new book - changing funeral traditions, urban China

Hong Kong-based anthropologist author publishes - $29 in paperback or free as ebook (choice of PDF, Epub, or mobi - for Kindle & other reading devices).

https://luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.105/

The Funeral of Mr. Wang

Life, Death, and Ghosts in Urbanizing China

 by Andrew B. Kipnis

In rural China funerals are conducted locally, on village land by village elders. But in urban areas, people have neither land for burials nor elder relatives to conduct funerals. Chinese urbanization, which has increased drastically in recent decades, involves the creation of cemeteries, state-run funeral homes, and small private funerary businesses. The Funeral of Mr. Wang examines social change in urbanizing China through the lens of funerals, the funerary industry, and practices of memorialization. It analyzes changes in family life, patterns of urban sociality, transformations in economic relations, the politics of memorialization, and the echoes of these changes in beliefs about the dead and ghosts.

     "This book is highly original and addresses a topic of central importance to understanding Chinese family life and the limits of a party-state's regulatory power over the society and individual citizens. Original and systematic fieldwork is expertly used to illustrate core arguments. To my knowledge there is no competing ethnography." — Deborah Davis, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Yale University

     "The Funeral of Mr. Wang is a vivid portrait of how the transition from life to death is negotiated in the midst of a rapidly transforming urban Chinese society. Showing how death in contemporary China generates interconnected processes of cultural recombination among family members, funeral service providers, bureaucratic regulators, strangers, and ghosts, this book will be critical reading for all students of China and of death in contemporary societies." — David A. Palmer, coauthor of The Religious Question in Modern China

More Uyghur documenters, U. British Columbia: Xinjiang Documentation Project

[cross-posting from the listserv for East Asia Anthropology 22 July]

... excellent words from Dr. Guldana Salimjan, who is a professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies department at Simon Fraser University, as well as co-director of the Xinjiang Documentation Project (https://xinjiang.sppga.ubc.ca/) at the University of British Columbia. She is a Kazakh scholar originally from Xinjiang.

[EXCERPT to give opening lines]

What China Studies Scholars Can Do about the Xinjiang Crisis
        University of Westminster Contemporary China blog, July 21, 2021

Special commentary

Written by Guldana Salimjan

In 2019, at a dinner conversation with several established China scholars, I mentioned that it is dangerous for me to return to China and do further research because of the dire situation in Xinjiang. A professor from China was puzzled, 'Why is that? I go back to my field site every year!' I sighed but quickly explained to her, 'Because right now the government has campaigns targeting Turkic Muslim people, and I am from one of these communities.' She still expressed disbelief and continued, 'But you are not Uyghur—they are outrageous.' I was utterly shocked this time and my mind went blank.

[full article, http://blog.westminster.ac.uk/contemporarychina/what-china-studies-scholars-can-do-about-the-xinjiang-crisis/]

Documentary lens on Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region since 2017

=-=-=-= Documenting the Undocumentable: China's Re-Education Camps. BY YI CHEN.

Documentary magazine, AUGUST 18, 2020.

https://www.documentary.org/feature/documenting-undocumentable-chinas-re-education-camps

=-=-=-= Summer 2021 The Uyghur Chronicles, https://www.theatlantic.com/the-uyghur-chronicles/

=-=-=-= Different subject: Uyghur poets. These sessions are connected to the people included in the dragnet pulling so many lives into confinement of body and mind:

The Uyghur Poets. Heart and Soul. BBC Radio, Fri 16 July 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct2gj2
+ Joshua L. Freeman thread on the poetry of Tahir Hamut Izgil:  https://twitter.com/jlfreeman6/status/1415646458926313472

=-=-=-= Reference list (live document updated regularly): Online bibliography on the genocide in the Uyghur region (East Turkestan): https://uhrp.org/bibliography/

This month marks 100 years of the CCP

Feature story on July 9, 2021 at National Public Radio's morning show, Morning Edition, {about 6 minutes playing time)

A few hours after broadcast many of the radio stories are put into transcript form to share or copy/paste.

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014512220/a-look-at-chinas-red-tourism-industry-as-the-communist-party-turns-100

Creative-commons (open access) announced May 30, 2021. See also Fiskesjö' cumulative listing of related writings by others

Dossier: Uyghur Women in China's Genocide

Rukiye Turdush, Uyghur Research Institute - Follow
Magnus Fiskesjö, Cornell University - Follow

Abstract

In genocide, both women and men suffer. However, their suffering has always been different; with men mostly subjected to torture and killings, and women mostly subjected to torture and mutilation. These differences stem primarily from the perpetrators' ideology and intention to exterminate the targeted people. Many patriarchal societies link men with blood lineage and the group's continuation, while women embody the group's reproductivity and dignity. In the ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in East Turkistan, the ideology of Chinese colonialism is a root cause. It motivates the targeting of women as the means through which to destroy the reproductivity and the dignity of the people as a whole. It is a common misunderstanding to associate genocide with only mass killings, and the current lack of evidence for massacres has led some to prematurely conclude there is no genocide. But this overlooks the targeting of women, which is also a prominent part of the definition of genocide laid out in the Genocide Convention. State policy in China intentionally targets Uyghur and other Turkic women in multiple ways. This dossier is focused on analyzing China's targeted policies against Uyghur women and their "punishment," as rooted in part in ancient Chinese legalist philosophy. In doing so, this dossier contributes toward further exposing Chinese colonialism and the genocidal intent now in evidence.

