All Reading
This section contains a curated list of useful articles, investigations, books and other reading materials. The list is updated on a weekly basis and suggestions for additions are welcome.
Starting Points:
Keeping pure and true - Regulating halal food is creating headaches for the government
China's cities abound with restaurants and food stalls catering to Muslims as well as to the many other Chinese who relish the distinctive cuisines for which the country’s Muslims are renowned. So popular are kebabs cooked by Muslim Uighurs on the streets of Beijing that the city banned outdoor grills in 2014 in order to reduce smoke, which officials said was exacerbating the capital’s notorious smog (the air today is hardly less noxious).
China’s other Muslims - By choosing assimilation, China’s Hui have become one of the world’s most successful Muslim minorities
China has a richly deserved reputation for religious intolerance. Buddhists in Tibet, Muslims in the far western region of Xinjiang and Christians in Zhejiang province on the coast have all been harassed or arrested and their places of worship vandalised. In Xinjiang the government seems to equate Islam with terrorism. Women there have been ordered not to wear veils on their faces. Muslims in official positions have been forced to break the Ramadan fast. But there is a remarkable exception to this grim picture of repression: the Hui.
Politics this week - September 3rd 2016
A suicide-bomber attacked the Chinese embassy in Kyrgyzstan, injuring three locals. Suspicion immediately fell on the restive Uighur minority in the neighbouring Chinese province of Xinjiang. The Communist Party chief of Xinjiang, Zhang Chunxian, was replaced by the boss of Tibet, Chen Quanguo. Under Mr Zhang, ethnic Uighurs had to carry special ID cards if they travelled, to help officials track troublemakers. See article.
The race card - The leader of a troubled western province has been replaced. He will not be missed by its ethnic Uighurs
When he took over in 2010 as the Communist Party chief of the western province of Xinjiang, Zhang Chunxian was portrayed by state media as a young, media-savvy official with a mission: to crack down hard on its separatists but also to foster “brotherly affection” between ethnic groups in the poor, violence-torn region. On August 29th Mr Zhang was moved to a new, as yet undisclosed, job, having claimed some success in his fight against Islamist “extremism”. The region’s ethnic divide, however, remains bitter.
Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang
With Oil and Water, anthropologist Tom Cliff offers the first ethnographic study of Han in Xinjiang, using in-depth vignettes, oral histories, and more than fifty original photographs to explore how and why they became the people they are now. By shifting focus to the lived experience of ordinary Han settlers, Oil and Water provides an entirely new perspective on Chinese nation building in the twenty-first century and demonstrates the vital role that Xinjiang Han play in national politics—not simply as Beijing’s pawns, but as individuals pursuing their own survival and dreams on the frontier.
Uyghur Nation - Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier
The meeting of the Russian and Qing empires in the nineteenth century had dramatic consequences for Central Asia’s Muslim communities. Along this frontier, a new political space emerged, shaped by competing imperial and spiritual loyalties, cross-border economic and social ties, and the revolutions that engulfed Russia and China in the early twentieth century. David Brophy explores how a community of Central Asian Muslims responded to these historic changes by reinventing themselves as the modern Uyghur nation.
China premier urges more efforts in restive Uighur heartland
China’s violence-prone western region of Xinjiang needs to make more efforts at development in its ethnic Uighur heartland to ensure young people there have “something to do and money to earn”, Premier Li Keqiang told its top officials.