第107案 | 阿布都卡德尔·加拉力丁Case 107 | Abduqadir Jalalidin
他是新疆师范大学文学院教授，研究中亚中世纪诗歌，写维吾尔语诗，把奥威尔的《动物农场》译成维吾尔语，参与编写维吾尔语文与文学教材。2018年1月28日，他的乌鲁木齐住所被搜查，文稿与电子设备被没收；1月29日晚约七、八点，国家安全警察把他从家里带走。此后八年又九个月，官方没有公布过任何指控、判决、关押地点或健康信息——没有一张纸。他的诗《无路可归》在关押中写成，被同监者背诵带出，2019年由他的硕士生约书亚·弗里曼译成英文登上《纽约时报》，2025年12月进了伦敦出版的诗集《Imprisoned Souls》。关于他的刑期，外界流传三种互不一致的说法：维吾尔援助组织名单作无期徒刑（无出处），2022年渠道消息作乌鲁木齐中级法院判十三年、刑满2031年1月28日（无官方印证），《寒冬》作2019年判十三年。本站三说并列、互不合并，本页「罪名与判决」栏的官方版本只有五个字：无公开记录。他的儿子在美国、女儿在日本，呼吁了八年，换来的官方回应是零。He was a professor in the College of Literature at Xinjiang Normal University, a scholar of medieval Central Asian poetry who wrote poetry in Uyghur, translated Orwell's Animal Farm into Uyghur, and helped compile Uyghur language and literature textbooks. On 28 January 2018 his Ürümqi home was searched and his manuscripts and electronic devices confiscated; at about seven or eight on the evening of 29 January, state security police took him from the house. In the eight years and nine months since, the authorities have published nothing — no charge, no verdict, no place of detention, no word about his health; not one sheet of paper. His poem 'No Road Back Home', written in custody, was memorised by fellow detainees and carried out; in 2019 his former master's student Joshua L. Freeman translated it into English for the New York Times, and in December 2025 it entered the London-published anthology Imprisoned Souls. Three incompatible accounts of a sentence circulate: a Uyghur support list records life imprisonment with no source given; a 2022 channel report gives a thirteen-year term from the Ürümqi Intermediate Court expiring 28 January 2031, with no official corroboration; Bitter Winter dates a thirteen-year term to 2019. This page archives all three side by side and merges none; the official entry in its 'Charge and Sentence' field is four words long: no public record. His son is in the United States and his daughter in Japan; they have campaigned for eight years, and the official response is zero.
Getting the name right first: one man, four spellings
The first lesson of the archive is the name. In the texts of different languages and different institutions, this case's subject wears at least four faces: the common English spelling Abduqadir Jalalidin, with Abdulqadir Jalaleddin found in some scholarly and human-rights texts; the Uyghur original, ئابدۇقادىر جالالىدىن; and two Chinese transliterations, 阿不都卡德尔·加拉里丁 and 阿布都卡德尔·加拉力丁 — the former in a case and biographical document of 24 November 2025, the latter the form used in the brief that commissioned this page. One man, four names, differing by a syllable or a character or two — a difference quite sufficient for a researcher to find him in one database and walk straight past him in another. This page's practice is therefore: the page name follows the brief's form; all four spellings are set side by side at first mention; the text thereafter uses "Abduqadir Jalalidin" throughout; and it is stated here that this is not a claim that the other spellings are wrong — an archive owes future searchers a concordance. For an enforced-disappearance case, variant spellings are no pedantry: one misspelled name can be one broken lead, and one of the things his family has done, over and over, for eight years of advocacy abroad, is to spell their father's name out again to every organisation and every journalist.
His birth information must likewise be written with its source grade attached: born 11 March 1964, on the English Wikipedia entry; this site retrieved no household register, university personnel file or other primary text to corroborate it, and the date is carried here at that grade. If the date holds, he was fifty-three when he was taken — a scholar at the height of his powers: the years of teaching, writing and supervising behind him had accumulated to the point of synthesis, cohort after cohort of graduate students had passed through his classroom, and he had reached the age at which a scholar of medieval Central Asian poetry might have been expected to build his life's reading into a system. This page will return several times to that age coordinate: taken at fifty-three, still unaccounted for at sixty-two. The last and ordinarily most productive stretch of an academic life has been removed entire — and removed in a manner that leaves no paper behind.
Who he is, in the most compressed sentence available: a professor in the College of Literature at Xinjiang Normal University, a scholar of medieval Central Asian poetry, a Uyghur poet, and a translator. Of those four identities, the first two were conferred by the establishment; the last two were conferred by language itself. The next sections take the four identities one by one — not to pad a biography, but because the factual layer of this case is thin by its nature: the state left him no case file that anyone can read, and what an archivist can pin down is only the complete life lived before he was taken, and the complete silence after. Both halves must be written in full. Without the first, the silence has no weight; without the second, the biography becomes obituary-style varnish — and he is still alive, at least in the only sense the record permits: no public record says he is not.
The scholar: medieval Central Asian poetry, and a lectern at Xinjiang Normal University
The core coordinates of Abduqadir Jalalidin's scholarly identity are a professorship in the College of Literature at Xinjiang Normal University and a research field: the poetry of medieval Central Asia. Unpack that field and its meaning is plain. Central Asia is one of the historical heartlands of Uyghur culture, and in the Middle Ages that land left behind a rich poetic inheritance — courtly and folk, religious and secular — written on parchment and paper and carried down the centuries by copying and recitation. A Uyghur scholar of medieval Central Asian poetry does the work of reading the texts at his own culture's sources back into intelligibility, explaining them, and teaching them to the next generation of students. In any normally functioning university this is among the most orthodox scholarship a literature faculty can house; and his career trajectory — teaching at Xinjiang Normal University up to the rank of full professor — shows that before 2018 the establishment's own evaluation of that work was positive. He had climbed, rung by rung, through the establishment's own review machinery to the top of its academic ladder. He was not a figure from outside the system, not a fixture of dissident lists, but a scholar of his own people who had reached the summit of the internal order.
The evidence boundary of this section must be written out with the same explicitness. In the public sources this site consulted, systematic documentation of the detail of his scholarly career is quite limited: no complete catalogue of his writings, no itemised list of his papers, no syllabus of his courses, no year-by-year record of his promotions was retrieved in any complete public text. This page does not fill those columns with conjecture: it invents no titles for his books, no scenes from his classroom, no recollections placed in the mouths of colleagues or students. What can be pinned is the spine: the university and the college, the professorial rank, the field of medieval Central Asian poetry, the dual creative identity of poet and translator, the part he played in compiling Uyghur language and literature textbooks, and the graduate students he supervised. The honesty of an archive sometimes consists exactly in this restraint. A scholar's public academic record ought to bulk large; that the outside world can now assemble only these few lines is partly a matter of era and language and the difficulty of retrieval — and partly the result of what happened to his name inside the walls after 2018, when it was removed entire from the public information of the university where he taught. Why his students, colleagues and scholarly community inside China fell collectively silent is not a matter this page will speculate on; it records only the phenomenon: the name of a full professor vanished from the public face of his own university.
