This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review’s contributors; read past entries here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.

“A new crackdown was clearly underway,” writes the Uyghur linguist Abduweli Ayup in the NYR Online, remembering the fifteen months he spent imprisoned in Xinjiang, China. “No one I spoke to knew why the police had abducted them. Each inmate was a bomb, filled with nausea, impatience, and boredom. One would ready the wick and another would light it.”

In August 2013 Ayup was detained without trial on charges of “illegal fundraising,” after organizing Uyghur-language programs for children, and moved among several severely overcrowded prisons in which he had to wear the uniform of a political prisoner. In his essay, developed from excerpts of a memoir-in-progress, he describes the cruelty and humanity of both inmates and guards, the misconceptions many in Han-majority China have about Uyghur history, and the subtle resistance necessary to keep the Uyghur language and culture alive, even inside prison. Ayup was eventually released after international political pressure, and he moved with his family to Norway, where he continues his fight to protect the Uyghur language in diaspora and, with an organization called Uyghur Hjelp, to document the repression Uyghur people still face in China.

We corresponded over e-mail this week to discuss the current situation in Xinjiang, Chinese surveillance, and the difficulty of maintaining international attention on the Uyghur cause.

Willa Glickman: Are you able to be in contact with people in Xinjiang? If so, what are you hearing about life there now? How tightly is communication abroad controlled or monitored?

Abduweli Ayup: Yes, I am in contact with people in Xinjiang, but I can’t talk to them when I want to. They must initiate because direct contact is not safe for them, especially after 2020 when I leaked some documents—the Karakax List—to the Western press. (Not to mention the near future, as there is another leaked document awaiting publication.) Nowadays, I am quite cautious, and I primarily talk to newcomers, refugees who left China in the last three years. I have documented fifteen of their cases. They tell me that Uyghurs are still suffering from fear, indoctrination, and surveillance, though the door-by-door mass arrests have stopped.

Anyone who is on a blacklist is tightly controlled: they cannot travel freely, their ID cards trigger security responses, their daily communications are monitored. There are several types of people in danger of falling onto a blacklist: the direct relatives of people who were sentenced to prison, people who frequently used foreign social media apps, people whose family members live abroad, and people born between 1980 and 2000, who were taught with the once official and now outlawed Til-Edebiyat Uyghur textbooks while in school. The whole generation is suspect because of the ideas in that curriculum. Its main author, Yalqun Rozi, has been sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

The Chinese government has long arms in the diaspora, too. Let me give you one example of people in the diaspora being controlled by Beijing and its affiliated organizations. We held a Uyghur cultural festival in Bergen on November 9, 2024. In the end, only two people came to perform, and no one showed up to watch. In Bergen, there are about three hundred Uyghurs and our organization invited them all individually. But they were each contacted by the Chinese embassy and warned not to participate in the festival—their family members back in China were threatened.

International attention was deflected from Xinjiang after China declared the reeducation camps “closed.” Since then, do you find that foreign governments or organizations have been as receptive to your work bringing attention to the conditions faced by Uyghurs?

No, Western governments and organizations are not receptive to our work anymore; it is not easy to make an appointment to meet with them. It’s difficult even at the local level. For example, I found that the Bergen public library system had installed Hikvision cameras in April 2024, which is the Chinese brand used in the camps and on street corners in Uyghur areas in China. I contacted the libraries, talked to the media, and talked to the Bergen municipal government. They promised not to buy any more cameras from Hikvision, but they are still in use in certain libraries. 

Since the pandemic, national governments have failed to act—economic recovery took priority. The US banned the import of goods made with forced Uyghur labor, but even though it has recognized that the Chinese government is committing genocide, it hasn’t actually pushed for action to solve the crisis. While it might be difficult to help the people in the prisons and camps directly, the US still hasn’t given protected asylum status to Uyghurs who have already reached its soil. The issue had already been absent from the UN, and now Trump has taken the US out of the Human Rights Council. It’s complete hypocrisy. 

It’s clear from your piece that the Uyghur language is harshly repressed in schools. In what other ways does the state prevent the transmission of your language and culture?

The Uyghur language is banned in schools, hospitals, and government buildings. Uyghur mosques are being shut down, Uyghur cultural activities are being banned, and there are no places to speak and practice our culture. 

Uyghur culture cannot be transmitted to younger generations at home because of the fifteen-year boarding education system: three years of kindergarten, six years of primary school, and six years of high school. Once intended primarily for children with detained parents, there has recently been a significant expansion of this system, and now many Uyghur kids from ages three to ten have to stay at boarding school for five or six days each week—it varies by location. Kids from ages ten to eighteen have to stay at school for ten months out of the year. If the kids are from an “untrustworthy family”—meaning one in which family members have been arrested—they have to stay at school year-round, until their graduation. 

Even when they are at home, Uyghurs are surveilled. Cameras have been installed outside the doors of many people’s homes, and government minders often spend extended periods living with the families they’re watching. Uyghurs are made to install an app that tracks their communications, and even their children report on them. When children go back to boarding school after the weekend, they’re asked to say whether their family is practicing Islam or speaking Uyghur at home. This can downgrade their status to “untrustworthy.” Only on the street can you speak the language—but then again, on every street there are surveillance systems that can record your voice, take your picture, and record your movements. 

You are a poet as well as a linguist. Does that influence the memoir you are writing? 

As a trained linguist, I paid careful attention to the language used in detention facilities—that’s why I wrote about what we did when speaking Uyghur was banned! People were creative in the cells, and we communicated through songs. You cannot speak the language, but you can murmur songs and their lyrics, and you can make yourself understood that way. Some captives wrote on the wall, mysteriously and in secret, and they even drew to express their feelings. I write about language usage and power structures, the autocratic hierarchy in the cell, the words used by the oppressors—for example, the cell bosses speak like army commanders. The Chinese guards and cell bosses use fascistic, dehumanizing terms—they tell us to speak renhua, “human language,” for example—when they punish Uyghur prisoners. They reminded me of Nazis. I recorded all this in my memoir. 

Are there particular cases of people imprisoned in China that you would like to bring to international attention? 

One of my focuses is the ongoing campaign of house raids, confiscations, and book burnings. Three brothers—Ekber, Musajan, and Enwer Abliz—were arrested in October 2023 because they had a collection of books written in Uyghur in their home. Ekber and Musajan were sentenced to between eight and ten years in prison, and Enwer for two to three years. Two other Uyghurs, professor Arzugül Abliz (no relation) and her husband, Firqet Abdukerim, were arrested in the spring of 2022 for having Uyghur historical novels in their house. Their prison sentences remain secret. I want the international community to address this issue and ask the Chinese government to release them as soon as possible. Reading and keeping Uyghur books shouldn’t be criminalized.