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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]

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]

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]

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]

Aiming at the problems of Uyghur oblique deformation, character adhesion and character similarity in scene images, this paper proposes a scene Uyghur recognition model with enhanced visual prediction. First, the content-aware correction network TPS++ is used to perform feature-level correction for skewed text. Then, ABINet is used as the basic recognition network, and the U-Net structure in the vision model is improved to aggregate horizontal features, suppress multiple activation phenomena, better describe the spatial characteristics of character positions, and alleviate the problem of character adhesion. Finally, a visual masking semantic awareness (VMSA) module is added to guide the vision model to consider the language information in the visual space by masking the corresponding visual features on the attention map to obtain more accurate visual prediction. This module can not only alleviate the correction load of the language model, but also distinguish similar characters using the language information. The effectiveness of the improved method is verified by ablation experiments, and the model is compared with common scene text recognition methods and scene Uyghur recognition methods on the self-built scene Uyghur dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relations between Spain and China, regardless of regimes and time, have followed a path of friendship without excessive mutual commitment. An analysis of these relations reveals the decisive role played by the diplomats and officials who have led them from the moment they were formally established as sovereign states. This article deals with the identification and analysis of the curricula vitae of the Chinese officials who played a leading role in the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Spain. It affirms that they established a relationship characterized, structurally, by a protocolary nature conditioned by the officials' impulse to the post. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The incidence of cervical cancer in Uyghur women ranks first among those in Han and other ethnic minority groups. We aimed to understand the natural history of HPV in Uyghur women. Methods: A longitudinal cohort study on the natural history of HPV infection in rural Uyghur women in China was conducted between May 2013 and May 2014. A total of 11000 women from South Xinjiang underwent HPV screening by careHPV and liquid-based cytology. Ultimately, a total of 298 women with positive HPV and normal biopsy results or CIN1 were enrolled to participate in a study including follow-up HPV testing for two years. Results: The HPV infection rate in Uyghur women was 9.15%. Among the participants, the careHPV test showed that 298 women were HPV-positive, and histology showed CIN1 or normal results for these women at baseline. Among these patients, after 24 months of initial recruitment, 92 (30.87%) patients had persistent HPV infections, and 206 (69.13%) had cleared HPV infection. Univariate analysis showed that persistent HPV infection was associated with age and shower frequency (P < 0.001 and P = 0.047, respectively). Conclusions: Our results suggest that women over the age of 50 years who have been infected with HR-HPV for more than 1 year should be regularly screened and monitored for HPV. In addition, education should be strengthened to improve poor health habits in these women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mercury, accepted as a harmful chemical today, is widely used in many fields by various nations as it was used in ancient times. Nations who believed in this element's changing and transforming properties believed that it transformed worthless metals into gold, a precious metal, and thus placed mercury in an important place in alchemy. In addition, mercury, which has an essential place in the science of medicine, has been combined with various plants or mixture included in drug compositions and used for therapeutic purposes. Mercury, used in Ayurvedic medicine, especially Indian medicine, is also included in yogic practice, considered among the sub-branches of Ayurveda. When the Old Uyghur texts are examined, the words that mean 'mercury; which appear in two different ways as kona suvı 'mercury' and zımıg 'mercury, are also used to transform worthless metals into gold, as well as to transform a worthless human into a divine body, as stated above. In addition, mercury is also included in various drug components for different purposes in medicine. This article aims to determine the words used for mercury in Old Uyghur, and the meanings and purposes of these words. Again, to show the reading differences in the text, and the movement over the read texts, the original texts are given in the article, and the text is transliterated again. So, the differences in reading and interpretation are reflected in the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uyghur Intangible Cultural Heritage is listed under the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, heritage lists of China, and the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, as well as the List of Representative Projects of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Therefore, it is necessary to outline and evaluate the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Uyghur in terms of the number of their representative elements, their area-categories, their geographical distribution, their inclusion in various lists, the safeguarding action plan for them. In this article, after briefly explaining the history of intangible cultural heritage studies in China and the related studies of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the article will proceed to introduce the Uyghur elements on the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. These will be specifically discussed. Then, 33 elements of Uyghur culture in the List of