Akida Pulat has not spoken to her mother in eight years. This Mother’s Day was her eighth without Rahile Dawut, the renowned Uyghur anthropologist and folklorist who disappeared into Chinese state custody in 2017. Dr. Dawut devoted her career to documenting Uyghur shrines and preserving Uyghur cultural memory. For that work, the Chinese government sentenced her to life in prison.
Her case is not unique, as I wrote for The Diplomat last year. Across the Uyghur diaspora in the United States, families are living with the same cruel separation: their relatives, including many of the most respected Uyghur intellectuals of their generation, are imprisoned by the Chinese government. Jewher Ilham, the daughter of Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, who was handed down a life sentence in 2014, has campaigned for his release ever since. Tumaris and Kamaltürk Yalqun have also spent years advocating for their father, Yalqun Rozi, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison, reportedly for his work as a literary critic and textbook editor.
The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) has documented at least 11 wrongfully detained or imprisoned Uyghur scholars and cultural leaders with immediate family members in the United States.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping is an opportunity to end this travesty. He should use all available leverage to demand the release of wrongfully imprisoned and disappeared Uyghur intellectual and cultural leaders, especially those with close relatives in the United States.
Summits between U.S. and Chinese leaders are crowded with competing priorities from trade to security and technology, and more. But human rights cannot be treated as a side issue. For Uyghur-American families, these cases are urgent and unresolved.
China’s persecution of Uyghur intellectuals is central to its policy of crushing Uyghur religion, language, and identity. Beijing has targeted professors, poets, publishers, artists, religious scholars, entrepreneurs, and cultural leaders because they preserve a people’s memory and pass it to the next generation. By locking them away, the Chinese government seeks to control not only Uyghur political life, but Uyghur culture itself.
Rahile Dawut is a scholar of Uyghur folklore and sacred sites. Ilham Tohti is an economist who advocated dialogue and understanding between Uyghurs and Han Chinese. Yalqun Rozi helped compile Uyghur literature textbooks. Their work was peaceful, academic, and, at the time, state-approved. Yet under Beijing’s repression, even documenting Uyghur heritage is now treated as a crime.
The scale of China’s campaign to silence Uyghur intellectuals is staggering. Half a decade ago, the UHRP documented at least 312 intellectual and cultural elites who have been held in some form of detention by the Chinese government. The true number is certainly higher, amid a near-total communications blackout and harsh punishment for anyone caught smuggling out information from the Uyghur homeland.
The Trump administration often speaks of “peace through strength.” Strength is not measured only by tariffs or military posture. It is measured by whether the United States is willing to defend its citizens, residents, and values, even when doing so is difficult. If Trump sits across from Xi and fails to raise these urgent cases, Beijing will read that omission not as pragmatism, but as weakness.
This is not a distraction 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 cases is not about charity for foreigners. It is standing up for the United States and making clear that Beijing cannot abuse American families without consequence.
The Chinese Communist Party is using torture and a 24-7 surveillance state to force Uyghurs to live and think in line with totalized loyalty to the state, and assist the state in erasing their distinct identity. The United States must not make that erasure easier by treating their freedom as secondary.
At this week’s summit, Trump must demand their release and make clear that any serious effort to stabilize China-U.S. relations must include justice for those who are unjustly imprisoned.
See The Diplomat’s profiles of “Detained Uyghur Intellectuals” here.
