Most people learned the name of Beijing-based Uygur professor Ilham Tohti only after he was detained following the deadly riots in Urumqi last July. His Xinjiang -focused Chinese-language website, uighurbiz.cn, was attacked by authorities for 'inciting propaganda and spreading rumours'.
But Tohti, 41, said he had actually begun writing about the plight of Uygurs 17 years ago, and different forms of government surveillance and harassment had been a fixture of his and his family's lives ever since.
The two-month detention (at his home and at hotels with all external communication severed) last year was the longest he had experienced; normally it was just hours and hours of 'chat' from dusk till dawn, which exhausted him. And occasionally it could almost be considered comical: he was banned at the last minute from attending an academic conference in Turkey last month, and in exchange, he and his family were 'treated to a holiday in Hainan ', accompanied at all times by three government security guards, who were very polite and even apologetic. The professor was allowed to return to Beijing 10 days later, after the conference had ended.
Shortly after Tohti returned he angrily wrote of the travel ban as 'an extremely outrageous affront against a citizen's right to leave the country'; in fact, since October the professor has missed eight academic exchanges abroad.
In person, Tohti mostly spoke of these restrictions in a tone of resignation, punctuated by his signature slightly-tilted smile.
'What I want to do is to promote the legal awareness of the Uygurs, and the country's rule of law,' Tohti said of his commitment to activism over nearly two decades, which has almost bankrupted him, resulted in one divorce and kept him forever one step from imprisonment.
He spoke to the South China Morning Post over several interviews at Minzu University of China. He has been teaching there since 1991: first law, then economics and more recently two sensitive electives - Xinjiang population studies and Central Asian politics and culture.