Representative Elements of National Intangible Cultural Heritage and the related 61 sub-elements will be discussed one by one, in accordance with the arrangement in the intangible cultural heritage areas identified by UNESCO. Three elements in the field of oral traditions and expressions; eight elements, 20 sub-elements in the field of performing arts; three elements, seven sub-elements in the field of social practices, rituals and feasts; five elements and 10 sub-elements in the field of knowledge and practices related to nature and the universe; 14 elements and 21 sub-elements in the field of handicrafts will be examined one by one. Brief information will be given about the item's name, its category in China, item number, inventory number, approval date, geographic distribution center(s), and item protection agency. Some elements will be defined when necessary. Considering that all studies regarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Uyghur are carried out within the framework of China's Intangible Cultural Heritage studies, Uyghur Intangible Cultural Heritage as a part of China's Intangible Cultural Heritage, suitable evaluations will be made on the studies regarding the Uyghur's elements, and the sub-elements. The Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Uyghur is an indication of the spiritual wealth of the country and humanity. It needs to be introduced in greater detail, more scientific research and more comprehensive evaluation. On the other hand, these kinds of studies, have a special value to China's Belt and Road Initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, based on a morpheme segmentation framework, we researched a text keyword extraction method for Uyghur, Kazakh and Kirghiz languages, which have similar grammatical and lexical structures. In these languages, affixes and a stem are joined together to form a word. A stem is a word particle with a notional meaning, while the affixes perform grammatical functions. Because of these derivative properties, the vocabularies used for these languages are huge. Therefore, pre-processing is a necessary step in NLP tasks for Uyghur, Kazakh and Kirghiz. Morpheme segmentation enabled us to remove the suffixes as the auxiliary unit while retaining the meaningful stem and it reduced the dimension of the feature space present in the keyword extraction task for Uyghur, Kazakh and Kirghiz texts. We transformed the morpheme segmentation task into the problem of labeling the morpheme sequences, and we used the Bi-LSTM network to bidirectionally obtain the position feature information of character sequences. We applied CRF to effectively learn the information of the preceding and following label sequences to build a highly accurate Bi-LSTM_CRF morpheme segmentation model, and we prepared morpheme-based experimental text sets by using this model. Subsequently, we used the stem vectors' similarity to modify the TextRank algorithm, subsequent to the training of the stem embedding vector using the Doc2vec algorithm, and then we performed a text keyword extraction experiment. In this experiment, the highest F1 scores of 43.8%, 44% and 43.9% were obtained for three datasets. The experimental results show that the morpheme-based approach provides much better results than the word-based approach, which shows the stem vector similarity weighting is an efficient method for the text keyword extraction task, thus proving the efficiency of morpheme sequence for morphologically derivative languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of Indian media. Utilizing the Propaganda Model formulated by Herman and Chomsky in the book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (1988), the paper aims to critically assess the news patterns and media performance of the mainstream Indian media. The contribution of the paper will be the application of the propaganda model in the context of Indian media. For this study, we have analyzed the media coverage of two events – India's ban on Chinese apps and the Pulwama attack. We focus on how Indian Media has helped the Government to establish the propaganda of nationalism during both events, which is explained by Herman and Chomsky in the five filters of news production. We investigate how the anti-China sentiment and the Pulwama attack have been used by the Government to divert attention from their failure of governance, and mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. The corporate media is playing its part in the machinations of the ruling BJP party. We conclude that the plurality of voices amongst journalists is in decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Wupu cemetery, located in the Yizhou District, Hami City, Xinjiang Province, and in the eastern part of the southern foothills of the Tianshan Mountains, is remains from the late Bronze Age. In this study, four faience beads excavated from the Wupu cemetery were examined by stereomicroscopy, synchrotron radiation micro-CT, and electron microprobe analysis. The appearance and compositions of these faience beads are presented and discussed. The results show that these tubular faience beads, glazed by the application glazing method, are all potash-rich faience, consistent with the faience produced locally in China. The faience products from the Central Plains were disseminated to the Hami region of Xinjiang Province during the Western Zhou dynasty (1046 BC–771 BC), reflecting the spread of such faience to the west with the Zhou people mastering the technique of making potash-rich faience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qixiang is a unique sacrificial culture created by the Han army eight banners in northeast China. This culture not only has elements such as shamanism and Han people burning incense, but also has military sacrificial elements. This paper argues that Qixiang is the evolution and legacy of Maji, a military sacrificial ritual in ancient China. The Han military banner people in the Qing Dynasty took Maji as the main body, combined the Manchu Shamanism with the Han incense burning, and created a cultural symbol representing their own ethnic group. At present, the