For China’s ethnic majority Han Chinese, “running” entails a number of different possibilities: study, emigration, working, or marrying someone overseas. But for ethnic minority groups such as Uyghurs or Tibetans, the exit is more likely to take the form of a flight into exile, in the face of countless barriers to getting a passport to leave the country. Even after they leave, many exiles continue to suffer from ongoing pressure from Chinese government harassment that makes many fear for the safety of relatives left behind in China. The ‘July 5th Incident’ sparked a decision to break away from the system and leave China. Sawut Muhammad is a neatly dressed and well-spoken young man in his early 30s who heads the Japan Uyghur Association. He and many others like him will likely never go home. Sawut, who started his studies in Japan in April 2016, describes himself as “one of the last Uyghurs to escape China.” He grew up in Xinjiang and attended a Chinese-language school where 90% of his fellow students were Han Chinese. He believed back then that it was possible for Uyghurs to make a success of their lives in China, as long as they had a high level of Chinese. So Sawut worked hard and won first prize in a railway design competition in his hometown, which helped him get accepted to study railways in schools in Sichuan and Beijing. He joined the ruling Chinese Communist Party and became a government official. In his early 20s, he worked as a deputy section chief in a railway company, managing a department of 100 people under the section chief and party secretary. For a while, Sawut thought he could learn Chinese, make Chinese friends, and still keep his Uyghur identity. He thought the party was doing the right thing for Uyghurs and Han Chinese alike. But the July 2009 crackdown in Urumqi, which happened while he was in secondary school, sowed the seeds of his eventual exile in his mind. The beating deaths of Uyghur factory workers In far away Guangzhou and Shaoguan June 2009 sparked a July 5 demonstration in Xinjiang that drew thousands of Uyghurs into the streets that was violently suppressed by the police, sparking large-scale violent clashes with bloodshed. The initial death toll, released two weeks after the incident, said that only 197 people had lost their lives, most of them Han Chinese, with just 10 Uyghurs and 11 Hui Muslims among the dead. But the London-based rights group Amnesty International quoted overseas Uyghur groups as saying that the true number of Uyghurs killed on July 5 and its aftermath was far higher. The Chinese government has kept all information about the incident under wraps, making it hard to get a complete picture of what happened, with most people outside China relying on verbal accounts from those in exile. Sawut Muhammad says it's hard to be sure exactly how many died. One thing he is sure of, however, is that the People's Armed Police opened fire on July 5. "I heard gunshots," he recalls. "Who has guns? Only the police have guns." Two days after the clash, Sawut saw armored vehicles patrolling the streets of Urumqi, and his Han Chinese friends started going out to protest and to retaliate against the Uyghurs. "The Han Chinese beat up Uyghurs indiscriminately. My friends filmed it and showed me, and the police did nothing to stop them. My whole world collapsed," Sawut says. "Two days later, I was getting looks of hatred from Han Chinese people whom I didn't even know on the street," he says. "That's when I decided to leave." There was a time when Han Chinese would be told off for openly criticizing Uyghurs in public, as part of the Communist Party's pursuit of "ethnic unity." "July 5, 2009 changed everything," says Sawut. Sawut still faced discrimination despite going on to join the Communist party and becoming a section chief at the railway company. He cites an incident on Oct. 1, 2014 as an example. He was boarding a train, which, as a railway employee, he was entitled to ride for free. All of the Han Chinese employees boarded with no problem. But Sawut was stopped by the police and told to go and sit in the carriage for Uyghurs. When he asked why, the police told him: "It's for your own good." Then he realized that he would always be treated differently. "China is ultimately run for the benefit of the Han Chinese," he says. And he saw no hope for an end to the hatred between the two groups if the Chinese Communist Party stays in power. So, like many other young Uyghurs, he made up his mind to leave. Sawut's mother didn't approve, because she knew he would join the Uyghur movement overseas, and he was already doing pretty well at work in Xinjiang. But Sawut was undeterred, and pushed ahead with his plan. Young Tibetans ‘run’ if they can Xiaota is a young Tibetan woman with Buddhist rosary beads on her wrists, a downward gaze, and a diamond nose piercing. Born on a Himalayan plateau, the 23-year-old moved to Japan as a student three years ago. Xiaota – a pseudonym to protect the safety and privacy of him and his family – refuses to speak Mandarin, saying she now only speaks Japanese or English, leaving Chinese behind her in China. Her parents sent her to a traditional Han Chinese primary school at the age of 5, where she was the only Tibetan in a class of 45 children. Xiaota was taught from an early age not to speak Tibetan outside the home, but to express herself in clear and well-accented Mandarin. As part of a silent minority, she learned to keep her head down and work hard. Her parents, who were outwardly staunch communists, put extra pressure on her at home, saying she had to outdo the Han Chinese, as a representative of the Tibetan people. Xiaota, who at five years old could barely read a word in Chinese, was made to memorize