Directly connected with that phenomenon is one rare institutional anchor left by the taking itself. On Radio Free Asia's reporting, staff of Xinjiang Normal University's security department confirmed to the station that Abduqadir Jalalidin's name appeared on a list of arrested faculty and staff. Weigh that detail carefully. It means his arrest was no isolated event but one line on a list drawn up at one institution in one period; it means the university's own security apparatus held such a list, and that the list could be asked about from outside. This page draws exactly two conclusions from it, and no more. First, his taking has an institutional paper trail of a kind — it was not a traceless, purely personal event. Second, the existence of the list is itself a key to the wholesale disappearance of Xinjiang's university intellectual elites from 2017 onward: how long that list runs, and what other names stand on it, lies beyond this case's scope. This page does not expand into a general history; it pins down only the fact that touches him directly — same university, same list.
Poet and translator: Animal Farm, in Uyghur
His second identity is that of a poet; his third, that of a translator; and in him the two are faces of one activity — writing in Uyghur, and bringing world literature into Uyghur. He is a Uyghur poet: so the case files of multiple human-rights organisations and of the PEN network record him, and on occasions including World Poetry Day 2024 PEN listed him among the imprisoned Uyghur poets (see the international-record section below). His poems were written in Uyghur, and readers outside the language have mostly met them in English translation. The most widely travelled of them was not composed at a desk and submitted to a journal: it is "No Road Back Home", written in custody and carried out of the high walls in the memory of fellow detainees. That poem's full chain of transmission is given its own section below.
On the translation side, the one achievement most consistently recorded across sources is this: he translated George Orwell's Animal Farm into Uyghur. This page carries the fact at the grade of multiple sources' common record; the year of publication, the publisher and the print run of that translation are not given consistently in any source this site retrieved, and are not supplied here. The fact itself, however, deserves a page of the archive's attention, because it states the man's spiritual coordinates with almost no need for commentary. Animal Farm is the twentieth century's most famous political fable: a story, told through animals, of how a totalitarian order is born — of how the slogans of a revolution become a new oppression, and the promise of equality becomes the rhetoric of privilege. A Uyghur scholar translated that book, sentence by sentence, for readers of his own mother tongue. Translation is never mere linguistic transfer: what a translator chooses to translate is itself a statement. What he chose was not a safe technical manual, not harmless landscape prose, but the most famous political allegory of the century. Years later, when state security police took the translator himself from his home — and when the authorities would not state even the reason for taking him — the episode reads, in the archive, with a resonance that needs no underlining from this page. The judgement is left to the reader; the facts are pinned: the translator was him, the book was Animal Farm, and the language he translated it into was Uyghur.
The translator's identity has another face as well: scholarly and pedagogical translation. A scholar of medieval Central Asian poetry necessarily works for decades between classical texts and the language of modern scholarship; and a scholar who helps compile Uyghur language and literature textbooks is doing the work of bringing learning down into the classroom. Poet, translator, textbook compiler — together these describe the most characteristic kind of node in a people's chain of cultural transmission. He wrote poems: production. He translated books: import. He compiled textbooks: transmission. Hold that structure in mind, because what befell Xinjiang's intellectual elites after 2017 was aimed precisely at such nodes: the people who produce, the people who import, and the people who transmit were lifted together from their lecterns and their desks. International scholarship later gave that wholesale removal a name — "eliticide" — and in 2025 the Uyghur Human Rights Project's campaign and writing brought the word to this case in particular (see below). This section establishes only the premise: to understand his taking, first understand which chain he stood on.
A textbook line: the Uyghur language and literature textbooks
The spine fact is a single sentence: Abduqadir Jalalidin took part in compiling Uyghur language and literature textbooks, and that textbook line is the same line as the later textbook case of Yalqun Rozi. This page's handling of that sentence is graded. That he participated in compiling textbooks is recorded in the common record of multiple case files and may be taken as verified. The characterisation "the same line" derives from the framing of case research around these matters: it refers to one and the same system of Uyghur textbook compilation and review, and to one and the same prosecutorial logic by which compilers were later pursued for the content of textbooks — and it is carried here with that attribution. It is not written as "he co-compiled such-and-such a specific volume together with Yalqun Rozi": whether the two men sat in the same editorial group, and which volumes or lessons each worked on, is a matter of no public record, and this page makes no such assertion.
Why compiling textbooks could become a "line" of cases deserves to be set out in the archive's manner. In Xinjiang's education system, Uyghur language and literature textbooks are no ordinary schoolbooks: they decide in what texts a generation of Uyghur students will come to know their own language and literature — which classical poems, which folk tales, which modern writers' works may enter the classroom. To sit in the compiler's chair is therefore to occupy the most consequential, and most establishment-trusted, position in the transmission of a people's culture: only vetted scholarly cadres of that people were ever seated there. After 2017, the compilers along that line were pursued retrospectively and in batches: textbooks that the state itself had organised, reviewed, published and used for years were re-characterised, and their compilers prosecuted for their content. The Yalqun Rozi textbook case is the line's best-known instance in the international record. Jalalidin's connection to the line is recorded by this page, at spine grade, as follows: he was one of the scholars who took part in compiling Uyghur language and literature textbooks, and his taking occurred within the period and the context of that line's wholesale reckoning. Whether the authorities ever charged him over textbook content is a different question — and on it this page is strict: the authorities have never published any charge against him at all, and this page will not promote a background coordinate into a statement of his "offence". To write background as charge is the archive's cardinal sin; the limit is set here, in the open, with its reason attached.
The line carries one further, colder implication, which the commentary section will develop; the factual structure is recorded here. A set of textbooks passes, from compilation through review to publication and distribution, through gate after gate of the education administration; every character a compiler wrote was, in its day, stamped by the system. Years later, the same characters become the evidence for prosecution — and not one of the hands that stamped them is ever called to account. Those taken away are only the hands that wrote. That structure holds in the Yalqun Rozi case; it holds in the background of this case too. And this case is darker by one layer than the textbook case proper: the Rozi case at least has a charge that can be looked up. This case does not even have a rumour-proof charge. It has only rumours.
His students: the pupils he trained, and Joshua L. Freeman
Half of a professor's scholarly life is written on paper; the other half is written in his students. Abduqadir Jalalidin supervised a number of graduate students — the fact is on the public record; their full number and names, apart from the one man treated below, were not retrieved by this site in any complete list, and are not supplied. That one man, as it happens, forms the single most important link in this case's international chain of transmission: Joshua L. Freeman, Jalalidin's master's student, who later became a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, working in the same fields of Central Asian and Uyghur literature. Teacher and student: one taught Central Asian poetry from a lectern in Ürümqi; the other set out from that classroom into the academic system of an Ivy League university. The line of succession itself is a specimen of the ordinary scholarly traffic that still existed between Xinjiang Normal University and international academia before 2018.
After the teacher was taken in 2018, that line of succession survived in a changed form: the student became the teacher's voice in the English-speaking world. Freeman spoke publicly and repeatedly about his teacher's case, and the weightiest of those interventions came in November 2019, when he published an essay in the New York Times whose title declares its whole argument — "China Disappeared My Professor. It Can't Silence His Poetry." The essay brought three things at once before the mainstream readership of the English-speaking world: a professor had been taken and the authorities had offered no explanation of any kind; in custody he had written a poem; and the poem had been memorised by fellow detainees, carried out, translated into English by his student, and published. One op-ed essay carried the name "Abduqadir Jalalidin" into the international mainstream record for the first time. The human-rights case files, the PEN records and the London anthology of 2025 can all be traced back along the chain that the student opened.
