Excerpt from Waiting to Be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

One

A Phone Call from Beijing

I keep returning to the first day of 2013.

That evening, I received an unexpected call from Ilham Tohti, an economics professor at Beijing's Central University for Nationalities. It had been years since we'd talked. He was at a Uyghur restaurant behind the university, celebrating the new year over dinner with a mutual friend of ours from Beijing.

After exchanging pleasantries, Ilham declared: "Xi Jinping has taken power. Things will get better for us now. Don't lose heart, and let our friends in Urumchi know that they should feel optimistic." Ilham was in an excellent mood. When he said things would get better, he was referring to Uyghurs' rapidly deteriorating political circumstances.

While today it's clear how absurd it was to expect any good to come to Uyghurs from Xi Jinping, at the time numerous Uyghur intellectuals cherished such hopes. Some liberal Han intellectuals likewise suggested that Xi might turn out to be relatively liberal. Given the lack of transparency in Chinese politics, the political inclinations of new leaders were often subject to speculation.

Xi's father, Xi Zhongxun, had been the ranking Communist Party official in northwest China soon after the party took power, and had criticized repressive state policies in the Uyghur region. Uyghur intellectuals preferred to think that Xi Jinping would follow in his father's footsteps on the Uyghur issue. These were hopes born of desperation, a battered community's daydream of better treatment by its colonial rulers.

I had met Ilham Tohti in the early 1990s at Central University for Nationalities (as it was then known), where I was finishing my bachelor's degree and Ilham was studying for his master's in economics. Ilham was an immensely energetic and loquacious man; he spoke quickly, as if his head was packed with words and he was rushing to get them all out. When we ran into each other on campus, he would begin talking excitedly on the spot as professors and students passed by. Once Ilham got started, he was hard to stop, especially on his favorite topic, the economy and demography of the Uyghur region.

Ilham would go on to become perhaps the most prominent dissident Uyghur intellectual in China. In the mid-2000s he founded a Chinese-language website called Uyghur Online, where he published articles defending Uyghurs' legal rights. Ilham argued that the Chinese government's own autonomy policies were not being implemented in the Uyghur region; that the Production and Construction Corps in Xinjiang functioned as a lawless state within a state; that the rapid influx of Han settlers was making the region's indigenous communities into minorities in their own homeland; that Uyghurs faced crushing unemployment; that the Uyghur language had been marginalized in the educational system.

A central goal of Uyghur Online was encouraging healthy dialogue between Han and Uyghurs and strengthening interethnic understanding. The website became a hub for like-minded intellectuals and students-Uyghurs, Han, and others-and became increasingly influential abroad. My cousin had introduced me to Uyghur Online; he told me that numerous young Uyghurs had become active readers and that they often debated what they read on the site.

Needless to say, Ilham Tohti's dissenting views drew the attention of the Chinese government. The police regularly invited him to "tea," a euphemism for taking someone for an informal warning or questioning. During some sensitive periods, like the 2008 Beijing Olympics or visits by Western leaders to Beijing, police would take Ilham's family for a monthlong "vacation." In 2009, following the government's declaration that Ilham bore responsibility for the July violence in Urumchi, he and his family disappeared. People assumed Ilham had been arrested. But after a month and a half of informal detention in the Beijing suburbs, he and his family were allowed to return home.

From Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman. Copyright © Tahir Hamut Izgil, 2023. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House LLC.