Harvard Participates in 75 Years of Uyghur Colonization in China

One of the first things I did once I got to Harvard was organize a protest. Mask on and megaphone clutched tight, I read aloud the names and ages of an Uyghur family:

Qemernisahan, 48 years old.

Shahide, 13 years old.

Imran, 11 years old.

Abdurahman, 9 years old.

Nehdiye, 5 years old.

None of them are alive today. In 2017, two surviving children say they lost touch with their family. Sometime after, Chinese authorities sentenced their father, whose name I never learned, to 16 years in prison for unknown reasons. Soon after, their eldest brother, whose name I also never learned, was sent to a concentration camp. And on Nov. 24, 2022, Qemernisahan and her four youngest children were killed in an apartment fire in Ürümchi, the capital city of Chinese-occupied East Turkistan (incorrectly known to many as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China).

The Memeteli family’s deaths were avoidable. Harsh Covid-19 restrictions made it difficult for them and other residents of the building to escape the fire. Exits were blocked off and public services were slow to respond. Theirs is just one of many tragedies bred by the Chinese occupation. The government’s mishandling of the fire alone exposes the decades-long colonial project that has been slowly interning, dispossessing, and murdering Uyghurs since 1949.

Earlier this month, the People’s Republic of China celebrated its 75th anniversary. Grand parades, concerts, and festivities commemorated decades of colonial conquest and imperial control.

Seventy-five years ago last week, the People’s Liberation Army invaded East Turkistan. Since then, the Uyghurs living there have endured relentless, unspeakable oppression: The destruction of 16,000 mosques, the detainment of as many as two million people in concentration camps, the conscription of nearly 500,000 children to colonial boarding schools, and test detonations of 45 nuclear bombs. The list goes on; its extent may never be fully known.

Harvard’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of my people haunts me every day I walk this campus.

Just last semester, X. Shawn Qu — founder, chairman, and CEO of Canadian Solar — delivered opening remarks at the 27th annual Harvard College China Forum. Canadian Solar, one of the world’s largest solar module manufacturers, has had a large manufacturing center in East Turkistan for the past two decades, drawing sharp criticism for failing to sufficiently ensure its supply chain does not involve Uyghur forced labor sourced from the region.

In April 2022, the head of the Chinese consulate in New York, Huang Ping, was invited to address that year’s iteration of the HCCF. In interviews, Huang has denied the existence of East Turkistan’s concentration camps, insisting that the Uyghur genocide is a lie.

The mere invitation of prominent figures involved in or supportive of China’s atrocities renders my peers who run the HCCF complicit in the specious denial of the millions of Uyghurs living and dying in the shadows of the People’s Republic. At best, these invitations are tone-deaf to the suffering of my people, and to my Uyghur, Tibetan, Hong Konger, and Taiwanese peers.

Harvard’s complicity in Uyghur erasure extends far beyond the speakers hosted at the HCCF.

Yao Ning, a local party secretary, studied as an Asia fellow at the University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation from 2010 to 2011. Not long after, Ning became the party secretary of Maralbeshi county, where researchers have identified at least nine Uyghur concentration camps. His role as party secretary would mean that he is at least partly responsible for overseeing these instruments of genocide. In July 2021, Ning was formally recognized by Chinese president Xi Jinping for his work.

It’s safe to assume that Ning would have utilized aspects of his education — two years of which he spent on this campus — in his professional practices. Again, we see how this University has enabled a repressive and genocidal Beijing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the University has maintained close connections with Chinese Communist Party leadership. Until Claudine Gay, every Harvard president since 1998 had met with the sitting Chinese president.

While in Beijing, former President Drew G. Faust even extended an invitation to Xi to visit campus. Purportedly convening to discuss academic freedom and climate change, the moral depravity of engaging with a man known to employ arbitrary detentions, colonial boarding schools, land grabs, and infrastructure development in Uyghur and Tibetan lands was seemingly lost on Harvard’s leadership.

Faust and her presidential peers have made it abundantly clear that this institution — an ostensible bastion of academic inquiry, free expression, and diversity — is willing to ignore and even celebrate the evils of a regime with a bloody history of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Today, I continue to pay tribute to the Memetelis, the family who met an unjust fate in that Ürümchi apartment. I now chant without a mask and grip my megaphone with pride rather than fear, but my message has not changed. I still shout the names of the countless martyred, disappeared, and imprisoned Uyghurs.

I do so in the hope that my words echo beyond Harvard’s brick walls and into a future where we can all attempt to conceive of an Uyghur homeland, one that is free for its people to thrive in its vast expanse.

Kawsar Yasin ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a joint History and Anthropology concentrator in Eliot House and a co-founder of the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP.