security Bureau to “restore data,” fearing he might have deleted something. The interrogation lasted from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. That night, the police also requested to go to Guan Heng’s residence – his grandmother’s house. They searched through drawers, bookshelves, and finally took away Guan Heng’s computer.
Fear quickly spread within the family. Relatives became distant from each other, not out of coldness, but out of survival instinct.
At the same time, Guan Heng faced online harassment. External propaganda accounts publicly “doxxed” his personal information – birthday, school graduation, address were all dug up. The comments section below the video was filled with insults calling him a “traitor,” and there were even death threats: “Let him be killed by black brothers in America.” His video was temporarily taken down due to malicious reports.
Under mental pressure, Guan Heng chose to cut off external responses as a form of self-protection. Unbeknownst to him, the footage he captured had been cited by international media and research institutions, becoming important on-the-ground evidence in investigating the human rights situation in Xinjiang.
Mrs. Luo said that although the video was reported by Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Asia, and BuzzFeed News’ investigation won a Pulitzer Prize because of it, “he doesn’t know, he dares not look.” The trauma from cyberbullying was too deep, making him avoid all related information since, becoming isolated and reluctant to communicate with others.
“He just wanted to speak with his camera, let more people know the truth… he never thought it would turn out like this” She sighed deeply.
Over the course of four years, Guan Heng has worked as a delivery person, an Uber driver, and a truck driver in the United States. In the spring of 2025, he moved to a small town in upstate New York. To his surprise, his roommates (a couple from China) in the shared house were reported due to economic disputes. On an early morning in August of the same year, when the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents went into his rented house to arrest the Chinese couple, they unexpectedly found Guan Heng.
When Guan Heng uttered, “I arrived by sea, no visa,” he knew he couldn’t escape. According to ICE standards, they will detain anyone who has illegally entered the United States, even though he was in the process of seeking asylum and had already obtained a work permit. He was handcuffed, taken away, and sent to a detention center.
Life in the detention center was oppressive and isolating, with language and cultural barriers causing him to sink into a low point.
It wasn’t until attention from the outside world began to focus on him. Upon learning about Guan Heng’s situation, the BuzzFeed News reporting team that inspired him to go to Xinjiang wrote a letter of support. Human rights organizations, media, and congressmen began to speak out, and his mother came to visit. It was the first time he realized he was not alone.
“I always thought of myself as a lone warrior,” he said. “It was only in prison that I realized that one cannot always be alone.”
Looking back at everything, he has no regrets. “Without doing that, I wouldn’t have come to the United States, and I wouldn’t have been detained here,” he said. “But because I now experience the taste of losing my freedom, I can better understand those who are locked up in concentration camps. I need help from the outside world now, and they also need it.”
“I still believe that I did the right thing.”
After Guan Heng was detained, his situation quickly drew attention from the U.S. immigration system and the international human rights community. Zhou Fengsu, the executive director of Human Rights in China (HRiC), was one of the first to publicly speak out for him, pointing out that Guan Heng, who risked his life to film the detention facilities in Xinjiang, was an extremely rare “first-hand testimony by a Han Chinese”, and provided irreplaceable evidence in international human rights investigations.
As Guan Heng’s story was made public on Chinese human rights platforms, support quickly expanded. In mid-December, on the eve of Guan Heng’s court appearance at a detention center in upstate New York, a number of human rights advocates and residents of New York from different ethnic backgrounds drove hours from Flushing to gather outside the prison to publicly demand Guan Heng’s release. This support helped lift Guan Heng out of his low point.
At the same time, the case entered a crucial stage of legal defense and prosecution. Guan Heng’s defense team is pushing for a bail application and preparing for substantive political asylum hearings.
At 38 years old, Guan Heng is still waiting. Waiting for trial, waiting for freedom, and waiting for his future, as his case is set to appear in court again on January 10th.
But he is no longer the “lone warrior” he once thought of himself as. He knows there are people standing behind him. His videos have accumulated over 1.27 million views online; his courage has not been in vain.
Between darkness and freedom, he chose freedom.
Guan Heng said, with the current shift in U.S. immigration policy, he feels that the entire system – from immigration judges to law enforcement agencies – seems to be more inclined towards accelerated deportation. He feels like he has stumbled into a “very untimely moment.” Despite this, he is no longer as anxious as before.
What he wants to say to the world the most is, “Thank you, it’s because of you that I didn’t give up.” He added, “I am very grateful to everyone who helped me on the outside. At this critical moment, it is your support that gave me the strength to persevere.”
Reflecting on the entire case, Zhou Fengsu believes that Guan Heng’s significance has far exceeded that of a simple immigration or asylum case. He said he invited Guan Heng to visit the Tiananmen Memorial in his home and described Guan Heng as a modest and clear-headed young man, showing genuine concern for freedom and democracy issues. “He is twenty years younger than me, but he represents a different China – a China that has not been brainwashed, still believes in common sense, courage, and freedom.” Zhou Fengsu said that it is these young people who inspire him deeply.