One factual judgement belongs here, pinned before sentiment can wash over it. Freeman's testimony carries archival value not merely because of the bond it expresses, but because he is one of the very few named witnesses in this case who stands in a direct, acknowledged relationship to the subject and speaks under his own name. Much of this case's information arrives through institutional lists and channel reports whose tellers are anonymous or absent; Freeman stepped forward under his real name and his real titles — the man's master's student, a Princeton postdoctoral researcher — and told the readers of the New York Times that his professor had been disappeared. In archival terms, a named statement by a directly connected person outranks an unsourced list entry. This page accordingly attributes everything it takes from Freeman — the teacher's taking, the poem's composition in custody, its carrying-out in fellow detainees' memories — to "the public account of his student Freeman"; and where the poem's transmission detail rests on Freeman alone, with no second source to cross-check it, the text says so, and the Verification Note grades it single-source.
The line of succession has a sequel. Freeman was later among those who carried the work forward that brought his teacher's poetry into formal print: the anthology Imprisoned Souls, a collection of imprisoned Uyghur poets published in London in December 2025, includes the work of Abduqadir Jalalidin (for the publication and its launch, see the international-record section; the anthology's full editorial credits and table of contents are carried here on the publisher's public information, and are not expanded name by name). From one newspaper essay in 2019 to one London volume in 2025 is six years: the student walked his teacher's poem, step by step, out of the memories of fellow prisoners and onto the shelves of libraries. Whether the teacher knows any of this is a matter of no public record. On the day the poems were published in London, where he was, how his health stood, what he was reading — or whether he was permitted to read anything at all — no one could tell his student.
28–29 January 2018: a search, a list, and a taking at seven or eight in the evening
The whole factual chain of this case turns on two days. Set out what can be pinned about them, item by item and source by source.
Day one, 28 January 2018: his Ürümqi home was searched, and his manuscripts and electronic devices were confiscated. The principal teller of this item is his son Babur, who lives in the United States and was not present at the scene; what he gave is the family's side of the account, relayed, and this page attributes it throughout as "his son's account to Radio Free Asia". The spine record contains one further detail — that after the search and confiscation he was, for a time, released back home. This page carries that detail at relay grade, without supplying any duration or circumstances for it. However the hours fell out, one point is certain: when 28 January ended he was still at home and the home still stood as it had — except that the manuscripts and computers of the study were gone. For a scholar who lives by the written word, the confiscation of manuscripts and devices is itself a kind of preliminary verdict: the words you have written are taken away first, for examination; the man who wrote them will be collected the following day.
Day two, 29 January 2018: he was taken from his home by Ürümqi state security police. His son Babur gave Radio Free Asia a specific hour for it: at about seven or eight o'clock on the evening of 29 January, he was taken from the house. This page pins that hour into the archive exactly as given — not because it carries any special procedural significance, but because in an enforced-disappearance case the hour is often all a family is left holding: which day, at what time, out of which door. In the eight years since, the family has been given not one further coordinate of comparable concreteness: no place of detention, no trial date, not one telephone call. The case's timeline thus presents a cruel asymmetry: its first two days are precise to the hour, and the nearly three thousand days and nights that followed are precise to zero.
Corroboration at the institutional level arrived in due course: staff of Xinjiang Normal University's security department confirmed to Radio Free Asia that his name appeared on a list of arrested faculty and staff (see above). This page grades that corroboration as a media enquiry answered by personnel of the institution concerned: it confirms two facts — the arrest, and the existence of the list — while the full text of the list, the written instruments of the taking, and the division of labour among the handling units are all matters of no public record. Lay the three strands side by side — a home searched and manuscripts seized; state security police at the door; the employer's list with his name on it — and the outline of 28–29 January 2018 is clear: this was a formal taking, with instruments, with institutional cooperation, with a list that could be checked; it was not a nameless, kidnap-style vanishing. The paradox stands precisely there. A taking executed with such completeness of procedure has, in eight years, left the family and the public not one sheet of paper from the handling side. This is not a case of the responsible office being impossible to find; it is a case of an office that did the deed and declined to leave a record. This page confines the basis of that judgement strictly to the three verified facts above: it does not extrapolate, and it does not speculate about motives.
One date error must be dealt with at the end of this section, lest it go on contaminating this case's timeline in every retelling. An article published by the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) in The Diplomat in August 2025 dates his taking to "the night of 29 July 2018". This page marks that dating plainly: it is wrong. First, it conflicts directly with his son Babur's account to Radio Free Asia — the evening of 29 January. Second, it conflicts with the Committee of Concerned Scientists' letter of 20 May 2018, written when he had already been gone for months; had he been taken on 29 July, a letter of 20 May about his case could not exist. Third, it is incompatible with the timeframe of the university security department's confirmation to Radio Free Asia. This page uses 29 January 2018 throughout as the date of the taking; the "29 July" dating appears only in this section and in the Verification Note, as a flagged error. The UHRP article's "eliticide" framing and its record of family participation are nonetheless used by this page (see below) — when citing an article that contains an error, the archival routine is to lift the erroneous sentence out and label it, and to use the remainder at its proper value. This page likewise advises anyone citing the case: the only correct date for the taking is 29 January; "29 July" is a corruption, probably of the month in transcription, whose origin cannot be established; this page records the error and does not guess at its cause.
The shape of an enforced disappearance: zero official explanation, and "reportedly in a re-education camp"
From 29 January 2018 the case enters a condition that recurs throughout this site's persecution archive but reaches an extreme form here: zero official explanation. Inventory the zero, item by item. No public bulletin of any arrest or detention. No formal legal instrument whose contents any public source has ever quoted as received by the family. No indictment, no news of a trial, no judgment. No official confirmation of any place of detention. No notification of any kind about his health. No published text of any reply to the international organisations' successive enquiries. On 20 May 2018 the Committee of Concerned Scientists wrote about his case; the information its letter relayed was that he had reportedly been sent to a "re-education camp", and that the authorities had offered no explanation whatsoever. This page grades that letter as a formal case intervention by an international scholarly body acting on its own channels of information, with the "re-education camp" item carried at "reported" grade — a relay, not an official confirmation. The Current Status entry above can therefore say only this: in May 2018 the best information the outside world could obtain about his whereabouts was one clause — reportedly in a re-education camp — and that clause has never, in eight years, been confirmed or refuted by any official text.
Set the "re-education camp" report beside the later rumours of a sentence, and the timeline shows a seam that must be disclosed to readers rather than papered over. If in the first half of 2018 he was held in a facility of the camp type, and if the channel report of 2022 is right that he had by then been sentenced by the Ürümqi Intermediate People's Court to thirteen years and was serving it in Ürümqi Prison, then somewhere between camp and prison a conversion must have occurred — from administrative internment to criminal sentence. The date of that conversion, its charge and its procedure are exactly what the zero official explanation covers. This page records only that the seam exists; it does not invent a date or a process for the conversion. Bitter Winter's March 2024 account — sentenced to thirteen years in 2019 — happens to fall within that seam's interval, but it is equally a channel report without official corroboration, and this page will not use it to weld the timeline shut (see the three-accounts section that follows). The archive's rule is simple: where two stretches of rumour are separated by a black box, draw the box as it is, label it "no public record for this stretch", and do not fill it with imagination.