study of Qixiang not only helps to understand the complexity of the development and evolution of Manchu shamanism, but also helps to reveal the ethnic identity of Han bannermen under the Eight Banners system of the Qing Dynasty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores how Paul negotiates and constructs social identity for the Christos-followers in Corinth from a post-supersessionist perspective by using the Social Identity Theory. Focusing on a close reading of two controversial passages taken from 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 7:17–24 and 9:19–23), this essay argues that there is continuation of existing social identities of both the Jewish and gentile Christos-followers. In the Christos-movement, Jews were not expected to give up their place of belonging in order to become Christos-followers. Likewise, gentiles were not expected to leave behind their previous identity and embrace Jewish practices in order to become the people of God who worship the God of Israel. While the existing social identities continue, Paul also creatively transforms them. Reflection on the implication of this reading for contemporary ethnic Chinese Christos-followers in Muslim-majority Malaysia is also offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prerequisite for applying short tandem repeat (STR) kits is obtaining population allele and/or haplotype frequencies and forensic parameters. Firstly, we aimed to investigate the population data of 19 X-chromosomal STRs (X-STRs) included in the AGCU X19 STR kit in the Han people residing in Hubei Province, Central China, and the Zhuang people residing in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of South China. Furthermore, we compared these population data with those for other Chinese populations. In total, 509 unrelated Han males and 266 unrelated Zhuang males were genotyped using the AGCU X19 STR kit. Allele frequencies, haplotype frequencies, and forensic parameters were computed, and genetic differences among 15 Chinese populations were analysed. The 19 X-STRs showed a high power of discrimination and high mean chance of exclusion, whether calculated using allele or haplotype frequencies. Major differences were found between Han and Oroqen, Uyghur, Mongolian, Tibetan, Li, and Yi populations. Aberrant biallelic patterns at DXS10159, DXS10134, and DXS10079 and allelic dropouts at DXS10164 were observed. The 19 X-STRs were highly polymorphic in the Hubei Han and Guangxi Zhuang populations, and the AGCU X19 STR kit was shown to be suitable for forensic casework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of surveillance technology by Chinese companies in Iran, which can identify individuals in crowds and be used by the regime to build cases against protesters. Companies such as Hangzhou Hikvision, Huawei, and FiberHome have been active in Iran, despite international sanctions and allegations of human rights abuses. These technologies enable constant surveillance and restrict freedom of movement, aligning with China's safe cities concept.

There are many words witnessed in the historical Turkish dialects or only in the Old Uyghur Turkish. One of them is the verb yaktur- arose to reproduce works to spread Buddhism. The word is not found in texts with Runic letters. The reason for this may be due to the fact that paper and printing techniques are not used in the writing of these texts. In the explanations given by the researchers, the origin of yaḳtur- is not entirely clear. This verb is mostly seen in Old Uyghur Turkish with the meaning 'to get books, copies etc. printed or to print'. The word in question is not found in texts with Runic letters. This may be due to the fact that paper and printing techniques are not used in Runic letter texts. We think that yaktur- 'to get books, magazines, etc. printed’ can be combined with the verbs *ya- and yak- in terms of root, meaning and structure. For this reason, the relationship between the meanings "to print books, copies etc." with the verbs *ya- "to approach", yak- to "approach", yak- to "drive, to rub" have been examined and explanations have been made in terms of etymology, structure and semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morphological segmentation is a basic task in agglutinative language information processing, dividing words into the smallest semantic unit morphemes. There are two types of morphological segmentation: canonical segmentation and surface segmentation. As a typical agglutinative language, Uyghur usually uses statistical-based methods in canonical segmentation, which relies on the artificial extraction of features. In surface segmentation, the artificial feature extraction process is avoided by using the neural network. However, to date, no model can provide both segmentation results in Uyghur without adding features. In addition, morphological segmentation is usually regarded as a sequence annotation task, so label imbalance easily occurs in datasets. Given the above situation, this paper proposes an improved labelling scheme that joins morphological boundary labels and voice harmony labels for the two kinds of segmentation simultaneously. Then, a convolution network and attention mechanism are added to capture local and global features, respectively. Finally, morphological segmentation is regarded as a sequence labeling task of character sequences. Due to the problem of label proportion imbalance and noise in the dataset, a focal loss function with label smoothing is used. The experimental results show that the F1 values of canonical segmentation and surface segmentation achieve the best results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent vote against the first-ever UN Human Rights Council resolution looking at the situation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang has prompted discussions and concerns over China's increasing grip over UN human rights bodies. Amidst tensions between Chino and the West, China's growing influence within the UN human rights system poses a challenge to progressive Global South governments, who seek to cooperate with Beijing on trade and development, while sharing