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Many autocrats govern with an in-group, whose support must be secured, and an out-group, which is subject to repression. How do autocrats exploit in-group/out-group dynamics to secure their survival? One strategy, we argue, is to broadcast out-group repression to the in-group as a signal of the regime's capacity for violence. Empirically, we focus on China, where the government represses ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Drawing on 1 million articles from six propaganda newspapers, we show that the regime broadcasts out-group repression to urban elites on each anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when 10% of Beijing residents joined anti-regime protests. To understand its effects, we conducted a survey experiment balanced on the national census during the June 2020 Tiananmen anniversary. Using a list experiment to mitigate preference falsification, we show that CCP propaganda about Uyghurs during the Tiananmen anniversary discourages protests among politically engaged urban elites because they fear repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing end-to-end speech recognition methods typically employ hybrid decoders based on CTC and Transformer. However, the issue of error accumulation in these hybrid decoders hinders further improvements in accuracy. Additionally, most existing models are built upon Transformer architecture, which tends to be complex and unfriendly to small datasets. Hence, we propose a Nonlinear Regularization Decoding Method for Speech Recognition. Firstly, we introduce the nonlinear Transformer decoder, breaking away from traditional left-to-right or right-to-left decoding orders and enabling associations between any characters, mitigating the limitations of Transformer architectures on small datasets. Secondly, we propose a novel regularization attention module to optimize the attention score matrix, reducing the impact of early errors on later outputs. Finally, we introduce the tiny model to address the challenge of overly large model parameters. The experimental results indicate that our model demonstrates good performance. Compared to the baseline, our model achieves recognition improvements of 0.12%, 0.54%, 0.51%, and 1.2% on the Aishell1, Primewords, Free ST Chinese Corpus, and Common Voice 16.1 datasets of Uyghur, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islam is widely spread throughout every corner of China, with the Hui people, the largest Muslim ethnic group in China, numbering over 10 million people, serving as its main carrier. Their culture types and local features exhibit great diversity across different provinces. The ceremony of Prophet's Day or Mawlid al-Nabi in China, as one of the three fundamental festivals of the Hui people alongside Eid al-Fitur and Eid al-Qurban, appears to be more comprehensive, open, and localized. Drawing from fieldwork in three Hui communities—Xi'an in Shaanxi province, Najiaying in Yunnan province, and Hezhou in Gansu province—this paper approaches the topic from the perspective of inculturation and cultural innovation. It aims to describe the ritual processes observed in these three different Hui communities and discuss how the Hui people integrate Islam with traditional Chinese culture in their local contexts, with the intention of forming and preserving their own cultural characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although ethnic governance in the People's Republic of China is often portrayed as a matter of controlling "minority nationalities" in the country's frontier regions, the ethnic affairs bureaucracy operates in every province. The origins of "nationalities work" as a discrete domain of governance can be traced to the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to mobilize scattered Hui communities in the eastern provinces of Shandong and Hebei in the 1930s–1940s. Thanks to the initiative of Hui Communists, local Party leaders came to understand that Hui were not simply scattered but interconnected. They adapted and replicated organizational methods to exploit Hui networks for gathering intelligence, smuggling goods and penetrating enemy-controlled cities. This history offers an instructive case of adaptive governance in the revolutionary period and the role of ethnic minority cadres in policy entrepreneurship. It also underscores the importance of the Party's experience in eastern China in the study of Chinese ethnic policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal in May 2018 and the ensuing reinstalled regime of biting sanctions against Tehran, Iran’s lack of access to the international banking system left it with few options but to rely on some of its major commercial partners, China in particular, to sidestep part of those financial and banking restrictions and penalties. Arguing that China has so far left a mixed record in its financial and banking relationship with the Middle Eastern country over the past several years, therefore, the present research tries to shed some light on the nature and scope of Beijing’s anticipated role in easing some of Tehran’s financial and banking troubles in the wake of relentless American pressures. On the positive side, the Chinese provided, either directly or through third parties, a lot of financial and banking services for the Iranians. Not only the Chinese government often looked the other way when such rather furtive interactions were taking place between the two sides, it also turned China into a safe