"Enforced disappearance" is a term of international human-rights law with a definite composition: deprivation of liberty carried out by agents of the state, followed by the state's refusal to acknowledge that deprivation, or its concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the person, thereby placing the person outside the protection of the law. This page sets the definition out because the factual structure of this case corresponds to it element by element: taken by state security police (on the family's eyewitness-relayed account, corroborated by the employer's list), after which the state side has made no public acknowledgement or statement of his fate or whereabouts for eight years. In adopting that frame this page relies on the verified facts above, not on rhetoric; and it notes, with archival discipline, the other half of the entry: the Chinese authorities have never acknowledged that this case constitutes an enforced disappearance, nor made any public characterisation of the case at all. The official position column is as blank as the official facts column. That blankness is what distinguishes this case from many others in this archive: other cases at least offer a judgment that can be argued with. This case offers no text to argue with at all — what the family has campaigned against for eight years is not a content they have read, but a complete silence.
The silence has another face: the family's state of knowledge. Around 28 April 2021, Radio Free Asia's reporting recorded the family's plain statement: they did not know why he had been taken, and they did not know whether he had been sentenced. Read the date on that statement again: April 2021, three years and three months after the taking. The most precise information the family of a full professor could give the world's media, after more than three years, was the words "we don't know" — they did not know the reason, did not know whether there had been a sentence, and naturally did not know where he was or how he was. This page adopts that statement as the anchor record of the family's knowledge, and carries it into the Current Status entry and the Verification Note: no later account of a sentence — including the thirteen-year report that surfaced in 2022 — has ever received public confirmation from the family side. Which is to say: even if the thirteen-year account is true, the family read their own father's sentence in a channel report from abroad. That order of reading is itself the most wounding footnote to the zero official explanation.
"No Road Back Home": a poem written in custody, carried out in memory
This case contains one episode that is rare among enforced disappearances anywhere: the man who was taken wrote a poem inside, and the poem came out.
The poem is titled 《无路可归》, known in English as "No Road Back Home". Its chain of transmission, reconstructed on his student Freeman's public account, runs as follows. Abduqadir Jalalidin wrote the poem during his custody. People held in the same place learned the poem by heart and carried it in memory. After those people came out, they brought the poem out from memory; the poem passed from hand to hand until it reached Freeman, who translated it into English, and it was published in November 2019 together with his New York Times essay. This page's grading of the chain must be stated plainly: its source is Freeman's public account alone, and no second source is available to cross-check it — the names of the fellow detainees and the particular links of memorisation and hand-to-hand transmission are matters of no public record, and are not supplied here. The chain's credibility has its own support nonetheless: the poem's text has since been carried by multiple organisations and was included in the London-published anthology Imprisoned Souls of 2025, and the texts in the different channels agree in substance (recorded here as a fact of publication); and the oral carrying-out of texts by released detainees is a form attested in reporting on other cases within the Xinjiang internment system. The composite grade is therefore: the poem's existence and publication, multiply attested; the details of its composition and transmission, Freeman's single-source account, used here with its attribution.
This page's citation of the poem's text obeys one hard rule: no single work is quoted beyond this site's citation ceiling, and only short lines already widely published are quoted at all. This page's practice is more restrained than the ceiling: beyond the title 《无路可归》 / "No Road Back Home", the text quotes no line of the poem. Two reasons are given. First, the poem exists in a Uyghur original and in English translation, with a layer of translation between them; until the authoritative original has been checked line by line, this page will not pass off a translation as the original. Second, the poem's full text is already in formal publication, in the newspaper and in the anthology, and readers can reach the whole poem through the sources; an archive page's duty is to record how the poem was written, how it came out, and how it was published — not to re-host the entire poem on this site. One fact suffices to show what is at stake: the poem is called "No Road Back Home". The name a man in custody gave his own poem was memorised by fellow prisoners, carried over the high wall in their heads, translated by his student, and printed in the New York Times. Those words are, in eight years, the only sentence of his own that has verifiably reached the outside world.
The poem also rewrote this case's place in the international record. Before it appeared, the case existed in institutional files as a name plus one line — taken, whereabouts unknown. After it appeared, the case possessed a text that could be read, taught and anthologised. The New York Times essay of November 2019 takes its title from the poem: China disappeared his professor, but it could not silence his poetry. On World Poetry Day 2024 the PEN network spoke again through his poem and his case; in December 2025 Imprisoned Souls was published in London and launched there, and his poem entered the libraries and bookshops of the English-speaking world in the durable form of a printed book. Every link of that chain is dated, year by year, in the international-record section below. One archival observation belongs here: on 28 January 2018 the state machine confiscated his manuscripts and his electronic devices; it could not confiscate a poem that had already been memorised into other men's heads. Between that confiscation and that survival stands the whole irony — and the whole hope — of this case.
Three accounts of a sentence: one blank column, and three incompatible rumours
This is the methodologically most important section of this page. Read it as an archive is meant to be read: look first at the blank column, and only then at the weight of each of the three rumours.
The blank column: the Chinese authorities have never published any information about any charge, verdict or place of custody in the case of Abduqadir Jalalidin. That sentence is not rhetoric; it is the product of an item-by-item search: no bulletin, no judgment document, no court press release, no official answer to any enquiry. The family's statement of April 2021 — they did not know the reason, and did not know whether he had been sentenced — is the blank column's counterpart on the family's side. The "Charge and Sentence" field of a page in this site's persecution archive can therefore give, for this case, the only honest answer archival method allows: no public record. The three accounts below are all records of a rumour layer appended beneath the blank column. This page archives them side by side so that future checkers know what has circulated, from where, and at what evidential weight — not because this page credits any one of them.
The first account: life imprisonment. The detainee list maintained by the Uyghur support organisation Uyghur Hjelp records this case as "sentenced to life imprisonment". This page's grade: the lowest of the three. The reasons are stated openly: the entry gives no source for its information and no court or date for the supposed judgment, and this site found no independent record anywhere else that corroborates a life sentence. A claim of life imprisonment resting on a single unsourced list entry — this page records its existence and marks its evidential grade in the same breath, so that it cannot be laundered into fact by repeated citation. That, precisely, is why this page archives the three accounts side by side instead of selecting one: if the thirteen-year account were printed alone and the life account deleted, future checkers would never know that a different term lies waiting in the list system. The archive's duty is to preserve the conflict, not to abolish it.
The second account: thirteen years, the 2022 channel version. In September 2022 a report emerged through Chinese human-rights-group channels holding that the Ürümqi Intermediate People's Court had sentenced Abduqadir Jalalidin to thirteen years' imprisonment for inciting subversion of state power and ethnic separatism, that he was serving the term in Ürümqi Prison, and that the term would expire on 28 January 2031. The account is cited by the English Wikipedia entry, and case and biographical documents of 24 November 2025 echo it. This page's grade: a channel report, relayed in several places, the most internally complete of the three — court, composition of charges, length of term, place of imprisonment and expiry date are all supplied (five elements in all) — but corroborated by no official text, no image of any judgment, and no public confirmation from the family. The arithmetic relationship between the stated expiry of 28 January 2031 and the taking on 29 January 2018 (the visible fingerprint of a thirteen-year term's commencement) shows only that the account is internally consistent; internal consistency is no substitute for external corroboration. This page's usage follows from the grade: in the Current Status entry and the Timeline, everything belonging to the thirteen years, to Ürümqi Prison and to 2031 is cited in the conditional — "if this account were correct" — and is never fused with the blank column of the official record.
