More than 400 scholars from around the world penned an open letter in British newspaper The Times on Monday to support a Xinjiang expert sanctioned by Beijing, castigating the ruling Chinese Communist Party for having used “covert attempts to silence critics outside its territory.”

The letter titled “Freedom threat” was signed off by academics from more than 100 universities, including Oxford University, Cambridge University and Harvard University. It responded to recent Beijing’s sanctioning of Joanne Smith Finley, a long-time social anthropologist at Newcastle University who specializes in the treatment of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in mainland China.

The sinologist, who has studied China for over three decades, is the only academic among the nine British politicians and lawyers targeted for disseminating what mainland authorities called “lies and disinformation.”

Smith Finley visited China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang several times from 1995 to 2018. Last November, she published a paper in the Journal of Genocide Research, a leading scholarly journal on genocide studies, and said that Xinjiang was the largest area where ethnic minorities and religious groups have been forcibly imprisoned since World War II.

Up to 100 million Uyghurs are forced to carry out ideological reforms and forced labor in internment camps or high-security prisons, the paper added.

The sanction of Smith Finley is believed to be in retaliation for measures taken by the British government over human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims.

“I have no regrets for speaking out, and I will not be silenced,” the anthropologist responded to the sanction on Twitter on Sunday.

In the Monday open letter, the academics suggested that the “unprecedented” sanction has threatened universities’ core principle of academic freedom and a “serious escalation” from the “long used covert attempts to silence critics outside its territory.”

“It reflects a misunderstanding of British universities. They are not organs of the state but autonomous institutions devoted to the pursuit of truth — however inconvenient to those in power,” the letter read.

“We, as fellow academics, stand in full solidarity with Dr Smith Finley and assert our commitment to academic freedom. We call on the government and all U.K. universities to do likewise.”

The open letter represented a “firm” counterattack against mainland China’s oppression, said Nick Megoran, a political geographer at Newcastle University.

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