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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]

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]

In parks and town squares across China in 2023, amateur dance enthusiasts engaged in a nationwide 'Xinjiang dance' craze, a phenomenon reflected and amplified on social media. For outside observers this might seem a bizarre development following the Chinese media discourses of terrorism, and the intense securitisation of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which so recently preceded it, but it aligned neatly with new initiatives across Chinese government, media and heritage to promote the region's burgeoning tourism industry, to fundamentally shift perceptions of the region in the national imagination, and to counter revelations of mass incarceration and cultural erasure in international media. This article highlights the ways that Uyghur heritage, music and dance have been harnessed in government projects to remodel the region's history and situate its peoples more firmly within the sphere of the Chinese nation, thinking through the ways in which the aesthetic formations and imaginaries of Uyghur heritage articulate the links between tourism and territory, colonialism and desire. [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]

The original beliefs of the Uyghurs, which have been overshadowed by their conversion to Manichaeism and Buddhism, have not been thoroughly studied until recently. However, Uyghur inscriptions as well as Chinese and Islamic sources provide us with some information regarding their beliefs. In the first part of this article series, the Uyghurs' belief in various cults related to celestial and natural beings was explored. In this second part, other religious elements will be analysed. The Uyghurs possessed a cult of ancestors, in which souls were believed to fly away. Funeral ceremonies called yoγ are noted to contain animal and human sacrifices as well as self‐harming activities. Worship included animal sacrifice and idol worship. Qam (shamans) performed rituals, including fortune telling and weather magic. Religious terminology included qut (divine fortune), ülüg (destiny), yol (luck), and yazuq (sin). They held the numbers seven and nine in high esteem as sacred numbers, while sacred lights descending from the sky and the sacred consort of a mythological ruler were important motifs. Although some scholars have written that Buddhism was practiced by the Uyghurs before their conversion to Manichaeism in the 760s, further research has shown that this was not the case. This article also reveals how their ancient beliefs survived even after their conversions to major religions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, as part of the efforts of the Chinese government first to integrate and, more recently, to forcibly assimilate the Uyghur population into China's mainstream culture and society, the Uyghur language has been marginalized and repressed to an unprecedented extent. The academic literature on Xinjiang's language policy has repeatedly acknowledged that this repression is a major source of concern and discontent among many Uyghurs. However, to date, little has been written about the public response of Uyghurs to this policy and their open efforts to challenge it. In particular, with very few exceptions, little is known about the public response of Uyghur writers and artists. In this article I analyse a large corpus of Uyghur poems and songs that engaged openly with the Uyghur language crisis and were published and disseminated in the Uyghur public sphere between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s. Unlike some studies that try to assess the condition of certain languages at a certain point in time through objective methodologies, these literary and artistic works provide an insider view on how the Uyghur cultural elite and many other Uyghurs experienced the repression and loss of their native language, and also, how they struggled against this repression. In the article I examine the diverse sentiments, perceptions, and discourses that these literary and artistic expressions communicate, and the different strategies that the Uyghurs used to struggle against the language policy and its consequences. I also explore what these works tell us about the development of Xinjiang's language policy over time, the linguistic reality in the region, and the impact that the language policy has had on Uyghur society. Finally, the article also investigates the broad political meanings of these works and speculates on the link between them and the efforts of the Chinese government to further marginalize the Uyghur language. [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]

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]

Forced labour persists in our global economy despite dedicated attention and eradication efforts from both the public and private sectors. Given the bounded reach and lack of enforcement by states and international organisations, the private sector has been the linchpin for eradication of forced labour globally. Utilising the brand-to-state boomerang model, this paper examines state-imposed forced labour in cotton production in China and Uzbekistan, and grapples with how interests – those of the states and the multinational corporations involved in forced labour – shape private governance outcomes. By investigating state-imposed forced labour in China (specifically, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) and Uzbekistan, we find that multinational corporations are reluctant to work towards eradicating forced labour when their net sales and profit are threatened by doing so. Building on the stream of international political economy research regarding how interests complicate governance effectiveness, we expose a gap in the literature on the impact of state-imposed forced labour on governance outcomes and illuminate global ramifications. [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]

