The team at @NewStatesman published a special issue focusing on the crackdown of the #Uyghurs this week, focusing on this crisis from the aspect of human rights, politics, the efforts to preserve the culture, and more. newstatesman.com/uyghur-special
"Five years ago, when studying geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, her phone buzzed in the middle of the night. It was a voice message from her father on the Chinese messaging service WeChat: 'Daughter, I have something urgent to tell you, call me back.'"
"Seyyah rang her father as soon as she heard his message the following morning. He didn’t pick up. She never heard from him again. In September 2020 a UN document reported his death from 'severe pneumonia and tuberculosis on 3 November 2018'."
“[My father] had diabetes and I’m pretty sure he didn’t have medication at the camp and just slowly decayed,” Seyyah says.
Unable to contact her mother, brother and sister (her other sister lives in Turkey), Seyyah has been informed by indirect sources that they are trapped at home – and having their “every single phone call and move monitored”.
"When she found out that her father had died, she honoured his memory alone by donning a black dress, cooking polo (a traditional rice and lamb dish), and dancing to a Uyghur song that her mother used to sing while her father danced along."
"In her first volume of poetry, The Mystery Land (2018), and in three new poems commissioned and translated for the New Statesman, Seyyah draws on Uyghur symbolism. 'We use spring a lot because spring is something new after the dead winter.'"
"In the final stanza of “Fossil and Tear”, the image of a fossil represents “this waiting, longing to be reunited with family, friends, my culture, the homeland – it is as if I’m getting fossilised”, ...
... yet the tears 'keep things fresh; they are not just sadness, but also like spring, like the rain'."
"Cut adrift from her background, Seyyah uses poetry to preserve Uyghur culture and prevent it from being characterised by victimhood. 'I’m scared of being defined by only genocide,' she says."
"My culture is such a joyful, happy desert – it’s sandy, it’s shifting, it’s hot. My dad was always a happy person. I want my culture to be seen by the world as resilient. It’s been there for thousands of years. It will survive."
"The appearance of a single Uyghur athlete at the Winter Olympics should reassure no one. At best, the torch-lighting ceremony showed the government cared enough about Western criticism to attempt to perpetuate the fiction that it believes in ethnic unity."
"At worst, it was a vision of the future China has designated for the Uyghurs: smiling, compliant and silent."
" Across the Uyghur region historic old cities are torn down, but Uyghurs build similarly designed homes on the urban outskirts. In the late 1960s, the Uyghurs’ network of sacred pilgrimage sites was closed for two decades,...
... but when restrictions eased in the 1980s, the shrines sprang back to life."
"Today, Uyghur musicians use jobs in the state’s propagandist theatrical extravaganzas to support their own artistic endeavours."
"The Uyghurs have been ruled from Beijing for two and a half centuries, but culturally they still face westward."
"As the Chinese state prosecutes an unprecedented war on the Uyghurs, officials often describe their assimilation policies as the gift of modernity. Villages are destroyed and replaced with clusters of identical concrete buildings."
"Farmers are forced into factories. Those who dissent find themselves in concentration camps, billed as vocational training centres preparing Uyghurs for a more “civilised”, Chinese life."
"Some small part of this compulsory Chinese modernity is widely attractive to Uyghurs, but much is not. Better roads and more access to cars and electronics over the last 20 years cause few complaints."
"But the cost has been the destruction of the Uyghurs’ most important historic sites, the removal of children to boarding schools designed to block cultural transmission, ...
... the criminalisation of everyday Uyghur etiquette, and even the forced redecoration of homes with Chinese-style furniture."
"If history is any guide, the success of this assimilation campaign will be uneven, and if Uyghurs are ever allowed to choose their own jobs, beliefs and habits again, ...
... Uyghur distinctiveness will re-emerge, changed but not severed from its past. It will be a small consolation for what is destroyed."
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"A top Chinese official in Tibet visited monasteries in and near the Tibetan capital Lhasa this week to warn monks against behavior considered disloyal to the ruling Chinese Communist Party, state media sources said." rfa.org/english/news/t…
Wang Junzheng, party secretary in the Tibet Autonomous Region, went on Thursday to the Ramoche temple in Lhasa and to Gaden monastery outside the capital, reminding monks to be “patriotic and law-abiding” citizens and remain loyal to the party, according to media accounts.
Wang also instructed monastery management committees in both places to enforce rules against assertions of Tibetan cultural and national identity deemed “separatist” by Chinese authorities.
While the tradition of skiing stretches back generations in one mountain community in #China’s northwest, authorities are trying to use the tradition as a selling point to tourists. nytimes.com/2022/02/18/spo…
"Still, there is no doubt that skiing has long been a way of life in the Altai Mountains in northern Xinjiang, a nub of territory where China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Russia intersect."
"In recent years, the local ski tradition in the Altai has faded with the encroachment of modernity and the Chinese government’s promotion of modern winter sports."
Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, has declared a laser incident involving a Royal Australian Air Force aircraft last week is an “act of intimidation” by #China. theguardian.com/australia-news…
Australia’s defence department reported a laser emanating from a People’s Liberation Army Navy vessel illuminated a P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft last Thursday when the Chinese ship was sailing east through the Arafura sea.
On Sunday, the prime minister characterised the episode as “a reckless and irresponsible act that should not have occurred”. Thursday’s incident in waters to the north of Australia followed days of domestic political contention about national security.
"#China’s lack of an mRNA shot — and its delay in approving a viable foreign option — has poked holes in #Beijing’s victorious pandemic narrative and prompted experts to question whether the country’s go-it-alone approach is ...nytimes.com/2022/02/18/bus…
... less triumphant than officials would have the world believe."
"#China is so committed to competing with the United States and the West on science and technology that some in the scientific community say it is hard to imagine that the state hasn’t pulled out all the stops to develop a homegrown mRNA vaccine."
"Neither his failure at the quadruple axel nor geopolitics has dampened the passion of Hanyu’s devotees in #Beijing, however. When he appeared at a presser this week, the usually sedate briefing room at the Games’ media center gave way to fan fervor." nytimes.com/live/2022/02/1…
"A hundred or so Chinese volunteer workers at the Olympics, mostly university students, waited outside the room for a glimpse. And the Chinese journalists inside were scarcely less excited."
"Hanyu told the journalists that he had received more than 20,000 letters and gifts from Chinese fans before and during the Games."
“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia presided over the theatrically timed test launches of three ballistic and cruise missiles on Saturday as part of what were described as nuclear deterrence exercises.” nytimes.com/live/2022/02/1…
“Mr. Putin watched the display from a Kremlin command center, accompanied by President Alexander G. Lukashenko of Belarus, whose government is considering allowing Russia to base some of its nuclear arsenal on its territory.”
“While the weapons demonstrated on Saturday have been shown before, two of the three were designed to evade U.S. missile defenses.