the entire book of 300 Tang Dynasty poems by rote, getting an excellent score in the subsequent test. Despite being a top student, she was often subjected to racist abuse by her Han Chinese classmates, who would substitute the word "dirty" for the homophonic Chinese word for Tibetan, calling her dirty, stupid, or stinky. Her Han Chinese teachers would do nothing when she complained about it, with some even telling her to go the hell back to herding sheep if she didn't like it. Xiaota was forced to be on her guard all through her "mainstream" education, responding to her oppression by working ever harder. By the time she was grown, the constant anti-Tibetan racism had made her determined to find a way out of China. She was one of the lucky few young Tibetans to manage an exit, ahead of waves of repressive new campaigns. In 2012, the Chinese government in Tibet ordered the full withdrawal of ordinary passports from local residents, more than 90% of whom were Tibetan. The party secretary who ordered the move was Chen Quanguo, who was later put in charge of Xinjiang and became infamous for a crackdown on Uyghurs that has drawn charges of genocide in the West.. It had always been hard for Tibetans to get passports, but fresh restrictions on overseas travel were imposed on Tibetan areas under the hard-line Chen. According to a 2014 report by Human Rights Watch titled “One Passport, Two Systems,” China began a “dual-track” approach to issuing passports as early as 2002, with one track being fast and easy, and the other extremely slow. The fast track was used in majority Han Chinese areas, while the slow track applied predominantly to Tibetan and other ethnic and religious minority groups, including the Uyghurs and the Hui Muslims, with Han people living in those regions subject to the same rules. The report found that the policies in these regions were discriminatory in content and effect and broke international law by imposing onerous restrictions on freedom of movement across borders. The Passport Law of the People's Republic of China states that police-run Entry/Exit Bureaus must issue regular passports within 15 days of receiving an application. Reasons for non-compliance with this rule must be given in writing, and applicants must be informed of their right to administrative appeal or litigation. However, this clause does not apply to Tibetans. As the Tibetan writer Woeser wrote in 2015: "It's easier for ordinary Tibetans to go to heaven than to get a passport." They must run a gauntlet of endless government hurdles, tedious procedures, endless official oversight –not to mention occasional meals out and gifts for the officials concerned. The process is said to take a year and a half, and the chances of emerging with a passport at the end of it are slim. Human Rights Watch lists 10 steps residents of the Tibetan Autonomous Region must go through to get a passport, starting with the local neighborhood or village committee, all the way to the highest level of their district police department. Applications must be approved by officials at every stage. For young Tibetans, good grades are their main ticket out of China. Anyone wanting to study abroad must first get admitted to a first-class university in other Chinese provinces as a stepping stone, says Xiaota, citing more famous universities in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. They then must get accepted to study overseas before they can apply for a passport. With political unrest breaking out in Tibet in 1959, 1989 and 2008, Beijing has had some form of restrictions on Tibetans leaving the country for the past half-century, to stop them from fleeing to India. Before 2009, Tibetans had a harder time applying for Chinese passports than Uyghurs, and were required to submit itineraries to local police stations just to travel to other provinces of China. Every time Xiaota went back to China, she would have to hand in her passport to the police. No exceptions are made, not even for those whose parents are government officials, teachers or party cadres. Anyone whose family members took part in any of the three major Tibetan uprisings against Chinese rule is barred from having a passport for life. Xiaota's top grades meant that she was admitted to a famous university in Guangzhou, where she then applied for overseas study. For her, the process went fairly smoothly, but her experience has been exceptional, she says. According to a New York Times article published in 2013, Tibetan and Uyghur students can't even apply to overseas universities without the approval of their current university. 10,000 yuan in bribes to get a passport In April 2016, Sawut finally got his chance to leave. He says that in the period just before Chen was installed as party secretary of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in August 2016, it wasn't too hard for Uyghurs to get passports or to study abroad. Back then, Han Chinese who lived in Xinjiang could leave China easily, and could expect to receive their passports about two weeks after applying. While it was slightly harder for Uyghurs, it was still possible to leave China if they had no criminal record, had some modest savings, and could find a good reason to travel, like overseas study. Sawut's first application to study at a language school in the United States was repeatedly rejected, however, with officials asking him to get a full copy of the curriculum and location of each class from the college. By the time Sawut finally managed to get a detailed teaching schedule for the school year, officials said there was only a half-year curriculum – too short to justify issuing a passport. "No sooner had I complied with one request, than an official would make