What’s often lacking in news stories about Xinjiang is context, especially of the region’s complex history, so I’m glad that the excellent ABC radio program Rear Vision focuses this week on the wider issues behind the concentration camps. The program features contributions from myself, the historian David Brophy, the Wall Street Journal correspondent Josh Chin, and Omer Kanat of the World Uyghur Congress. You can listen/download here.
Bloomsbury will be publishing a new, updated edition of China’s Forgotten People in June. The update consists of a foreword and afterword that deals with the camps in Xinjiang – their origins and their rationale, what we know and what we don’t, and why this is such a terrible new chapter in the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to control and shape the region and its peoples.
There’s an extract from Chasing the Chinese Dream up on the China Channel.
I’m quoted in today’s Financial Times in a piece on recent violence in Xinjiang.
A mining project in Xilinhaote, Inner Mongolia
Isobel Yeung, who works for CCTV, China’s state broadcaster, recently wrote a piece for The Independent in which she argued that the Western media are misrepresenting China’s policies towards ethnic minorities in Inner Mongolia. She argued that the government aren’t trying to destroy the culture of nomadic herders by moving them into cities- they just want to improve their ‘medieval lifestyle’. Here’s my response to this in The Independent.
Nick Holdstock 