Recommended Citation

Turdush, Rukiye and Fiskesjö, Magnus (2021) "Dossier: Uyghur Women in China's Genocide," Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal: Vol. 15: Iss. 1: 22–43.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5038/1911-9933.15.1.1834

Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol15/iss1/6

Hong Kong professor, "why I stay here"

Blog article (Op/Ed) late March 2021 by Dr. Gordon Matthews at CUHK, https://hongkongfp.com/2021/02/21/academic-gordon-mathews-why-i-am-staying-in-hong-kong-for-now/ to discuss what is gained and what is lost by teaching and researching at the university campus, even while free speech and thinking is threatened by Mainland controlling forces.

When scholars describe Chinese governance

with a critical voice and eye, then central government reactions can be harsh. The March 2021 statement issued by the Association for Asian Studies points this out, https://www.asianstudies.org/aas-statement-on-chinese-government-sanctions/

Statement by the AAS Board of Directors
March 29, 2021

The Association for Asian Studies (AAS), a scholarly, non-political, non-profit professional association with approximately 6,500 members worldwide, wishes to express its solidarity and support for our esteemed colleague and member, Professor Joanne Smith Finley of the University of Newcastle, UK, who is one of nine people sanctioned on March 26, 2021, by the Chinese Foreign Ministry for ostensibly "maliciously spread[ing] lies and disinformation."

Professor Smith Finley is a respected scholar and an elected member of the China and Inner Asia Council of the AAS. She organized two valuable panel sessions at the recently concluded 2021 AAS Annual Conference that examined Chinese state policies in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Her research, like that of other AAS members, manifests scholarly scruples, analytical forthrightness, and a balanced but critical approach. It highlights the obligation of scholarship to examine and acknowledge significant social issues. The sanctioning of Prof. Smith Finley and members of her immediate family represents a reprehensible blow to academic freedom under the terms of UNESCO's 1997 Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel, which calls upon all UN member states to protect the freedom of thought, expression, and movement of higher education teaching personnel and, in particular, the right to disseminate freely the results of their research.

As a community of scholars, the AAS regrets the levying of sanctions by the Chinese Foreign Ministry against individual researchers and scholarly organizations. These actions quell the production of knowledge and hinder the capacity of researchers to provide national and international publics, policy makers, and academe well-informed analyses of Chinese society, politics, and culture.

=-=-=-=-=-= Documenter of Xinjiang genocide gives (listserv) rejoinder,

...strange that this AAS statement does not include by name the two other 'sanctioned' scholars as well, Björn Jerdén, the Swedish political scientist and China scholar, and Adrian Zenz, the German anthropologist who has done more than most of us to research and valiantly expose the atrocities in China. Zenz in particular has already been very viciously attacked by the Chinese propaganda machine, Jerdén also...

And the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) institute is not even hinted at by the AAS ... even though the targeting of an independent institute, too, is a new low from Chinese regime. It's the largest European China-focused such institute. A group of 32 research institute and think tank directors have put their feet down: https://statement-china-sanctions.vercel.app

Shanghai frozen in time, 360 degrees

Stitching many digital pictures together yields 195 Gigapixel panoramic portrait of the city at this time,

https://www.dpreview.com/news/1645435845/chinese-company-captures-incredibly-detailed-195-gigapixel-360-degree-panorama-of-shanghai

article 1/2021, Racism with Chinese Characteristics

https://chinachannel.org/2021/01/22/chinese-racism/

Racism with Chinese Characteristics (7 min read) -January 22, 2021 by Magnus Fiskesjö

How China's imperial legacy underpins state racism and violence in Xinjiang

-----[opening paragraph; excerpt]

Due to incidents last year in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, where Africans were evicted and forced to sleep on the street simply because they are African, there is a growing realization around the world that Chinese racism exists. Despite the government's denials, racism against Africans in China is often blatant. In one widely circulated clip, one can see a white and a black woman both trying to enter a shopping mall: only the white woman is permitted, and both leave in disgust. Just as in the West's past, in China contempt for Africans is also often mixed up with patronizing exoticization. Chinese comedians wear blackface on state TV. In Shenzhen's Windows on the World theme park, dark-skinned ethnic minority people are choreographed to perform either as primitive Africans, or as primitive themselves.

... ... truncation

-----[concluding paragraph]

Before the Communists took power, their declared ideology was "internationalist" and anti-imperialist, even promising to restore independence to all peoples conquered by the Chinese empire, including the Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hmong, and so on. But after 1949, official Communist mythology reclaimed all these groups as genetically "Chinese" peoples who cannot split away from the fatherland. Today, the erstwhile ideal of equality between indigenous nationalities in what was once the Chinese empire is being shed altogether. In Xinjiang it has been replaced with a Nazi-style purification of the nation, intended as a final solution that will obliterate China's ethnic and cultural diversity inherited from the Qing empire. Unfortunately, this state racism is not likely to go away until it is broadly recognized and rejected – including by the Chinese people.

---See also, Magnus Fiskesjo: Online bibliography (periodically updated) on the genocide in the Uyghur region (East Turkestan):

https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/chinas-re-education-concentration-camps-xinjiang