The Xi Jinping regime in China has been implementing various policies that prioritize the concept of "national security," and highlight concerns about the perceived threat of a Color Revolution. The concept of "national security" has been elevated to a policy philosophy of "holistic" or "comprehensive" security. This comprehensive security means that "security" is related to all areas, including the economy, culture, and the environment, and that security takes precedence over other factors such as the economy, culture, and the environment. Diplomacy is no exception, and the policy philosophy is to treat diplomacy and security together, where security takes precedence over diplomacy. The emphasis on the logic of national security also influenced its Hong Kong policy and its policy of governing the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Furthermore, it led to the strengthening of domestic management of foreigners and international NGOs. Moreover, this domestic logic of "national security" has had a strong influence on foreign policy. For example, the domestically propagated discourse on the "color revolution" directly influenced the US-China summit meeting, where the topic of discussion was whether the US was planning to overthrow the CCP regime or not. In China, diplomacy and domestic politics appear to be rapidly becoming one and the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial parks in north-west China occupy a liminal space between labour camps and private industry. Drawing on worker interviews, government documents, industry materials and images this article shows that for-profit public-private industrial parks have been built as part of a "camp fix" mechanism centred on detaining and "re-educating" Uyghurs and Kazakhs at the periphery of the nation. It argues that these industrial parks concentrate forms of repressive assistance and "dormitory labour regimes" that operate at other frontiers of Chinese state power and point these strategies of disempowerment towards a seemingly permanent, ethno-racialized underclass, producing a "re-education labour regime." It further argues that the material infrastructures of these surveiled and policed spaces themselves are productive in enforcing the goals of the "camp fix": the creation of high-quality, underpaid, docile and non-religious Muslim workers who are controlled through the built environment. [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]

Objectives: Xinjiang plays a vital role in the trans‐Eurasian population migration, language diffusion, and culture and technology exchange. However, the underrepresentation of Xinjiang's genomes has hindered a more comprehensive understanding of Xinjiang's genetic structure and population history. Materials and Methods: We collected and genotyped 70 southern Xinjiang's Kyrgyz (SXJK) individuals and combined the data with modern and ancient Eurasians published. We used allele‐frequency methods, including PCA, ADMIXTURE, f‐statistics, qpWave/qpAdm, ALDER, Treemix, and haplotype‐shared methods including shared‐IBD segments, fineSTRUCTURE, and GLOBETROTTER to unveil the fine‐scale population structure and reconstruct admixture history. Results: We identified genetic substructure within the SXJK population with subgroups showing different genetic affinities to West and East Eurasians. All SXJK subgroups were suggested to have close genetic relationships with surrounding Turkic‐speaking groups that is, Uyghur, Kyrgyz from north Xinjiang and Tajikistan, and Chinese Kazakh, suggesting a shared ancestry among those populations. Outgroup‐f3 and symmetrical f4 statistics showed a high genetic affinity of SXJK to present‐day Tungusic, Mongolic‐speaking populations and Ancient Northeast Asian (ANA) related groups. Allele sharing and haplotype sharing profiles revealed the east–west admixture pattern of SXJK. The qpAdm‐based admixture models showed that SXJK derived ancestry from East Eurasian (ANA and East Asian, 42.7%–83.3%) and West Eurasian (Western Steppe herders and Central Asian, 16.7%–57.3%), the recent east–west admixture event could be traced to 1000 years ago based on ALDER and GLOBETROTTER analysis. Discussion: The high genetic affinity of SXJK to present‐day Tungusic and Mongolic‐speaking populations and short‐shared IBD segments indicated their shared common ancestry. SXJK harbored a close genetic affinity to ANA‐related populations, indicating the Northeast Asian origin of SXJK. The West and East Eurasian admixture models observed in SXJK further provided evidence of the dynamic admixture history in Xinjiang. The east–west admixture pattern and the identified ancestral makeup of SXJK suggested a genetic continuity from some Iron Age Xinjiang populations to present‐day SXJK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

