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This article draws on archival materials from late Qing Turpan Prefecture to explore Qing colonialism within the context of mass vaccination efforts in Xinjiang from 1880 to 1911. Following the reconquest of the region in 1877, Xiang Army leaders established official vaccination bureaus across Xinjiang—a colonial administration that encompassed all of East Turkestan—to combat smallpox outbreaks within Musulman (Uyghur) communities and the Qing army garrison. The vaccination bureau in Turpan, although led by Han vaccinators from Inner China, depended heavily on the labor of Musulman graduates from the region's assimilationist Confucian schools. The Turpan Vaccination Bureau reinforced the Xiang Army's broader project of colonial assimilation by training Musulman apprentices in various Chinese medical texts and using them to disseminate these ideas across the prefecture through the medium of vaccination. However, Turpan's Musulmans possessed their own sophisticated body of knowledge regarding epidemics and healing and routinely resisted the imposition of normative Qing/Chinese medical behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two books that focus on the Chinese government's treatment of Muslim ethnic minorities in western China, particularly the Uyghurs. The first book, "In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony," is written by Darren Byler, an American anthropologist who conducted research in the targeted region. The second book, "How I Survived a Chinese 'Re-education' Camp," is written by Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman who managed to escape from China and tells her personal story. Both books shed light on the massive scale of the internment camps and the dehumanizing treatment of the detainees. The article also discusses the development of a high-tech surveillance system and the larger context of China's political shift towards nationalism and Han Chinese supremacism. [Extracted from the article]

As an Uyghur intellectual and university professor, Ilham Tohti directly relayed Uyghur grievances from remote villages in southern Xinjiang to the central government in Beijing. Because I Have To: The Path to Survival, the Uyghur Struggle. [Extracted from the article]

By assembling more than fifty hours of interviews with eleven former Uyghur students and teachers, alongside an array of published and unpublished textual documents, this article offers the most complete history of the Uyghur student movements of the 1980s—in the face of considerable neglect and confusion. It argues, first, that the university functioned as a social, intellectual, and political space that allowed Uyghurs to develop their ethno-national identity, build shared grievances, and mobilize politically. Second, it argues that the December 1985 Uyghur student movement was a foundational turning point in the erosion of Hu Yaobang's accommodationist ethnicity policies of the early 1980s, changing how the Party-state diagnosed the reasons for Xinjiang's instability and delimited Uyghur political participation in the People's Republic of China. This article further unsettles later attempts by Chinese scholars to retroactively characterize the student movement as essentially separatist and the work of behind-the-scenes plotters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I was therefore pleased to see Harris dedicate her third chapter to the rich tradition of I hikm t i (Turkic-language prayers) attributed to Yasawi, which has continued among Uyghur communities despite state control and censorship. Rachel Harris's I Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam i reminded me of my home in a remote and caring village community in Altishahr (southern Xinjiang). This chapter can be read in comparison with or as complementary to Rian Thum's research.[1] Thum shows how the written becomes the oral, whereas Harris examines how oral and written texts (handwritten copybooks, published texts) interact and travel. [Extracted from the article]

True, Afghanistan's historical trajectory does not fit the imperialism-socialism-capitalism arc as precisely as the other territories discussed in Khalid's I Central Asia i . Here, Khalid argues that the story of Central Asia in the last two and half centuries is inextricable from the conceptual development of nationality and nationalism in the region. With the publication of Adeeb Khalid's I Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present i , alongside another recent book, Shoshana Keller's I Russia and Central Asia i ,[1] we now have such a volume. [Extracted from the article]

This is an important point because in the early post-Mao era, when the CCP abandoned its class ideology, identity politics took its place in Xinjiang (and Tibet). In fact, when Millward uses the Uyghur script change in 1984 to illustrate China's capricious impositions, he seems to be unaware that it was a Uyghur official who initiated the change, enabled by the identity politics of the day. For the Mao era, Millward details the new state's disruption of Uyghur society through a variety of imposed policies. [Extracted from the article]

None of these quibbles diminish Byler's remarkable contribution to our understanding of contemporary settler colonialism, the lifeways of Uyghur internal migrants, and the ongoing catastrophe in the Uyghur homeland. Byler argues that the global Islamic revival, intensifying state repression in Xinjiang, and the spread of internet use in the region helped inspire a resurgence of piety in the Uyghur community. Byler poignantly recounts the power of close friendships for Uyghur migrant men in Urumchi. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the relationship between gender and Uyghur identity through the story of Nuzugum, the allegory of a Kashgar woman who kills an enemy outsider she is forced to marry rather than yield her chastity and bear his children. Tracing the story from its nineteenth-century roots to literary, artistic, and political incarnations in recent decades, the article argues that the story's prominence in the canon of Uyghur literature and its eponymous protagonist's place among Uyghur national heroes highlights the integral but overlooked role of gender in the construction of modern Uyghur identity. The resiliency of the story's gendered themes also underscores gender's importance in contemporary Uyghur political advocacy, especially advocacy about the transfer of Uyghur women to factories in China's coastal cities, an issue connected to the July 2009 protests and riots in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]