The third account: thirteen years, the Bitter Winter 2019 version. Bitter Winter magazine reported in March 2024 that he was sentenced to thirteen years in 2019, and that when his poem circulated he had already served about a year. This page's grade: a single media channel report. Set it beside the second account and the points of conflict are visible at a glance. Both give a term of thirteen years, but one dates the sentencing to 2019 while the other leaves the year unstated, its expiry implying a commencement in 2018; and Bitter Winter's formulation that he had "already served a year" when the poem circulated sits in a relation to the poem's November 2019 publication in the New York Times that can only be read as approximate — if sentence was passed within 2019 and the poem appeared in November 2019, the "year served" is at best a round figure. This page's treatment: the two accounts stand side by side and are not merged into a consensus of "thirteen years" — because their agreement on the number may be the echo of one channel report in different relays, or the coincidence of two independent lines, and until a judgment document exists, any merger misleads the reader. This page would rather print a table of conflicts than one clean sentence — "he was sentenced to thirteen years" — that the record does not earn.
Finally, set the three accounts back into the timeline and draw the balance. January 2018: taken. May 2018: reportedly in a re-education camp. November 2019: the poem is out. April 2021: the family states plainly that it does not know whether he has been sentenced. September 2022: the thirteen-year channel report appears. March 2024: Bitter Winter supplies its 2019-sentencing version. And the life-sentence entry sits in its list, undated. This page's conclusion is a single sentence, and it must pass into the Verification Note in exactly this form: in a condition of zero official publication, this case contains no fact of judgment that an archive can certify as true — only three rumour layers of unequal weight, and one exact piece of testimony from the family: "we don't know". Whoever meets, anywhere outside this page, a retelling that promotes any one of the three into a settled conclusion should return to this section and examine its source and its grade.
The family: Babur, Bulbulnaz, and eight years of speaking in public
Inside the walls, silence; outside the walls, speech. In this case the speakers outside the walls are his two children: his son Babur in the United States, and his daughter Bulbulnaz in Japan. Brother and sister, in two different countries, have campaigned publicly for their father for years — giving interviews, attending events, feeding information to organisations. The principal nodes of the family's public voice, in the record this site consulted, are as follows.
The earliest and most consequential intervention was Babur's account to Radio Free Asia of how his father was taken: the search and confiscation of 28 January, and the taking by state security police at about seven or eight on the evening of 29 January. Every anchor detail of this case's timeline comes from that telling. Its evidential form is a named account by a direct family member to a media outlet, interlocking with the university security department's confirmation of the list to the same outlet. On 28 April 2021 Radio Free Asia carried the family's voice again: they stated plainly that they did not know why he had been taken, and did not know whether he had been sentenced (see above). Between the telling of 2018 and the telling of 2021, what the family could say to the world describes a desolate arc: at first they could report how their father disappeared; in the end, all they could report was that they knew nothing.
The daughter Bulbulnaz's advocacy on the Japan side entered the public record through reporting by Japan's public broadcaster, NHK, among other Japanese media. This page grades the NHK item as family advocacy carried by a Japanese public broadcaster, with programme details resting on that broadcaster's own record; this page does not relay programme text it did not retrieve. The pattern itself — the siblings speaking from two countries — is a footnote to the dispersal of such families: the father taken in Ürümqi, the son testifying in America, the daughter appealing in Japan. As for his wife and the rest of the family inside China, there is no public record; under this site's principle of strict protection for ordinary people inside the country, this page does not expand on them, and does not speculate about them, at all.
In August 2025 the family's advocacy entered a new frame. The Uyghur Human Rights Project built a campaign and an article — the latter carried by The Diplomat — around the theme of "eliticide", placing Abduqadir Jalalidin alongside Rahile Dawut as representative cases of the wholesale removal of Uyghur intellectual elites, and family members attended the related events. This page cites that article under two self-imposed rules. First, it uses only the article's frame (eliticide) and its record of family participation. Second, the article misdates the father's taking to "the night of 29 July 2018"; this page has flagged and corrected that error in the section on the taking, and anyone citing the article is asked not to carry its date forward. An article published for a campaign to free fathers got the date of the father's taking wrong by half a year — this page pins the error out without any reproach to the family: the error lies in the institutional text, not in the relatives. But if the archive does not correct it, a half-year's displacement will take root in the citation chain. There is no better illustration of why this page sources every fact item by item: even the institutions most sympathetic to this case can misstate its dates.
The result of eight years of advocacy must be written as it stands. As of this page's publication, the family's public campaigning has drawn no public response of any kind from the authorities: no whereabouts disclosed, no charge published, no publicly recorded visit arranged, no reply letter made public. This page has set that record beside the nearly identical one in its Rahile Dawut entry: daughters and sons search abroad for eight years, the institutional files grow thicker, and inside the wall there is no sound at all. The value of the campaigning therefore cannot be reckoned by whether it extracted a response. Its one certain achievement is that this man has not vanished entire from the public record: his name is still being spelled out, his poem is still in print, his case is still being updated year by year in the scholarly and human-rights networks outside the UN system proper. Against an enforced disappearance, keeping the name alive is the only battle a family can win. This page is, in its essence, a part of that battle: it takes what a brother and sister have said over eight years and pins it into a file that can be searched, cited and checked.
The international record, year by year: from one letter in 2018 to one London book in 2025
The international record of this case is not large, but its thread is complete and checkable year by year. This page arrays it in chronological order, naming the institution and the character of each item.
2018. The Committee of Concerned Scientists wrote about his case on 20 May 2018 — the earliest international institutional record this case possesses. Its letter relayed that he had reportedly been sent to a "re-education camp" and pointed out that the authorities had offered no explanation of any kind. In the same year the scholar-protection monitoring of Scholars at Risk took the case up (that organisation tracks detained scholars worldwide, and the case has remained live within scholar-protection networks since). One body speaks for the community of scientists, the other for the university network; their intervention marks the case, from its beginning, as a case of a persecuted scholar rather than an ordinary criminal matter — and that initial characterisation, set against the state security apparatus that took him, is the main line of the case's international record for the eight years that follow.
2019. In November his student Freeman published his essay in the New York Times and printed the English translation of "No Road Back Home" (see the poem section). It was the case's first entry into international mainstream media, and the public starting point of the prison poem's chain of transmission. Around the same period, organisations of the Uyghur exile community, the World Uyghur Congress among them, carried the case continuously in their lists of detained Uyghur intellectual elites. This page grades exile-community lists as community records, cited in parallel with institutional files and never relied on alone.
2021. Two nodes. First, on 28 April, Radio Free Asia recorded the family's statement that it knew neither the reason nor whether there had been a sentence (see the family section). Second, records published by the Uyghur Human Rights Project in 2021 showed that more than three hundred Uyghur intellectuals had been disappeared or detained — from that year this case has a collective coordinate: he is not the only name on the list, but one of more than three hundred. The precise scope of that UHRP count (its inclusion criteria and the composition of its list) rests on that organisation's published text; this page takes from it only the magnitude that bears directly on this case — more than three hundred Uyghur intellectuals disappeared — and does not mix it with other statistical scopes. A distinction against this site's Rahile Dawut page must be kept clear: the figure of 312 carried there belongs to the cultural-elite cohort in the same institutional lineage of counting; the two pages' figures derive from different releases and different scopes, are each cited to their source, and are not forcibly unified.
