#FengSiyu was sentenced to 15 years of harsh imprisonment, solely because she was a student of #RahileDawut and studied Uyghur culture alongside her teacher. For an ethnic group, what could be a more cruel punishment than this? Those who study Uyghur culture face the same

#FengSiyu was sentenced to 15 years of harsh imprisonment, solely because she was a student of #RahileDawut and studied Uyghur culture alongside her teacher. For an ethnic group, what could be a more cruel punishment than this? Those who study Uyghur culture face the same punishment as Uyghurs themselves.

The following content is excerpted from a report by @hrichina:

In 2012, after graduating from Hangzhou Foreign Language School, Feng Siyu received admission offers from 17 top international institutions, including the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and Northwestern University. She ultimately chose to complete her bachelor’s degree in history at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and in 2016, she pursued further studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

While striving for academic excellence, Feng Siyu consistently maintained a spirit of social concern. In 2013, she spent her summer teaching in Yushan County, Jiangxi, where she taught local children poetry and music, introducing them to the works of Gu Cheng and classics like *Returning to the Fields*. Before leaving, she purchased books such as Charlotte’s Web and Exploring the Earth for the children.

Feng Siyu demonstrated extraordinary academic passion for Uyghur cultural studies, specifically attending a summer program at the University of Wisconsin to study the Uyghur language under Professor Gulnisa Nazarova, eventually achieving fluency. In 2017, her undergraduate honors thesis, From Istanbul to Kashgar: Ahmet-Kemal’s Educational Mission in Chinese Turkestan, 1885–1917, earned her the Alfred F. Havighurst History Prize at Amherst College, an award recognizing outstanding achievements in humanities research. That same year, she joined the Folklore Research Center at Xinjiang University, dedicating herself to in-depth field research on Uyghur women’s folklore and culture, with plans to pursue a PhD in history at Harvard University under Mark Elliott.

However, all these academic dreams were abruptly halted due to persecution by the Chinese Communist Party.

According to internal police intelligence from Urumqi obtained by The Intercept, in October 2017, authorities investigated Feng Siyu because her OnePlus phone contained “foreign software.” Absurdly, the same police report noted that this software was a pre-installed program on the smartphone, with no evidence that Feng Siyu had ever used it. Nevertheless, this young scholar was arrested in 2018 and subsequently vanished without a trace. It is believed that Feng Siyu was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2018 and may have been transferred from a Xinjiang prison to one in her home province of Zhejiang.

However, anthropologist Rune Steenberg believes the real reason for Feng Siyu’s arrest is likely tied to her academic work. In February 2017, Feng Siyu joined the Folklore Research Center at Xinjiang University, collaborating with the internationally renowned Uyghur ethnographer Rahile Dawut. Dawut, the center’s founder, had long been dedicated to studying Uyghur culture, including folktales, religious culture, and oral literature. However, this distinguished scholar disappeared in December 2017 and was secretly sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018. As Dawut’s collaborator and a researcher of Uyghur culture, Feng Siyu likely became a victim of the authorities’ crackdown on Uyghur cultural studies. The investigation into her phone’s software was merely a flimsy pretext for political persecution….

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