AAA Renews Its Call for the Release of Dr. Rahile Dawut

October 6, 2025

Ambassador David Perdue
U.S. Embassy in Beijing
No. 55 An Jia Lou Lu 100600
Via email: vog.etats@SCAgnijieB

Dear Ambassador Perdue,

The American Anthropological Association has written to the embassy in 2018 and in 2021 concerning the fate of Dr. Rahile Dawut, a celebrated anthropologist and renowned scholar from China’s Uyghur ethnic minority group. We now write again concerning the life sentence she was given in 2023.

Dr. Dawut is a trailblazing professor and ethnographer from the Uyghur ethnic group in far-western China who documented the religious and cultural traditions of her people. Over the years, the Chinese had funded her research. She had met President Jiang Zemin in 2000 at a conference where she represented Uyghur scholars. And one of the last projects she worked on before she disappeared had received funding from the National Social Science Foundation of China. Unfortunately, it was precisely the breadth and significance of her work that ensnared her as the Chinese government continues its campaign of eliminating the Indigenous cultural systems and societies in the Uyghur and Kazakh regions. Her conduct, the peaceful exercise of the right to academic freedom, is expressly protected under international human rights instruments including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which China is a signatory.

The fate of the Uyghurs is a continuing human rights crisis, characterized by China’s systematic and multi-faceted persecution, which many governments and human rights organizations have classified as crimes against humanity and genocide. Over one million Uyghurs have been extrajudicially detained since 2017 in internment camps that China calls “vocational training centers.” In addition to the US, numerous governments, including the UK and Canada, have recognized China’s actions as genocide or crimes against humanity. Late last year, the European Parliament and the US renewed pressure on China at the UN Human Rights Council.

As the world’s largest professional and scholarly society for our field, we stand for advancing understanding of the human condition through anthropological research, and for applying this understanding to addressing some of the world’s most pressing problems. Anthropologists have a long and rich tradition of reporting on distinctive cultural perspectives, allowing people to give voice to these perspectives in their own words.

Dr. Dawut, who wrote and lectured widely on Uyghur folklore and traditions, is far from being a threat of any kind. She was arrested because she is an outstanding woman scholar, and it is evident their methods of disappearing people are designed to inflict maximum hurt and destruction within the Uighur community and, indeed, the world at large.

We strongly urge the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to continue doing what you can do to have Dr. Dawut released, along with the many thousands of other disappeared scholars/intellectuals and other camp detainees and bring a halt to the state program destroying their peoples’ cultures. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if we can provide additional information.

Sincerely,