2024. The PEN network spoke. PEN America and PEN International carried the case among their imprisoned writers and poets; the Uyghur PEN Centre took part; and on World Poetry Day 2024 the PEN network used his poem and his case to speak for imprisoned poets. This page's grade: the case listings and the Poetry Day activity are recorded jointly across several PEN organisations, with the texts of particular activities resting on each centre's own releases. The year's record marks a completed change in the case's international identity: from "disappeared scholar" to "imprisoned poet". The poem's chain of transmission had by then overtaken the case's chain of transmission — the world remembers him first as a poet, and only then as a professor.
2025. Three nodes. First, in August, UHRP's "eliticide" campaign and its Diplomat article placed him alongside Rahile Dawut, with family members attending (the date error is flagged; see the family section). Second, on 24 November, a case and biographical document in the Chinese human-rights milieu restated the case, echoing the thirteen-year channel account of 2022 (see the three-accounts section); this page records it at the grade of a case-document layer. Third, in December, the anthology of imprisoned Uyghur poets, Imprisoned Souls, which includes his work, was published in London and launched there. That is the node at which this case's international record passes from the advocacy text to the published book: appeals expire; books do not. At the time of writing, less than a month has passed since the anthology's publication; its library holdings and critical reception are not yet matters of record, and this page records the publication and the launch themselves, without pre-writing any reception.
Set the years in a row and draw the honest total: one letter in 2018; one essay and one poem in 2019; one collective number in 2021; one Poetry Day in 2024; one campaign and one book in 2025. Eight years of international record make a sheaf of pages that is not thin — yet not one page of it comes from the country that took him, and not one page of it has drawn half a sentence of reply from that country. This page pins the whole line down without inflating its effect and without slighting its existence: against an official record of zero, this line is the case's entire proof of public existence.
One layer of background only: the people directly connected to him
This site's discipline is a restrained background layer: only persons directly connected to the subject are written, and a case page is not inflated into a general history. This section therefore writes three groups, and only three.
The first group is the compilers of the textbook line. The Uyghur language and literature textbook compilers represented by Yalqun Rozi stand on the same textbook line as he does (see the textbook section). That cohort had been the cadres through whom the state itself organised the compilation of their people's textbooks, and they were later pursued, or taken, over the content of those books. His connection to the group is "the same line"; this page has graded that characterisation above and invents no detail of concrete collaboration.
The second group is his own university's arrested faculty and staff. The list that Xinjiang Normal University's security department confirmed to Radio Free Asia establishes that he was one of a batch of people taken from the institution where he taught. Who else stands on that list, and how many, is a matter of no public record; this page neither guesses nor extrapolates a number. It records only this: he did not disappear alone. He was entered, together with his colleagues, on a single list at the university where he had taught for decades.
The third group is the community of Uyghur scholars and cultural figures who disappeared in the same period. The one most often publicly paired with him is Rahile Dawut (Case 40 in this archive): likewise a Uyghur scholar, likewise vanished in this period, and in 2025 paired with him in UHRP's eliticide frame. One structural difference between the two cases must be written plainly: Dawut's life sentence has at least the Dui Hua Foundation's confirmation of 2023 and the formal concern of United Nations experts in 2025 as external anchors; this case, to this day, does not possess even one sentence-confirmation of that grade. Both are representative cases of an eliticide; his file is the blanker of the two. Beyond these groups, the wider picture — the full list of more than three hundred, scholars of other disciplines, figures of publishing and the performing arts — belongs to the special records of UHRP and other organisations; this page gives the pointer and does not develop it. A case page's duty is to write one person through, not to write a whole movement out in full.
Current status: eight years without news is itself the archival fact
Before this page closes, the current status is written out item by item, all of it as of the check date of 1 November 2026.
Life and death: no public record establishes that he is no longer alive, and no official record establishes that he is serving a sentence; this page writes throughout on the archive's convention for such cases — whereabouts unknown after a taking, survival presumed pending proof — and all its formulations rest on that basis. Age: if the birth date of 11 March 1964 holds, he is sixty-two. Place of custody: no public record; the rumour layer holds two stations — "re-education camp" (reported, 2018) and "Ürümqi Prison" (channel report, 2022) — the first a rumour of destination, the second a rumour of imprisonment, neither officially confirmed. Term: no official record; the rumour layer holds three coexisting accounts (life imprisonment / thirteen years, channel version / thirteen years, Bitter Winter version); if the thirteen-year channel account were correct, the term would expire on 28 January 2031, in which year he would turn sixty-seven. Health: no public record — not one word. Visits and correspondence: no public record shows that the family has ever been granted a visit, a telephone call or a letter. Official response: from the beginning until now, no public record.
This section stands alone because this page wishes to make a method explicit: for an enforced-disappearance case, "no public record" is not the archive's failure; it is the archive's content. A man sentenced to thirteen years inside a functioning legal process accumulates a train of paper — a judgment, a place of imprisonment, visit records, sentence-reduction rulings. For this man there is none of it: only the rumour layer that family and organisations have assembled over eight years. To write out the absences, item by item, to the point where they cannot be looked away from, is the most accurate record this page can make of "eight years without news". This page will be kept current: should an official text, a family confirmation or a new institutional verification appear, the status entry will be rewritten on the new evidence, and the traces of the rewriting will be preserved.
Timeline
11 March 1964: Abduqadir Jalalidin is born (on the English Wikipedia entry; no primary text retrieved to corroborate it).
The years to 2018: He teaches in the College of Literature at Xinjiang Normal University, rising to professor, researching medieval Central Asian poetry; writes poetry in Uyghur; translates Orwell's Animal Farm into Uyghur; takes part in compiling Uyghur language and literature textbooks (the same line as the Yalqun Rozi textbook case — graded in the text); supervises graduate students, among them Joshua L. Freeman, who later becomes a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton (no complete public record of exact years or of a catalogue of his writings).
28 January 2018: His Ürümqi home is searched; manuscripts and electronic devices are confiscated; he is briefly released back home (on his son Babur's account to Radio Free Asia and the spine record — relay grade).
About 7–8 p.m., 29 January 2018: He is taken from his home by Ürümqi state security police (his son Babur's account to Radio Free Asia). Staff of Xinjiang Normal University's security department confirm to Radio Free Asia that his name appears on a list of arrested faculty and staff.
20 May 2018: The Committee of Concerned Scientists writes about his case: reportedly sent to a "re-education camp", with no official explanation of any kind. Scholars at Risk's monitoring takes the case up.
November 2019: His student Freeman publishes his essay in the New York Times, making public the English translation of "No Road Back Home", written in custody and carried out in the memory of fellow detainees.
28 April 2021: Radio Free Asia records the family's statement: they do not know why he was taken, and do not know whether he has been sentenced. His daughter Bulbulnaz's advocacy in Japan also enters the public record through NHK reporting (the precise dates resting on that broadcaster's record).
2021: The Uyghur Human Rights Project publishes its record of more than three hundred Uyghur intellectuals disappeared or detained; this case is among them.
September 2022: A report emerges through Chinese human-rights-group channels that the Ürümqi Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to thirteen years for inciting subversion of state power and ethnic separatism, that he is serving the term in Ürümqi Prison, and that the term expires on 28 January 2031 (channel report, no official corroboration; archived alongside the life-sentence account).
March 2024: Bitter Winter reports that he was sentenced to thirteen years in 2019 and had already served a year when his poem circulated (single-media channel account; archived alongside the 2022 channel report).