major divergences on human rights priorities. This paper aims to present the goals and tactics behind China's increasing presence at the UN Human Rights Council, and propose some reflections on its impact for progressive Latin American and other Global South governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The supply of coins and their metal materials is important for state governance. Many details about the monetary supply network in ancient China still need to be verified. In this paper, 15 early Tang dynasty Kaiyuan Tongbao 開元通寶 coins excavated from the Lafu Queke 拉甫却克 cemetery, Hami 哈密 city, were studied by combining scientific analyses (PXRF and MC-ICP-MS etc.) with the archaeological context and historical texts. The results show that all of these coins are made of Cu-Sn–Pb ternary alloy. The lead isotopes match with the isotopic signatures of some southwest China lead mines consistent with historical records, 14 coins are located in the range of Southern China geochemical province, and the lead of 5 coins could be considered as highly radiogenic lead (HRL). Combining these results with the archaeological context and historical texts, it can be inferred that the coins minted in southwest China were made from locally exploited raw metal, and supplied to the northwest borderland of the Tang dynasty in the seventh century CE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its launch, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the China-led economic and cultural development strategy, captured impressive media and scholarly attention and critiques. CHINA'S ASIAN DREAM: Empire Building along the New Silk RoadGEOCULTURAL POWER: China's Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty-First Century: By Tom Miller. Miller connects the China's "Go-West" policy with the rise of infrastructure financing as a key component of the international donor community where China is taking the lead. [Extracted from the article]

Handwritten signatures have traditionally been used as a common form of recognition and authentication in tasks such as financial transactions and document authentication. However, there are few studies on minority languages such as Uyghur and Kazakh used in Xinjiang, China, and no available public dataset for these scripts, which are widely used in banking and other fields. Therefore, this paper addresses this problem by constructing a dataset containing Uyghur, Kazakh, and Han languages and presents an automatic handwritten signature recognition approach based on Uyghur, Kazakh, Han, and public datasets. In the paper, a handwritten signature recognition method that combines local maximum occurrence features (LOMO) and histogram of orientated gradients (HOG) features was proposed. LOMO features use a sliding window to represent the local features of the signature image. The high-dimensional features formed by the combination of these methods are dimensionally reduced by principal component analysis (PCA). The classification is performed using k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), and it is compared with the random forest method. The proposed method achieved a recognition rate of 98.4% using a diverse signature database compared with existing methods. It shows that the method was effective and can be applied to large datasets of mixed, multilingual signatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past two decades, studies of Y chromosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (Y-SNPs) and short tandem repeats (Y-STRs) have shed light on the demographic history of Central Asia, the heartland of Eurasia. However, complex patterns of migration and admixture have complicated population genetic studies in Central Asia. Here, we sequenced and analyzed the Y-chromosomes of 187 male individuals from Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Karakalpak, Hazara, Karluk, Tajik, Uyghur, Dungan, and Turkmen populations. High diversity and admixture from peripheral areas of Eurasia were observed among the paternal gene pool of these populations. This general pattern can be largely attributed to the activities of ancient people in four periods, including the Neolithic farmers, Indo-Europeans, Turks, and Mongols. Most importantly, we detected the consistent expansion of many minor lineages over the past thousand years, which may correspond directly to the formation of modern populations in these regions. The newly discovered sub-lineages and variants provide a basis for further studies of the contributions of minor lineages to the formation of modern populations in Central Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uyghur people used many alphabets from past to present. Because of many reasons related to the alphabets they used and the periods in which those alphabets were used, changes were made in the rules of spelling. With the stream of time, there might be changes in the number and spelling of words used in languages, but such a change has been experienced more in Uyghur language than in other languages. While only four alphabet changes were made in Uyghur language, which has been used in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of China since 1950, eight spelling changes were made from 1980 to 2010. Uyghur people living in Central Asia had to change the alphabet several times in certain periods. In this article, after the alphabets used by the Uyghur people in the period after they accepted Islam, that is, from the Karakhanids period (840-1213) to the present day, are explained with examples, the spellings of the words used in the above-mentioned alphabets are compared and the differences are explained with examples. In some periods, the number of letters used in the same alphabet was changed. While the new words produced for Uyghur language in different stages and words that have been changed from foreign languages or accepted as they are, are explained with examples, some negative problems experienced due to the frequently change of the spelling rules in today's modern Uyghur studies are summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talmy's motion event typology (Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Towards a cognitive semantics: Conceptual structuring systems, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) has served as an influential framework for exploring event representation across languages. While confirming its basic premises, many studies argued that the typology cannot fully capture the vast intra- and inter-typological variations. Consequently, proposals have been made to expand the typology and/or reconceptualize it as a typology of constructional strategies for encoding events. This article furthers this line of inquiry by examining caused-motion expressions by adult speakers of an understudied Turkic language, Modern Uyghur. Systematic analyses of lexicalization patterns, that is, which components are typically selected for expression, how frequently they are selected, and how they are packaged in syntactic constructions, show that Uyghur is a prototypical verb-framed language. It differs most strikingly from English (considered satellite-framed) in terms of lexicalization patterns. Detailed comparisons with French and Turkish (putatively verb-framed) reveal intra-typological variations in that Uyghur speakers systematically used verb-framed constructions while French and Turkish speakers exhibit much flexibility and a general preference for satellite-framed constructions. Overall, our data lend support to Talmy's typology conceived as a strategy-based typological framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, grape is one of the top five fruit crops for both bearing acreage and production. Recently, national grape production has been stalling because of an increase in drought events. In order to combat the adverse effects of drought on grape production, it is imperative to understand the historical drought trend and frequency during the growing season. In this study, we focused on agricultural drought during the four growth periods of grape: bud break-flowering, flowering-veraison, veraison-berry maturation, and berry maturation-leaf fall. Based on the weather data from 429 meteorological stations, we computed the Crop Water Deficit Index (CWDI) in the five main grape-growing regions of China: Northeast China, North China, Northwest China, Southwest China, and Southeast China. Then, we evaluated the CWDI-based drought distribution and trend in the study regions, as well as the frequency of different degrees of drought. The results showed that exceptional drought was occurring frequently in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northern Gansu province, and northern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Among the four study growth periods of grape, exceptional drought was the most expansive during bud break-flowering. What's more, exceptional drought coverage during bud break-flowering in the study regions was increasing from 1981 to 2016. Analysis of butterfly structure showed that the occurrence of drought was continuous and persistent in northern China. Our study results could serve as guideposts to highlight Chinese grape production industry's vulnerability to agricultural drought against the background of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uyghur text detection and recognition in images with simple backgrounds is still a challenging task for Uyghur image content analysis. In this paper, we propose a new effective Uyghur text detection method based on channel-enhanced MSERs and the CNN classification model. In order to extract more complete text components, a new text candidate region extraction algorithm is put forward, which is based on the channel-enhanced MSERs according to the characteristics of Uyghur text. In order to effectively prune the non-text regions, we design a CNN classification network according to the LeNet-5, which gains the description characteristics automatically and avoids the tedious and low efficiency artificial characteristic extraction work. For Uyghur text recognition in images, we improved the traditional CRNN network, and to verify its effectiveness, the networks trained on a synthetic dataset and evaluated on the text recognition datasets. The experimental results indicated that the Uyghur text detection method in this paper is robust and applicable, and the recognition result by improvedCRNN was better than the original CRNN network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the Old Uighur historical documents discovered in Turfan and its surroundings from the 13th and 14th centuries, Uighurs are many personal (private) letters belonging to Uighurs, mostly Buddhists, some Manichaeans, and a small number of Christians. A few of these letters were unearthed in 20th century China at the Kara-hoto ruins in the Kansu Corridor, and the majority in the Turfan oasis or the famous Thousand Buddha (Mogao) Caves in Dunhuang. Osman Fikri Sertkaya says that he identified 110 Uighur letters in his article published in 2012 based on the inventory work he had done until then, adding the 40 letters listed in Takao Moriyasu's works, which he did not include in his list, making the total number of Old Uighur letters 150. Although it is known that these letters were published at different times by scientists from different nations such as Germany, Japan, Russia, France, the UK, Turkey, etc., the most comprehensive study on the subject was published in Turnout by Brepols Publishers in Berliner Turfantexte in 2019. It is the book published as the 46th volume of the series with the title Corpus of the Old Uighur Letters from the Eastern Silk Road (= COUL) written by the Japanese historian and Turcologist Takao Moriyasu. In this book, paleographic descriptions, transcriptions, English translations, and the author's comments on 209 Old Uighur letter fragments are presented. In COUL, letters were evaluated in five main groups, and at the same time, 7 envelopes and the texts on them were examined. In this article, first of all, the difficulties encountered in the identification of Old Uighur letters and the basic criteria are taken into account in the determination of the letters will be discussed. Then, the classifications of the letters arranged