Rebiya Kadeer is an ethnic Uyghur, businesswoman, and political activist. Born in city of Altay of China, Kadeer became a millionaire in the 1980s through her real estate holdings and ownership of a multinational conglomerate.
Background
Rebiya Kadeer was born on 15 November 1947 in the city of Altay in the Xinjiang Uygur Minority Autonomous Region. Kadeer’s family was Muslim and ethnic Uygur, the dominant ethnic group in Xinjiang. In the 1950s the Communist Party labeled Kadeer’s family ‘bourgeoisie’, due to the fact that they owned a small farm, hair salon, restaurant and bathhouse. The family property was confiscated and they were forced to relocate to the city of Aksu in the south of the province.
Education
Rebiya Kadeer was educated locally.
Career
During the turbulent period of the Cultural Revolution from the mid-1960s to the 1970s, Kadeer stayed at home and raised her six children while her husband worked, bringing home a meager wage. In order to supplement the family’s income, Kadeer secretly made and sold clothing, which during the Cultural Revolution was a dangerous act of counter-revolutionary capitalism. When government authorities discovered Kadeer’s activities they pressured her husband into divorcing her and their marriage ended in 1976. Only a year later she married Sidik Rouzi, a Uygur dissident who had recently been released from prison. Kadeer was 30 years old when Deng Xiaoping ushered in a new era of reform in China and she promptly took advantage of the new economic opportunities. She opened a laundry business in Aksu, later expanding into selling fruit, vegetables, and leather products. She made her first fortune in the 1980s when she opened a pair of department stores in the provincial capital Urumqi and rented space to merchants. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 Kadeer’s Akida Trading Company expanded business into Kazakhstan and Russia, making millions on imported iron and steel. At this time Kadeer’s personal wealth ran into the tens of millions of dollars and in 1994 she was identified by Forbes magazine as one of the wealthiest people in China.
The government quickly promoted Kadeer politically and advertised her as an example of China’s humane policy towards ethnic Uygurs, Muslims, and women. In 1992 Kadeer was elected a member of the National People’s Congress and in 1995 she was a delegate to the United Nation’s World Conference on Women held in Beijing. But as ethnic hostilities rose between Uygurs and Han Chinese, Kadeer and her family were torn between her political loyalties and her conscience. In 1996 her husband fled to the United States, where he became active in the exiled-Uygur community, which is critical of China’s human rights policy and advocates an independent Uygur homeland. In February 1997 Kadeer was arrested and harassed by the Chinese military after investigating a bloody government crackdown on Uygurs in the city of Gulja (Yining).
Nevertheless, Kadeer continued to be in the good graces of government officials and in the fall of 1997 she was asked to give a speech in Beijing at the People’s Congress in front of an audience of 4800 party members, including President Jiang Zemin and the Politburo. To the surprise of those in attendance Kadeer denounced in harsh terms the government’s policy towards ethnic Uygurs, called for religious freedom, and pleaded for an end to the arrest and execution of Uygur dissidents. A month after her speech her passport was revoked and she was expelled from the People’s Congress. Despite constant harassment by government agents, Kadeer continued to speak out against the human rights abuses in Xinjiang province. In August 1999, while going to meet a US congressman at a hotel in Urumqi, Kadeer was arrested and handed an eight-year prison sentence. Her crime was that she sent her husband in America copies of local newspapers, which the government described as ‘dissemination of state secrets’. In 2005 Kadeer earned an early release and was sent into exile in the United States. A year later she was elected president of the World Uygur Congress and in recent years she has visited numerous heads of state advocating for greater rights of Uygurs in China. Meanwhile her children have remained in Xinjiang, overseeing the family business and enduring constant government surveillance, including the recent beating and arrest of her sons for alleged tax evasion.
Connections
At the age of 14 Kadeer received a marriage proposal from a deputy bank director 12 years her senior and a year later she was married. Two years later she gave birth to the first of 11 children. When government authorities discovered Kadeer’s activities they pressured her husband into divorcing her and their marriage ended in 1976. Only a year later she married Sidik Rouzi, a Uygur dissident who had recently been released from prison.