Responses to Chinese Rule in Xinjiang: Patterns of Cooperation and Opposition

No abstract available. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5564/mjia.v0i10.122 The Mongolian Journal of International Affairs; Number 10, 2003, Pages 102-11

How China Says No: Thoughts on Being Blacklisted by China

China can say no, as was once declared in the title of the popular 1990s Chinese book. A sovereign country, China has every right to admit or exclude those who seek permission to enter. That it has chosen to exclude a group of scholars who contributed to an edited volume on the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, now known as the “Xinjiang 13,” should not and will not elicit much concern in the wider academic world, despite a slew of recent articles in Bloomberg, the Washington Post, the New York Times, blog fora like China Beat, and on listservs such as China-pol, etc. It is also interesting that this issue has only now emerged in the popular press, nearly eight years later. What does concern me, as one of the names on the list, is the suggestion that there is anything one can do personally, or even collectively, to be removed from such a list, so that’s what I’ll focus on here

Constructing a contemporary Uighur national identity : transnationalism, islamicization and State representation

Analyse de la façon dont l'Etat chinois a utilisé les Ouïgours, turcophones et musulmans, pour promouvoir sa politique à l'égard du Moyen_Orient (la "carte islamique" du régime), mais aussi des effets indirects de cette politique : le développement du sentiment national au sein de ce peuple sensible à la supériorité que lui manifestent traditionnellement les Han

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as an example of separatism in China

In this paper, I will argue that the continuing incidents of violence that have occurred in the region known as the Uyghur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, or Eastern Turkestan, are best understood as incidents of civil unrest in the public sphere, and rarely can be described as “secessionism” (fenliezhuyi) in the traditional sense of the term (which I take to mean coordinated acts of violence against the government and civilian populations for the purpose of establishing an independent state). The struggles of the Uyghur people with the Chinese nation-state that have taken place since its incorporation in 1949 are best understood in the context of efforts to attain sovereignty, not as a religious or Islam-inspired campaign. Except for the fact that the Uyghur are a Muslim people, their concerns and issues resemble that of Tibet, and the occasional violence that takes place in the Tibetan Autonomous Region in China and protests against Chinese rule, are rarely if ever described as “terrorist,” though they are often lumped together with the Uyghur incidents as “secessionist” (fenliezhuyi). At the same time, in this paper an attempt will be made to show that the region of Xinjiang, which had been extremely peaceful since the late 1990s, but then erupted in the last few years, has been caught up in an economic boom that would be the envy of any of its surrounding Central Asian states. Indeed, China should be congratulated for the enormous economic and social transformation of the region over the past two decades, but at the same time should be encouraged to find ways to preserve and promote the vibrant and extraordinary Central Asian civilization that Uyghur culture represents

Internal Colonialism and the Uyghur Nationality: Chinese Nationalism and its Subaltern Subjects

The economic and political ascendency of the People's Republic of China at the end of this century has made China's neighbors nervous. While China's intentions toward the recovery of Hong Kong and Taiwan are clear, much doubt remains about China's other expansionist goals. This article suggests that while China may not have expansionist designs on any of its neighboring territory that is already considered part of China, policy shifts toward China's subaltern groups indicate that a ris..

The Qur'an and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction

How is it possible to comprehend and assess the impact of the Qur’an on the literary expressions of Chinese Muslims (Hui) when the first full ‘translations’ of the Qur’an in Chinese made by non-Muslims from Japanese and English appeared only in 1927 and 1931, and by a Muslim from Arabic in 1932? But perhaps the fact that such a translation appeared so late in the history of the Muslim community in China, who have had a continuous presence since the ninth-century, is the best starting point. For it would be possible to address the relationship between the sacred text (as well as language) and identity among minority groups in a different way. This paper looks at the ways in which the Qur’an is imagined then embodied in literary texts authored by two prize-winning Chinese Muslim authors: Huo Da (b. 1945) and Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948). While Huo Da, who does not have access to the Arabic language, alludes to the Chinese Qur’an in her novel, The Muslim’s Funeral (1982), transforming the its teachings into ritual performances of alterity through injecting Arabic and Persian words for religious rituals into her narrative of a Muslim family’s fortunes at the turn of the twentieth century, Zhang Chengzhi, who learned Arabic as an adult and travelled widely in the Muslim world, involves himself in reconstructing the history of the spread and persecution of the Jahriyya Sufi sect (an off-shoot of the Naqshabandiyya) in China between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in his only historical novel, A History of the Soul (1991), and in education reform in Muslim communities, inventing an identity for Chinese Muslims based on direct knowledge of the sacred text and tradition and informed by the history of Islam not in China alone but in the global Islamic world, especially Arabic Islamic history

How China Says No: Thoughts on Being Blacklisted by China

China can say no, as was once declared in the title of the popular 1990s Chinese book. A sovereign country, China has every right to admit or exclude those who seek permission to enter. That it has chosen to exclude a group of scholars who contributed to an edited volume on the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, now known as the “Xinjiang 13,” should not and will not elicit much concern in the wider academic world, despite a slew of recent articles in Bloomberg, the Washington Post, the New York Times, blog fora like China Beat, and on listservs such as China-pol, etc. It is also interesting that this issue has only now emerged in the popular press, nearly eight years later. What does concern me, as one of the names on the list, is the suggestion that there is anything one can do personally, or even collectively, to be removed from such a list, so that’s what I’ll focus on here

China's ethnic reawakening

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/Foreigners and the Chinese themselves typically picture China's population as a vast monolithic Han majority with a sprinkling of exotic minorities living along the country's borders. This understates China's tremendous cultural, geographic, and linguistic diversity in particular the important cultural differences within the Han population. China is now seeing a resurgence of pride in local history and culture, most notably among southerners such as the Cantonese and Hakka who are now classified as Han. These differences may increase under economic pressures such as inflation, the growing gap between rich and poor areas, and the migration of millions of people from poorer provinces to those with jobs. Chinese society is also under pressure from the officially recognized minorities such as Uygurs and Tibetans. For centuries, China has held together a vast multicultural and multiethnic nation despite alternating periods of political centralization and fragmentation. But cultural and linguistic cleavages could worsen in a China weakened by internal strife, inflation, uneven growth, or a post-Deng struggle for succession