Ablajan Awut Ayup (阿布拉江·阿乌提·阿尤普) Ablajan Awut Ayup is a Uyghur singer and songwriter, known by the stage name ‘AJ’ and nicknamed the ‘Uyghur Justin Bieber.’ He was born in the mid-1980s in Sanju township, Pishan (Guma) County, in the Hotan Prefecture of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Awut Ayup rose to prominence as a pop performer in the mid-2000s, writing songs about Uyghur identity and culture that fused Central Asian rhythms with hip-hop and R&B. His first album reportedly sold more than 100,000 copies, and he became one of the first Uyghur public figures to perform across China. In 2013 he released his first Mandarin-language track, and he presented himself publicly as a ‘messenger of peace’ seeking to bridge Han Chinese and Uyghur cultures. In March 2017 he gave an interview to the BBC in which he spoke of his hope to connect the two cultures through music. He was detained in early 2018 amid the region-wide internment campaign. Radio Free Asia reported that he was taken into custody by state security officers in Urumqi on February 15, 2018, as he returned from a music tour in Shanghai, after a brief detention and questioning in December 2017. Rights Defense Network later reported that he was taken away by Hotan prefecture police in March 2018 and held in an internment camp, then formally arrested on unspecified charges. In December 2018, the Hotan City District Court reportedly sentenced him in secret to 11 years’ imprisonment; the charge was not disclosed. Rights Defense Network reported that his prison term runs to March 2029; the facility where he is serving the sentence is not publicly known. The Uyghur Human Rights Project has called on Chinese authorities to disclose his whereabouts and the charges against him, and his case has been cited by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China. His name appears in Rights Defense Network’s Issue 131 (August 31, 2026) listing of reported current-custody cases; no confirmed release has been reported. Status note: the charge, court proceedings, and current whereabouts are reported by secondary human-rights sources; no official record has been publicly disclosed.
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