World Poetry Day 2024: PEN America, PEN International and the Uyghur PEN Centre speak through his poem and his case for imprisoned poets.
August 2025: The Uyghur Human Rights Project's "eliticide" campaign and its Diplomat article place him alongside Rahile Dawut, with family members attending. The article's dating of the taking to "the night of 29 July 2018" is an error; it is flagged and corrected by this page and is not used in the text.
24 November 2025: A case and biographical document restates the case (using the Chinese name form 阿不都卡德尔·加拉里丁), its account of the term echoing the thirteen-year channel report of 2022.
December 2025: The anthology of imprisoned Uyghur poets Imprisoned Souls, which includes his work, is published in London and launched there.
1 November 2026: This site's check date — eight years and nine months after the taking, the official charge, verdict, place of detention and state of health are all matters of no public record.
Our Take
This site's commentary on this case stays with this case's own facts.
First, the crux of this case is not the length of any sentence but the impossibility of checking any sentence. In this site's persecution archive, cases carrying terms longer than thirteen years are common enough — life imprisonment and suspended death sentences occur there too. But those cases at least possess a judgment document, a charge, and a date of pronouncement: the family knows what to hate, the lawyer knows what to rebut, the archive knows what to record. This case has none of that. A full professor was taken from his home by state security police eight years ago, and the state has not produced a single word of explanation — not even whether he is "in a camp", "in a prison", or "already sentenced" can be answered except by piecing together a son's account to a radio station, institutional lists and channel reports. Thirteen years or life: until an official text exists, both are rumour layer. The one certain fact is that a state has kept complete silence for eight years about the fate of one of its own citizens. In the language of international human-rights law, that is an enforced disappearance; in plain language, it is a man taken by the state while the state behaves as though nothing happened. This page puts that point first in its commentary for a reason: this case is first a disappearance case, and only second a miscarriage case — because nobody can even point to where "the case" is.
Second, look at the combination of identities that was taken: a scholar of Central Asian poetry, a poet in his mother tongue, the Uyghur translator of Animal Farm, a compiler of Uyghur language textbooks, and a supervisor of graduate students. Not one of those five identities is the identity of a political activist; together they are the complete set of trades by which a people's cultural memory survives: the man who researches the sources, the man who creates, the man who imports world literature, the man who writes the next generation's textbooks, and the man who trains the successors. UHRP's word for the removal of this whole cohort in 2025 — "eliticide" — strikes this page as accurate when applied to this case. What is being extinguished need not be the body (his life or death is, to this day, a matter of no public record); it is a people's capacity to hand its culture on to its next generation — the man at the lectern gone, the man on the textbook committee gone, the man who translated Orwell gone. Born in 1964, taken in 2018 at just short of fifty-four, he was at precisely the age when a scholar hands a life's learning on to his students; the handing-on was interrupted, and of the students who were to receive it, one, far away at Princeton, carried his poem into a London anthology instead. That broken line of succession is the most concrete footnote "eliticide" can have.
Third, that poem. On 28 January 2018 they searched his home and confiscated his manuscripts and his electronic devices: the entire stock of a writing man's drafts, cleared out in a night. But they missed one thing: memory. A poem he wrote in custody was memorised by fellow prisoners, carried out of the high wall inside men's heads, translated by his student's hand into English, printed in the New York Times, and chosen for a book published in London. From confiscation to publication is seven years: the words on paper were taken away, and the poem in memory travelled the world. This page does not write the episode up as any romantic victory — the man who wrote the poem is still inside, and the men who memorised it cannot even be named from the public record — but the archive must record the factual structure: a state can confiscate a man's whole stock of manuscripts, and it cannot confiscate a text that has already entered other men's memories. That is also why the first thing of his to "leave prison" in this case was his poem. The poem's title, "No Road Back Home", reads today as though he had written his own verdict for these eight years — except that the verdict ought to have been delivered, in words, by the institution that took him, and that institution has not produced a word.
Fourth, the coexistence of three accounts of a sentence deserves the attention of later observers in its own right. Life imprisonment; thirteen years (sentenced in 2019); thirteen years (expiring in 2031) — the three circulate through a Uyghur support list, human-rights channels and a religious-freedom magazine, and each, passing into the next pair of citing hands, risks being laundered into "reportedly sentenced to X years". This page's handling — three accounts side by side, each sourced and graded, the official column reading only "no public record" — is not pedantry. It is the only responsible handling for this class of case. Because for the family, which account turns out to be true means two wholly different lives: waiting outside a prison gate on 28 January 2031 to receive a man, or having no gate to wait outside at all. To keep the three accounts distinct is to keep the difference between a family's next five years and a family's "no future" distinct. No archivist has the authority to choose the family a kinder version.
Last, the family. A son in the United States who can fix the hour of his father's taking to seven or eight in the evening; a daughter in Japan who keeps speaking; eight years of it, and the official response is zero. This site's Rahile Dawut page recorded nearly the same sentence: awards and letters buy not one word of a whereabouts. This case adds one further layer: even the "sentence" around which the awards and letters gather has never been established. Even so, this page pins the eight years of advocacy year by year into the international record, for the reason stated in the family section: against an enforced disappearance, keeping the name alive is the only battle a family can win. A Uyghur poet who translated Animal Farm for the readers of his mother tongue must not end his archive with the four words "whereabouts unknown". This page exists to expand those four words into more than ten thousand: who he was, what he did, on what day, at what hour, and by whom he was taken from his home, and in each year since, who in the world has still been looking for him. If an official text ever appears, this page will gladly be rewritten; if none ever does, this page is his archive itself.
Verification Note
This site's characterisation: this is a case of enforced disappearance, in the background of the wholesale removal of Xinjiang's intellectual elites from 2017 onward, targeting a Uyghur scholar and poet; it meets this site's criteria for the persecution archive and is a priority case of minority persecution. The source structure must be explained first. This case has no official text of any kind: the Chinese authorities have never published any charge, judgment or custody information concerning him, so everything in this page about "the case" comes from the family's accounts, from university personnel confirming matters to the media, from the case records of international scholarly and human-rights organisations, from the public account of his student, and from channel reports — each layer graded separately in the text and in the paragraphs below. Wherever the text says "no public record", that is a statement of this site's item-by-item search, not a gap to be filled by conjecture.
Facts verified across sources: he was a professor in the College of Literature at Xinjiang Normal University, a scholar of medieval Central Asian poetry, a Uyghur poet and a translator, who translated Orwell's Animal Farm into Uyghur and took part in compiling Uyghur language and literature textbooks (the common record of multiple human-rights and PEN case files and the line of his student's writing); his master's student Joshua L. Freeman later became a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton (on Freeman's own account and the line of his academic institution's pages); he was taken on 29 January 2018 by Ürümqi state security police (his son Babur's account to Radio Free Asia, the time premise of the Committee of Concerned Scientists' letter of 20 May 2018, and the confirmation by Xinjiang Normal University security staff to Radio Free Asia that his name stood on a list of arrested faculty and staff — three strands interlocking); the authorities have offered no explanation of any kind since (consistent across the institutional records, and, as a negative fact, confirmed by this site's item-by-item search); his poem "No Road Back Home" has been published in the New York Times and in the London anthology Imprisoned Souls of 2025 (publication multiply attested); and his family — son in the United States, daughter in Japan — has campaigned publicly for years (Radio Free Asia, 28 April 2021; the NHK reporting line; the August 2025 UHRP event record).
