Mihriay Erkin was born on February 23, 1990 in Tokkuzak Bazaar, Konisheher County, Kashgar, East Turkistan (also known as Xinjiang) in an intellectual family. From September 2007 to July 2009, she studied at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Minority Preparatory Program, China. From September 2009 to July 2013, she studied botanical biotechnology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China and won the Guanghua Academic Award during her studies. From 2014 to 2017, she studied for a Master’s degree in Plant Biotechnology at the University of Tokyo in Japan and received a Master’s degree. From 2018 to 2019, worked at Nara Institute of Science and Technology. She was forced to return to China on June 18, 2019, and was detained at the end of February 2020, and her body was handed over to his family on December 20 of that year.

Mihriay was actively involved in various social, scientific, and cultural activities in Japan. In September 2016, children from the original Misato Uyghur Language School in Misato city, Japan, spent two hours teaching the Uyghur language in their native language, which led to the improvement of mother tongue education in Japan. March 2019, in his testimony on March 17, he testified about his abducted father, aunt, nephew, and 16 students.

Mihriay Erkin volunteered to translate into English Uyghur testimonies and letters from her homeland that were circulated on social networking sites from May 2018 to April 2019 and collected by her uncle, Abduwali Ayup. She advised on the compilation of materials on learning the mother tongue of Uyghur children in exile.

Mihriay Erkin taught a mother tongue course in Kashgar on July 15, 2011, and has worked on it every summer holiday until 2013. After Abduwali Ayup’s arrest, she continued to teach mother tongue in Kashgar until she left for Japan.