China’s Genocide and the Eliticide of Uyghur Scholars

August 19, 2025 | The Diplomat | By Omer Kanat

On the night of July 29, 2018, Chinese authorities raided the home of Dr. Abdulqadir Jalaleddin, a celebrated Uyghur poet. Police placed a black hood over his head and took him away. Jalaleddin’s arrest was part of the state campaign to erase Uyghur identity, a key aim of the genocide against the Uyghur people.

While in detention, Jalaleddin wrote the poem “No Way Home,” memorized by fellow detainees and translated by one of his former students. The poem concludes:

In December 2017, Dr. Rahile Dawut, a renowned Uyghur ethnographer and the founder of a folklore institute at Xinjiang University, was planning to travel to Beijing. But before she could make the trip, Dawut disappeared. Five years later, in 2023, her family finally learned that she had been sentenced to life in prison for “endangering state security.” 

Seven years later, Jalaleddin and Dawut remain in incommunicado imprisonment. Their children in the United States do not know where they are, or what conditions they are being held in.

At a recent Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) event, Dawut’s daughter, Akida Polat, and Jewher Ilham, daughter of leading Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, spoke movingly of the pain of having parents serving life sentences. They also acutely diagnosed the deep loss to an entire people, when Uyghur intellectuals have been brutally silenced as part of the multiyear genocide by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP). 

Meanwhile, the world looks away. Universities and publishers of academic and scholarly work have a special responsibility to make academic freedom, and freedom of expression more generally, a condition of cooperation with institutions in China. 

This lesson was learned the hard way by Princeton University Press (PUP). In June, its director joined a Chinese government-sponsored tour of the Uyghur region, and issued a statement praising “the incredible power of Uyghur poetry,” while saying not a single word about the brutal treatment of Uyghur poets like Jalaleddin. This decision made PUP an “instrument of disinformation,” showing “shocking naïveté,” as noted in a roundup of the critical response published in The Uyghur Times.

In short: If the Chinese government succeeds in keeping Uyghur historians and poets locked away forever, the genocide succeeds in its aim of eradicating our civilization. To fight for their release is to fight the genocide. Conversely, to ignore the intellectuals languishing in prison is to normalize an ongoing cultural genocide in the Uyghur homeland, which we know as East Turkestan. 

The persecution of the intellectuals in East Turkestan must be recognized as a “new form of eliticide,” as UHRP first noted in 2021, and a strategy to “erase an ethnic identity,” as Austin Ramzy reported in The New York Times.

It’s time for the world to take stronger action. The U.S. and other governments need to publicly call for the release of Uyghur intellectuals, and work with allies to coordinate pressure on the Chinese government. Universities and publishers need to refuse cooperation with the institutions in China facilitating the persecution of the intellectuals. 

Jalaleddin and Dawut are just two of the many prominent Uyghur intellectuals China has silenced. In 2021, despite limited information available from our homeland, UHRP documented more than 300 Uyghur intellectuals, artists, and writers disappeared and detained in the Uyghur homeland. The total number is certainly much higher. Their fate? Decades-long prison terms, even life sentences. Some have been punished for work the Chinese government once approved and even commissioned, including writing state-sponsored textbooks now deemed subversive. 

By targeting the scholars and interpreters of our history, literature, and traditions, China is attacking the core of Uyghur identity. These intellectuals are the living memory of a people who have thrived for over a millennium at the crossroads of Eurasian civilizations. Uyghur poetry, folklore, and literature draw on Turkic oral verse, Persian literature, influences from the Arab world, and elements from East Asia and Europe to create something entirely our own. Erasing Uyghur culture is a deep loss, not just for the Uyghur people, but for humanity’s shared cultural heritage. By the same token, if the government can get away with locking up talented and creative artists and writers, it will succeed in shutting down our future living culture. 

Now Beijing presents a Potemkin version of Uyghur traditions, creating genocide-denying propaganda out of our heritage. A handful of our mosques may still stand, but inside they are empty. Our children are forcibly separated from their parents in state-run boarding schools where they are punished for speaking our language. Even their names are changed. Our language is restricted, our mosques and graveyards are bulldozed, and our books are burned. 

Without scholars like Dawut documenting our shrines, Tohti championing our human rights, Yalqun Rozi compiling our literature, and Husenjan Esqer recording our language, our culture risks becoming a fossil, preserved only for display rather than a living thing.

The U.S. has both the power and the moral obligation to act, especially when detainees have relatives who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have recognized China’s persecution of the Uyghurs as genocide and crimes against humanity. We urge the Department of State to publicly press for the release of detained Uyghur intellectuals by name, demand information on their conditions, and work with international partners to coordinate pressure on Beijing. No other nation has the power to hold China accountable. If the U.S. fails to act, the world will forget about us.

These actions are not just symbolic. Naming detainees matters. By showing that the international community is monitoring these cases, it can improve their treatment, prevent torture, and lead to release. Silence, on the other hand, consigns prisoners to permanent disappearance.

China wants the world to accept its genocidal policies, and forget the eliticide of Uyghur scholars. We cannot let this happen. It is an urgent imperative for governments and global scholarly communities to once again speak their names, demand their release, and hold China accountable.