Gulchehra Hoja is a Uyghur American journalist and reporter for Radio Free Asia. She fled East Turkestan in 2001, and lived in the Washington, DC area ever since. In 2014, she was the first person in the Western world to report on the genocide facing the Uyghur people of East Turkestan.
As a response to her reporting, the CCCP detained more than twenty-five members of her family; many of whom remain illegally incarcerated or missing. She has testified in front of Congress on the plight of the Uyghur, and won many awards for her work, including the Magnitsky Human Rights Award and the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Courage in Journalism Award.
She was named as one of the world’s 500 Most Influential Muslims in 2019 and 2020.
A Stone is Most Precious Where it Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Loss, Exile, and Hope
In February 2018, twenty-four members of Uyghur journalist Gulchehra Hoja’s family were arrested by the Chinese state as a direct retaliation for her investigations into Chinese oppression of the Uyghur people.
Hoja grew up with her people’s culture and history running through her veins. As a young woman, she became a star presenter on Chinese state television, but then she began to understand what China was doing to her people, as well as her own complicity as a journalist. When her rising fame and growing political awakening coincided, she made it her mission, despite the personal cost, to expose the crimes Beijing continues to commit in the far reaches of its nation.