according to the compositions that can be represented by formulas in a systematic structure, which Osman Fikri Sertkaya and Takao Moriyasu created based on some words, phrases, opening and ending formals, will be compared and both similar and different aspects will be tried to be determined. Thus, it will be stated what kind of benefits the opening and ending patterns, which constitute the basic criteria in the classification of Uighur letters, can be systematically handled, determined, and demonstrated with formulas in the classification of documents that have yet to be defined. Simultaneously, a new proposal will be made to facilitate the identification and classification of Old Uighur personal (private) letters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scene text detection task aims to precisely localize text in natural environments. At present, the application scenarios of text detection topics have gradually shifted from plain document text to more complex natural scenarios. Objects with similar texture and text morphology in the complex background noise of natural scene images are prone to false recall and difficult to detect multi-scale texts, a multi-directional scene Uyghur text detection model based on fine-grained feature representation and spatial feature fusion is proposed, and feature extraction and feature fusion are improved to enhance the network's ability to represent multi-scale features. In this method, the multiple groups of 3 × 3 convolutional feature groups that are connected like the hierarchical residual to build a residual network for feature extraction, which captures the feature details and increases the receptive field of the network to adapt to multi-scale text and long glued dimensional font detection and suppress false positives of text-like objects. Secondly, an adaptive multi-level feature map fusion strategy is adopted to overcome the inconsistency of information in multi-scale feature map fusion. The proposed model achieves 93.94% and 84.92% F-measure on the self-built Uyghur dataset and the ICDAR2015 dataset, respectively, which improves the accuracy of Uyghur text detection and suppresses false positives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The situation of the human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is frequently reported in the Western media and it has gained a central place in the Euro-Atlantic political discourse which condemns Beijing's attitude towards human rights at home. However, the sanctions adopted by both the US and the EU in relation to the treatment applied by the Chinese government to the Uyghurs in the XUAR are strongly discouraged and limited by the economic dependencies of the two Western giants on China. The goal of this paper is to discuss the effectiveness of the economic sanctions in supporting the human rights international regime in the context of current economic interdependence between the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), on one side, and China, on the other side. The hypothesis of the paper is that the asymmetrical economic interdependence is undermining the effectiveness of the economic sanctions in supporting the human rights international regime. When there is an increased interdependence between a supporter and promoter of human rights, in this case the US and the EU, and a great economic power that does not regard the human rights as having a universal value in the current international order, the effects of the economic sanctions are inefficient in addressing this problem due to the high economic and political costs for both their issuers and their targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose. The aim of the study is to assess the impact of a multifaceted education strategy for Uyghur patients with glaucoma on their anxiety, satisfaction, and comprehension of disease information in rural China. Methods. This study recruited 100 patients who were randomized into two groups: the control group that received a conventional consultation and the intervention group that received a multifaceted education approach. Information comprehension was evaluated using a 15-item questionnaire. A 6-item State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-6) score was used to assess patient anxiety levels. Satisfaction was evaluated on the day of discharge. Results. After education, patients in the intervention group scored significantly higher than those in the control group on their knowledge of glaucoma (p ≤ 0.001). Education level, family history of glaucoma, and number of glaucoma clinic visits were independently associated with baseline scores (p = 0.038, 0.002, and 0.017, respectively). The age was negatively correlated with scores (p ≤ 0.001) after education. The STAI-6 score of the intervention group was 28.50 ± 5.13, which was significantly lower than that of the control group (32.50 ± 6.47, p = 0.001). Income levels were negatively correlated and the duration of glaucoma was positively correlated with STAI-6 scores (p ≤ 0.001 and p = 0.003 , respectively). Overall satisfaction was significantly higher in the intervention group (p ≤ 0.001). The knowledge score was positively correlated with overall satisfaction and follow-up probability (both p ≤ 0.001). The STAI-6 score was negatively correlated with overall satisfaction and follow-up probability (p = 0.017 and 0.006, respectively). Conclusions. This new multifaceted educational strategy can enhance patients' knowledge of glaucoma, reduce their anxiety, and improve their satisfaction. ClinicalTrials.gov (No. 2100050926) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilingual lexicon extraction is useful, especially for low-resource languages that can leverage from high-resource languages. The Uyghur language is a derivative language, and its language resources are scarce and noisy. Moreover, it is difficult to find a bilingual resource to utilize the linguistic knowledge of other large resource languages, such as Chinese or English. There is little related research on unsupervised extraction for the Chinese-Uyghur languages, and the existing methods mainly focus on term extraction methods based on translated parallel corpora. Accordingly, unsupervised knowledge extraction methods are effective, especially for the low-resource languages. This paper proposes a method to extract a Chinese-Uyghur bilingual dictionary by combining the inter-word relationship matrix mapped by the neural network cross-language word embedding vector. A seed dictionary is used as a weak supervision signal. A small Chinese-Uyghur parallel data resource is used to map the multilingual word vectors into a unified vector space. As the word-particles of these two languages are not well-coordinated, stems are used as the main linguistic particles. The strong inter-word semantic relationship of word vectors is used to associate Chinese-Uyghur semantic information. Two retrieval indicators, such as nearest neighbor retrieval and cross-domain similarity local scaling, are used to calculate similarity to extract bilingual dictionaries. