Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like had I not been born Uyghur.
The weekend before last, I visited the home of my close friend in Saratoga Springs, Upstate New York. It was here that she had grown up, just as her mother and father before her. She drove me by the homes of her grandmother, her uncle, her aunt and her cousin — each lived within 15 minutes of her family home. For the first time, I wondered: what would it have been like had I not been born Uyghur?
Would my grandparents also live just a drive away? Would I worry so much then, about the weight of my words? Words now that could amount to the disappearance of my own grandmother. But instead, I was born Uyghur. Instead, my grandmother lives 7,500 miles away, and nine years have passed since I last saw her, last heard from her. Nine years have passed since the start of the Uyghur genocide.
Being Uyghur, my existence in of itself is a crime, and my words condemning China — for killing my grandfather, for destroying my motherland and for detaining my people by the millions into concentration camps — lead only to more targeting and repression. My American citizenship has failed to save me from threatening calls from Chinese numbers, from my name being stamped on the Chinese government blacklist, and from others being attacked because of their mere association with me.
For the past 10 years, the Chinese government has been committing a ruthless genocide against the Uyghur people of East Turkistan, now officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. This genocide, however, is being committed with intentionally engineered silence and secrecy. Though the concentration camps in East Turkistan stretch miles in length and hundreds in number, photos are rare, videos are almost non-existent and voices are silenced. My own involvement in advocacy has led to repercussions for my family in East Turkistan that I am fearful to even publicly say. I am reluctant to speak too openly about my experiences in fear of what the Chinese government may do next.
And yet, this is the same government that Cornell University views as a valuable partner.
2019 marked the peak of the Uyghur genocide and its coverage in mainstream media. In July, 22 countries signed a joint letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council denouncing China’s mass detention of Uyghurs and calling for greater access to Xinjiang. In October, 23 countries signed a joint statement urging China to respect human rights in Xinjiang. That same year, 2019, former President Martha Pollack made a visit to China as the first Cornell President in over 10 years to do so. It was during this visit that Cornell’s 11th President, Jeffrey Lehman, stated that “decoupling [with China] would be a devastating overreaction.”
As millions of Uyghurs lay rotting in concentration camps facing a genocide just across the country, Cornell’s administration and leadership turned a blind eye. With Pollack, on that visit, was current President Michael Kotlikoff. It was during this visit that Kotlikoff stated that Cornell has “a long-standing commitment to addressing the greatest challenges facing human society.” But, standing to address the Uyghur genocide happening on the same soil that Cornell’s leadership stood upon, I guess, was not important enough.
In 2021, the United States Department of State recognized China’s human rights abuses in East Turkistan — Xinjiang — as a genocide, and a few months following, Cornell’s Faculty Senate rejected a resolution to move forward with deepening Cornell’s ties with Peking University. Faculty raised concerns about the genocide and PKU’s complicity. Nonetheless, Cornell’s administration went on with the partnership.
The Faculty Senate’s rejection, however, did spark a reaction elsewhere, not from Cornell leadership but from the Cornell chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association. The student group began circulating a petition urging the University to continue with the partnership with PKU, citing that allegations of human rights abuses in China were created simply to “deliberately discredit and attack China."
CSSA is a Chinese student organization with chapters in universities across the US, but setting it apart from any other student-run club is that it is the “ONLY Chinese student organization officially supported by [the] Embassy of People's Republic of China at Cornell University," according to its website. While it is not clear that the Chinese government or the Chinese embassy had a role in the development and dissemination of the petition, “Beijing has a history of using CSSA branches to influence campus discourse.”
CSSA’s in America were found to be “alerting Chinese diplomats about on-campus events that have the potential to conflict with China’s preferred political narratives”, to “suppress free speech,” and act as a monitoring mechanism of Chinese students studying abroad.
At the sacrifice of the morals, obligations, and values that Cornell says they stand for, the University has continued to remain steadfast in its commitment to China. Moreover, they have allowed their campus to have space for groups such as CSSA. For a Cornell student like me, this can mean that the life or death of my family members in East Turkistan is dependent on my words and my actions here on campus.
Today marks the 76th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, celebrating a government that is actively exterminating my people, culture, and identity.
Sometimes, I wonder what it would have been like had I not been born Uyghur.
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Zilala Mamat ‘26 is a Government student in the College of Arts and Sciences and an Opinion Columnist for the Cornell Daily Sun. Her fortnightly column focuses on the intersections of the Uyghur genocide, China’s global influence, and Cornell’s ties to Chinese institutions, examining how questions of academic freedom, complicity, and advocacy shape campus life and beyond. She can be reached at zam32@cornell.edu.
