A disappearance in Xinjiang

Did not see this gripping feature on our imprisoned anthropologist colleague Rahile Dawut, until today. It says her elderly 80+ mother was allowed a prison visit, only through a screen. Unclear when. The Chinese Communist regime is so profoundly cowardly, it is hard to grasp, no-one can make sense of it. –Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

Source: Financial Times (4/26/24)
A Disappearance in Xinjiang
By Edward White

© Iris Legendre. Based on a portrait by Lisa Ross

A car pulls up outside an apartment building in Ürümqi. An elderly woman, in her eighties and frail, emerges and is helped into the vehicle. She is driven to a prison on the outskirts of the western Chinese city. She is taken inside a room where she is shown, via a screen, her 57-year-old daughter, the Uyghur anthropologist Rahile Dawut. Days later the old woman relays the encounter to her granddaughter, Akeda Paluti. “Your mother is doing well,” she says. “Try not to worry.”

Rahile’s life was devoted to the preservation of cultural diversity across the vast Xinjiang region, nearly three times the size of France and covering about one-sixth of modern China. For centuries, ancient Silk Roads wove past its mountain ranges, lakes, deserts and valleys. Today, officially called the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, it shares borders with Russia and Mongolia; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Rahile insisted on conducting gruelling fieldwork. She regularly travelled hundreds of kilometres from the capital Ürümqi to isolated villages to research the local Mazar — the shrines and tombs, sometimes attached to mosques, where saints have been buried or where miracles happened — as well as the farmers and craftsmen to understand the traditions etched into their daily lives. She recorded the oral histories that local leaders had for centuries offered to pilgrims; their poetry, music, folkways and other traditions.

Rahile showing video she shot to young people from the Tajik Youth Cultural Center in Guma, Xinjiang, 2005 © Studio Lisa Ross

Before Rahile, the few textbooks that included Uyghur oral histories gave scant recognition to where they came from or how they were collected. Rahile traced not only the region’s Muslim traditions but also pre-Islamic traditions of Buddhism and shamanism, finding song lines and rituals connecting the people of Xinjiang to their ancestors across central Asia and beyond. These myriad threads, she knew, were at risk of being lost for ever amid the encroachment of modernity and the steady creep of cultural homogeneity pursued by the ruling Chinese Communist party.

For years, Rahile worked this way. When she returned to her husband and daughter from weeks on the road, there was never enough room for all the material she had collected. Boxes of hard drives, discs and video tapes were stuffed under the beds. Sitting at her desk she wrote long into the nights, Uyghur folk music playing in the background, her dark eyes beneath a sweep of thick black hair. Every now and then, she sprang into dance.

Rahile was born in the first years of the Cultural Revolution, a period when religious leaders and places of worship were attacked as enemies of communism. While religious persecution was tempered in China under Mao Zedong’s successor Deng Xiaoping, the intellectual class in Ürümqi, which Rahile and her family were part of, were never seen as particularly devout in their observance of Islam. Not completely secular, their personal faith was mostly expressed through core moral teachings. She told her daughter it was important to always be honest, to always be grateful for each meal. Later, in private, she said she was uneasy about Pan-Islamic practices — women wearing black veils, people not eating outside — gaining traction in western China during the 2000s. These changes, she told friends, meant local Uyghur societies were losing some of their unique traditional values and becoming less distinguishable from Middle Eastern Islam.

Rahile, whose father was a university professor, read voraciously in her youth and became a star student. After marriage and giving birth to Akeda, her parents encouraged her to pursue graduate studies in Beijing while they helped look after the little girl. In the late 1990s, Rahile became the first Uyghur woman to gain a doctorate in folklore studies from Beijing Normal University.

One of Akeda’s earliest memories, at five or six, is of travelling with her parents by train for days for her mother’s graduation ceremony, a journey of nearly 3,000km east. They cycled around the Chinese capital, her mother pointing out some words on signs in English, encouraging her young daughter to memorise them. She was strict, but only by example. When they returned to Ürümqi the celebrations continued, and Akeda’s uncles and aunts gently teased the young girl about how hard she would need to study if she was to replicate mother’s success.

Rahile with her daughter Akeda at Nanshan, near Urumqi, c.2000. Akeda now works as a data analyst in Seattle © Akeda Dawut

Rahile’s research was considered groundbreaking by her peers and, increasingly, her methods were emulated by younger Uyghurs and visiting foreign researchers, who she selected, trained and nurtured. Preserving the culture and sharing it with the outside world was a meaningful pursuit, binding her students together. When they were not in the field, their time was spent almost entirely in one of two places, Room 604 of the Minorities Folklore Research Center Rahile had founded at Xinjiang University, or in Rahile’s home. Over dinners at Rahile’s table, she counselled her flock on everything from research methods, study grants, scholarships and job hunting to their love lives. “If you choose my field,” Rahile told her younger students, “you probably won’t be rich. But you’ll be happy.”

There were good years. Rahile’s professional output — books, journal articles, speeches — gained her international recognition. Her lectures drew audiences at Harvard, Cornell, Cambridge. In August 2008, speaking in her slightly high-pitched, near-perfect English, she gave the closing address at a conference she had helped organise in Ürümqi on Mazar culture across the Silk Road. Earnestly she thanked her “dear students” for their help, the international guests for suffering high airline prices at the time and Xinjiang University’s foreign affairs officials for their support. As she thanked the event’s sponsor, Japan’s Toyota Foundation, a rogue smile flashed across her lips. “In the future, if I ever have the chance to buy a car, I will make sure it’s a Toyota.”

