The desire of the Chinese authorities to control the narrative regarding its borderland peoples has been dealt a blow with the opening of the exhibition, Genghis Khan: Comment les Mongols ont changé le monde at the Chateau des ducs de Bretagne in Nantes, France. In Blockbuster show on Genghis Khan opens in France after row with China, the Guardian reports: … Continue reading France Offers Fresh Look at Genghis Khan and the Mongols
In a recently published research article, Learning to be Chinese: colonial-style boarding schools on the Tibetan plateau, James Leibold and Tenzin Dorjee examine this vast network where "Tibetan children are placed in around-the-clock state care with little access to their home communities." A few factoids they cite help to give an idea of what this really … Continue reading Learning to be Chinese: Boarding Schools in Tibet
Incarceration of Xinjiang's Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples expanded massively beginning in 2017, but the campaign targeting intellectuals specifically dates back to mid-2014. At the end of Xi Jinping's April 2014 visit to Xinjiang, an explosion at the Urumqi train station killed three people and injured nearly 80 others, according to the BBC. Just two … Continue reading China’s Culture Wars: Opening Salvo in Crackdown on Uyghur Intellectuals
An excerpt from Darren Byler’s review of Sean Roberts’ The War on the Uyghurs: Prior to the US declaration of the Global War on Terror, Uyghurs were described occasionally as “counterrevolutionaries” or as “separatists”, but never as terrorists. Working in concert with Chinese state security in a Beijing-based investigation, in the early 2000s US intelligence officials took up … Continue reading Book Review of “The War on the Uyghurs”: How a People Became “Terrified”
Aug 23, 2020 Update: Bainuu, the only Mongolian-language social media application available in China, which hosted about 400,000 Southern Mongolians users, reportedly shut down by Chinese authorities. A few years back I posted a piece entitled A Resounding "Yes" to Mother-tongue Literature -- but for Whom and about What? In this context, “mother-tongue” … Continue reading Contemporary Fiction from China: Must it Be Penned in Mandarin?
A large-scale, colourful rendition of the Kyrgyz epic Manas (玛纳斯史诗) was staged March 22-23 in Beijing’s ultra-modern Poly Theater. This performance came just two days after the newly anointed President Xi Jinping, speaking at the People’s Congress, cited two of the three great oral epics of non-Han peoples, Manas and the Tibetan-language King Gesar. While … Continue reading “Manas” Onstage: Ongoing Moves to Sinicize China’s Three Great Oral Epics
According to a July 28, 2017 report by Radio Free Asia (Uyhgur Language): In late June, the Education Department in Xinjiang’s Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian) prefecture issued a five-point directive outlawing the use of Uyghur at schools in favor of Mandarin Chinese “in order to strengthen elementary and middle/high school bilingual education.” Under the directive … Continue reading Xinjiang’s Hotian Education Department Issues Directive Limiting Use of Uyghur in Schools
A while back I stumbled upon a short Chinese news item about a newly discovered handwritten manuscript of the Kyrgyz Epic of Manas (玛纳斯史诗). This centuries-old trilogy in verse recounts the exploits of the legendary hero Manas, and his son and grandson in their struggle to resist external enemies and unite the Kyrgyz people. Along … Continue reading Jusup Mamay, Manaschi: A Rehabilitated Rightist and his Turkic Epic
Nearly 20 years after the appearance in China of one of the most shocking first-person narratives of the Cultural Revolution, The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (牛棚杂忆, 季羡林著), The New York Review of Books has published the book in English. Written by Ji Xianlin, the account appears with a new introduction by Zha Jianying … Continue reading Excerpt of the Week: Zha Jianying on Ji Xianlin’s “The Cowshed”
China: Surviving the Camps, adapted from Zha Jianying's introduction to The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, just launched in 2016: At the center of the book is the cowshed [牛棚], the popular term for makeshift detention centers that had sprung up in many Chinese cities at the time [of the Cultural Revolution]. This one was … Continue reading “This is our Auschwitz”: Introduction to the “The Cowshed”
Ethnic ChinaLit 