Feng Siyu (冯斯瑜) is a young scholar from Zhejiang Province, China, known for her research on Uyghur culture. She appears in the Rights Defense Network (维权网) Issue 131 roster of reported current custody cases (dated August 31, 2026) as a prisoner currently in custody.
According to a report by Human Rights in China (HRIC), Ms. Feng graduated from Hangzhou Foreign Languages School in 2012 after receiving offers of admission from 17 of the world’s leading universities, including the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and Northwestern. She chose to complete a bachelor’s degree in history at Amherst College in Massachusetts, then studied at SOAS, University of London.
Ms. Feng studied Uyghur in a summer program at the University of Wisconsin under Professor Gulnisa Nazarova, eventually reaching fluency. In 2017, her senior thesis — on an Ottoman educator’s mission in Chinese Turkestan between 1885 and 1917 — won Amherst College’s Alfred F. Havighurst Prize for outstanding work in the humanities. That year she joined the Folklore Research Center at Xinjiang University, where she conducted fieldwork on Uyghur women’s folk culture, and planned to pursue a doctorate in history at Harvard University.
In the summer of 2013, she had volunteered as a teacher in Yushan County, Jiangxi Province, teaching poetry and music to local children. In 2014, she shared on Facebook a South China Morning Post article marking the 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
According to the HRIC report, internal police documents from Urumqi obtained by The Intercept show that authorities began investigating Ms. Feng in October 2017, claiming her OnePlus phone contained “foreign software.” The report notes that the police documents themselves acknowledged the application was a factory-installed program, with no evidence she had ever used it.
Ms. Feng was arrested in 2018 and has been out of public view since. HRIC reports that she is believed to have been sentenced to 15 years in prison that year, and may since have been transferred from a facility in Xinjiang to a prison in her home province of Zhejiang. Reuters, reporting in September 2025, described her as a Han Chinese researcher of Uyghur culture detained in 2018 and later sentenced to 15 years for separatism, citing HRIC.
Anthropologist Rune Steenberg, cited in the HRIC report, argues that the real reason for her arrest likely lies in her academic work: in February 2017 she had begun working alongside Rahile Dawut, the internationally known ethnographer of Uyghur culture, at the Xinjiang University center. Dawut disappeared in December 2017 and was secretly sentenced to life in prison in 2018.
HRIC has called on the Chinese authorities to release Ms. Feng unconditionally and to disclose the reasons and legal grounds for her detention. No official Chinese statement on her case has been located.
The identification of the roster entry “Feng Siyu” with this case is based on the exact name match, the confirmed Chinese characters, and the distinctive biographical record. The 15-year sentence is reported as HRIC’s belief, not as an independently verified fact; no court judgment or official custody document has been located. Current custody status is reported as the roster classifies it.
*This profile is compiled from a rights-monitoring roster, a human-rights organization report, and wire and international press coverage. It will be updated if additional sources emerge.*
**Sources:** Rights Defense Network / 维权网 Issue 131 (August 31, 2026); Human Rights in China (report, August 2025); Reuters (September 23, 2025); ANI wire (August 27, 2025).
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Media Profile & Archive: Feng Siyu (冯斯瑜) — Media Profile & Archive