This document contains abstracts from the International Journal of Psychology. The first abstract focuses on the development of racial identity frameworks among African Americans. The second abstract explores the relationship between language and ethnic identity among indigenous peoples in the Republic of Sakha. The third abstract compares the perception of emotional valence among Indian, Chinese, and Mexican participants. The fourth abstract investigates the potential positive impact of cross-categorization strategies on reducing stereotypes of Han nationalities towards minorities in China. The study suggests that cross-categorization can improve the evaluation of minorities and contribute to better ethnic relations. The study also examines the concept of "social self" in relation to cross-categorization. [Extracted from the article]

This article argues that China's campaign of reeducation and forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region through so-called Vocational Skills Education and Training Centers (VSETCs) represents a significant conceptual innovation over prior labor reform. Beijing's erstwhile penal labor systems treated labor as an integral part of reeducation but suffered from limited reeducation results, low work productivity, and poor resocialization outcomes. In contrast, the VSETC system pragmatically eschews Maoist tenets of labor's transformational power: its internment camps prioritize intensive reeducation, followed by a process of gradual release into potentially more efficient nonprison enterprises. The resulting potential profitability gains translate into higher economic sustainability—an essential prerequisite for the system's primary goal of long-term assimilation and coercive integration of resistant ethnic groups into Beijing's social order. However, VSETC's and the region's focus on control and disintegrating ethnic social capital undermines its integrative efforts, replicating a long-standing weakness of prior labor reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in economic, technologocial, and political areas is the most serious systemic challenge to the Atlantic bloc after the end of the Cold War. During the era of the U.S. President Donald Trump, the measures against PRC's rising remained one-sided due to Trump's suspicions againts NATO alliance. With the election of Joe Biden to the U.S. presidency, his policy of strengthening transatlantic alliance enabled NATO to adopt a common approach concerning the PRC. The PRC's support to Russia in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, its measures against Uyghur population in Xinjiang, and its strong language in Taiwan issue are factors that led to change in Europe's threat perception. Thus, European countries started to side with the USA concerning the PRC. NATO identified the PRC as a systemic challenger in 2021 and announced that it will act cooperatively against the security threats that PRC caused. NATO identified political, economic, and digital spheres competition areas with the PRC. It should be expected that NATO will strengthen its partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region; solidify cooperation between the USA and European countries to provide common approach concerning the PRC; and adopt an active position in cybersecurity to counter the activities of the PRC in the cyber area. [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]

In recent years, a global tilt toward rightist majoritarianism has made Muslim and Christian minorities of Asia more vulnerable to violence and displacement. China's program of "de-extremification" among the Uyghurs, Myanmar's military operations against the Rohingya, and Hindutva-inspired violence in India illustrate strong-handed homogenizing impulses, even by governments that profess to embrace diversity. By examining these different contexts through a common lens, it becomes possible to recognize recurring patterns and think beyond the nation-state as the only framework for addressing minority vulnerability. After comparing Muslim and Christian vulnerability across a variety of Asian contexts, the essay explores the possibility of "Islamo-Christian" solidarity in the face of majoritarian violence. This new alignment defies a longstanding imperialist framework, whose geopolitics pits a Christian West against a Muslim other. It also embraces an ethic of empathy that transcends the language of "religious freedom" – a principle arising from the same geopolitics that manufactured majority-minority distinctions to begin with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Folk narratives are an important component of cultural memory. Narrative, which reflects information, experiences and teachings from the past, serves the function of ensuring the continuity of cultural memory, protecting the identity of the society and transferring it to future generations. Turkish folk narratives are mostly the product of the transition to settled life and are a genre that contains many codes about this period of the Turks. The theme of love come to the fore in folk narratives especially with the influence of the settled life. The Uyghurs are a deep-rooted Turkish tribe that has survived on the stage of history since the early periods and had an early settled life. It is possible to see their deep-rooted past in the oral and written tales they have created. The narrative of "Şehzade Behram and Melike Dilriz", which is the subject of the current study, is an example of this. In the narrative, the features that the heroine looks for in a spouse and the competitions the she forces male heroes to take part in are among the motifs that carry the cultural codes of the settled life. The type of Khidr that takes shape in this context and occupies a central position in this study is a product of the collective memory of the Uyghur Turks, and it has both similar and different characteristics with the traditional Turkish belief in Khidr. In this article, the structure and characteristics of the type of Khidr in the belief system and culture of the Uyghur Turks were identified and examined. [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]

