After isolated terrorist incidents in 2015, the Chinese leadership has cracked down hard on Xinjiang and its Uyghurs. Today, there are thought to be up to a million Muslims held in 're-education ...camps' in the Xinjiang region of North-West China. One of the few Western commentators to have lived in the region, journalist Nick Holdstock travels into the heart of the province and reveals the Uyghur story as one of repression, hardship and helplessness. China's Forgotten People explains why repression of the Muslim population is on the rise in the world's most powerful one-party state. This updated and revised edition reveals the background to the largest known concentration camp network in the modern world, and reflects on what this means for the way we think about China.
Scholars have long been puzzled by why Muslim landowners in Central Asia, called begs, stayed loyal to the Qing empire when its political legitimacy and military power were routinely ...challenged.Borderland Capitalism argues that converging interests held them together: the local Qing administration needed the Turkic begs to develop resources and raise military revenue while the begs needed access to the Chinese market.
Drawing upon multilingual sources and archival material, Kwangmin Kim shows how the begs aligned themselves with the Qing to strengthen their own plantation-like economic system. As controllers of food supplies, commercial goods, and human resources, the begs had the political power to dictate the fortunes of governments in the region. Their political choice to cooperate with the Qing promoted an expansion of the Qing's emerging international trade at the same time that Europe was developing global capitalism and imperialism.Borderland Capitalism shows the Qing empire as a quintessentially early modern empire and points the way toward a new understanding of the rise of a global economy.
As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the ...rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined. The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199568048/toc.html
Despite more than a decade of rapid economic development, rising living standards, and large-scale improvements in infrastructure and services, China's western borderlands are awash in a wave of ...ethnic unrest not seen since the 1950s. Through on-the-ground interviews and firsthand observations, the international experts in this volume create an invaluable record of the conflicts and protests as they have unfolded-the most extensive chronicle of events to date. The authors examine the factors driving the unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang and the political strategies used to suppress them. They also explain why certain areas have seen higher concentrations of ethnic-based violence than others.
Essential reading for anyone struggling to understand the origins of unrest in contemporary Tibet and Xinjiang, this volume considers the role of propaganda and education as generators and sources of conflict. It links interethnic strife to economic growth and connects environmental degradation to increased instability. It captures the subtle difference between violence in urban Xinjiang and conflict in rural Tibet, with detailed portraits of everyday individuals caught among the pressures of politics, history, personal interest, and global movements with local resonance.
Eric Schluessel explores the late nineteenth-century encounter between Chinese power and a Muslim society through the struggles of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan. He traces the emergence of ...new struggles around essential questions of identity, recasting the attempted transformation of Xinjiang as a distinctly Chinese form of colonialism.
China's Last Imperial Frontier explores imperial China's frontier expansion in the Tibetan borderlands during the last decades of the Qing. The empire mounted a series of military attacks against ...indigenous chieftaincies and Buddhist monasteries in the east Tibetan region seeking to replace native authorities with state bureaucrats by redrawing the politically diverse frontier into a system of Chinese-style counties. Historically, at all the strategic frontier locations, the state had been for the most part outstripped by local institutions in political, military, and ideological strengths. With perceived threats from the Anglo-Russian “Great Game” accentuating Qing vulnerability in Tibet, the Sichuan government took advantage of the frontier crisis by encroaching upon local and Lhasa domains in Kham. Even though the Kham campaign was portrayed in Qing official discourse as a part of the nationwide reforms of “New Policies” (xinzheng) and administrative regularization (gaitu guiliu), its progress on the ground was influenced by the dynamics of interregional relations, including Sichuan’s competition with central Tibet, power struggles among Qing frontier officials, and varied Khampa responses to the new regime. The growing regionalism intensified the resistance of local forces to imperial authority. Despite the uneven results of the late Qing campaign, it had come to serve as an important source of sovereignty claims and policy inspirations for the subsequent governments.
This is the first environmental history of China during the three thousand years for which there are written records. It is also a treasure trove of literary, political, aesthetic, scientific, and ...religious sources, which allow the reader direct access to the views and feelings of the Chinese people toward their environment and their landscape.Elvin chronicles the spread of the Chinese style of farming that eliminated the habitat of the elephants that populated the country alongside much of its original wildlife; the destruction of most of the forests; the impact of war on the environmental transformation of the landscape; and the re-engineering of the countryside through water-control systems, some of gigantic size. He documents the histories of three contrasting localities within China to show how ecological dynamics defined the lives of the inhabitants. And he shows that China in the eighteenth century, on the eve of the modern era, was probably more environmentally degraded than northwestern Europe around this time.Indispensable for its new perspective on long-term Chinese history and its explanation of the roots of China's present-day environmental crisis, this book opens a door into the Chinese past.
This study utilizes a wide range of new source materials to reconstruct the day-to-day operations of the port of Canton during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Using a ...bottom-up approach, it provides a fresh look at the successes
Based on rare firsthand historical data, Wang Ke presents the analysis of the East Turkestan from the perspective of Islamic social structure, the origin and evolution of thoughts on national ...revolution, the power structure of the Republic, and international politics. The original Japanese edition of this book has been recognized as the most authoritative research work on the independence movement of East Turkestan. This revised, enriched English edition provides valuable references for the prominent issues of Xinjiang today. “For those intrigued by the modern history of China’s Xinjiang region, this detailed study of the 1940s invites the reader to explore a tempestuous decade marked by conflict and turmoil as Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic groups sought to form an independent state, the East Turkestan Republic. Understanding the complex involvement of powerful outside forces, a brutal world war, and an opportunity for groups that saw a chance at independence requires careful examination, and Professor Wang’s book does an admirable job in doing so. His exceptionally wellwritten book offers numerous insights, many based on materials that range from diaries and documents to memoirs and personal interviews. Altogether, Wang’s recently translated account strengthens our understanding of Xinjiang’s mid20th century conundrum." —Linda Benson, Professor Emerita, Oakland University “The history of efforts to build an independent East Turkestan in the 1930s and 1940s is complex and controversial. Wang Ke’s detailed reading of 20thcentury Chinese and Uyghur sources, complemented by Japanese secondary materials, informs a valuable account of the Sheng Shicai era in Xinjiang, the shortlived Eastern Turkestan movement of 1933–1934 and especially of the Eastern Turkestan Republic that governed northern Xinjiang from 1944 to 1949, a state whose influence is still felt today despite efforts to erase it from official narratives. This research, now available in English, is an important addition to the growing library of work on modern Xinjiang and Uyghur history." —James Millward, Professor, Georgetown University
