cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51447521
** “If I call my family, there will be problems.” **
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Beginning in 2016-17, as the Chinese state expanded surveillance and mass internment in the Uyghur Region – as purported counter-terror measures – contact between Uyghurs abroad and their families inside China collapsed. In 2020, a leaked Chinese government database cited Uyghurs’ “overseas communications” with relatives as a cause for internment. In a connected world, where long-distance communication is cheap and instantaneous, making a phone call has far-reaching consequences.
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Uyghurs abroad have been cut off from parents, siblings, and extended family members for as long as a decade. The result has been unresolved grief for deaths in the family learned years after the fact, intergenerational trauma as children grow up without knowing grandparents, deteriorating mental health, and isolation from cultural expression rooted in family life. These harms unfold in a global context of increasing Islamophobia, in which Muslim communities are increasingly securitised, surveilled, and treated as collective threats: all conditions that normalise extraordinary state control over ordinary family life.
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Indirect contact with relatives, such as through mutual acquaintances, provoked retaliation by authorities. One Uyghur [said] that following an innocuous and mediated exchange last year, security agents questioned his father-in-law. When contact was possible, some families experienced monitored or scripted phone calls that simulated “normality” while functioning as intimidation. Others were offered the possibility of a family reunion but only under strict conditions, such as agreeing to monitor Uyghur diaspora members or to disengage from advocacy. News, if it arrived at all, was often incomplete or years after the fact, and the ambiguity of not knowing has become a permanent condition. These are not dramatic, headline-grabbing abuses, but everyday systems of harm.
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For many Uyghurs, family is a means through which the state reaches and attempts to control them, even across borders. Family members inside China are punished for the actions, speech, or presence of relatives abroad. This threat disciplines critical speech overseas, compelling silence not because Uyghurs lack grievances, but because having family in the Uyghur Region is a form of leverage. Yusup, originally from Kashgar and now living in Turkey, last spoke with his mother in 2018. Although Yusup isn’t sure if it was because of their conversation, she was detained the same year and spent six years in prison.
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Why, then, does this intimidation and coercion continue with little intervention, especially since China’s transnational repression infringes on the sovereignty of other states? In part, it is because the world has moved on to other emergencies, leaving Uyghur families to manage what functions as a subtle tool of authoritarian control. However, the broader issue of transnational repression is acknowledged as a growing challenge for democratic societies. A January 2026 analysis by the European Parliament documents how states increasingly deploy surveillance, intimidation, and family-based coercion to control diasporas abroad.
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