By: Daniel McElroy
Photo: Ablajan Studios
Once hailed as a possible peacemaker between China’s Han ethnic majority and his own Uyghur minority, well-known pop star Ablajan Ayup is now missing in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, officially known as as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Ayup, who stopped responding to friends on Chinese messaging app WeChat on February 14, has not been seen or heard from since being detained at Urumqi airport on his way back from a music festival in Shanghai on February 15.
Friends of the artist believe that he has been detained in a “political re-education camp”—one of the 800,000 to 1 million Uyghurs in the region who have been imprisoned in such camps since April 2017, when regional authorities began detaining Uyghurs accused of harboring “strong religious” or “politically incorrect” views en masse.
Starting as a singer-songwriter who wrote about Uyghur identity and culture—fusing those topics with both Central Asian as well as American hip hop and R&B rhythms—Ayup rose to prominence in the mid-2000s as an inspiration among Uyghur youth. His first album sold over 100,000 copies on a restricted market, and soon he was able to begin playing all over the XUAR, and eventually throughout China—one of the first Uyghur public figures to rise to such fame. Ayup, who did not speak Chinese or English until his teens, released his first Mandarin-language track in 2013 after his Han Chinese manager encouraged him to start appealing to the wider Chinese audience as a purposeful “messenger of peace”.
Indeed, such a messenger seems to be needed. The XUAR has been a hotly contested region since the founding of the People’s Republic of China—which invaded and took political control of the XUAR almost immediately. Mass migration of Han Chinese followed, and the demographics changed rapidly; Han Chinese accounted for 6% of the region’s population in 1949 and today make up 45% of this figure. All the while, Uyghurs have struggled to maintain a political voice, and repression against their unique cultural and religious traditions has been harsh as Beijing has always received such demands as a threat to the nation itself.
Amidst this tension, Ayup began transforming himself into a voice for Uyghur unity as his notoriety increased. In July 2014, he planned a concert in the XUAR capital of Urumqi that was to be his first overt call for Uyghur unity. Unfortunately for him, though ethnic clashes and attacks by Uyghur separatists have been commonplace for the past several decades through the region and the rest of China, particularly bad violence struck just before the concert was scheduled to occur and led to over 100 deaths (both Uyghur and Han) outside the city of Kashgar. Authorities immediately moved to shut down his concert, calling it off one hour before Ayup was to take the stage.
Since the appointment of a new Chinese Communist Party Secretary, Chen Quanguo, in the XUAR in August 2016, crackdowns on the region’s Uyghur population have only intensified. Neither Chen Quanguo nor central Chinese government authorities have admitted the existence of the alleged political re-education camps in the XUAR, but local authorities have confirmed personally sending significant numbers of Uyghurs to such camps and have described intense overcrowding in the facilities.
Friends and acquaintances are unsure why Ayup would have been arrested in February. Some have speculated that a recent trip to perform in Malaysia could be to blame, as Uyghurs are forbidden from travelling to the Muslim-majority country where Chinese authorities believe they could be radicalized. Others believe that Ayup’s involvement with a Uyghur charity or his investment in Uyghur unity and heritage are the cause.
Whatever the reason that the Chinese government has decided to target Ayup and almost a million other Uyghur people, they must not continue. The culture of this ethnic minority group must not be suppressed due to authorities’ fears of terrorism and violence, and their demands for political self-determination should be at the very least acknowledged, if not granted. Regardless, however, a musician working to peacefully gain awareness for the rich culture and terrible plight of his people must not be imprisoned as if he were a threat to China itself—when he could very well be the “messenger for peace” that is so needed to bring an end to violence and repression in the XUAR.