another one. They were constantly coming up with new reasons to refuse me," he says. Sawut finally asked a Han Chinese friend, who told him that some Uyghurs were getting issued with passports by the entry-exit bureau. It seemed as if bribery was the only way forward. In the end, Sawut spent 10,000 yuan (1,390 USD) bribing officials to get his passport. He then made trips to Turkey and Japan before applying to study in Japan. "It had to be a democracy. I didn't want to live in a totalitarian state," he says. He quit his job at a railway company and left Xinjiang without looking back. However, since Sawut left China, policies toward Uyghurs in Xinjiang have changed dramatically. After Chen took office, the authorities built a large number of "re-education camps" in Xinjiang, incarcerating an estimated one million or more Muslims in camps and setting up far-reaching surveillance networks everywhere else. Reports revealed that since October 2016, the Xinjiang authorities began confiscating Uyghurs' passports. By 2017, all passports in Xinjiang had to be handed over to the police for "safe-keeping." No new passports were issued, and residents of Xinjiang, particularly the Uyghurs, were no longer free to leave. According to Sawut, there are currently around 2,000-3,000 Uyghurs in Japan. But because the Japanese government lists them all as "Chinese nationals," they don't show up in immigration statistics. There are a few thousand each in other democratic countries, including the United States, while some 50,000 live in Turkey and more than 300,000 in Kazakhstan, he says. Since the camps were set up in 2017, the government has cut off Uyghurs in China from their families in neighboring Kazakhstan. Anyone caught sending messages of distress to family across the border could be arrested. A former Yumin county government official named Dalesh Sheritzat, a Communist Party member, in 2018 became one of many Uyghurs detained for this. Sawut says it's still not impossible for Uyghurs to get out of post-2017 China. They do it mostly by relocating to big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, completely changing their household registration, and by paying bribes to get a passport, he says, adding that he knows of some who have managed this successfully. Uyghurs told the Voice of America earlier this year that Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang are more likely than other ethnic groups to get their passports returned after they've been given to police for "safe-keeping.” But they said all residents of Xinjiang, even the Han Chinese, have a harder time getting a passport than they would anywhere else in China. A Han Chinese resident of Xinjiang currently studying in Japan who gave only the nickname Xiao Gao confirmed Sawut's statements about passport applications for Han Chinese. He said it wasn't too hard for him to get a passport when he wanted to leave Xinjiang. But he was still unable to apply to study overseas from Xinjiang, and had to apply to study in a coastal or interior Chinese province before he could apply to an overseas program. Tibetan memories and identity Xiaota says she never expected to be looked down upon by Han Chinese in Japan. Yet, one day as she was eating at a Tang-style restaurant in Japan, she took off her mask, only to hear a Han Chinese man at a nearby table tell his friends: "Thanks to these minorities, we're limited in the number of kids we can have." Xiaota doesn't speak much Mandarin these days. She spoke to WHYNOT in Japanese, and feels a sense of apprehension if she runs into Han Chinese in a restaurant. Xiaota has little love for China. She says her aim is clear, regardless of where she lives. "I don't want to be Chinese. I just want to be a person," she says. Apart from the Tibetan community, Xiaota sometimes talks to Japanese or Indian students, but refuses all contact or communication with Han Chinese. Her fear ensures that she seldom reveals her identity as a Tibetan. As we talk, the news comes on the television. Rishi Sunak is now British prime minister. "Look!" says Xiaota, her eyes shining. "People of Indian descent can be prime ministers now." Xiaota sees the United Kingdom as accommodating of diversity, and wants to emigrate there at the first opportunity. She feels that the job of keeping Tibetan religion, identity and history now falls to Tibetans in the diaspora. Xiaota was born after the Lhasa uprising of 1989, and her mainstream schooling left her with little understanding of her own history. Xiaota only learned about her people's history of resistance to Chinese Communist Party rule after she left the country. She said she broke down after learning through videos about key events in modern history: the 1958 armed uprising in Gannan; the Dalai Lama's 1959 flight from Tibet; the pro-democracy movement of 1989 that ended in the Tiananmen massacre; and the Lhasa unrest of 2008. "I cried watching all of it for the first time on YouTube," she says. "I realized that the history taught by the Chinese Communist Party was all lies. I never expected that all of it would be fake." Tibetans care deeply about keeping alive the history and memories of their people, Xiaota says, with many of them giving their kids an "alternative education" at home. She recalls her mother quietly walking over to her bedside one night in their shared guest room during a 2017 vacation in China and whispering: "Actually, the Panchen Lama is fake." [Editor's note: Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, identified by the Dalai Lama as the 11th Panchen Lama, was taken prisoner by the Chinese government in 1995, when he was just six years old, and never heard from again.. Beijing later proclaimed that Gyaincain Norbu