Rushan Abbas details the abuses against her family and community by the Chinese state in a new book.
Seven years ago, Rushan Abbas came to Washington, D.C. and began speaking out about the experience of her community, the Uyghurs, an ethnically Turkic people living in the far west of China that has been persecuted by the Chinese state. Five days after her appearance at the Hudson Institute in 2018, her sister, Gulshan Abbas, was disappeared by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and has yet to return.
But instead of being silenced by such a life-altering event, Abbas has persisted, increasing her advocacy efforts, leaving her full-time job and making it her mission to advocate on behalf of her family and the Uyghur people.
On Tuesday Abbas returned to D.C., this time to promote her new book, Unbroken: One Uyghur’s Fight for Freedom. The title refers to her emotions following her sister’s disappearance in Xinjiang, the region in which most of the Uyghur population lives, as well as her attitude toward the ongoing genocide there. Abbas maintains that although her heart may be broken her spirit is not, which she says is essential to maintaining her fight against the CCP.
Uyghur detention and imprisonment in China has been a geopolitical issue for years, with reports beginning in 2010s that members of the minority group were being removed from their homes, required to disavow Islamic religious customs, forced into labor programs and sometimes imprisoned.
In 2021 the U.S. Congress passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which “ensures that goods made with forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China do not enter the United States market.” The law has been successful in coercing some international firms from locating production facilities in the region. A joint investigation by The New York Times and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, however, showed the Chinese government has found ways around the ban, in part by moving Uyghurs to jobs in factories outside the territory.
At her talk, Abbas said companies that invest in Xinjiang and utilize labor programs tied to it are making genocide a profitable venture for China. Her memoir presents an opportunity to introduce the perspective of the Uyghur people, whose voices are too often left out of the narrative spun by the CCP. Abbas uses her platform to educate as over “90 percent of people do not know who the Uyghurs are,” urging attention to be brought to their plight.
Over the past seven years in which her sister has remained in captivity, Abbas has maintained her role as a prominent face and figure for the Uyghur cause. This is not easy. The CCP relies on the fear for a loved one’s fate to silence protests against its actions in Xinjiang. Yet as Damon Wilson, President of the National Endowment for Democracy shared as he introduced her, “silence is the oxygen of tyranny,” and Abbas will not be silenced.
You can read more about her story and the plight of the Uyghur people in her memoir, available June 10.