haven for a large sum of the financial reserves which Iran had already moved from Europe to the East Asian country. On the negative side, the Chinese contributed little to Iran’s de-dollarization campaign, while they disappointed gratuitously some pro-China forces among certain conservative authorities in the Islamic Republic by demanding from Tehran to join the FATF before engaging in any close banking and financial partnership involving the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1997, the Chinese Party-state has engaged in a campaign of transnational repression against the Uyghur diaspora. This campaign has grown in severity since the 2014 declaration of the People's War on Terror and Strike Hard campaigns, which, taken together, involved a program of mass incarceration for the Turkic peoples of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). This article examines the everyday impacts of extraterritorial persecution on the Uyghur diaspora and their ability to successfully integrate into their new host societies and exercise their political and cultural agency. The article draws from nineteen in-depth interviews with Uyghurs living around the world and a dataset of over 7,000 incidents of China's targeting of Uyghurs globally since 1997. We examine how Chinese practices and the everyday effects of transnational repression vary between different regime types. We argue that Uyghurs experience both marginalization in their host country and the threat of transnational repression from China, a particularly precarious situation that we term double precarity. This double precarity is felt most acutely in more authoritarian contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental health and psychosocial support for Uyghurs living abroad need to be acknowledged as an important component of the humanitarian response. To formulate appropriate interventions for promoting mental health, a comprehensive understanding of identified problems is needed. However, several challenges - including language barriers, community perceptions of mental health, and mental health services - must be addressed. In this field report, we draw from our experiences of the Uyghur diaspora in relation to mental health to present the challenges which need to be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tahir Hamut Izgil's recent memoir, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, brings to life a cast of poets and intellectuals who used to meet under the cover of darkness, against the backdrop of mass detentions in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang province. In his 2018 poem "Somewhere Else," Izgil, who escaped China, writes with the exile's keen longing: "Of course / I too can only stare / for a moment into the distance." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rising China has upended the academia in many fronts. One of the challenges has been the reinvented ideal of Tianxia All-Under-Heaven, which first appeared in the eighth century BCE and has been offered by China as the alternative to the Westphalia system of nation-states on the basis that it will bring peace and harmony to the war-ridden international world. Nevertheless, ongoing international controversies regarding the "forced Sinicization" of the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, and the Mongols under its rule has given rise to the questions of the nature of both Tianxia and Sinicization. Analyzing a famous Vietnamese literary trope of the "principal graduates of the two kingdoms" that emerged no later than the 15th century, this essay proposes a concept of civilization envy to discuss the nuances of Sinicization. Civilization envy is a competitive mentality that desires to prove one's civilizational parity with or even superiority over China, the center of Tianxia. This mentality of civilization envy continues to modern era, and the "principal graduates of the two kingdoms" have been promoted to national heroes to show that Vietnam is a "Domain of Literature." The evolution of the trope shows that China and Vietnam had different understanding of civilizing missions. For China, it involved transforming mores and customs of the peoples under its direct control. For Vietnam, when dealing with China, it involved acquiring literary competence, especially the skills in mastering Sinitic script and poetry composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various methods have been proposed to reconstruct admixture histories by analyzing the length of ancestral chromosomal tracts, such as estimating the admixture time and number of admixture events. However, available methods do not explicitly consider the complex admixture structure, which characterizes the joining and mixing patterns of different ancestral populations during the admixture process, and instead assume a simplified one-by-one sequential admixture model. In this study, we proposed a novel approach that considers the non-sequential admixture structure to reconstruct admixture histories. Specifically, we introduced a hierarchical admixture model that incorporated four ancestral populations and developed a new method, called HierarchyMix , which uses the length of ancestral tracts and the number of ancestry switches along genomes to reconstruct the four-way admixture history. By automatically selecting the optimal admixture model using the Bayesian information criterion principles, HierarchyMix effectively estimates the corresponding admixture parameters. Simulation studies confirmed