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the Chinese-Uyghur bilingual dictionary extraction method proposed in this paper is improved to 65.06%. This method helps to improve Chinese-Uyghur machine translation, automatic knowledge extraction, and multilingual translations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic and immune factors play an important role in tuberculosis. Under different ethnicities and genetic backgrounds, different immune and inflammation‐related gene polymorphisms may confer different susceptibility to tuberculosis. This study investigated the relationship between immune and inflammation‐related gene polymorphism and susceptibility to tuberculosis in Xinjiang Uyghur population, China. In this case‐control study, we enrolled 507 pulmonary tuberculosis patients and 454 healthy controls from Southern Xinjiang. single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping was performed. The 12 SNPs of nine immune and inflammation‐related genes (including TNF rs361525, IL6 rs2066992 and rs1524107, IL17A rs3748067, IL17F rs763780, VDR rs731236, rs2228570 and rs1544410, IFNGR1 rs1327474, P2RX7 rs3751143, CTAGE1 rs4331426 and Toll‐like receptor 4 (TLR4) rs4986790) and their relationship with tuberculosis were evaluated. The T allele and TT genotype of IL‐6 rs2066992 and rs1524107 increased the risk of active tuberculosis. The C allele of IFNGR1 rs1327474 was related to the reduced risk of tuberculosis in the Xinjiang Uyghur population. The G allele and AG/GG genotypes of TLR4 rs4986790 were associated with an increased risk of tuberculosis (p <.05). Furthermore, haplotype analysis found that the haplotype TT of interleukin (IL)‐6 was a risk factor, whereas the CG type was a protective factor for active tuberculosis in the Xinjiang Uyghur population. There were three immune and inflammation‐related genes (IL‐6, IFNGR1 and TLR4) and a total of four SNPs (rs2066992, rs1524107, rs1327474 and rs4986790) related to the susceptibility of the Uyghur population to tuberculosis. Our findings may provide evidence for further understanding the mechanism of tuberculosis susceptibility in the Xinjiang Uyghur population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population admixture results in genome-wide combinations of genetic variants derived from different ancestral populations of distinct ancestry, thus providing a unique opportunity for understanding the genetic determinants of phenotypic variation in humans. Here, we used whole-genome sequencing of 92 individuals with high coverage (30–60×) to systematically investigate genomic diversity in the Uyghurs living in Xinjiang, China (XJU), an admixed population of both European-like and East-Asian-like ancestry. The XJU population shows greater genetic diversity, especially a higher proportion of rare variants, compared with their ancestral source populations, corresponding to greater phenotypic diversity of XJU. Admixture-induced functional variants in EDAR were associated with the diversity of facial morphology in XJU. Interestingly, the interaction of functional variants between SLC24A5 and OCA2 likely influences the diversity of skin pigmentation. Notably, selection has seemingly been relaxed or canceled in several genes with significantly biased ancestry, such as HERC2 – OCA2. Moreover, signatures of post-admixture adaptation in XJU were identified, including genes related to metabolism (e.g. CYP2D6), digestion (e.g. COL11A1), olfactory perception (e.g. ANO2) and immunity (e.g. HLA). Our results demonstrated population admixture as a driving force, locally or globally, in shaping human genetic and phenotypic diversity as well as in adaptive evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morphological segmentation is a basic task in agglutinative language information processing, dividing words into the smallest semantic unit morphemes. There are two types of morphological segmentation: canonical segmentation and surface segmentation. As a typical agglutinative language, Uyghur usually uses statistical-based methods in canonical segmentation, which relies on the artificial extraction of features. In surface segmentation, the artificial feature extraction process is avoided by using the neural network. However, to date, no model can provide both segmentation results in Uyghur without adding features. In addition, morphological segmentation is usually regarded as a sequence annotation task, so label imbalance easily occurs in datasets. Given the above situation, this paper proposes an improved labelling scheme that joins morphological boundary labels and voice harmony labels for the two kinds of segmentation simultaneously. Then, a convolution network and attention mechanism are added to capture local and global features, respectively. Finally, morphological segmentation is regarded as a sequence labeling task of character sequences. Due to the problem of label proportion imbalance and noise in the dataset, a focal loss function with label smoothing is used. The experimental results show that the F1 values of canonical segmentation and surface segmentation achieve the best results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to show the matrix of Chinese territorial coloniality on the territory today called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). State "development" programs in the territory will be analyzed, as well as their effects on the management forms of the indigenous populations, with special interest in the strategies of colonial appropriation and despoil of the natural and human environment of the Uyghur people. This has been the scenario for controlled migration processes and military settlement colonies by the State, with the aim of establishing control and appropriation over its natural, geographical and human resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 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]

