Akida Pulat not spoken to his mother in eight years. This Mother’s Day was her eighth without Rahile Dawutthe famous Uighur anthropologist and folklorist who disappeared taken into the custody of the Chinese state in 2017. Dr. Dawut has dedicated his career to documenting Uyghur shrines and preserving Uyghur cultural memory. For this work, the Chinese government sentenced sentence her to life in prison.
His case is not unique, as I wrote for The Diplomat last year. Across the Uyghur diaspora in the United States, families are experiencing the same cruel separation: their loved ones, including many of the most respected Uyghur intellectuals of their generation, are imprisoned by the Chinese government. Jewher Ilham, the daughter of a Uighur scholar Ilham Tohtisentenced to life in 2014, campaigned for his release since. Tumaris and Kamalturk Yalqun also spent years defending their father, Yalqun Rozi, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison, would have for his work as a literary critic and textbook editor.
The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) has documented at least 11 Uyghur scholars and cultural leaders unjustly detained or imprisoned with immediate family members in the United States.
The arrival of US President Donald Trump meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping is an opportunity to put an end to this travesty. He should use every lever available to demand the release of unjustly imprisoned and missing Uyghur intellectual and cultural leaders, especially those with close relatives in the United States.
Summits between U.S. and Chinese leaders are filled with competing priorities from trade to security and technology, and more. But human rights cannot be treated as a secondary issue. For Uyghur American families, these cases are urgent and unresolved.
China’s persecution of Uyghur intellectuals is at the heart of its policy of crushing Uyghur religion, language and identity. Beijing has target teachers, poets, editors, artists, religious scholars, entrepreneurs and cultural leaders, as they preserve the memory of a people and pass it on to the next generation. By locking them up, the Chinese government seeks to control not only Uyghur political life, but also Uyghur culture itself.
Rahile Dawut is a specialist in Uyghur folklore and sacred sites. Ilham Tohti is an economist who advocated dialogue and understanding between Uighurs and Han Chinese. Yalqun Rozi helped compile textbooks on Uyghur literature. Their work was peaceful, academic and, at the time, state-sanctioned. Yet under Beijing’s crackdown, even documenting Uyghur heritage is now considered a crime.
The scale of China’s campaign to silence Uyghur intellectuals is staggering. Five years ago, the UHRP documented at least 312 intellectual and cultural elites who have been detained in one form or another by the Chinese government. The real number is certainly higher, amid a near-total communications blackout and harsh penalties for anyone caught smuggling information from the Uyghur country.
The Trump administration speaks often of “peace through strength”. Strength is not measured solely by tariffs or military posture. It is measured by America’s willingness to defend its citizens, its residents and its values, even when doing so proves difficult. If Trump comes face to face with Xi and fails to raise these urgent cases, Beijing will view this omission not as pragmatism, but as weakness.
This should not distract us from an “America First” foreign policy. It is a natural expression of American priorities. An “America First” approach should mean defending American citizens and their families from the reach of foreign authoritarian governments. When Uyghur Americans and their loved ones are targeted by the Chinese government, raising their case is not a matter of charity to foreigners. He defends the United States and makes clear that Beijing cannot abuse American families without consequences.
The Chinese Communist Party uses torture and a 24/7 surveillance state to force Uyghurs to live and think according to the total loyalty to the stateand help the state erase their distinct identity. The United States must not facilitate this erasure by treating its freedom as secondary.
At this week’s summit, Trump must demand their release and make clear that any serious effort to stabilize U.S.-China relations must include justice for those unjustly imprisoned.
See profiles of “detained Uyghur intellectuals” published by The Diplomat. here.