Concerns of ‘Eliticide’ as China imprisons Uyghur intellectuals to erase culture

Recently, a Uyghur folklorist and ethnographer, Rahile Dawut, missing since 2017, was revealed to be serving a life prison for “separatism,”.

Another Uyghur scholar, economist Ilham Tohti, who had vanished into Chinese custody years earlier was found to be experiencing the same fate on similar charges.

The Dui Hua Foundation, which revealed Dawut’s life sentence, noted estimates of as many as several hundred Uyghur intellectuals who have been detained, arrested, and imprisoned since 2016.

In early 2021, after years of cumulative reports on the internment camp system in Xinjiang, the United Nations, the United States, and the legislatures of several European countries, officially branded the treatment of Uyghurs as genocide or crimes against humanity.