But everyone knew Rahile was walking a dangerous tightrope. She was considered something of a master at it. Academics in Xinjiang were exquisitely aware of the omnipresence of the Chinese Communist party. Racism towards the Uyghurs was prevalent. Foreign academics visiting the Xinjiang capital saw how their local friends, esteemed scholars, “couldn’t get a fucking taxi at night”.

And yet, for two decades Rahile worked within the system, balancing the pursuit of research as well as it could possibly be done despite the darkening sensibilities and rising paranoia of the party-state. She was fastidious. She made sure her students did not engage with banned books, that they obtained consent for recordings, saw that they cut personal opinions and avoided direct criticisms of government policy from their dissertations.

Her greatest gift as an ethnographer, colleagues say, may have been her ability to “meet people where they are at”. This meant not just putting local, usually poor, worshippers, farmers and craftsmen at ease, but always giving face, due respect, to officials, and seeking the proper permissions for her travels, interviews and recordings.

Rahile recording an elder in Xinjiang, 2005. Her great gift, say colleagues, is her ability to put people at ease © Studio Lisa Ross

Like most academics in China, she was a party member, obtained her degrees from state universities and received funding grants from the Ministry of Culture. When the university ruled that her masters students must submit their dissertations in Chinese — after they had been completed in their native Uyghur — she paid for the work to be translated. When a foreign academic’s passport was confiscated, Rahile visited the local police station to retrieve it, assuring them the visitor was not an agent from a foreign state. When students were questioned or detained for possessing recordings of the Koran, Rahile could rescue them, assuring police they were students of religion and did not pose a threat.

Even so, by 2016, there were signs that Rahile’s own mood was darkening. She had long tried to encourage officials to reclassify Xinjiang’s religious traditions and places as part of China’s cultural heritage — something that could be preserved and protected, not forgotten or suppressed. Increasingly, the project was incompatible with the attitude in Beijing towards Uyghurs and its hardline policies. That year, after a flight she was on to Hong Kong was diverted through Chengdu, south-western China, local police came to her room in the middle of the night. While she was not apprehended, her harassment outside Xinjiang was another indicator of the spreading culture of persecution towards Uyghurs.

Rahile had often jokingly told her female students to think of the frequent and invasive body searches they encountered travelling in and around Ürümqi as a free massage. But then Rahile, tired and pushed, surprised one student by saying the searches were becoming too much. She said she wished she hadn’t returned from her last trip abroad. Another student came to her torn over whether to pursue her studies overseas or stay in Ürümqi to be closer to her family. “Just go,” Rahile told her. “We don’t know what will happen tomorrow.”

Then, in December 2017, Rahile was taken by the Chinese state. For the past six years, close friends and family have been frozen in time, replaying their final conversations with her over and over in their minds. None realised the imminent crisis she faced. Looking back now, it all seems so obvious.

Since the early days of Mao, Xinjiang has been a headache for the Communist party leadership in Beijing and the ethnically Han Chinese officials dispatched to govern in Ürümqi. Under Communist party rule there has been a huge flow of Han migration to the region, especially to the northern urban areas. Whereas in 1949, Han Chinese accounted for fewer than 7 per cent of the population, today the region of 25 million people is composed of 45 per cent Turkic Uyghurs, who are mostly Muslims, 40 per cent Han and 7 per cent Kazakhs, with the remainder made up of dozens of other ethnicities, including smaller Muslim groups.

For many years, the Chinese government was reluctant to publicly acknowledge threats posed by small pockets of separatism and religious extremism. But in the early 2000s, Beijing started to recalibrate its approach to the region, reflecting apprehension after the 9/11 attacks. In 2002, the State Council, China’s cabinet, published a document titled “East Turkistan Terrorist Forces Cannot Get Away with Impunity”, the first comprehensive public allegations of more than 200 incidents in the 1990s, including 31 acts blamed on terrorists. China soon ramped up co-operation with the US “war on terror” and subsequent international campaigns to eradicate transnational Islamic fundamentalism.

In 2009, after protests against racism by thousands of Uyghurs turned violent and were followed by brutal state reprisals, the government cracked down. Surveillance and limits on Uyghurs’ worship and travel were expanded. A series of deadly events followed, including an SUV ploughing into tourists in Tiananmen Square in 2013 and a 2014 knife attack at a train station in Kunming, southern China, which killed 29 people and injured about 140. Chinese security officials and experts started to express concern over the expanding geographic reach of the attacks, their frequency, sophistication and the rising number of casualties.

Ultimately it was Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012, who set the country on a course to rewrite the history of Xinjiang. Two years after taking office, he conducted an inspection tour of the restive region. Just hours after he left, explosives were detonated at Ürümqi’s train station and bystanders were attacked by two men with knives. Critics say that under China’s most powerful leader since Mao, Beijing not only crystallised its resolve to eradicate the threat of terrorism, but that the party’s high-level policy towards China’s non-Han minority groups shifted from promoting the “unity of the Chinese nationalities” to ensuring the “shared consciousness of the Chinese national community”.

This was a change from a cautious tolerance of diversity to the dogmatic pursuit of a unified Chinese nation, Xi’s new narrative sought to tie contemporary Chinese people, regardless of their true ethnicity, language or cultural background, to 5,000 years of a singular, glorious, Chinese civilisation. Under the banner of “anti-poverty”, the government built what it said was a network of vocational and technical training centres across Xinjiang. The state said these facilities were to boost the economic prospects of the region’s poorer people while also aiding in its deradicalisation efforts.

Western governments and human rights experts now say that these facilities were internment camps, which, at their peak from about 2017 to 2019, were used to detain hundreds of thousands — possibly more than one million — Uyghurs and other Muslims. They claim many prisoners were subjected to re-education and forced labour.