The New Dominion

Again, the cool-posts-about-Xinjiang rate has reached critical mass and it’s time to share some links. On to the good stuff.

Timothy B. Weston at The China Beat has conducted a fascinating interview that sheds some light on an all-too neglected aspect of modern-day Xinjiang: the self-reported perspective of the Han Chinese that were born and grew up in Xinjiang and consider it their home. Weston’s interviewee, Leong, is now a student at the University of Colorado (adding “overseas Chinese” to his already colorful set of identities) but grew up in an ethnically diverse part of Urumqi. Equally worth viewing and pondering are the comments, which have elicited responses from all sorts of quarters.

After reading up on a localized Han Xinjiang-ren’s thoughts on Xinjiang, head on over to being/becoming, a personal blog whose latest post offers some concise reflections on why certain aspects of American pop-culture - specifically Arnold Schwarzenegger - appeal to Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Once you start peeling off the layers (and read this article) you’ll start to see how there’s more to this apparently arbitrary movie-star preference than meets the eye.

After browsing through being/becoming’s other intriguing posts on Uyghurs and Xinjiang you’ll inevitably stumble upon the web page for The Organization for the Advancement of Studies of Inner Eurasian Societies, or “OASIES” (clever, clever, clever!), a brand new Central Asia academic community based at Columbia University. I’m happy to see more concrete evidence of a growing interest in Central Asia and Xinjiang.

The Christian Science Monitor reporter Peter Ford has published an article of the usual journalistic tint called Uyghurs Struggle in a World Reshaped by Chinese Influx. Of particular interest is the journalist’s encounter with the last living monarch on Chinese territory, King Daoud Mehsut of Kucha, whose palace is now a triple-A tourist attraction. Of his from riches-to-photo-opps story, King Daoud merely says, “I get a cut”… of the 200RMB per ticket admission fee.

And finally, Michael from The Opposite End of China discovered a government published “backgrounder” praising the past year’s progress on the implementation of local autonomy in China - another statistics-fest courtesy of the CCP. Michael uses his trusty newspaper archive spelunking skills to bring to light some interesting Los Angeles Times articles on Chinese language policy in the 1950s and 60s, creating a context that questions the accuracy of the backgrounder.

Now go to Urumqi and eat some Xibo food!