Uyghur Youth Deported From Germany May Face Persecution in China

Human Rights Research Center
9 hours ago
7 min read

August 12, 2026

HRRC condemns Germany’s actions in deporting Arafat Adil back to China where he may face persecution. HRRC urges Europe to establish a special envoy when addressing Sino-EU relations to ensure the ethnically diverse population of China is recognized and their rights protected.

Portrait of Arafat Adil, provided by his mother Guzelay Adil [Image Credit: Guzelay Adil via AP News]

On July 21, 2026, Arafat Adil, a 21-year-old Uyghur Chinese man with dual citizenship from Turkiye, was deported by German Authorities from the Frankfurt Airport. Arafat has lived in Turkiye since 2017 and attempted to seek asylum in Germany. His mother, Guzelay Adil, said that Arafat was taken into custody and interrogated when he landed in Beijing the next morning. Chinese authorities refused to confirm Arafat’s status despite his family’s appeal.

Arafat’s case is not an isolated incident. In November 2025, Germany deported Rizwangul Bekri, a Uyghur woman, to China, but she was fortunately transferred to Turkiye instead. German officials claimed the attempted deportation was made due to an administrative error.

Other countries have done similar deportations. For example, Thailand authorities forcibly deported 40 Uyghur men back to China in February 2026. Human Rights Watch and UN Human Rights Chief, Volker Türk, both expressed concerns for their unknown fates; the Ccp refuses to comment on their status.

Why does China crack down on Xinjiang?

Map of China, Xinjiang province [Image Credit: Council of Foreign Affairs]

Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), a province located in Northwest China, is home to 12 million people, mostly Uyghurs. The Uyghurs are a distinct ethnic group from Han Chinese, speaking Turkic and practising Islam while the province capital, Urumqi, is closer to Kabul, Afghanistan than Beijing.

The Ccp tightened its control after President Xi Jinping and Xinjiang Province leader Chen Quanguo rose to power in 2014, under the political campaign of “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism ” (Strike Hard Campaign, 严厉打击暴力恐怖活动专项行动).

Ccp authorities then claimed that extreme religious terrorism initiated by foreign forces aimed to separate Xinjiang from China and disrupt the ethnic harmony, citing the 1990s East Turkestan Islamic Movement and the 2009 anti-Han riots in Urumqi. In Urumqi, economic disparity fueled the ethnic tensions.

Since the 1980s, Beijing had initiated economic developments in the region for its vast oil and mineral reserves. As a result, state-supported Han migrations expanded upon economic development to fill labour gaps. Han enterprises quickly dominated the markets with less incentives to hire Uyghurs due to language barriers. Wang Lequan, Xinjiang's communist party secretary from 1994 to 2010, defended the discriminatory hiring process by claiming that, “the education and cultural level of the people here (Xinjiang) is quite low.”

However, Human Rights Watch reported that the ethnic tensions between Han and Uyghurs during the 1990s to early 2000s were not only shaped by economic disparity.

Barbara Demick, a renowned journalist and writer who studies ethnic groups in China, examined in her book, Eat the Buddha, that one of Ccp’s border strategies of ethnic harmonizing policy is to relocate Uyghurs to Canton, a Southern province in China, believing that providing jobs to Uyghurs could alleviate the interethnic economic gaps and that job employments could divert the Uyghur’s attention for its ethnic policy.

The boiling point of the 2009 Anti-Han riots happened when Han workers in Canton believed the Uyghur migrant workers assaulted Han women, based on online rumors. Violent clashes then resulted in two Uyghur men dead. Critics speculated that the violent cases in Canton led to a breaking point in Urumqi, which eventually led to the 2009 riots.

An analysis from a cultural perspective

The Ccp’s crackdown on Xinjiang, as well as Tibet, can also be interpreted from a cultural perspective. Within in the traditional Huaxia (Sino cultural realm, 華夏) belief system, power is concentrated as a sphere centered on the Tianzi (the Son of Heaven, 天子), who is regarded as the supreme moral and political ruler. Those who are closer to the Tianzi are considered the most civilised and hold greater power. In contrast, those who belong to the outer-sphere possess the least power, and are regarded as less civilized. Those who are outside of the spheres are considered as the four barbarians (see Figure 1):

Dongyi (東夷, Eastern Yi) – barbarians to the east.

Nanman (南蛮, Southern Man) – barbarians to the south.

Xirong (西戎, Western Rong) – barbarians to the west.

Beidi (北狄, Northern Di) – barbarians to the north.

Figure 1, Huaxia ideas of hierarchy and power. [Image Credit: youtube screenshot from We toast HK] — Figure 1, *Huaxia* ideas of hierarchy and power. [Image Credit: youtube screenshot from *We toast HK*]

Within the Huaxia belief, the status of barbarians is not permanent and they are interpreted as cultural entities instead of biological entities like the West.

