His dictionaries taught Chinese to the Uyghur world. Then he was taken away
Hüsenjan was a Chinese state employee — and member of the Chinese Communist Party — tasked with creating dictionaries for the Uyghur language. His work couldn’t save him.
Window on Xinjiang
This monthly Xinjiang column is written by Darren Byler, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he studies the technology and politics of urban life in Chinese Central Asia and around the world. His writing has appeared in Logic, Guardian, and ChinaFile among other publications.
More Posts
‘Heaviness in the stomach’: A Uyghur daughter alone in America on her birthday during a pandemic
“I started to see a sadness in their eyes. They had become sad. They didn’t know what to do, so they just accepted it.” Post-disappearance...
Sealed doors and ‘positive energy’: COVID-19 in Xinjiang
Although there have only been several dozen reported cases of COVID-19 in Xinjiang, lockdowns within the region have created widespread forms of stress and panic.
The disappearance of Perhat Tursun, one of the Uyghur world’s greatest authors
Perhat Tursun is the preeminent modernist Uyghur author, a self-proclaimed Kafka character whose novels are among the most influential in Uyghur society. He was disappeared at the height of his powers by the Chinese state, a victim of the government’s re-education campaign in Xinjiang.
‘The darkness only deepens’: A decade of stories of loss in Xinjiang
“It took me years to feel normal again. Actually, I still don’t feel normal.” “I realized that the Chinese Communist Party’s attitude toward us had...
A Xinjiang scholar’s close reading of the China Cables
“Never allow escapes, never allow trouble, never allow attacks on staff, never allow abnormal deaths…” Darren Byler analyzes the 25 key points in the Chinese...
Ilham Tohti’s Sakharov Prize and the desecration of Uyghur society
Ilham Tohti was famous for pushing back against the material and social dispossession of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims. When even this moderate scholar was silenced five years ago, it signalled that there was no more space to publicly suggest ways to oppose the elimination of Uyghur culture. The Sakharov Prize honors the dignity of Uyghur social life and the way Ilham Tohti strove to protect it.
Xinjiang education reform and the eradication of Uyghur-language books
The “bilingual” education system introduced over the past decade in Xinjiang is better characterized as an attempt to transform minority education systems in the region...
How companies profit from forced labor in Xinjiang
Factories of Turkic Muslim internment, part of China’s reeducation camp system, are subsidized and directed by the state, and employ many former detainees at a fraction of minimum wage. Companies, both Chinese and foreign, are taking advantage.