FAIRFAX, Va. — Muslim Uyghurs living in the United States, more than 7,000 miles from their homeland in China, know that their actions as a diaspora community can put their families back in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in danger. Their fears of retaliatory attacks on relatives living in East Turkestan — what they prefer to call their region — by the Chinese government means they often cannot speak publicly about the human rights abuses committed against their people. Yet they have found creative ways to preserve their culture and stay close to their roots.
Qudus, 34, is one such Uyghur-American. He owns a restaurant in New York City dedicated to introducing Americans to authentic Uyghur cuisine. He agreed to speak with PassBlue on the condition that we do not use his real name or that of his restaurant. He has relatives back in Xinjiang and is afraid that any opinions he voices on the nationalist agenda of the Chinese government will put his family in the country at risk. It has happened before, he told PassBlue, when he was interviewed last year. His grandfather was visited by the police.
“The Chinese government is very powerful,” Qudus said in an interview last month. “I don’t want them to hurt my family members or my friends in my hometown. Anyone I know, they can hurt them.”
China, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, is its monthly rotating president in November. The Council does not discuss the Uyghur topic in the chamber, at least not publicly, although the matter is debated in other UN forums.
Targeting families of people in a diaspora is one way authoritarian governments keep their own citizens in check. The Chinese government uses this tactic well. In 2021, The New York Times reported how the relatives of Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist living in Norway, became a target of retaliation by Chinese state police because of his activism. Ayup’s brother in China was imprisoned, and Ayup’s niece died after she was harassed and forced to return to China from Japan. Ayup told the Times that he believed his niece died in a state detention camp.
The Muslim Uyghurs have been subjected to human rights violations by the Chinese government that some other countries, including the United States and Britain, have described as genocide. A report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2022 documented a range of abuses against the Uyghurs and other Turkic people living in Xinjiang Province.
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The UN report said that the human rights office started receiving allegations since 2017 from the region on the disappearance of Uyghurs into re-education camps, where they are forced to learn Mandarin and denounce their Uyghur heritage. The Chinese government has denied the allegations. Despite the dismissive response, activists, media and testimonies from Uyghurs who have managed to leave China continue to highlight the grave rights abuses being carried out against the ethnic minority community in Xinjiang.
A joint statement by Britain and 50 other countries released recently at a UN General Assembly committee on human rights violations in Xinjiang said that an independent assessment found evidence of arbitrary detention and systematic use of “invasive surveillance on the basis of religion and ethnicity.”
The statement noted: “The assessment concluded that the arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim minorities on a large scale in Xinjiang ‘may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.’”
Qudus is one such Uyghur who escaped China. He lives with his wife and parents in New York City. His main connection to his homeland is his boutique restaurant, he said. He cooks every meal served in the restaurant, a narrow space demarcated into three parts: an area with two rows of neatly arranged chairs and tables where customers eat; a counter with a computer where orders are taken; and the kitchen at the far end of the place. One can hear the clatter of pans and pots as Qudus fries and stirs his signature noodles.
“When I got to America I knew I was sick,” Qudus said, “because I have never experienced the kind of love that Americans have [for their country]. So I thought I could bring my culture and language here to let people know that there is a nation like mine still surviving. A lot of people [who come to the restaurant] ask questions about our culture and we educate them. We introduce our famous food, laghman, a soup and noodle dish, to them. They love it.”
Qudus’s parents left Xinjiang in the 1990s for Türkiye, but they eventually left for the US because Türkiye did not hold “real freedom” for them, he said. His family used to visit their homeland every year to see relatives and friends, but the trips stopped in 2015, when the Chinese government started cracking down on the Uyghur community. When Qudus’s grandfather died six months ago in China, the family could not go to the funeral because they worried they would end up in a detention camp for Uyghurs. His grandmother also died in Xinjiang from complications related to Covid-19.