the effectiveness and robustness of HierarchyMix. We also applied HierarchyMix to Uyghurs and Kazakhs, enabling us to reconstruct the admixture histories of Central Asians. Our results highlight the importance of considering complex admixture structures and demonstrate that HierarchyMix is a useful tool for analyzing complex admixture events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This study aimed to evaluate recent trends in physical inactivity prevalence by sociodemographic characteristics and the province of China's residence between 2013 and 2019. Methods: The study included 4,229,616 participants 40 yr or older from 414 geographically defined localities in China during the 7-yr period. Self-reported total physical inactivity was collected to determine the standardized prevalence of physical inactivity. Logistic regression analysis was used to examine the association between physical inactivity and stroke risk, obtaining odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI). Results: Results showed that the standardized prevalence of physical inactivity increased from 22.12% (95% CI = 21.99%–22.45%) in 2013 to 28.79% (95% CI = 28.48%–29.19%) in 2019, with an absolute difference of 6.67% (95% CI = 6.15% to 7.16%) and a yearly increase rate of 5.03% (95% CI = 4.85% to 5.21%). In 2019, physical inactivity was higher in female and rural participants (female = 29.55%, rural = 29.46%) than in male and urban participants (male = 28.03%, urban = 28.26%). The prevalence of physical inactivity also varied by race/ethnic groups, with the highest prevalence observed among Uyghur (47.21%) and the lowest among Yizu (14.84%). Additionally, the prevalence of physical inactivity differed by province, ranging from 14.44% in Beijing to 50.09% in Tianjin in 2019. Multivariate analyses showed that physical inactivity was associated with a higher risk of stroke (OR = 1.17, 95% CI = 1.12–1.21, P < 0.001). Conclusions: In conclusion, our study found an overall increase in physical inactivity prevalence among Chinese adults ≥40 yr old from 2013 to 2019, with significant variation across regions, sex, ages, and race/ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While modern family-related ideas and behaviors have become more widely accepted in contemporary China, Chinese Muslim minorities continue to hold on to traditional religious practices. Surprisingly, data from our survey conducted in Gansu province in China's northwestern borderlands reveal that Muslims of the Hui and Dongxiang ethnicities reported much higher rates of cohabitation experience than the secular majority Han. Based on follow-up qualitative interviews, we found the answer to lie in the interplay between the highly interventionist Chinese state and the robust cultural resilience of local Islamic communities. While the state maintains a high minimum legal age of marriage, the early marriage norm remains strong in Chinese Muslim communities, where religion constitutes an alternative and often more powerful source of legitimacy--at least in the private sphere of life. Using the 2000 census data, we further show that women in almost all 10 Muslim ethnic groups have higher percentages of underage births and premarital births than Han women, both nationally and in the northwest where most Chinese Muslims live. As the once-outlawed behavior of cohabitation became more socially acceptable during the reform and opening-up era, young Muslim Chinese often found themselves in "arranged cohabitations" as de facto marriages formed at younger-than-legal ages. In doing so, Chinese Muslim communities have reinvented the meaning of cohabitation. Rather than liberal intimate relationship based on individual autonomy, cohabitation has served as a coping strategy by which Islamic patriarchs circumvent the Chinese state's aggressive regulations aimed at "modernizing" the Muslim family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 study examines why 23 Muslim-majority countries supported China at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UN/HRC) in 2019, despite allegations of human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Using a fuzzy-set qualitative-comparative analysis (fsQCA), we compared the factors that led Muslim-majority and non-Muslim countries to support China. Our analysis found that Political Regime Affinity (PRA) was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for Muslim-majority countries to support China, while China's Foreign Aid (ODA) was a necessary but not sufficient condition for non-Muslim countries. These findings suggest that ideological factors, related to the autocratic political regime (PRA), played a significant role in Muslim-majority countries' decision to support China in the UN/HRC in 2019. However, it is important to note that other factors may have also been involved. These findings have important implications for understanding the complexities of international relations and the factors that shape states behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how the legendary general Yue Fei (1103–1142) and his legacy have been perceived and appropriated in Chinese history. Twentieth-century historians approached Yue's career by highlighting the tension between his dedication to the nation (baoguo) and his personal loyalty (jinzhong) to Emperor Gaozong (1107–1187) of the Song. I argue that for Yue Fei himself and those who wrote about him in late imperial China, Yue's guo , from which he derived his political identity and toward which he devoted his