For the past decade, an uncrossable distance has separated me from my daughter.
She is in the Uyghur homeland — what China’s government calls Xinjiang — living under Beijing’s totalitarian drive to erase our culture. I am in exile, having fled nine years ago to avoid arrest. When I last saw her, she was a wide-eyed 6-year-old. She is growing up today without her father in a country that wants her to forget who she is.
Countless families like mine have been shattered by Beijing’s drive to forcefully assimilate Uyghurs into Chinese society. As many as one million Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities were sent to detention facilities between 2016 and 2019, forced to renounce Islam and subjected to Communist Party indoctrination. China says it closed those facilities, but Uyghurs still face coerced labor, mass surveillance and forced birth control. Many others have simply been imprisoned; I have reason to believe several of my relatives are among them.
When these atrocities first became known nearly a decade ago, Uyghurs assumed the global community would act to end one of the most sweeping campaigns of ethnic and religious repression since the Holocaust. For a time, the world heard us. A 2022 U.N. report said China may have committed crimes against humanity. Several countries declared it a genocide, banned goods made with Uyghur forced labor, and imposed sanctions on China. Yet China, which denies committing such crimes, has shrugged off the pressure and continued to extinguish our culture.
Uyghurs are now coming to a crushing realization: The world has failed us. If we are to survive as a people, Uyghurs in the diaspora must preserve in exile what China is erasing.
President Trump’s trip to Beijing in May brought this hard truth home. His first administration declared China’s policies a genocide. But there is no indication that this human rights catastrophe even came up during his meetings with President Xi Jinping of China, the man who set these policies in motion.
For centuries, Uyghurs maintained a distinct Eurasian identity. When I was young, my grandmother told me how our ancestors transformed our hometown, Poskam, from a desert into a living oasis: planting mulberry trees, digging irrigation canals and building our homes — a civilization conjured from sand. Our way of life blends influences from east and west yet remains unmistakably Uyghur, with our own literary, musical, architectural, philosophical and culinary traditions, some recognized by UNESCO as part of humanity’s shared heritage. Song has been especially important. My grandmother used to say our souls live in our songs. She sang while kneading dough to make noodles, braiding my aunt’s hair and watching the sun set over our mountains and deserts.
But our strong sense of self has complicated Beijing’s efforts to integrate us into the Chinese nation. Its answer is to extinguish what it means to be Uyghur. A Financial Times investigation published in May documented Beijing’s systematic dismantlement of the mechanisms through which Uyghur identity is passed down. This includes taking Uyghur children from their families and sending them to boarding schools where they are forbidden from speaking their mother tongue, and eradicating Uyghur-language publishing and literature.
Uyghurs in the diaspora, scattered mostly across the United States, Europe and Central Asia, have responded. Families have launched volunteer-run Uyghur-language schools for our children. Cultural associations keep alive traditions like the meshrep — our vibrant communal gatherings featuring food, song, dance and moral education. Others are assembling online repositories of Uyghur literature, historical documents, photographs and recordings before they disappear.
We are not the first people to stand on this precipice. Diaspora Jews helped preserve Jewish identity for centuries; exiled Tibetans are struggling to do the same, as have many other peoples throughout history.
But there is no road map, and the challenge is immense.
Much depends on sustaining our language, the irreplaceable medium of a culture. Yet I’ve seen a worrying pattern emerge across the diaspora: The first generation speaks the mother tongue. The second understands it, but increasingly responds in the local language. By the third generation, comprehension tends to fade. By the fourth, the language is often functionally dead, taking with it the bonds that connect people and communities. As a result, young Uyghurs are gradually disengaging from our gatherings and identity, which weakens our collective voice and, ultimately, our capacity to keep fighting.
We lack some of the basic tools needed to turn this around. Many of the top Uyghur scholars, writers, artists, historians and linguists — people critical for cultural preservation — are silenced or imprisoned in China. The homegrown Uyghur schools and community organizations in the diaspora that are trying to fill that void operate mostly in isolation, under severe funding and manpower constraints.
I founded the digital literary magazine Tupraq in 2024 and the news and commentary site Uyghur Post last year to help keep our written word alive. Both survive on small donations and volunteers. I have had to work multiple jobs to keep them afloat, and have repeatedly come close to shutting down.
Meanwhile, Beijing is working to undermine efforts like ours. Human rights groups have documented a broad campaign of intimidation by China aimed at silencing Uyghurs abroad, and digital security watchdogs say China-linked actors are likely behind cyberattacks against Uyghur websites. Uyghur Post has faced relentless attacks, forcing prolonged shutdowns. Fake sites have sprung up, apparently to confuse readers and erode our credibility. Similar challenges are reported by Uyghurs engaged in cultural preservation around the world.
Pressure on China to end its atrocities against Uyghurs must never relent. But what the Uyghurs need from the global community is changing. If the world can’t stop what’s happening in China, governments and private organizations must recognize that a unique slice of human culture faces extinction — and provide funding and institutional support for the Uyghur communities within their borders who are fighting to prevent that.
I do this work for my daughter. I wake up every morning wondering who she has become, whether she remembers the songs I sang to her. I realize I may never see her again. But what we build in exile may keep fragments of the Uyghur soul intact so that young ones like her can reclaim them someday.
Tahir Imin is a Uyghur scholar and writer who was previously imprisoned by China’s government. Based in Washington, D.C., he is the founder of the Uyghur Post news website and the Uyghur Freedom Institute.
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