Outrage at China’s life sentence for Uyghur folklore scholar Rahile Dawut

September 28, 2023 | The China Project | By Ruth Ingram

According to the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington, D.C., some 435 scholars and academics from Xinjiang have been muzzled, arrested, imprisoned, or simply disappeared in the midst of the greatest crackdown on academic freedom in China since the Cultural Revolution, the period of political upheaval from 1966 to 1976 that shut China’s university system and sent a generation of Chinese scholars to toil in the countryside.

Omer Kanat, the executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, a documentation and advocacy group in Washington, D.C., said he was devastated “on an intensely personal level” to learn of Dawut’s sentence.

“Rahile Dawut is not a political person, but she is a representation of Uyghur culture,” Kanat told The China Project. “Her dedicated career as an anthropologist should never have made her a target.”

Read the full article: https://thechinaproject.com/2023/09/28/outrage-at-chinas-life-sentence-of-uyghur-folklore-scholar-rahile-dawut/