In 2017, Ablajan, a Uyghur living in the United States, called his parents in Khotan, a city in the south of the Uyghur homeland. The conversation ended abruptly when his mother instructed him not to call again. She warned that any further contact could result in punishment for family members in China. In the eight years since he made that call, Ablajan has not spoken to his parents.

The long silence is not a breakdown in personal relations. It is the result of state control over Uyghur families. Uyghurs are a Turkic, and predominantly Muslim, people numbering approximately 12 million people in China and half a million in the diaspora. The Chinese administration refers to the Uyghur homeland as "Xinjiang", or "new frontier”, which is considered a colonial term by many Uyghurs. The toponyms “East Turkistan” and “Uyghur Region” are preferred by Uyghurs in the diaspora.

Beginning in 2016-17, as the Chinese state expanded surveillance and mass internment in the Uyghur Region – as purported counter-terror measures – contact between Uyghurs abroad and their families inside China collapsed. In 2020, a leaked Chinese government database cited Uyghurs’ “overseas communications” with relatives as a cause for internment. In a connected world, where long-distance communication is cheap and instantaneous, making a phone call has far-reaching consequences. 

As I researched a report on diasporic Uyghurs who have not spoken with family members inside China, Albajan’s story of state intimidation as the cause of this silence was not an exception. Uyghurs abroad have been cut off from parents, siblings, and extended family members for as long as a decade. The result has been unresolved grief for deaths in the family learned years after the fact, intergenerational trauma as children grow up without knowing grandparents, deteriorating mental health, and isolation from cultural expression rooted in family life. These harms unfold in a global context of increasing Islamophobia, in which Muslim communities are increasingly securitised, surveilled, and treated as collective threats: all conditions that normalise extraordinary state control over ordinary family life. 

Indirect contact with relatives, such as through mutual acquaintances, provoked retaliation by authorities. One Uyghur told me that following an innocuous and mediated exchange last year, security agents questioned his father-in-law. When contact was possible, some families experienced monitored or scripted phone calls that simulated “normality” while functioning as intimidation. Others were offered the possibility of a family reunion but only under strict conditions, such as agreeing to monitor Uyghur diaspora members or to disengage from advocacy. News, if it arrived at all, was often incomplete or years after the fact, and the ambiguity of not knowing has become a permanent condition. These are not dramatic, headline-grabbing abuses, but everyday systems of harm.

For many Uyghurs, family is a means through which the state reaches and attempts to control them, even across borders. Family members inside China are punished for the actions, speech, or presence of relatives abroad. This threat disciplines critical speech overseas, compelling silence not because Uyghurs lack grievances, but because having family in the Uyghur Region is a form of leverage. Yusup, originally from Kashgar and now living in Turkey, last spoke with his mother in 2018. Although Yusup isn’t sure if it was because of their conversation, she was detained the same year and spent six years in prison.

Despite years of separation, there was a refusal to give up on family bonds, even when communication was impossible.

The Chinese government has worked to advance a narrative that the Uyghur Region is stable, open, and ready for tourism and investment. At a January 2021 press conference, Zulhayat Ismayil, a spokesperson for the Xinjiang Information Office, claimed that “the communication between people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang and their relatives abroad is free and normal.” Yet this assertion stands in contrast to the experiences of the Uyghurs who spoke to me. As Yusup explained, “If I call my family, there will be problems.”

Why, then, does this intimidation and coercion continue with little intervention, especially since China’s transnational repression infringes on the sovereignty of other states? In part, it is because the world has moved on to other emergencies, leaving Uyghur families to manage what functions as a subtle tool of authoritarian control. However, the broader issue of  transnational repression is acknowledged as a growing challenge for democratic societies. A January 2026 analysis by the European Parliament documents how states increasingly deploy surveillance, intimidation, and family-based coercion to control diasporas abroad.

While international human rights law recognises the right to privacy and family life, including the right to communicate with relatives, under Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, there is a necessity to address situations in which individuals refrain from communicating out of credible fear that doing so will expose their loved ones to state violence: a state threat that is sometimes more implicit than explicit.

Throughout my conversations with diasporic Uyghurs, what stood out was not only loss and guilt, but also dignity. Despite years of separation, there was a refusal to give up on family bonds, even when communication was impossible. Reyhangül, whose family comes from Ghulja, said, “I’m glad I have a busy life now. Having kids, a husband, and work means I don’t feel lonely. However, while I am living my life, I know that my brothers and sisters are alive somewhere.” 

The Uyghurs who spoke to me did not ask for sympathy or exceptional treatment. Their request was simple, to contact their families without fear and to know whether their loved ones are safe.  

*All identifying details of the Uyghurs mentioned in this article have been removed for security reasons.