What is the impact of China’s official human rights stance on international human rights discourses/norms? Will China’s ambition to change the international human rights framework succeed, resulting in a new normative order in the world of human rights? The article attempts to address these questions. First, it identifies the state’s practice pursuing different standards when dealing with human rights issues internationally and domestically. Second, it argues that China is no different from other states when it behaves in a double standard way. The paper maintains, however, that China’s double-standard human rights approach is critical for the future development of the international human rights regime since the CCP leadership intends to redefine human rights in its own interests. While China’s interests align with most states in the third world, its pursuit of normative design is a threat to the current notion of universal human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Uyghurs, who demolished the II. Kokturk Khaganate and established an independent government under the name Otuken Uyghur State, are known for their cultural and religious systems developed within the history of Central Asian Turks. As a result of the trade-based relations with Sogdian, Toharian and the Chinese over the geography, changes have occurred in the Uyghur society structure. Among the innovations that took place in the Turkish society specifically for the Uyghurs, there are changes such as living in settled life, adopting Manichaeism and Buddhism, religions specific to Central Asia, and alphabet change. The most important innovation in the social life of Uyghurs, a warrior and nomadic community, is religious change. Manichaeism, which was made systematic in the founding of Mani in the 3rd century, was accepted as a state religion during the period of Uyghurs by Bögü Khan. This doctrine, which is based on dualities such as light-dark and good-evil, is a belief system that bases its salvation on abiding the Five Commandments and the Three Seals. This doctrine, which prohibits eating meat, killing creatures was adopted by the ruling class in a religious character that was originally adopted by Bögü Khan and his family members, despite the fact that they were in stark contrast with the Turkish social structure. Manichaeism, which is a state religious identity with Uyghurs for the first time, has been an indication of religious freedom in Uyghurs as a belief system that progresses side by side with Buddhism, although it was initially trapped in the Uyghur dynasty. Manichaeism, which developed under the political protection of the Otuken Uyghur State, continued until the destruction of the Uyghurs by the Kyrgyz. The Uyghurs, destroyed by the Kyrgyz in 840, turned to the Tarim Basin and established the Khotco Uyghur State. This period, in which the Buddha religion was built on solid foundations, is seen as a peak period in terms of Turkish Buddhism. Although the period when Buddhism started to be seen among Turks, the adoption of the Buddha religion by the Uyghurs in mass, is dated to the 9th century. The Uyghurs, who preferred the Mahāyāna Buddhism aimed at the liberation of society, learned the belief systems of this doctrine, especially with the help of Sogd and Chinese, and revealed religious works with the Uyghur Alphabet, whose origins were based on the Sogd script. Experiencing the thought systems of these teachings on the basis of Manichaeism and Buddhism, Uyghurs have created a developed social structure especially at the level of these belief systems based on individual and social liberation. Charity culture, which is one of the practices that this religion commands to the civilian people outside the monastery in both Manichaeism and Buddhism, has a conceptual richness on the basis of these teachings. The concept of charity, which ranks first among the Five Commandments, known as the virtues such as not killing living things, not drinking, not adulterous, and righteousness in Manichaeism, is one of the concepts that the Society emphasizes in two groups: Elects and Hearers. The concept of charity, which is also expressed as material aid to the clergy of the civilian people, known as the Hearers class, appears as a tradition in this doctrine, which has been skillfully theorized by the Elects and has promises to attract civilians to religious practices. As with Manichaeism, the practice of charity, which is related to the virtue of generosity that Buddha candidates must have on the way to enlightenment, is known as the sacrifices that Bodhisattvas make to living beings in their own personalities, both material and spiritual (compassion), as an example of charity for the clergy. In this direction, the article is based on the purpose of showing the qualities of the materials related to charity in the Manichean and Buddhist works of Old Uyghurs in line with Manichaeism and Buddhism. In this study, first of all, the view of related teachings on charity concept in terms of Manichaeism and Buddhism, the results of charity practice in the Uyghur period written by various researchers and whether it corresponded in the Old Uyghurs, and the concept of charity on the basis of Manichaeism, Buddhism and Uyghurs, the reasons for the partnerships that developed between Manichaeism and Buddhism in terms of charity culture will be studied by revealing the type, content and benefits it will have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]