WASHINGTON – Before U.S. President Donald Trump flew to Beijing last month, Uyghur activist Rushan Abbas hoped the summit would bring a breakthrough for her imprisoned sister, who has been detained in a Chinese prison for nearly eight years.
Both the Senate and House passed resolutions just days before Trump’s departure urging him to push for the release of six Chinese Communist Party detainees – including her sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas.
“I am asking the leader of the free world to look a dictator in the eye and demand the return of my sister, a soul who has been stolen by the machinery of hate,” Rushan Abbas wrote in a May 14 commentary in The Hill.
Trump’s meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, however, failed to produce any immediate breakthroughs for the Uyghurs’ decade-long plight, and neither side mentioned human rights even coming up.
The news hit Uyghurs living in the United States differently. Some were bitter, but Abbas said she was trying to remain hopeful.
“I still believe that the people in the White House and the State Department are still trying everything they can. Not everything is public – there are both public and private conversations,” Abbas told The Diplomat a week after the summit.
Abbas now lives in Falls Church, Virginia, with her five children. She’s one of roughly 12,000 Uyghurs estimated to be living in the United States. Her sister, a retired medical doctor, was arrested days after Abbas spoke about the government’s persecution of Uyghurs at a think tank in Washington.
“It’s really frustrating, but we don’t see any other way but continuing to use our voices on every platform we have to keep reminding Americans and politicians to continue paying attention to this atrocity,” she said.
Like Abbas, some Uyghurs still hold out hope that the Trump administration, which was first to label China’s persecution of Uyghurs a “genocide,” will eventually return to its former toughness.
But several other Uyghurs told The Diplomat that they’d lost faith in lobbying Washington, and have turned elsewhere to aid friends and family detained or surveilled in China’s Xinjiang autonomous region.
“The fact that he [Trump] met with Xi, in spite of the ongoing genocide, is itself the biggest loss for us,” said activist Salih Hudayar, who left his hometown in southern Xinjiang as a child and grew up in Oklahoma. He lost all contact with relatives in China almost a decade ago.
“The prerequisite should have been, you end this genocide, and then come sit down and talk with us,” said the 33-year-old, who lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with his parents, wife, and three children.
Since 2017, the Chinese government has reportedly imprisoned more than one million members of Turkic ethnic groups, most of whom are Uyghurs – a mostly Muslim ethnic group who live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. Many have been arbitrarily detained in a network of “re-education camps” in the name of combating extremism, and subjected to forced labor, surveillance, family separation, religious restrictions, and sterilization.
The U.S. State Department declared the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs a genocide in 2021, and a United Nations report later determined they could amount to crimes against humanity. Beijing strenuously denies these claims.
The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act – sponsored by then-Senator Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s secretary of state – became law in 2020, requiring the government to compile reports on the crackdown in Xinjiang, and sanctioning Chinese officials thought to be responsible for human rights abuses there. Two years later, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act came into force, aiming to block the import of goods manufactured through forced labor from Xinjiang. The law also ordered the creation of a list of entities manufacturing merchandise with forced labor.
However, the labor law’s entities list has not been updated since Trump took office last January. Following the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, official reports from the White House and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made no mention of Chinese human rights issues, including that of the Uyghurs, being discussed. Instead, the U.S. president appears to have struck a friendlier tone toward his Chinese counterpart, recently calling leader Xi Jinping a “friend” and a “good man” on June 3.
Before the trip, the Chinese Embassy in Washington had taken to social media to warn the United States not to challenge China on the issue by declaring four “red lines in China-US relations,” among them “democracy and human rights.”
“Why doesn’t the United States admit that, hey, we are scared of China, and we cannot do anything? Just say it,” said Uyghur journalist Tahir Imin, 45. More than 20 of Imin’s relatives are imprisoned in China.
He acknowledged that the U.S. government has been the country most supportive of the Uyghur cause, but expressed frustration that in recent years some lawmakers and activists have made optimistic but redundant statements “as if liberation day is coming next week.” These fed the diaspora false hope, he said.
“We became disappointed when we were overwhelmingly dependent on somebody who doesn’t know us, whose plans may change over time,” said Imin, referring to U.S. lawmakers.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who led the Senate resolution alongside Senator Dick Durbin of the Democrats, told The Diplomat on May 19 that he had not received a detailed readout on “the discussion the president was able to have in favor of releasing the detainees.”
Democratic Senator Tim Kaine said he had hoped Trump would use the opportunity to discuss the release of political prisoners with Xi.
