Ilham Tohti

Ilham Tohti: The Moderate China Could Not Tolerate

In January 2014, an economics lecturer at Beijing's Minzu University of China was stopped as he tried to board a flight to the United States. He had spent a decade arguing, in print and in Mandarin, that China's own Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law should be honoured — that Uyghurs and Han Chinese needed a shared vocabulary rather than separate grievances. Eight months later a court in Xinjiang sentenced him to life imprisonment for separatism. He has been in solitary confinement, by most accounts, ever since, and his family has had no contact with him since early 2017.

Artush

Ilham Tohti was born on 25 October 1969 in Artush, in China's far western Xinjiang region — Uyghur, and from the country's most distant periphery. He was educated at Northeast Normal University, and then at Minzu University of China in Beijing, the state institution founded expressly to train and study China's ethnic minorities. He stayed on there to teach economics.

That trajectory matters. Tohti was not a dissident in exile or a religious figure. He was a product of the Chinese state's own system for cultivating minority intellectuals, working inside a Beijing university, writing largely in Chinese, for a Chinese audience.

The Economics of Grievance

His scholarly specialism was the economic relationship between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang — the regional economy, and the distribution of its returns. This was not an abstract field. In a resource region undergoing rapid state-directed development, the question of who captures the value — who gets the jobs, the contracts, the credit — is the material substrate of everything else that happens there.

Tohti's argument was that unrest in Xinjiang had causes an economist could name: unemployment among young Uyghurs, structural exclusion from the region's growth, and a security response that treated the symptom as the disease. He was making, in other words, a policy case rather than a national one. He wanted the state to work better, not to disappear.

Uyghur Online

In the mid-2000s he founded Uyghur Online, a bilingual website whose purpose, as he described it, was to give Uyghurs and Hans a common platform for discussion and exchange. The bilingualism was the point. Uyghur-language debate was invisible to the Han majority; Chinese-language commentary on Xinjiang was almost entirely official. Tohti built a place where the two could see each other's arguments.

The authorities shut it down in 2008. In July 2009, in the aftermath of riots in Ürümqi, he was detained; international pressure secured his release on 23 August. He kept writing.

The Moderate's Trap

The most striking feature of Tohti's public record is how conservative it was. He did not call for an independent East Turkestan. He called for the implementation, through democratic means, of a law already on China's books. He positioned himself as a bridge, and consistently argued for reconciliation between ethnic groups rather than separation.

This is what makes the separatism conviction so revealing. Prosecutors were obliged to construct their case not from any advocacy of independence — there was none — but from the existence of the platform itself and from his relationships with his students. Amnesty International called the two-day trial an affront to justice, noting that his lawyers were denied access to the evidence against him.

At least six of his students were also imprisoned between 2014 and 2017 — Abduqeyum Ablimit, Perhat Halmurat, Akbar Imin, Mutellip Imin, Shohret Nijat and Atikem Rozi — with sentences ranging from three and a half to eight years. Their current status is unclear. The message to any Uyghur student considering an academic career in the social sciences was not subtle.

Silence

Tohti's arrest came months before the launch, in May 2014, of the Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism — the policy under which more than half a million Uyghurs would be prosecuted or imprisoned between 2017 and 2021. He was, in effect, the first casualty of a system he had spent his career warning about.

Since early 2017 his family has been denied visits. The scale of the secrecy around him was measured in September 2024, when a prison guard was sentenced to seven years for disclosing information about Tohti's health. His daughter Jewher Ilham, now living in the United States, has accepted his honours on his behalf. "I do not know where my father is," she said. "2017 was the last time my family received word about him."

Those honours have accumulated in his absence: the Martin Ennals Award in 2016, the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize and the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, both in 2019. The European Union continues to call for his immediate and unconditional release.

Why Ilham Is Called a Genius

Tohti's claim on the word is not the usual one. He did not produce a landmark theorem or a discovery. What he did was harder to see and, in its context, rarer: he built an intellectually honest account of an ethnic conflict from inside the state that was prosecuting it, in that state's own language, using that state's own law as his standard.

The specific quality is diagnostic clarity under maximum pressure to distort. Almost every other participant in the Xinjiang argument was incentivised toward simplification — the state toward terrorism, the diaspora toward colonialism, foreign observers toward whichever suited them. Tohti held to a more difficult and more useful position: that the violence had traceable economic and administrative causes, that those causes were fixable, and that fixing them was in the Chinese state's own interest. Holding a position that offers no side an easy weapon, and holding it in Beijing while doing it, requires a kind of intellectual nerve that is genuinely uncommon.

The counter-case deserves saying. Tohti's academic output is not large and is not internationally influential as scholarship; his reputation now rests substantially on his imprisonment, and prizes awarded to jailed men are partly political instruments. He did not win his argument — the opposite of his prescription is what China implemented. It is fair to say that he is honoured for courage and moral judgment more than for scholarly originality, and it would be dishonest to inflate the second in order to justify the first. But moral judgment under those conditions is itself a cognitive achievement: he read the situation more accurately than the security apparatus did, and the decade since has vindicated his diagnosis in the most terrible way available.

Legacy

The Sakharov Prize citation and the sustained EU pressure have kept his name attached to a repression that Beijing would prefer to discuss without names. He remains the most prominent single individual associated with the Uyghur case, and the moderate whose silencing marks the moment the moderate position ceased to exist. His daughter has become his voice. His argument — that the Xinjiang problem was an economic and legal one before it became a security one — is still the strongest thing anyone has written about it, and is still unanswered.