Perhat Tursun is a prominent modernist writer in Xinjiang whose work is inspired by Kafka and Rumi — and who is now serving a 16-year sentence in a Chinese prison.
In Beijing the 1980s, Perhat led a Uyghur student group that met twice weekly to discuss literature, and the "books he was introducing to us were completely different from what we had ever read before — Kafka, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky," his friend Tahir Hamut Izgil told me.
Perhat's own writings explored symbolism and modernist themes in new ways, inspiring devoted fans as well as critics.
"So few people can give Uyghur literature that aesthetic sense," Tahir said. "He is truly unique. There is no one like him."
Over the years, Perhat's work has attracted both admirers and critics.
Perhat has drawn comparisons to Salman Rushdie, after Uyghur conservatives in Xinjiang denounced his 1999 novel "The Art of Suicide" as heretical, leading to book burnings and death threats.
In early 2018, Perhat's friends abroad received word he had been detained.
In 2020, he was reportedly sentenced to 16 years in prison. He will be 66 years old if he is released on that timeline.
Read Perhat's poem "Sleeper at Dusk," translated by Joshua Freeman:
This is a masterful retelling of the history of the People's Republic of China, through the eyes of its diplomats.
Bloomberg reporter Peter Martin paints a deeply human portrait of China's emissaries, pulling back the veil on their motivations and struggles.
Peter draws on dozens of interviews and more than 100 Chinese-language memoirs, digging up wild anecdotes and occasional glimpses into the personalities and true feelings of China's diplomats as they navigated career, politics, bureaucracy and the rest of the world.
New: I interviewed Lithuania's deputy foreign affairs minister Mantas Adomėnas about withdrawing from the China-led 17+1 summit. He said the 17+1 was "always on the initiative and terms and agenda proposed by China" and lacked "mutuality."
Adoménas also criticized China's refusal to allow the 17+1 to discuss human rights, and he is opposed to China's insistence on separating economics/development discussions from human rights.
Adoménas cast China's rise & the pressure it puts on global democratic institutions as a near-existential struggle for Lithuania.
"As Lithuanians, we see our survival as conditional on the international order based on the rule of law and seeking for the increase of democracy."
This is why the question “why don’t Muslims care about what’s happening to the Uighurs” often bothers me. It depends who is asking and why. I’ve seen this question asked too many times by people whose implicit answer is “because Muslims are subhuman.”
(The answer to the question is that Muslims who know about Uighur repression do care! And those who live in countries with political freedoms show it through their speech and actions).
The useful question to be asking is, why doesn’t the Saudi government et al criticize China for its Muslim genocide? The answer is that autocratic governments of Muslim-majority populations pretty much all have close ties to the Chinese govt.
NEW SCOOP from @zachsdorfman: China's Ministry of State Security has demanded that private Chinese companies, including Baidu and Alibaba, help them process stolen U.S. data, such as from the OPM hack, U.S. intelligence officials believe.
Zach writes, "In what amounts to intelligence tasking, China’s spy services order private Chinese companies with big-data analytics capabilities to process massive sets of information that have intelligence value, according to current and former officials."
“Just imagine on any given day, if NSA and CIA are collecting information, say, on the [Chinese military], and we could bring back seven, eight, 10, 15 petabytes of data, give it to Google or Amazon or Microsoft, and say, ‘Hey, we want all these analytics," said one official.
Aaron Shen (沈岳 in Chinese) sent me a request to connect on LinkedIn. He claimed to be the assistant director of international liaison at the China Center for Contemporary World Studies — the in-house think tank of the International Department of the Chinese Communist.
He and I exchanged messages for a couple of weeks. During that time, I saw his list of LinkedIn contacts grow from 55 to 72. The list included political risk analysts, a current U.S. Defense Department employee, a top exec at the US-China Business Council, and similar people.