service, meant first and foremost the Song dynastic state. The pushing and pulling of multivalent themes of loyalty and state service in the "historic assessment" of Yue Fei since the turn of the twentieth century speak to the complexities embedded in different Chinese governments' navigation of ethnic and class politics in their pursuit of a new national identity for China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wu Jieh-min's book, "Rival Partners: How Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and Guangdong Officials Forged the China Development Model," explores the role of Taiwanese businesses, known as Taishang, in China's rapid economic rise. Wu argues that Taishang played a crucial role in China's economic growth by forming partnerships with local officials in Guangdong province, which allowed for the establishment of factories producing labor-intensive products for export. The book also highlights the exploitation of migrant workers in this model and connects these domestic dynamics to global trends. While the book provides valuable insights, it lacks discussion on how senior officials in Beijing perceived these relationships and the intentional nature of China's rise. Overall, "Rival Partners" is a significant contribution to understanding China's economic development and cross-strait relations. [Extracted from the article]

"The Uyghurs: Kashgar before the Catastrophe" is a book of black-and-white photographs taken by Kevin Bubriski during his visit to Kashgar in 1998. The images capture everyday life in the city, which was undergoing urbanization and transformation into a Chinese metropolis. The book highlights the historical significance of the photographs, as many aspects of Uyghur culture depicted in the pictures have since been criminalized and disappeared. While the coverage of the book is not exhaustive, the photographs provide valuable insights into the social practices of the Uyghur population before the current crisis. [Extracted from the article]

Saskia Witteborn's book, "Unruly Speech: Displacement and the Politics of Transgression," focuses on the discourse of Uyghurs, a group that has gained international attention due to stories of persecution and re-education camps in their homeland of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Witteborn uses the ethnography of communication to analyze how Uyghurs challenge social and political limits through transgressive communication practices. The book explores transgressive communication in the Uyghur region, the diaspora community in Germany and the United States, and online. It also examines the significance of names and the role of Uyghur NGOs in promoting free thought and political self-determination. The book includes personal narratives and testimonies that shed light on human rights abuses in XUAR. While the heavy theoretical discussion may distract from the author's own observations, the book provides a comprehensive overview of Uyghur studies and communications for scholars in these fields. [Extracted from the article]

After collecting Raman spectral data of 12 compounds from commonly used Uyghur medicinal materials, the mixture data are synthesized using computer simulation methods. An accurate identification method for Uyghur medicine components based on Raman spectroscopy and multi-label deep learning is constructed, and the performance of the model Mix2Com is evaluated using several metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall value, and F1 score. [Display omitted] • Existing methods identifying Uyghur medicinal components aren't fit for large samples. • A new method based on Raman spectroscopy and multi-label learning is proposed. • Macro-parallel identification of components is achieved. • The model Mix2Com is constructed with LSTM and Attention introduced. • Mix2Com achieves 90.76% accuracy, better than XGBoost and DeepRaman. Uyghur medicine is one of the four major ethnic medicines in China and is a component of traditional Chinese medicine. The intrinsic quality of Uyghur medicinal materials will directly affect the clinical efficacy of Uyghur medicinal preparations. However, in recent years, problems such as adulteration of Uyghur medicinal materials and foreign bodies with the same name still exist, so it is necessary to strengthen the quality control of Uyghur medicines to guarantee Uyghur medicinal efficacy. Identifying the components of Uyghur medicines can clarify the types of medicinal materials used, is a crucial step to realizing the quality control of Uyghur medicines, and is also an important step in screening the effective components of Uyghur medicines. Currently, the method of identifying the components of Uyghur medicines relies on manual detection, which has the problems of high toxicity of the unfolding agent, poor stability, high cost, low efficiency, etc. Therefore, this paper proposes a method based on Raman spectroscopy and multi-label deep learning model to construct a model Mix2Com for accurate identification of Uyghur medicine components. The experiments use computer-simulated mixtures as the dataset, introduce the Long Short-Term Memory Model (LSTM) and Attention mechanism to encode the Raman spectral data, use multiple parallel networks for decoding, and ultimately realize the macro parallel prediction of medicine components. The results show that the model is trained to achieve 90.76% accuracy, 99.41% precision, 95.42% recall value and 97.37% F1 score. Compared to the traditional XGBoost model, the method proposed in the