Qazhyghumar Shabdanuly

Qazhyghumar Shabdanuly (; 1925 – 11 February 2011) was a Kazakh Chinese political activist and a Kazakh-language dissident writer. For more than forty years, Qazhyghumar was imprisoned by the People's Republic of China for his political views.

Biography Qazhyghumar was born in 1925 in the village of Tansyq in Eastern Kazakhstan, then in the Soviet Union. Soon, the family fled from the 1932–1933 famine to Xinjiang.

The first independent edition of Qazhyghumar 's history novel Pana (Shelter) was published in Kazakhstan in 2005. Qazhyghumar's original Kazakh text was in the Arabic script, and was transcribed into Cyrillic by Qabdesh Jumadilov. The first complete six-volume edition of Qylmys was printed in Almaty in 2009. In January 2010, it was nominated for Kazakh state prize in literature. The nominator presented Qylmys as "a book about the colonization of the Kazakh territories, which gives a clear picture of what Kazakhs went through under the imperial pressure of China and the Soviet Union". However, the government commissioners stonewalled the proposal and struck the book off the nominations' list.

As of July 2010, Qazhyghumar remained under house arrest in Chuguchak. Kazakh nationalist organizations advised president Nursultan Nazarbayev to demand full freedom for Qazhyghumar but, as of 2010, limited government efforts brought no result. According to Qazhyghumar's daughter Jaynar, who lives in Almaty and is a citizen of Kazakhstan, the Chinese government regularly refused to let Qazhyghumar leave the country. He has five surviving adult children, four of them remain in China. According to Jaynar, her mother and her siblings in China are able to travel from China to Kazakhstan and back.