第40案 | 热依拉·达吾提Case 40 | Rahile Dawut
维吾尔民俗学权威、新疆大学教授热依拉·达吾提2017年12月赴京开会前夕失踪，2018年被以「分裂国家」秘密判处无期徒刑，关押地点至今不明。她的女儿在海外为她呼吁，联合国专家2025年再次就其强迫失踪发声。Rahile Dawut, a leading Uyghur folklorist and Xinjiang University professor, vanished in December 2017 on her way to a Beijing conference; in 2018 she was secretly sentenced to life imprisonment for 'splittism,' and her place of detention remains unknown. Her daughter campaigns for her abroad, and UN experts raised her enforced disappearance again in 2025.
The Woman: A Scholar Who Studied the Culture of Her Own People
Rahile Dawut was born in 1966 in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, and is an ethnic Uyghur scholar. According to the case files of English PEN, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, she was among the first Uyghur women to earn a doctoral degree, completing a PhD in folklore at Beijing Normal University. She then returned to Xinjiang, joined the faculty of Xinjiang University, rose to full professor, and founded the university's Minorities Folklore Research Center, directing research on Uyghur folklore and cultural heritage for many years. Sources do not agree entirely on the exact founding year of the center, and this page does not adopt a single year as final; what is documented is that she founded the center and led it.
Her research field was the everyday life and faith traditions of the Uyghur people: folk tales and oral literature, pilgrimage customs at shrines and mazars (the sacred tombs and holy sites revered by Uyghurs), festivals and rituals. In anthropology and folklore studies these are entirely normal academic subjects: recording how a people tells its own stories, venerates its own holy places and hands down its own memory. Over decades she published papers and books, trained graduate students and led fieldwork trips into the countryside. Her scholarly reputation reached well beyond Xinjiang and beyond China. According to English PEN and other institutions, she was invited to lecture at the University of Cambridge, Cornell University and Harvard University, and was recognized internationally as one of the leading authorities on Uyghur folklore. Honors recorded in multiple institutional profiles include a 2008 award named for the founder of Chinese folklore studies, Zhong Jingwen. In 2016 she received a research grant from China's culture authorities that was reported as the largest ever awarded to a Uyghur research project. Almost every honor available to a scholar had come her way, and all of it arrived less than two years before she disappeared.
To understand this case it is necessary to understand what later happened to the very things she studied. From around 2017, within Xinjiang's mass internment and de-extremification campaign, mazars and shrines were demolished or altered in large numbers, Uyghur language and cultural education was drastically compressed, and religious and folk practices were placed under tight control. The scholars who studied mazars, the professors who compiled Uyghur textbooks and the cultural figures who collected folk literature vanished into the detention system in waves. The Uyghur Human Rights Project counts more than three hundred detained Uyghur intellectuals and cultural elites; its figure is 312. Rahile Dawut is among the most academically eminent and internationally known names on that list. A scholar who studied her own people's culture received a life sentence in the midst of a campaign systematically erasing that culture. Her case was never only her own; it is a coordinate marking where the cultural purge fell on academia.
The Disappearance: December 2017, a Trip to Beijing That Never Happened
In December 2017 Rahile Dawut was preparing to travel to Beijing for an academic conference. According to her family and rights organizations, contact with her was lost around that planned trip, and from then on there was no word from her at all. She did not appear at the conference. She did not return to her lecture hall at Xinjiang University. Her phone could not be reached, and her family received no official notification of any kind. In the Xinjiang of 2017, disappearance carried a specific meaning: the mass internment campaign was at its height, large numbers of Uyghurs were being sent into camps and prisons, and families often learned only months or years later, through fragments of information, whether a relative was alive or dead and where they were held. She vanished at exactly that moment.
For the first years after her disappearance, the outside world knew nothing of her situation. The Chinese authorities issued no notice about her: no arrest announcement, no indictment, no trial report, no judgment. Her name disappeared from Xinjiang University's web pages. Her research center ceased to exist. Her students and colleagues fell silent. Inside the wall, she was erased as if with a rubber eraser. Outside it, her daughter Akeda Pulati began a long search and a long campaign. The daughter, living abroad, used academic and human rights channels to ask everywhere for news of her mother, and met only silence. A professor, a scholar who had held major state research funding, had evaporated completely from her own country's public information, to the point where even whether she was still alive could only be guessed.