was the 11th Panchen Lama.] That night, Xiaota's mother told her the entire recent history of the Tibetan people. That's when she found out that the Dalai Lama was actually in India, and that such secrets could only be discussed when nobody else was around. In September 2022, as Lhasa was under lockdown due to COVID-19, the authorities took Tibetans from their beds in the middle of the night and sent them off to quarantine camp, where they were billeted in basic stone huts with poor sanitation, according to photos sent to Xiaota by a friend in Tibetan. Xiaota got this information from a primary source, but didn't know who to send it to. The story was eventually reported by overseas media a few days later. It's now much harder for information to get out of China, due to government controls. "A lot of stuff doesn't get reported until three days after the event by foreign media," Xiaota says. During the zero-COVID restrictions, plenty of Chinese nationals studying overseas wanted to tell the world what was going on in China, but were unsure whether to speak out or keep quiet, fearing that they were being watched by the state security police online [and fearing potential retaliation against their families back home], despite living in free countries themselves. Later, Xiaota learned from relatives who were cadres that the government had been late paying the salaries of its Tibetan civil servants, who suffered cuts to their benefits. Now, even “brainwashed” Tibetans inside China are beginning to have doubts about what Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping calls the "Chinese dream." And the fact that the economy can no longer support the government's previous utilitarian approach, China could be on its way to a crisis, she says. Xiaota's mother has started warning her not to go back there. Xiaota, looking around to see if there are any Chinese people listening, touches the prayer beads on her bracelet, and confesses: "Actually, I really want to go to India. But if I do, there'll be a stamp on my passport saying I've been to India, and everyone will know why I went there," she says. That's her goal for this year -- to improve her English, then travel to Western countries, then finally to India. After losing friends and loved ones, a shift to speaking out In July 2017, more than a year after he moved to Japan, Sawut suddenly found that his sister and friends back home had unfriended him on the Chinese social media platform WeChat. They showed up in his contacts with the message: "The other party is not your friend," and he couldn't message them or receive messages from them. Before that, he'd been able to stay in touch with loved ones, although he had received a request from unidentified people via his sister for the address of his university, as well as warnings not to be in contact with other Uyghurs overseas. The mystery contacts also got his sister to ask him to add a suspected state security police account as a friend on WeChat. Sawut refused, but his sister told him: "You have to do this." Reading between the lines, it seemed to Sawut that his sister had some powerful people breathing down her neck. He stopped using WeChat after that. He still gets strange phone calls from time to time claiming that he has mail waiting for him at the Chinese consulate and asking him to come and collect it. Sawut pays them no heed. After all, he says, "once you're inside the consulate, you're on Chinese soil." Like many Uyghurs overseas, Sawut's passport has expired and he can't leave the country because he can't renew it. But he is allowed to remain in Japan on his current visa. As someone who has lived in Japan continuously for the past five years, Sawut is eligible to apply for Japanese citizenship. But even with a Japanese passport, Sawut and other Uyghurs don't ever expect to set foot in China again."We daren't go back, because we don't want to be locked up like Mihriay Erkin was," he says. Mihriay Erkin, who once worked alongside Sawut at a restaurant in Japan, quit her job at the Institute of Advanced Science and Technology in Japan and went back to China in 2019, because she feared for her parents' safety, with all that was happening in Xinjiang. Nobody has heard from her since, Sawut says. Overseas media were able to confirm in 2020 that she had died. Many observers blamed the Chinese government, which has denied any involvement in her death. Erkin once texted a friend saying that she had been taught since childhood that children had a filial duty to their parents, and asking them to lay red peonies on her grave if she died and if there was a grave to put them on. Sawut was devastated by the news of her death, which also united Uyghurs abroad. In 2021, four years after losing contact with his family and after graduating, Sawut joined the Japan Uyghur Association, hoping to speak up for his fellow Uyghurs. He freely admits that he was afraid to do anything for a while. But now that Mihriay is dead and most of his fellow Uyghurs have also lost contact with their families, he feels that there is no longer anything to fear. "No matter whether you are afraid or not, they will catch you, " Sawut says. "I might as well speak out and contribute to the Uyghur cause from overseas." When they parted for the last time, Sawut's mother gave him a piece of wolf jade, which contains tiny bones from a wolf's foot, for good luck on his journey. "I had no plans to go back even then, but I still lied and told her I'd be back in a couple of years," Sawut said. "But I didn't think I'd be able to return." Sawut still misses his family, and sometimes touches the jade, to remember his mother, or gathers together with friends to sing Uyghur songs, and ease the pain of exile.