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David Tobin analyses how Chinese nation-building shapes identity and security dynamics between Han and Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
This study focuses on Neolithic period Majiayao-style painted pottery from Northwest China, which is known for its high quality and beautiful décor. While much is known about the pottery, research on the associated Majiayao Culture has previously been limited to cultural histories that emphasize chronology and trait-list classification, leading to a static and simplistic view of past realities. This study instead focuses on the long-overlooked social and economic processes behind the production of these vessels. Attribute and physicochemical analyses of hundreds of ceramic vessels and samples selected from multiple sites in Gansu, Qinghai, and Sichuan provinces are combined with settlement ...
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is China’s largest province, shares borders with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and Mongolia, and possesses a variety of natural resources, including oil. The tensions between ethnic Muslim Uyghurs and the growing number of Han Chinese in Xinjiang have recently increased, occasionally breaking out into violence. At the same time as being a potential troublespot for China, the province is of increasing strategic significance as China’s gateway to Central Asia whose natural resources are of increasing importance to China. This book focuses in particular on what life is like in Xinjiang for the diverse population that lives there. It offers important insights into the social, economic and political terrains of Xinjiang, concentrating especially on how current trends in Xinjiang are likely to develop in the future. In doing so it provides a broader understanding of the region and its peoples.
In the first study to incorporate majority Han and minority Uyghur perspectives on ethnic relations in Xinjiang following mass violence during July 2009, David Tobin analyses how official policy shapes identity and security dynamics on China's northwest frontier. He explores how the 2009 violence unfolded and how the party-state responded to ask how official identity narratives and security policies shape practices on the ground. Combining ethnographic methodology with discourse analysis and participant-observation with in-depth interviews, Tobin examines how Han and Uyghurs interpret and reinterpret Chinese nation-building. He concludes that by treating Chinese identity as a security matter, the party-state exacerbates cycles of violence between Han and Uyghurs who increasingly understand each other as threats.
This book presents a pioneering ethnographic exploration of practices and ideologies of eldercare in the bingtuan - a paramilitary state organization composed largely of migrants (most of them very poor) to the north-western frontier province of Xinjiang since the 1949 Communist Revolution. In exploring the discourses and actions of the elderly, their relatives, and the state, the book uncovers the ways in which macro-level economic and social transformations are linked to the material and emotional realities of ordinary Chinese people. The light shed on gender and inter-generational relations within the modern urbanized bingtuan illuminates ageing, care and social support mechanisms in an era of rapid social change globally.
This book considers how identity informs the nature of economic participation among ethnic minority entrepreneurs in China’s remote Northwest through interviews with entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds, including Tibetan, Han and Muslim Chinese. It will be useful for students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Ethnic Studies and Economics.
The Chinese-speaking Muslims have for centuries been an inseperable but anomalous part of Chinese society--Sinophone yet incomprehensible, local yet outsiders, normal but different. Long regarded by the Chinese government as prone to violence, they have challenged fundamental Chinese conceptiosn of Self and Other and denied the totally transforming power of Chinese civilization by tenaciously maintaining connectios with Central and West Asia as well as some cultural differences from their non-Muslim neighbors. Familiar Strangers narrates a history of the Muslims of northwest China, at the intersection of the frontiers of the Mongolian-Manchu, Tibetan, Turkic, and Chinese cultural regions. Based on primary and secondary sources in a variety of languages, Familiar Strangers examines the nature of ethnicity and periphery, the role of religion and ethnicity in personal and collective decisions in violent times, and the complexity of belonging to two cultures at once. Concerning itself with a frontier very distant from the core areas of Chinese culture and very strange to most Chinese, it explores the influence of language, religion, and place on Sino-Muslim identity.
Xinjiang, the nominally autonomous region in China's far northwest, is of increasing international strategic and economic importance. With a population which is mainly non-Chinese and Muslim, there are powerful forces for autonomy, and independence, in Xinjiang. This book provides a comprehensive overview of Xinjiang. It introduces Xinjiang's history, economy and society, and above all outlines the political and religious opposition by the Uyghur and other Turkic peoples of Xinjiang to Chinese Communist rule.
Xinjiang is the ‘pivot of Asia’, where the frontiers of China, Tibet, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia approach each other. The growing Uyghur demand for a separate homeland and continuing violence in Xinjiang have brought this region into the focus of national and international attention. With Xinjiang becoming the hub of trans-Asian trade and traffic , and also due to its rich energy resources, Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang are poised to assert their ethno-political position, thereby posing serious challenge to China’s authority in the region. This book offers a new perspective on the region, with a focus on social, economic and political developments in Xinjiang in modern and contemporary times. Drawing on detailed analyses by experts on Xinjiang from India, Central Asia, Russia, Taiwan and China, this book presents a coherent, concise and rich analysis of ethnic relations, Uyghur resistance, China’s policy in Xinjiang and its economic relations with its Central Asian neighbours. It is of interest to those studying in Chinese and Central Asian politics and society, International Relations and Security Studies.
Stunning works in precious metals, glass, and stone -- many recently excavated and virtually unknown outside China -- shed new light on a pivotal epoch in Chinese history. From the 4th through 7th century, monks and merchants freely traveled along the fabled Silk Road, linking China with the west, propagating Buddhism, and purveying exotic goods and artifacts that fundamentally transformed Chinese culture and society. This sumptuous volume, the first to explore the magnificent treasures and sites of China's northwest section of the Silk Road, accompanies an exhibition at the Asia Society in New York. The text by an international team of scholars illuminates the importance of the region in this period of fertile cross-cultural exchanges between Eastern and Western Asia.