PRC's genocide of Uyghur land, life, and livelihoods since 2017

From: The New York Review of Books <newsletters @ nybooks dotcom>
Date: 9 February 2025     Subject: The Fight for Uyghur Rights

excerpt from New York Times Review of Books interview with Uyghur poets linguist, falsely imprisoned 15 months in China's Gulags:

It's clear from your piece that the Uyghur language is harshly repressed in schools. In what other ways does the state prevent the transmission of your language and culture?

The Uyghur language is banned in schools, hospitals, and government buildings. Uyghur mosques are being shut down, Uyghur cultural activities are being banned, and there are no places to speak and practice our culture. 

Uyghur culture cannot be transmitted to younger generations at home because of the fifteen-year boarding education system: three years of kindergarten, six years of primary school, and six years of high school. Once intended primarily for children with detained parents, there has recently been a significant expansion of this system, and now many Uyghur kids from ages three to ten have to stay at boarding school for five or six days each week—it varies by location. Kids from ages ten to eighteen have to stay at school for ten months out of the year. If the kids are from an "untrustworthy family"—meaning one in which family members have been arrested—they have to stay at school year-round, until their graduation. 

Even when they are at home, Uyghurs are surveilled. Cameras have been installed outside the doors of many people's homes, and government minders often spend extended periods living with the families they're watching. Uyghurs are made to install an app that tracks their communications, and even their children report on them. When children go back to boarding school after the weekend, they're asked to say whether their family is practicing Islam or speaking Uyghur at home. This can downgrade their status to "untrustworthy." Only on the street can you speak the language—but then again, on every street there are surveillance systems that can record your voice, take your picture, and record your movements. 

new book, winemakers of Tibet

Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: Winemaking in Shangri-La by Brendan Galipeau, published by the University of Washington Press. The book provides an historical and political ecological analysis of the emergence of Tibetan areas of Southwest China as a budding global wine region and the implications upon local indigenous livelihoods and identities. 

Description: Set in the Sino-Tibetan border region renamed "Shangri-La" by the Chinese government for tourism promotion, Crafting a Tibetan Terroir considers how the deployment of the French notion of terroir works to create new forms of ethno-regional identities and village landscapes through the production of Tibetan wine as a commodity. In Shangri-La, a rapidly developing international ethno-travel destination, European histories and global capitalism are being reestablished and reformulated through viticulture, which has altered landscapes and livelihoods. From the introduction of vineyards by nineteenth-century French and Swiss Catholic missionaries to make sacramental wine, to twenty-first century commercialization, this ethnography documents the ways Tibetans are indigenizing modernity in the context of economic development on their own terms. It provides timely insight into China's rapid entry into the global wine market, highlighting the localized impacts of this emergent industry, which include transformation from subsistence agriculture to monocropping and intensified agrochemical use. It also addresses larger issues of international trade, suggesting that certain commodities—stimulants and intoxicants in particular—have long connected Europe and the Asia Pacific region, and that these connections are now being reconceived in fashioning new industries and identities.