Matters resting on a single source or on relay, graded in the text: the birth date of 11 March 1964, from the English Wikipedia entry, with no primary text to corroborate it; the search of 28 January 2018, the confiscation of manuscripts and devices, and the "briefly released back home" detail, from his son's account and the spine record's relay chain; the specific hour of about seven or eight on the evening of 29 January, from his son's account alone (a direct family member's account, graded as such); the "reportedly sent to a re-education camp" item, from the Committee of Concerned Scientists' letter of 20 May 2018 — a relay, not an official confirmation; the composition of the prison poem and the detail of its carrying-out "memorised by fellow detainees", from Freeman's account alone (the poem's publication itself is multiply attested; the transmission detail is single-source); the participation in textbook compilation and the characterisation of the Yalqun Rozi textbook case as "the same line", from the framing of case research — this page found no record of the two men sitting in one editorial group on a specific volume or lesson, and has accordingly limited itself in the text; and NHK's reporting of the daughter's advocacy, cited on the line of the Japanese public broadcaster's record, without relaying programme text this page did not retrieve.
Source conflicts and this page's treatment (the central record of the three-accounts dispute and the date dispute): first, the three accounts of a sentence stand side by side — the Uyghur Hjelp list's life imprisonment (no source given, graded lowest); the September 2022 Chinese human-rights-group channel report of a thirteen-year term imposed by the Ürümqi Intermediate People's Court for inciting subversion of state power and ethnic separatism, served in Ürümqi Prison, expiring 28 January 2031 (cited by English Wikipedia and echoed in the case document of 24 November 2025, with no official corroboration); and Bitter Winter's March 2024 report of a thirteen-year term imposed in 2019, with about a year served when the poem circulated (single-media channel report). The three are incompatible, and this page refuses to merge them: the official version in the text and in the status entry reads only "no public record", and the three are cited only conditionally and with attribution. Second, the dispute over the date of the taking: UHRP's August 2025 Diplomat article gives "the night of 29 July 2018" — in conflict with the RFA record, with his son's account, and with the Committee of Concerned Scientists' letter of 20 May 2018, all at once. This page judges it an error, does not use it in the text, and archives it here and in the taking section as a flagged error; when citing that article, this page uses only its eliticide frame and its record of family participation. Third, variant spellings of the name: the English Abduqadir Jalalidin and Abdulqadir Jalaleddin both circulate; the Chinese forms 阿不都卡德尔·加拉里丁 (case document of 24 November 2025) and 阿布都卡德尔·加拉力丁 (this page's name) both circulate — the text carries them side by side at first mention and thereafter uses the page name; this is a spelling variance, not a factual conflict. Fourth, the collective-count scopes: UHRP's 2021 record of more than three hundred disappeared Uyghur intellectuals and the figure of 312 carried in this site's Rahile Dawut page (for the cultural-elite cohort) derive from different releases; each is used to its own source, and the figures are not forcibly unified.
Matters of no public record, flagged wherever they arise in the text: the official charge, sentence, and every element of any trial; the exact place of custody (the camp and prison accounts are both rumour layer); his state of health; family visits, telephone calls and correspondence; a complete catalogue of his poems in his mother tongue and the division of labour in the textbook compilation; the circumstances of his wife and the rest of the family inside China (this page, on its strict-protection principle, does not develop them); the names of the fellow detainees who memorised the poem and the links of its transmission; and the full table of contents and reception record of the December 2025 anthology (not yet developed at the time of writing). All sources have been paraphrased and summarised by this site; single-work direct quotation is far below this site's citation ceiling; and beyond the poem's title, no line of the poem is quoted in the text, for the reasons given in the poem section.
The three-requirements check: time and place are confirmed (the birth year at Wikipedia grade; the employing university; the search of 28 January 2018 and the taking on the evening of 29 January with its hour and place; the letter of May 2018; the poem's publication in November 2019; the family's statement of April 2021; the August 2025 campaign and the December 2025 anthology — all supported by the anchor sources above, with single-chain details graded item by item); cross-verification has been completed (the family's accounts, the institutional confirmation, the scholarly organisations' letters, the student's account, the PEN and human-rights case files, and the channel reports kept in six separate layers throughout, with the conflicts listed together in this section); and documentary and visual evidence: this case has no image of any judgment and no official document image that can be checked — that absence is itself recorded in the text as an archival fact — while the checkable published evidence consists of the poem's published texts (New York Times, November 2019; Imprisoned Souls, 2025) and the institutional case files, recorded here as to existence and provenance only.
Sources
- Radio Free Asia, reporting on this case: the son Babur's account of the 28 January 2018 search of the home, the confiscation of manuscripts and electronic devices, and the taking on the evening of 29 January at about seven or eight o'clock by Ürümqi state security police; the confirmation by Xinjiang Normal University security staff that his name appeared on a list of arrested faculty and staff; and the 28 April 2021 record of the family's statement that they did not know the reason for the taking and did not know whether he had been sentenced. The spine of this case's timeline and of the family's state of knowledge.
- Committee of Concerned Scientists, letter of 20 May 2018: reportedly sent to a "re-education camp", with no official explanation of any kind. The earliest international institutional record of the case, and one of the time premises confirming the taking date of 29 January 2018.
- Joshua L. Freeman, New York Times, November 2019, "China Disappeared My Professor. It Can't Silence His Poetry": the teacher's taking with no official explanation; "No Road Back Home", written in custody and carried out in the memory of fellow detainees, published in English translation. The spine source for the poem's chain of transmission (single-source on the detail, graded in the text).
- Scholars at Risk, scholar-protection monitoring case record: the case carried as a detained-scholar case.
- NHK, reporting on the daughter Bulbulnaz's advocacy in Japan (the Japan-side record of the family's voice).
- Uyghur Human Rights Project, 2021 record: more than three hundred Uyghur intellectuals disappeared or detained; this case among them.
- Uyghur Human Rights Project, August 2025 "eliticide" campaign and The Diplomat article: he and Rahile Dawut placed side by side as representative cases, with family members attending; the article's "night of 29 July 2018" dating of the taking is an error — this page cites only its frame and its record of family participation, and does not use the date (see the Verification Note).
- PEN America, PEN International and the Uyghur PEN Centre, case records and World Poetry Day 2024 interventions: the case carried as an imprisoned Uyghur poet's case.
- World Uyghur Congress, lists of detained Uyghur intellectual elites (community record layer, cited in parallel with institutional files).
- English Wikipedia, "Abduqadir Jalalidin": born 11 March 1964; the September 2022 Chinese human-rights-group channel report of a thirteen-year term imposed by the Ürümqi Intermediate People's Court for inciting subversion of state power and ethnic separatism, served in Ürümqi Prison, expiring 28 January 2031. Birth date and channel report both used at relay grade.
- Uyghur Hjelp detainee list, entry for this case: "sentenced to life imprisonment", no source given — graded lowest of the three accounts, archived side by side.
- Bitter Winter, March 2024: sentenced to thirteen years in 2019, with about a year served when his poem circulated — single-media channel account, archived side by side.
- Imprisoned Souls, anthology of imprisoned Uyghur poets (London, December 2025): includes his work; published and launched in London.
- Case and biographical document of 24 November 2025 (Chinese name form 阿不都卡德尔·加拉里丁): restates the case, its account of the term echoing the thirteen-year channel report of 2022.