experiment improves the accuracy by 49% and the recall value by 18%; compared with the DeepRaman model, the accuracy is improved by 9% and the recall value is improved by 14%. The method proposed in this paper provides a new solution for the accurate identification of Uyghur medicinal components. It helps to improve the quality standard of Uyghur medicinal materials, advance the research on screening of effective chemical components of Uyghur medicines and their action mechanisms, and then promote the modernization and development of Uyghur medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pseudoexfoliation syndrome (PEX) is characterized by the deposition of fibrous pseudoexfoliation material (PEXM) in the eye, and secondary glaucoma associated with this syndrome has a faster and more severe clinical course. The incidence of PEX and pseudoexfoliative glaucoma (PEXG) exhibits ethnic clustering; however, few proteomic studies related to PEX and PEXG have been conducted in Asian populations. Therefore, we aimed to conduct proteomic analysis on the aqueous humor (AH) obtained from Uyghur patients with cataracts, those with PEX and cataracts, and those with PEXG and cataracts to better understand the molecular mechanisms of the disease and identify its potential biomarkers. To this end, AH was collected from patients with cataracts (n = 10, control group), PEX with cataracts (n = 10, PEX group), and PEXG with cataracts (n = 10, PEXG group) during phacoemulsification. Label-free quantitative proteomic techniques combined with bioinformatics were used to identify and analyze differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) in the AH of PEX and PEXG groups. Then, independent AH samples (n = 12, each group) were collected to validate DEPs by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The PEX group exhibited 25 DEPs, while the PEXG group showed 44 DEPs, both compared to the control group. Subsequently, we found three newly identified proteins in both PEX and PEXG groups, wherein FRAS1-related extracellular matrix protein 2 (FREM2) and osteoclast-associated receptor (OSCAR) exhibited downregulation, whereas coagulation Factor IX (F9) displayed upregulation. Bioinformatics analysis suggested that extracellular matrix interactions, abnormal blood-derived proteins, and lysosomes were mainly involved in the process of PEX and PEXG, and the PPI network further revealed F9 may serve as a potential biomarker for both PEX and PEXG. In conclusion, this study provides new information for understanding the proteomics of AH in PEX and PEXG. Overview of pseudoexfoliation syndrome (PEX) and pseudoexfoliative glaucoma (PEXG) and the experimental procedure of our study. A) Examination of the patients with PEX. Clinical signs of PEX include a 3-ring pattern of pseudoexfoliation materials (PEXM) on the anterior lens surface, i.e., a central disc, an intermediate clear zone, and a granular peripheral zone. PEXG diagnosis is established based on PEX diagnosis and the accompanying changes in the glaucoma fundus and retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL). a. Cup-to-disc ratio >0.9 and optic atrophy in fundus image. b. Thinning of the RNFL near the optic disc on optical coherence tomography imaging. B, C, D) Represent limitations in genetic research, clinical diagnosis and treatment, and experimental models of PEX, respectively. E) Describes epidemiological characteristics. Experimental procedure: The workflow involves collecting, digesting, and processing AH samples from patients with cataracts, PEX with cataracts, and PEXG with cataracts for LC-MS/MS proteomics and bioinformatics analysis. Subsequently, the DEPs were validated, and data were visualized (30 A H samples for label-free proteomic, 36 A H samples for ELISA). BP: biological process, CC: cellular component, MF: molecular function. [Display omitted] • We revealed the proteome of AH in Uyghur patients with PEX and PEXG. • FREM2 and OSCAR were downregulated in AH of PEX and PEXG. • F9 was upregulated in AH of PEX and PEXG. • Bioinformatics identified F9 as a potential biomarker for both PEX and PEXG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropical theileriosis is a tick-borne disease that caused by Theileria annulata , and leads to substantial economic impact in endemic area. Distinguishes to other piroplasms, Theileria is the only eukaryotic parasite could transform mammalian leukocytes. At present, buparvaquone is the most effective drug used for treatment of Theileria infection. However, frequently reported of failure treatment with buparvaquone for some T. annulata isolates. Mutation of TaPIN1 was reported to be the direct reason for failure of buparvaquone treatment. Through in vitro culture, a T. annulata isolate with a TaPIN1 mutation that is similar to the reported strain was recently identified in China. In order to understand the distribution of Theileria with mutation of TaPIN1 in China, here we developed a TaqMan probe-based real-time PCR technology to detect the mutated TaPIN1 gene. The specificity, sensitivity and reproducibility of the established TaqMan Real-time PCR method were evaluated, and field cattle blood samples collected from Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region were used to test its application. Among 1683 samples, 335 samples were confirmed positive for T. annulata by traditional PCR method and 34 samples were positive for buparvaquone-resistant. The TaPIN1 gene of those 34 samples was sequenced and analyzed with the published gene