On 7/8/21 4:45 PM, wytheh...@cox.net wrote:
The few Uighurs I know are certain that the Chinese government treats
them in repressive ways. They recount many instances and policies of
oppression.
But it is a mistake to assume that there is an ethnic group called
"Uighurs." That is really a blanket term for the Muslim central Asians
who live in Xinjiang, disparate peoples ethnically, who are banded
together against Chinese repression. I see this as a religiously-based
imperialism against people who for expedient purposes band together
under the Uighur banner.
Wythe
True. The New Yorker Magazine had a harrowing story about the attempt to
rid a woman of Kazakh origins of her Muslim beliefs. In fact, before
these "stans" were created, you simply had Turkic-speaking, Muslim
peoples spread across Czarist Russia's south. Actually, my two years of
Turkish at Columbia U. allow me to understand bits and pieces of Uyghur
speakers. As you go toward the east from Turkey, the Turkic speakers
become more and more difficult for Turkey's people to understand. My
relatives like to watch Azerbaijan TV just for laughs (they are
considered yokels) but could obviously not have a conversation with a
Uyghur. To be honest, I don't even think there's much of a sense of
solidarity. That existed under Mustafa Kemal but had a reactionary dynamic.
Fortunately, the article is not behind the magazine's paywall now.
Growing up in this remote part of Asia, a child like Sabit, an ethnic
Kazakh, could find the legacy of conquest all around her. Xinjiang is
the size of Alaska, its borders spanning eight countries. Its population
was originally dominated by Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other indigenous
Turkic peoples. But, by the time Sabit was born, Kuytun, like other
parts of Xinjiang’s north, had dramatically changed. For decades, the
Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps—a state-run paramilitary
development organization, known as the/bingtuan/—had helped usher in
millions of Han Chinese migrants, many of them former revolutionary
soldiers, to work on enormous farms. In southern Xinjiang, indigenous
peoples were still prevalent, but in Kuytun they had become a vestigial
presence.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/12/surviving-the-crackdown-in-xinjiang
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