That state of evaporation lasted three and a half years. In July 2021 the Uyghur Service of Radio Free Asia confirmed through sources inside Xinjiang University that Rahile Dawut had been tried and imprisoned. The sources were people within the university, and the service reported the confirmation according to its verification procedures. It was the first definite news since her disappearance that she was alive and had been through a trial. But when the trial had taken place, where, on what charges and with what sentence, nobody yet knew. The answer took more than two further years to surface, and when it came, it was chilling.
The Secret Trial: A Life Sentence in December 2018
On 21 September 2023 the Dui Hua Foundation, based in the United States, published its confirmation: Rahile Dawut had been tried in December 2018 by an intermediate people's court in Xinjiang on charges of splittism endangering state security and sentenced to life imprisonment, together with life deprivation of political rights; she appealed, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region High People's Court rejected the appeal and upheld the judgment. The Dui Hua Foundation has for many years verified individual Chinese political prisoner cases through official channels, and the case information it has confirmed has a strong record of accuracy. This page treats its confirmation as the core source for the sentence and charges and states that basis in the verification note. The specific name of the trial court has not been published in any source, and this page records it as no public record rather than guessing.
Align the timeline and a brutal fact emerges. When she was sentenced to life in December 2018, the outside world did not even know she had been arrested. Her disappearance was being reported as a camp case, and her daughter was still asking which camp her mother might be in, while in reality a trial that decided the rest of her life had already ended, unnoticed by anyone outside the system. Life imprisonment is the heaviest punishment short of death, normally reserved for what officials judge to be the gravest offenses. A folklorist who organized no armed group and took part in no violence, whose entire work consisted of papers, fieldwork and teaching, was given a life term in the name of splittism and endangering state security. What evidence was presented, how the hearing was conducted, whether she had a lawyer and what she said in court are all matters of no public record. No one outside has ever seen the judgment.
The direction of the charge deserves to be examined word by word. Splittism targets not a specific act but a possibility inherent in identity and thought. To study Uyghur culture, to record Uyghur tradition, to let Uyghurs remember who they are had, in the Xinjiang context after 2017, become sufficient grounds for suspicion in themselves. Her research objects were mazars and folk belief, and mazar pilgrimage was precisely one of the practices being targeted and demolished in that period. The scholar and her subject were disposed of together: the shrines bulldozed, and the person who studied the shrines sentenced for life. A case run on that logic requires nothing the defendant actually did. Who she was and what she studied were already the crime. The case fixes one facet of that campaign in place: it set out not only to remake how living people lived, but to cut a people's academic link to its own history, so that later generations would lack even the tools and the teachers to study their own culture.
One Name Among More Than Three Hundred Detained Uyghur Intellectuals
Rahile Dawut is not an isolated case. The Uyghur Human Rights Project counts 312 detained Uyghur intellectuals, writers, artists, publishers, teachers and other cultural elites. What the members of this group share is that they were the people responsible for memory and transmission in Uyghur society: university professors, textbook compilers, poets, singers, website editors and religious scholars. Many of them had once been honored figures inside the system, who, like Rahile Dawut, had received awards, led projects and been covered positively by official media. When the campaign arrived, yesterday's honors were voided overnight, and academic achievement turned into an inventory of guilt: the more deeply you understood Uyghur culture, the more dangerous you were held to be.
The international scholarly reaction has been strong and sustained. Thousands of academics worldwide have signed appeals for the release of their detained Uyghur colleagues, several universities with which she had scholarly ties have expressed public concern, and international conferences in anthropology and folklore studies have repeatedly given agenda time to her case and to cases like it. For the scholarly community, the chill of this case lies in its signal: if recording a culture can be punished with life imprisonment, then the whole of Xinjiang studies, and indeed all minority studies, loses its most basic academic safety. Fieldwork goes undone, sensitive topics go untouched, research subjects go uncontacted. A culture is forbidden to be remembered before it can even be studied.
The distance between official language and fact also has to be recorded. Official Chinese accounts of the Xinjiang detention campaign long concentrated on vocational education and training and de-extremification, and asserted that all trainees in the centers had graduated. Rahile Dawut's case presents another line entirely. She was not a trainee. She was a professor formally tried in a criminal proceeding and sentenced to life, and her case has never appeared in any official public material. The graduation claim cannot explain a life sentence, and it cannot explain the eight-year evaporation of a scholar. This page records that contradiction as it stands and polishes it for neither side.
A Daughter's Campaign: Akeda Pulati and the Awards Accepted on Her Mother's Behalf
After her mother vanished, Akeda Pulati became the case's principal voice abroad. Living and working in the United States, she has for years told her mother's story through media interviews, human rights events and academic occasions, demanding that the Chinese government disclose her mother's whereabouts and charges, permit family contact and release her. She has explained one simple thing to the world again and again: her mother was only a scholar, who spent a lifetime studying folk tales and shrines and never did anything to harm anyone. A daughter has had to prove her mother's innocence to the entire world, while the accusing side has never produced a single sheet of paper in explanation. That asymmetry is the essence of the family's situation in this case.
