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.

Full essay : If the global community can’t stop China’s atrocities against the Uyghurs, it must help us keep our culture alive in exile.