sequences from NCBI database. The results showed that the sequence obtained from the present study has good consistency with those published sequences. In conclusion, the TaqMan probe-based real-time PCR targeting T. annulata mutated TaPIN1 gene was successfully established and can be used to detect clinical samples to investigation of buparvaquone-resistant parasites in Xinjiang region quickly and accurately, which will be useful for guiding clinical medicine application. • T. annulata resistant to buparvaquone was found in China where buparvaquone was forbidden to be used to treat cattle. • The mutation of TaPIN1 where most likely lead to buparvaquone-resist for Theileria annulata was detected. • Established a TaqMan real-time PCR method to detect the mutation of TaPIN1. • The distribution of Theileria annulata resistant to buparvaquone was investigated in Xinjiang, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study" by Alexandra Grey explores the implementation and interpretation of language rights in China. The book focuses on the Zhuang people, China's largest minority, and their experiences with language rights. Grey argues that China's discourse on language is influenced by the imperative of national unity and the ideology of developmentalism, which prioritize Mandarin and marginalize minority languages. She also analyzes the linguistic landscape in Guangxi, showing the dominance of Chinese and the limited presence of Zhuang. While the language rights regime in China symbolically values minority languages, it does not empower speakers or promote linguistic justice. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of language rights in China and is a valuable contribution to the literature on minority languages. [Extracted from the article]

• A novel variant c.A875G of the PPEF2 for a large Uyghur family with nonsyndromic high myopia was identified by whole exome sequencing. • The PPEF2 was strongly expressed in the inner segment layer and outer nuclear layer formed by photoreceptor protrusions. • The variant in PPEF2 might cause high myopia by regulating the migration, proliferation and apoptosis of myopia-related cells. High myopia (HM) is a serious blinding eye disease, and genetic factors play an important role in the development of HM. In this study, whole exome sequencing (WES) was used to identify a novel variant c.A875G of the PPEF2 for a large Uyghur family with nonsyndromic HM. The variant was verified to cosegregate with HM in the family using Sanger sequencing. Another novel variant c.1959C > G in PPEF2 was identified in one of 100 sporadic cases of HM by multiplex PCR targeted amplicon sequencing (MTA-seq). The Ppef2 was verified that mainly expressed in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), choroid and retina tissues. Immunofluorescence (IF) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) assays showed that the PPEF2 was strongly expressed in the inner segment layer formed by photoreceptor protrusions, as well as in the outer nuclear layer. Compared with the wild-type, the c.A875G resulted in reduced protein levels but had no effect on protein subcellular localization in cells. In addition, the c.A875G variant resulted in a decreased migratory and proliferative capacity but promoted apoptosis in cells. In summary, PPEF2 was identified as a novel HM-causing gene, and this variant in PPEF2 might cause HM by regulating the migration, proliferation and apoptosis of myopia-related cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the retraction of papers from a genetics journal due to concerns about informed consent for study participants, particularly from ethnic minorities in China.

Health disparities based on racial status are well-researched by social scientists, but this field of knowledge has rarely been investigated beyond the Western context. As the largest province in China, Xinjiang has over 50% non-Han populace—and this group is subjected to various forms of inequalities. The current study is the first to quantitatively demonstrate the disparity in mortality between the Han majority and Turkic minority in Xinjiang. We have developed a theory-driven framework to approach race as a fundamental cause of mortality disparity through both individual and context-level pathways that trigger the proximate determinants of death. We compiled the 2015 China Microcensus with the Sixth Decennial Census (2010) and web-extracted point-of-interest information for data at different ecological levels. The results reveal that the mortality rate is significantly pronounced for Turks at the county-level and Turks' death incidence is elevated at the household level. The inclusion of variables at the individual- and context-level explains about 38% of the mortality disparity between Han and Turks, but the significant disparity remains strong after considering the covariates, the "healthy migrant" scenario, geographical clustering, and exposure risk. We cautiously suggest the remaining unexplained portion of the mortality disparity may be due to unobserved racial inequity and urge the academic community to further investigate this underexplored subject. • The study is the first to quantitatively demonstrate the death gap between the Han and Turks in Xinjiang. • We studied race as a fundamental cause of death gap through both individual-level and context-level pathways. • Variables at individual- and context-level explains about 38% of the death gap between Han and Turks in Xinjiang. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]