“We lost everything because we cannot go back,” Qudus said. “We lost our house, the businesses we invested in our hometown, the retirement money [his parents] are supposed to get from the government. . . . We cannot take any of it because we cannot go back. They might say if you come back, you will get all of it, but if you do, you are gone. They are going to put you in the facilities.”
The Uyghurs have suffered various forms of oppression since 1949, when the China Communist Party declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China, but the latest harsh crackdowns on their freedoms started in 2017, when reports about Uyghur Muslims being forced into concentration camps emerged. Many reports by media and human rights groups have described over the years detainees in camps being forced to renounce their Uyghur culture, religion and language. But the Chinese government said the camps house petty offenders who are being taught vocational training.
Now it has become even more difficult for the minority group to leave the Xinjiang region. Security scrutiny has intensified at the local airport.
Arslan Hidayat, program director for the Campaign for Uyghurs, a nonprofit group that advocates for the ethnic minority population, said that his relatives were being held in state custody on bogus charges. China locks such people up, he added, to shield the world from the realities of what is happening in the region.
“It is to block information from going out,” Hidayat, a Uyghur born in exile, said. “Journalists cannot go into the Uyghur region to report on what is going on. The nutshell is to hide the truth. It is to keep the Uyghurs in line. Back in the day, you were able to go out and obtain passports, but this got much more difficult so that Uyghurs could not leave and testify to what was happening.”
Approximately 10,000 Uyghurs currently live in the US, according to the Uyghur American Association. Another 500 to 1,000 have been lingering in the US asylum system for at least two years. The separation from their families in Xinjiang is a relentless source of stress and anxiety, according to the Uyghur Human Rights Project, which promotes human rights and democracy for Uyghurs in China.
The US Senate, under the Trump presidency, passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, imposing sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for human rights abuses against Uyghurs in China. In September 2021, President Joe Biden proposed refugee admissions for 2022 that prioritized the admission of “at-risk Uyghurs,” but not many of them have been able to take advantage of the provision. The New York Times reported in 2021 that no Uyghur was admitted into the refugee system for two consecutive years.
Irade Kashgary, a 29-year-old Uyghur-American, co-founded Ana Care and Education, a language and culture school, with her mother seven years ago. The school, in Fairfax, Va., has 120 students. Classes are held on Sundays, when ethnic Uyghur children are introduced to their original language, dance and music. Kashgary’s mother, Sureyya, said the school was a response to the repression on Uyghurs’ literature by China.
Irade Kashgary, like Qudus, asked that her real name not be used in this article. (Her mother’s name is also a pseudonym for this article.) Irade Kashgary is marrying a man who is also related to a Uyghur family in Xinjiang. She is wary that her fiancé’s family could be targeted for reprisal from the Chinese government. She came to the US with her parents when she was five years old. Her father, a historian, was running from persecution, she said.
The repression of the Uyghurs’ language is especially painful for the community in China and the diaspora. Qudus said that his 15-year-old relative in Xinjiang was slapped by his Han Chinese teacher because he spoke Uyghur in class. Beijing has banned the language in schools, and many Uyghur books have disappeared from libraries and bookshops, Sureyya Kashgary said. In 2017, when China outlawed the Uyghur language across all levels of education, it said it wanted to have a “common language and writing system.”
“The Chinese government is burning our textbooks and putting a lot of our professors in jail,” Sureyya Kashgary said. “They are sending our teachers and doctors to the concentration camps and would not let us speak our language. All Uyghur schools are closed. This is what inspired me. We have a beautiful culture, language and writing. I would like to keep them all.”
Apart from cultural preservation, she said that her school, located near Washington, also serves as a community hub. Hidayat of the Campaign for Uyghurs agreed, saying that the school’s programs are an essential pushback against China’s control of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and overseas.
“It is a vital lifeline, and I will encourage everyone to support them,” he said.
Damilola Banjo is a reporter for PassBlue. She has a master’s of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. in communications and language arts from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She has worked as a producer for NPR’s WAFE station in Charlotte, N.C.; for the BBC as an investigative journalist; and as a staff investigative reporter for Sahara Reporters Media.
