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Uighurs in US Say China Using Detained Family Members in Forced Interviews

Asim Kashgarian

   WASHINGTON - Uighur community members in the United States are
   expressing skepticism after the Chinese government media in a series of
   separate videos showed their families in Xinjiang allegedly denouncing
   their detention as propaganda.
   Those Uighurs say their family members, after disappearing for years,
   are now reaching out to them via Chinese social media platforms to
   discourage them from speaking out against the crackdown in Xinjiang
   region.
   One of the Uighurs residing in the U.S., Samira Imin, told VOA that
   China Daily earlier this month showed her father, Iminjan Seydin, in a
   video on its Twitter account after he had gone missing in a Chinese
   detention camp for more than two years. Seydin also contacted Imin via
   WeChat, rejecting his detention and telling his daughter that she was
   "deceived by anti-China forces."

   "In our first online conversation on WeChat, after (nearly) three
   years, he is demanding me to delete my posts in the past and not
   publish anything on social media apps such as Twitter," Imin, a
   27-year-old medical worker in Boston, told VOA. She said she is
   convinced that her father has been coerced by Chinese authorities to
   ask her halt pro-Uighur activism.
   "The Chinese government's attempt to control my actions and thoughts
   through my father is not acceptable," she said, adding "I want my
   father to be free from all types of state surveillance. I want to have
   normal conversations with him."
   'Inciting extremism'

   Before his arrest in mid-2017, Seydin was a full-time professor of
   Chinese history at the Xinjiang Islamic Institute in the region's
   capital Urumqi. At the same time, he owned a publishing organization
   called the Imin Publishing House, which since its inception in 2012,
   had printed nearly 50 books on topics such as language, education,
   technology and psychology.
   Imin said she did not know the whereabouts of her father for months
   until 2019 when her contacts in Beijing said he was put in a so-called
   "re-education camp." She was told Seydin was sentenced to 15 years in
   prison for "inciting extremism" in a secret trial.

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