The respected Uyghur scholar became a powerful symbol of the devastation of that culture. Her imprisonment cannot go unchallenged
I last saw Rahile Dawut in 2016, at a conference we’d organised in Hong Kong. We sat in a sunny precinct, drank coffee, and enjoyed a rare moment of calm before the gathering storm. She was detained in 2017, and this week we have confirmation, via the US-based Dui Hua Foundation rights group, that Dawut has been jailed for life by China for “splittism”: a deliberate attempt to split the Chinese nation.
When we met in 2016, Dawut was already experiencing trouble. On her journey from Urumqi to Hong Kong, her plane was diverted due to snow, and she and a student checked into a hotel in Chengdu. They were woken in the middle of the night by the local police: the hotel had reported them because their ethnicity was marked as “Uyghur” on their passports, and Uyghurs no longer had the right to travel freely within their own country.
Why didn’t she run then? Wasn’t it clear what was going on? The authorities were already building the network of internment camps, already rounding up religious people in the south. But why would she feel personally in danger? She was not a critic of the regime; her work was entirely apolitical. She was an internationally respected scholar, a professor in the region’s top university, and she was leading several government-funded research projects on Uyghur intangible cultural heritage.
Dawut spent 25 years researching the religious traditions and expressive culture of her people. Following a groundbreaking PhD on Uyghur pilgrimage sites, she published prolifically in Uyghur, Chinese and English. She received numerous grants and awards from Chinese and international funders. As director of the Minorities Folklore Research Centre at Xinjiang University, she trained a new generation of Uyghur anthropologists and was invited as visiting scholar and research partner to several universities in the US and the UK.
She was a generous colleague and treated her students like an extended family. In pursuit of her research projects she led her students (and occasionally a stray foreign academic) on gruelling field trips, facing hostile travel conditions, sleeping in impoverished villages, and explaining her mission with a ready smile and unfailing courtesy to suspicious local officials. She amassed an unparalleled collection of audio and video recordings of Uyghur shrine festivals, rare documents on Uyghur religious traditions, and interviews with the people who inherited and transmitted this vibrant culture.
Dawut got me out of a tight spot more than once. One time, I arrived in Urumqi in July 2009, just before the forceful suppression of a peaceful demonstration and subsequent outbreak of inter-ethnic violence. The local police confiscated my passport and held on to it (they told me they’d lost the key to the drawer) until the morning of my return flight. Dawut went into the police station and persuaded them I was an academic studying Uyghur music, and not a hostile foreign agent. Another time, she rescued one of her students who was detained when the police found a recording of the Qur’an on her phone. Dawut went to the police station and persuaded them that her student was not listening to the Qur’an because she was a religious extremist, but because she was a student of Uyghur folklore.
Over the past six years, the sacred shrines have been destroyed, and the people who visited them detained for “re-education” in the camps, or given long prison sentences on spurious charges of “religious extremism”. It’s clear that Dawut’s “crime” is her research: the same painstaking work to document Uyghur heritage that was previously officially approved and supported by government grants.
Dawut has become a powerful symbol of the devastation of Uyghur culture and society, but she is just one individual among many. The Chinese authorities have gone to extraordinary lengths to mask what has been happening in the Uyghur region, but we know of at least 312 individual cases of people like her – Uyghur academics, writers and creative artists – who have been detained and imprisoned simply because they researched, promoted, transmitted and created Uyghur culture and history.
Chinese president Xi Jinping has been explicit in his calls for a “correct understanding” of the history of Xinjiang. What this means is that history is now being comprehensively rewritten to demonstrate that the Uyghur region and its people have been an integral part of the Chinese nation since ancient times. Dawut’s research contradicts this distorted view of history, and so she and her work have been disappeared.
Part of this push to rewrite the region’s history is through tourism. Over the past few years we have seen millions of Chinese tourists pouring into the Uyghur region to watch singing and dancing Uyghurs, and to visit the tomb of the “fragrant concubine”. International travel firms are eagerly promoting similar tours to the UK market. I hope that travellers will pause and think of Rahile Dawut before they join one of these tours.
But institutions need to pause too. Unesco continues to treat China as a protector of Uyghur heritage by including it in its heritage lists, even though China’s actions in the Uyghur region demonstrably constitute what Unesco elsewhere calls “strategic cultural cleansing”.
A 2022 report by the UN high commissioner for human rights provided detailed documentation of policies in the Uyghur region that may constitute crimes against humanity. And yet China is about to renew its position on the UN Human Rights Council. Given the extensive evidence of crimes against humanity and cultural cleansing in the Uyghur region, international governments and organisations that express a commitment to human rights need to do more than pay lip service. For Rahile Dawut’s sake and for so many others, there cannot be business as usual.