Abduweli Ayup is writing books for exiled Uyghur children

Abduweli Ayup is a Uyghur linguist, language teacher, and champion of mother-tongue education. He was born in Kashgar in 1973. He studied at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing in the late 1990s, and went on to do a master’s degree in linguistics at the University of Kansas.

Then he returned to Xinjiang, where he opened a chain of Uyghur-language schools, which he hoped would nurture a new generation of Uyghur poets, musicians, and keepers of his people’s traditions. But in 2013, he and two business partners were arrested on charges of “illegal fundraising.” He was released the following year, but his detention on trumped-up charges, like the 2013 airport seizure of economist Ilham Tohti, was an early sign of the repression that was in store for Uyghurs.

Abduweli Ayup is now based in Norway. His latest effort to keep the Uyghur language alive and vital is a series of books for first graders and upward, featuring stories of birds, prickly hedgehogs, troublesome lynxes, mountains, deserts, ancient forests, and faraway rivers. The series that aims to fuel a love for the language of home among exiled Uyghur children. He has just published the sixth book.

The campaign to kill off Uyghur language and culture

Before Abduweli Ayup was forced to flee his homeland in 2015, the writing was already on the wall for native Uyghur education in Xinjiang. His 2013 arrest was intended to stop his Uyghur-language schools from operating, three years after a government campaign for “bilingual education” (双语教育) outlined in the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Mid Long Term Education Reform and Development Plan 2010–2020.” The plan called for all ethnic minority high school graduates to “basically have a skilled grasp and use” of spoken and written Mandarin by 2020, and was designed not to keep the Uyghur tongue running in parallel with Mandarin Chinese, but to eventually squeeze it out entirely.

But in 2017, the bilingual education policy was replaced by Mandarin-only “national language education” (国语教育). Uyghur was now completely off the table. Uyghur teachers became cleaners and caretakers, academics, writers, and students were rounded up, and authors of primary school textbooks were hounded for special treatment.

Historian David Brophy describes the CCP’s “multidimensional assault on Uyghur society” as not unlike a “classical Stalinist purge” when referring to Party members rounded up for their “two-faced” loyalty. Among the casualties of the campaign were editors of Uyghur-language school textbooks. In 2021, Sattar Sawut, the director of the Xinjiang Education Department, was given a suspended death sentence with a two-year reprieve for assembling like-minded “separatists” to compile and publish textbooks to “split the country.” They were accused of preaching “ethnic separatism, violence, terrorism, and religious extremism” for over 13 years. At least five editors were given lengthy jail terms. This was despite the fact the books had been produced in a state publishing house and had official approval.

Once the “two-faced collaborators” were dispatched, Xinjiang primary school books were revised. In 2018, scholar Joanne Smith Finley found new books on government bookstore shelves that were “stripped” of Uyghur markers. Han Chinese culture and social life, together with Han facial features, clothing, names, literature, folklore, and poetry predominated. Those of the Turkic races were almost absent.

A signature policy of Xí Jìnpíng’s 习近平 has been to sinicize the Western regions, to “reeducate” all those who could be corralled into camps, and to rid society of “pernicious” and “splittist” influences. Children have also become targets. Some 500,000 children of parents who were detained have been taken away and raised in orphanages. Reports coming from these boarding schools show poor conditions, and children immersed in Han Chinese language and culture while denied the opportunity to learn Uyghur language and cultural practices.

Exiled families are distraught. Istanbul is full of single husbands and wives whose partners never made it out, and parents who made it out together fingering photos of the children they were forced to leave behind. “Will I even recognize them if I see them again?” asked Nafisa and Ilham, speaking to The China Project from Turkey. They could only get passports for three of their children as they fled in 2017; the other two were left in the care of aunts who were arrested. The children were removed from them. “Will we even be able to speak to each other? Will they know they are Uyghur?”

In her paper presented as evidence of genocide to the Uyghur Tribunal in London 2021, Julie Millsap, formerly of Campaign for Uyghurs, quotes Article 30 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whereby each child has the right to “enjoy his or her own culture, to profess his or her own religion, or to use his or her own language.”

The campaign against Uyghur culture, says Millsap, is not characterized by wailing and cries of fear, but of silence. “Genocides like that of the Uyghurs are defined in part by the absence of a spoken word in an indigenous tongue,” she reports. Children are forbidden to speak Uyghur, students chatting after class are chided for not speaking the “national language,” and elderly farmers and housewives are detained for reeducation until Mandarin trips naturally off their tongues.

Keeping Uyghur culture alive in exile

Raising children in the diaspora is no easy task. Abduweli Ayup managed to spirit away his own children, aged two and eight, when he fled persecution. They have little memory of the scenes he tries to evoke in the pages of his books. He concedes they must adapt to their new country, but neither does he want to raise foreigners in his own home. “We must fight to keep our culture alive,” he tells The China Project, “or why did we leave?”

He and other diaspora parents struggle inwardly, wanting to pass on Uyghur values, religion, and traditions on to their children, but knowing they cannot force the ideology of a land that is foreign to them. His books are intentionally written with a light touch. “My children will not be a version of me. They will be themselves,” he says. “They must discover what it is to be a Uyghur in Los Angeles, London, or Bergen.”

In writing the books, he has thrown himself into the world of a child, filling the heavily illustrated pages with his own stories of birds and fish and animals, and avoiding themes of death — on the orders of his nine-year-old daughter. A crafty lynx gets a shock after devouring what he imagines to be an exotic bird: a hedgehog in disguise covered in the feathers of birds he had dispatched earlier.

The books weave tales of particular birds around the cities they have left behind. He starts them off with simple stories. They learn how Uyghurs treat each other, what their homes look like, how they cook their food, and how they celebrate the milestones of life. They move on to Uyghur heroes, musical epics, the underground Karez freshwater canals of Turpan, one of the hottest places on earth, and other famous landmarks. He attempts to lure the readers back into the land they may never see with their own eyes. “Uyghurness is beautiful,” says Ayup. “Not through force but through love.”

George Orwell’s 1984 is a fitting metaphor for PRC assimilationist policies in Xinjiang, according to Smith Finley.

“Shall I tell you why we have brought you here?” asks O’Brien, Winston Smith’s captor at the Ministry of Love. “To cure you! To make you sane…We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them…We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.”

The “crushing” process is integral. “We shall crush you down to the point from where there is no coming back…Everything will be dead inside you…You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

But Abduweli Ayup is defiant in his efforts to keep his language alive for future generations. He is determined this will never happen to Uyghurs — at least to those in exile. “We will not be crushed,” he tells The China Project.