NEW YORK - Joanne Smith Finley, a British expert in Uyghur studies, will never forget when she learned that her dear friend Abdurehim Heyit was detained in 2017, writes Liam Scott in Foreign Policy.
“When I heard he had been interned, I was absolutely distraught. I just collapsed into tears,” she said.
“I was imagining awful things. I was imagining that they would break his hands. Heyit’s detention was part of the ongoing crackdown and human rights abuses in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, which have particularly targeted Uyghur intellectuals, artists, and writers.
Uyghur studies scholars Elise Anderson and Timothy Grose both remember where they were when they learned that their longtime mentor and friend, the internationally acclaimed Uyghur folklorist Rahile Dawut, had disappeared in 2017. And academic Darren Byler remembers when he learned that his mentor, the famed Uyghur writer Perhat Tursun, was detained in 2018.
“When I’m feeling strong,” Finley told Foreign Policy, the sadness she feels about her many Uyghur colleagues and friends who have been persecuted and detained is a motivator. But “sometimes it’s debilitating.”
The Western academics who have devoted their lives to the study of Uyghur society and Xinjiang, where the Chinese government is committing what the U.S. government says constitutes genocide, are experiencing personal trauma and professional difficulties at the same time as they advocate and work for their detained colleagues and friends. A sense of loss has been matched by a sense of duty.
Due to their work on the region and the human rights crisis happening there, many of them face harassment and retaliation from the Chinese government—in the form of sanctions and lawsuits, denied visa applications and travel bans, online trolling, and state media smears.
Among these Western scholars, no one knows harassment like Adrian Zenz, the Minnesota-based German anthropologist who has produced groundbreaking research on the Uyghur genocide. He’s often smeared in state media outlets such as the Global Times, and he’s a regular target of trolls on Twitter, sometimes receiving upward of 1,000 comments on posts.
