A young Uyghur rapper and singer-songwriter not seen since his arrest 20 months ago is imprisoned in China, serving a three-year sentence for composing lyrics that “promoted extremism,” according to the Chinese rights advocacy group Weiquanwang.
Yashar Shohret, 26, who previously participated in the 2022 “White Paper” protests in China, has been missing since his arrest on Aug. 9, 2023, in Chengdu, Sichuan province, where he had been going to university.
A new report by Weiquanwang, or Rights Protection Network, a loose network of volunteers in China and abroad seeking to promote legal reforms in China, found that Shohret had been sentenced on June 20, 2024, to three years in prison on charges of “promoting extremism” and “illegally possessing items promoting extremism.”
He appealed the verdict, but the second trial upheld the original sentence, with the prison term lasting until Aug. 8, 2026. He is currently serving his sentence at the Wusu Prison in Xinjiang, the group said.
Radio Free Asia could not independently confirm that. Calls to the prison and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Prison Administration Bureau were not answered. Chinese search engines yielded no public records of Shohret’s arrest, trial or sentencing.
Overseas Uyghur youth activist Aman, who prefers a pseudonym for safety reasons, said the Chinese Communist Party has used high-profile arrests to set an example, but now they often make people “disappear quietly,” without announcing charges or public sentencing.
‘White Paper Protests’
Shohret originally hailed from Bole city, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern China, where 12 million Uyghurs live and face widespread persecution and surveillance under Beijing’s rule.
Previously, Shohret had been detained for three weeks for participating in the November 2022 “White Paper” protests, when thousands took to the streets of Chinese cities to protest harsh COVID-19 restrictions.
The rare public protests were triggered by a big apartment building fire in Urumqi in which several Uyghur residents died. Many demonstrators held up white sheets of paper to express that their voices were stifled.
Shohret sang a memorial song in Uyghur language for the fire victims and was immediately suppressed by the police and detained for 21 days on suspicion of “gathering a crowd to disrupt social order” before being released, Weiquanwang said.
‘Charged out like cheetahs’
Shohret, who performed under the stage name “Uigga,” seems to have gotten in trouble for songs he composed.
One of them, a 2023 song titled “Wake Up” that was listed on NetEase Cloud Musica popular Chinese music streaming service, contained the following Uyghur lyrics:
“They charged out like cheetahs.
Who? A group of hunters...
When I woke up,
The surroundings made me sink into deep thought."
In his lyrics, Shohret appears to metaphorically refer to himself as prey in a hostile environment, his fate already decided, said Sawut Muhammed, director of East Asian Affairs at the advocacy group World Uyghur Congress.
Those words were probably viewed as threatening to the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, said Muhammed.
“In the CCP’s view, emphasizing the Uyghur language could lead to a rise in Uyghur nationalism,” he said. That’s “detrimental to Xi Jinping’s vision of building a unified Chinese nation.”
Sawut pointed out that after 2017, when there was mass internment of Uyghurs in camps, China arrested many Uyghur scholars, singers, poets and writers. Many were accused of using politics in their art.
Although China’s constitution guarantees the right to use one’s mother tongue, the implementation of bilingual education after the year 2000 effectively requires Uyghur students to learn Mandarin and suppresses the Uyghur language, he said.
Gong Zi Shen, a Chinese current affairs commentator living in the United States, said Shohret’s lyrics are not explicitly political, but describe inner emotions. While the White Paper movement was sparked by dissatisfaction with the lockdown and zero-COVID policies, Shohret was not a leading student figure, he said.
However, Beijing cannot tolerate even the suggestion of dissent, and sentenced him for “extremism,” a punishment far more severe than would be applied to majority Han Chinese, Shen said.
Edited by Malcolm Foster.