The Washington Post profiles Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, whose lectures at the Central Nationalities University draw huge crowds:
The weekly lectures are a kind of high-wire act for the 40-year-old economist from Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region in China’s far west. He has been put under house arrest dozens of times over the past decade for criticizing how China runs his homeland and treats his people.
The fearlessness so admired by his students, a Chinese ethnic mosaic of Hans, Uighurs, Kazakhs and others, is exactly what the government fears.
Yet Tohti is not a separatist or even a political dissident. He’s a Communist Party member and a teacher at a top Chinese university who sees himself as a bridge between Hans and Uighurs. That the government has so far refused to endorse his middle road and work with him shows how difficult it is to resolve differences between the party and its restive Uighurs and Tibetans.
“Tohti stands out for his commitment to working within the established Chinese political order,” said Rian Thum, a Uighur history researcher at Harvard University. “He is an outspoken and articulate critic of many discriminatory Chinese policies, but his writings do not challenge the ideological foundations of the People’s Republic or the legitimacy of Chinese rule in Xinjiang.”