In 2020 Scholars at Risk gave its Courage to Think Award to persecuted scholars including Rahile Dawut, and Akeda accepted the award and spoke on her mother's behalf. In 2023 English PEN named Rahile Dawut the PEN Pinter Prize International Writer of Courage, chosen by the writer Michael Rosen, who shared his own Pinter Prize with a Uyghur scholar who could not be present. Akeda again accepted on her mother's behalf. These honors share one feature: the recipient herself sits in an unknown prison, knows nothing of the awards, and the trophies are kept by her daughter, awaiting a day of return that no one can date. The empty place at the awards podium says more about the state of this case than any speech could.
According to family and rights-group records, since December 2017 Akeda has had no direct contact with her mother at all: not one phone call, not one letter received, not one visitation permit, not even one official verbal confirmation of where her mother is held. This site found no systematically verifiable public record concerning relatives of hers inside Xinjiang, and following its strict principle of protecting ordinary people inside China, it does not expand on them. What can be confirmed is only the daughter's public trajectory across eight years, from searching and asking to campaigning and accepting awards: a young woman abroad single-handedly carrying what judicial disclosure and family rights to information should have carried. Her persistence has kept this case from sinking into the statistic formed by those three hundred names, and kept it a specific person, with a name, with a daughter waiting.
International Response: Formal UN Expert Concern in 2025
International attention to this case falls into two phases. The first was led by academia and rights organizations. English PEN has continuously updated its case file. Chinese Human Rights Defenders lists her among detained human rights defenders. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom includes her in its database of religious prisoners of conscience, and the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission's Defending Freedoms Project has adopted her case. The pattern of arbitrary detention and restricted cultural rights described in the UN Human Rights Office's 2022 assessment of Xinjiang corresponds to the facts of this case; the assessment may not name every individual, but she is among the most representative cases of the phenomena it describes.
The second phase was formal intervention by the UN human rights machinery. On 3 September 2025 five UN special procedures experts addressed a formal inquiry to the Chinese government about Rahile Dawut's case. On 1 October 2025 the UN Human Rights Office issued a statement: the experts expressed serious concern over her enforced disappearance and pointed to the criminalization of Uyghur cultural expression in the case, calling on China to disclose her whereabouts, her charges and their legal basis. Special procedures communications are the UN human rights system's formal channel for individual cases, and being named in this way means the case has entered the experts' continuing tracking list. As of the writing of this page, any Chinese government response to the communication is a matter of no public record, and the authorities have at no point made any public statement about her charges, sentence or place of detention.
The outcome must be recorded honestly. From 2017 to 2025, academic petitions, rights organizations' case files, PEN's prizes and UN communications have not produced a single word about where she is. She is among the most internationally prominent of the more than three hundred detained Uyghur intellectuals, and this is still the result. What the situation of those with less prominence may be is not hard to imagine. This page records that line of response in full, not because it has worked, but because it is, for now, the main trace this case has left in the world. The woman herself cannot utter a sound; the only proof that she existed, and still exists, is the archive and the appeals of others.
Latest Status: A Life Sentence, No Whereabouts, No Public Record
As of the last verification for this page, Rahile Dawut's status can be summarized in three sentences. Sentence: life imprisonment, confirmed by the Dui Hua Foundation. Location: no public record. Health and recent condition: no public record. Which prison holds her, how her body is bearing up, whether any family visit has ever been allowed and whether she knows of the international awards given in her name are all beyond inquiry. Born in 1966, she is now sixty years old, and the best scholarly years of a folklorist's life have been spent in disappearance and imprisonment.
In Chinese judicial practice, a life sentence is the starting point of imprisonment for the remainder of a life. Although the system formally allows commutation and parole, there are almost no precedents in the public record for cases of serious political offenses of this kind. This page makes no prediction about her future; it records only the institutional facts and the blanks: no judgment, no place of detention, no family visit, no official response, and not one sentence of hers transmitted to the outside. In eight years, an internationally renowned scholar has disappeared from the world in this way, leaving only a daughter's appeals and institutions' files to prove she once existed and still exists. To write out the words no public record item by item, rather than letting them blur into a vague disappearance, is the most basic accuracy this page can practice.