In the early passage of Mencius, Confucious philosopher Mengzi explicitly asserts the cultural dominance of Huaxia over the Yi (barbarians): I have heard of using the teachings of the Xia to transform the Yi; I have never heard of being transformed by the Yi. (Mengzi 3B:9)”.

In short, barbarians can become “civilised” by adopting the customs, rituals, and language of the Huaxia, or by submitting to the authority of the Tianzi, according to Huaxia beliefs.

Although there is not direct evidence suggesting that the Ccp’s modern policy on Xinjiang and Tibet–such as the Ethnic Unity Law or the State Religious Law are modelling after the Huaxia belief–critics argue that the contemporary state-building in China selectively revives imperial concepts, such as selecting which components of religious or ethnic cultures are “civilized Chinese culture”, to justify domestic unity.

Why is deportation a significant human rights concern?

To decipher why Arafat Adil’s deportation is a significant human rights concern, one must understand what are the daily struggles for Uyghurs living in Xinjiang.

First, ethnic minorities in China, particularly the Uyghurs and Tibetans, are unable to obtain a passport like their Han Chinese counterparts.

Second, Uyghurs in Xinjiang are living in two worlds. There are the Uyghurs promoted by the Chinese authorities: an exotic “minority region”, where grateful nomads were being lifted out of poverty and praising the party with cultural dances. Then there is the Xinjiang experienced by the locals, who have watched their next generations not being able to speak to their parents in Uyghur language, dissidents arrested in re-education camps, and authorities coercing religious figures and tearing down mosques.

The people who were forcefully deported back to China were at great risk of torture and detained in the re-education camps in Xinjiang, where they would be forced political brainwashing–an act that The World Uyghur Congress asserted that, based on the scale and the gravity of the camp, is a crime against humanity.

Uyghur re-education camps were established under the Province leader Chen Quanguo and allegedly served to provide vocational training and to deter Islamic extremism. Satellite images from the Australian Human Rights Institute show that there are 400 camps in the region, most of which underwent significant construction that critics fear would force more people into the camps.

What should Europe be aware of?

Uyghurs in Xinjiang are most likely to move to Türkiye due to its shared linguistic and cultural traits. Penpa Tsering, head of the Central Tibetan Administration, advocated for greater coordination among democratic countries, as the Ccp’s policies have impacts beyond China’s borders. He emphasized that freedom and human dignity are matters of global governance, democratic values, and civil liberties.

The European Union, which holds legislative authority over many areas concerning human rights in Europe, must be aware of the ethnic distinctiveness of China, especially in regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang.

Glossary

Asylum: protection or safety, especially that given by a government to people who have been forced to leave their own countries for their safety or because of war:
Autonomous: independent and having the power to make your own decisions
Barbarian: a member of a group of people from a very different country or culture that is considered to be less socially advanced and more violent than your own
Brainwashing: the process of making someone believe something by repeatedly telling them that it is true and preventing any other information from reaching them
Coercing: to persuade someone forcefully to do something that they are unwilling to do
Contemporary: existing or happening now, and therefore seeming modern:
Counterparts: a person or thing that has the same purpose as another one in a different place or organization
Crimes against humanity: crimes against humanity involve either large-scale violence in relation to the number of victims or its extension over a broad geographic area (widespread), or a methodical type of violence (systematic).
Custody: the state of being kept in prison, especially while waiting to go to court for trial:
Discriminatory: treating a person or group differently from and usually worse than other people, because of their race, gender, sexuality, etc.
Dissident: a person who publicly disagrees with and criticizes their government
Disparity: a lack of equality or similarity, especially in a way that is not fair
Domestic Unity: In China, domestic unity is described as forging a strong sense of the community of the Chinese people. Enshrined in the lately enforced Ethnic Unity Law
Exotic: unusual and exciting because of coming (or seeming to come) from far away
Extremism: the fact of someone having beliefs that most people think are unreasonable and unacceptable
Imperial: belonging or relating to an empire or the person or country that rules it
Interrogation: to ask someone a lot of questions for a long time in order to get information, sometimes using threats or violence:
Linguistic: connected with language or the study of language
Mencius: Mencius is a Chinese record of the philosopher's conversations with warring lords, disciples, and adversaries of the Way, as well as a collection of pronouncements on government, human nature, and a variety of other Confucion philosophical and political subjects.
Nomads: a member of a group of people who move from one place to another rather than living in one place all of the time
Philosopher: someone who studies or writes about the meaning of life
State-building: The creation, shaping or strengthening of a nation.

References

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Uyghur Youth Deported From Germany May Face Persecution in China

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