“I had high hopes, and I may not know everything that was discussed, but I’ve certainly not heard that that was a significant topic,” Kaine, a co-sponsor of the resolution, told The Diplomat, “Even if they may not agree on a whole lot of other issues, to show goodwill and that they want to build a relationship, that often is what can come out of a summit – some movement on some individual cases.”
Even though Uyghurs have strong support in Congress, they need to be able to persuade the executive branch, which runs diplomacy, said Elise Anderson, a lecturer at George Washington University and expert on Uyghur issues.
“If it can’t then be turned into executive action through cooperation, I can understand why a lot of people may feel disappointed,” said Anderson, who lived in the Xinjiang region from 2012 to 2016.
Like Abbas, other Uyghurs also believe lobbying members of Congress is still the U.S. diaspora’s strongest bet.
“America is still the country that made the atrocity determination for Uyghur issues. And those values are so embedded in our institutions that I would like to bet they would still hold up,” said Rayhan Asat.
Her brother has been held in a Xinjiang internment camp system since 2016. Ekpar Asat was the second Uyghur named in the Senate resolution.
“I think that there are good people within the Trump administration as well, who truly believe in the American values, and I hope those are the voices that will prevail,” said Asat said, a human rights lawyer at the Atlantic Council who’s been in the United States for 11 years.
Some experts were skeptical.
There is no reason to expect that Trump will be sympathetic toward Uyghurs, considering his disinterest in human rights as a traditional concern in diplomacy, and “the prevalent Islamophobia in both Trump administrations,” said James Millward, a professor of Chinese history at Georgetown University.
“I personally breathed a small sigh of relief that he didn’t say something worse [at the summit],” Millward added.
The sense of disappointment comes as American Uyghurs increasingly fear transnational repression – Beijing-led attempts to stamp out activism on U.S. soil.
The FBI has maintained a webpage on transnational repression since at least early 2022, according to the internet archive, and its Philadelphia field office created the bureau’s first task force dedicated to transnational repression last January.
In response to questions about China-backed transnational repression, the bureau said in a May 25 statement to The Diplomat that its investigations and intelligence collection show the Chinese government represents “the most prolific transnational repression perpetrator” abroad, including in the United States, targeting activists, dissidents, and minorities in the Chinese diaspora.
Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told The Diplomat in an emailed comment last month that the government firmly opposes the U.S.’ “unwarranted denigration and smearing” against China.
“The accusation of ‘transnational repression’ is totally made out of thin air. The U.S. attempt to hype up [the] ‘China threat’ and tarnish China’s reputation is doomed to fail,” wrote Liu.
“Now, the Uyghurs are very, very careful. They don’t want to socialize even if they used to, because they are afraid,” said Omer Kanat, co-founder of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, an advocacy group.
“Everybody is very scared to speak openly and talk about the situation.”
Last year, Representatives Chris Smith, a Republican, and Jim McGovern, a Democrat, introduced a Transnational Repression Policy Act. If passed, the bill would give transnational repression an official definition as tactics deployed by foreign governments to “reach beyond their borders to intimidate, silence, harass, coerce, or harm individuals,” including political dissidents, activists and religious and ethnic minority groups.
Several experts said that beyond diplomatic engagement, U.S. authorities should instead prioritize doubling down on the enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. U.S. consumers still find goods made with raw materials sourced from Xinjiang, noted Yaqiu Wang, a fellow at the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations and former director for China research at Freedom House.
Sophie Richardson, former China director at Human Rights Watch, said that members of Congress should refuse to participate in formalities during Xi’s reciprocal visit to Washington in September.
“Demonstrating some real political opprobrium on the occasion of something like a state visit will be a test of whether people who are concerned about these issues are willing to go a bit further,” Richardson said.
Some Uyghurs, including Hudayar, believe the only way to protect Uyghurs is for the region to completely separate from China. It’s a cause he’s made sacrifices for.
“I personally don’t want to keep living out of my parent’s basement, but if I stopped doing this [advocacy] full time and got a normal 9 to 5 job, then I wouldn’t be able to do this,” Hudayar said. “I’m not going to give up my dream of serving my people and freeing my country for 50K a year.”
Tahir Imin, who works odd jobs including home remodeling and translation to fund the two Uyghur news outlets he runs, said that the U.S. diaspora should instead turn its attention to personal and professional development.
“If we don’t have famous sportsmen, musicians, entrepreneurs – our community would collapse. The foundation of the Uyghur cause is the Uyghur people themselves, not any government,” Imin said.
“If we cannot be strong enough as soon as possible, we’re just gonna die. Our destiny is in our heart, in our hands.”