Verification Note
This page was compiled by cross-checking English PEN, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, the Dui Hua Foundation, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, reporting by Radio Free Asia's Uyghur Service, and the UN Human Rights Office's statement of 2025 and its 2022 Xinjiang assessment. The evidence is graded as follows: her birth year and place, education and university post, lecture invitations abroad, the December 2017 disappearance, the July 2021 confirmation that she had been tried and imprisoned, and her daughter's campaigning and acceptance of awards on her behalf are each recorded by at least two independent institutions and are treated as cross-verified. The core judgment information, the life sentence, the December 2018 trial and the rejected appeal, rests principally on the Dui Hua Foundation's confirmation of 21 September 2023; that foundation specializes in verifying individual Chinese political prisoner cases over many years, and this page names it as the core source, noting that the later concern of UN experts and the files of multiple rights organizations are consistent with it and that no contrary record has appeared. The specific name of the trial court, the statutory provisions of the charges, the full judgment text, her place of detention and her state of health have never been disclosed by the Chinese authorities and are recorded item by item as no public record.
Conflicting details are collected here. Her daughter's name is rendered Akeda Pulati in some sources and Akida Pulati in others, and this page notes both renderings rather than treating one as final. The founding year of the Minorities Folklore Research Center is given as 2007 in some sources; lacking multi-source agreement, the main text does not adopt a specific year. The Zhong Jingwen Award is dated 2008 in multiple institutional profiles, and the text follows that date while noting its source level here. The description of the 2016 culture-authority research grant as the largest of its kind for a Uyghur project comes from institutional reporting, and the text phrases it as reported rather than as an absolute claim. The figure of 312 detained Uyghur intellectuals and cultural elites is the Uyghur Human Rights Project's statistic and is attributed to it, not blended with other counts. Quotations throughout are paraphrased and summarized; direct quotation is minimal and far below this site's citation ceiling for any single source.
Our Take
Our Take is tied to the facts of this case alone. Rahile Dawut spent her life doing one thing: recording the stories, shrines and customs of the Uyghur people, turning them into scholarship and teaching them to students. For that work, the first half of her life brought a doctorate, a professorship, major state research funding and lecture invitations from Cambridge and Harvard. After 2017 it brought disappearance, a secret trial and a life sentence. What she did never changed. What changed was the regime's characterization of Uyghur culture: when recording a culture is treated as a breeding ground for splittism, folklore studies becomes endangering state security. If a state wants a people to forget who it is, the most effective method is not to burn books but to imprison the people who write and teach them for the rest of their lives, and to bulldoze the shrines alongside. Her case and the ruins of mazars across Xinjiang are exactly the two faces of that single undertaking: demolish the physical objects, and imprison the keepers of memory.
Consider also the procedure. A scholar was sentenced to life imprisonment, and the world learned of it only five years later, through verification by an overseas foundation. To this day the Chinese authorities have published nothing about her charges, her judgment or her place of detention, and eight years of a daughter's questions have not won a single sentence in reply. If the judgment could truly withstand examination, why is there not one sheet of paper that can be shown? What the secret trial disposed of was not only one woman's freedom, but the public's most basic trust in that judicial system. In 2025 five UN experts jointly expressed concern, and their term was enforced disappearance. That is the accurate summary of this case: a person taken by the state, with the state refusing to acknowledge where she is held. That is not justice; it is evaporation. This site pins her name, her scholarly career and this broken timeline here: born in 1966, disappeared in December 2017, secretly sentenced to life in December 2018, her sentence publicly confirmed only in September 2023, formal UN concern in 2025. Whoever writes this history in the future will not be able to turn past the page on which a scholar of folk tales was imprisoned for life.
Sources
- Dui Hua Foundation: confirmation of 21 September 2023 (trial in December 2018, life imprisonment, appeal rejected by the Xinjiang High People's Court).
- English PEN: case file on Rahile Dawut and the record of the 2023 PEN Pinter Prize International Writer of Courage, chosen by Michael Rosen.
- UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: statement of 1 October 2025 and the five special procedures experts' case inquiry of 3 September 2025; the 2022 Xinjiang human rights assessment.
- Radio Free Asia, Uyghur Service: July 2021 reporting confirming through Xinjiang University sources that she had been tried and imprisoned.
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders: case file on the detained Uyghur scholar.
- U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission: prisoner-of-conscience and Defending Freedoms Project case listings.
- Uyghur Human Rights Project: count of detained Uyghur intellectuals and cultural elites (312).
- Scholars at Risk: the 2020 Courage to Think Award and the record of her daughter accepting on her behalf.