The Chinese Communist Party has unleashed a campaign of repression against Turkic minorities residing in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). This campaign does not stop at China's borders. This study introduces the Transnational Repression of Uyghurs Dataset, which contains 7108 cases of Uyghurs being targeted in 44 states from 1997 to 2021, the largest public dataset on transnational repression published to date. Unlike other regimes, the Chinese state has been indiscriminate in its persecution, often pursuing apolitical diaspora members on account of their ethnicity rather than political activism. China's transnational repression of Uyghurs has expanded rapidly in recent years as domestic repression has increased in XUAR. We documented 238 incidents from 1997 to 2014, and an additional 6870 events since 2014. The paper argues that globalization is producing a new trend of transnational minority persecution, offering new insights for our understanding of twenty-first century genocides and minority persecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no exact information about the number of languages that exist today. Studies show that there are nearly ten thousand languages in the world. Recent research, based on more specific data, shows that there are about 7,000 living languages in the world. It should also be noted that there is an uneven distribution between the number of languages and the number of speakers. Today, a number of measures are taken to protect the languages and national identities of Turkic peoples living in different communities. Today, Turks live as a community in Russia, Iran, China, Bulgaria, Germany, Moldova, Georgia, Hungary and other countries. The policy towards the languages of the Turks in the mentioned countries is not at all satisfactory. The fact that the laws of the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran do not guarantee the protection of the languages of the minority Turkic peoples by the state makes it difficult for the Turkic peoples living in these countries. Today, the isolation policy towards Turkic communities is carried out for specific political purposes in countries where a small number of Turkic people live predominantly. In this article, we will try to talk about the language policy applied against Turks in Georgia, one of the countries where Turks live the most. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarship on Qing Xinjiang has not paid much attention to the Qing relationship with the Kirghiz. On one hand, the Kirghiz, decentralized and fragmented, escape the attention of scholars interested in Qing relations with Central Asian "polities." On the other hand, historians of Altishahr consider the Kirghiz as nomadic outsiders, only mentioning them in passing when their paths cross those of the Altishahri. A careful examination of Manchu-language palace memorials from the Qingdai Xinjiang Manwen dang'an huibian , however, shows that there was a subgroup of Kirghiz who the Qianlong emperor (r. 173599) and his officials firmly incorporated into Altishahr and maintained as an integral part of Altishahr society. In turn, these Kirghiz, whom I call "inner Kirghiz," went on to serve the Qing empire as active agents of early Qing state building efforts in Xinjiang. Using inner Kirghiz life stories, I will ultimately argue that boundaries separating "Qing" and "foreign" remained elastic throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. These boundaries were neither clear-cut nor permanent, constantly fluctuating according to the decisions made by the Qianlong emperor and his officials as well as the inner Kirghiz themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study traces the evolution of systemic state-sponsored coercive labor in the cotton harvest in China's northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The recent situation in the XUAR is compared to Uzbekistan, which implemented forced labor in cotton picking until 2021. Both regions create structurally coercive labor environments through a centralized authoritarian state apparatus that deploys human resource–intensive local grassroots mobilization efforts. The article finds that while both regional entities' coercive labor dynamics are in many ways comparable, the resulting labor settings are not easily captured through static standard measures such as the ILO forced labor indicators. Instead, state-sponsored forced labor is characterized by pervasive state-induced and systemic dynamics of coercion that are deeply embedded within sociocultural contexts. Whereas Uzbekistan's coercive labor practices were primarily driven by economic considerations, Xinjiang's labor transfer program pursues some economic aims but is predominantly designed to achieve Beijing's wider ethnopolitical goals in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We examined the 99th percentile URL of hs-cTnI in a healthy population in Xinjiang. • The 99th percentile URL of hs-cTnI was higher in the Uyghurs than in the Han group. • Ethnicity and sex influence the 99th percentile URLs of hs-cTnI. • An accurate reference interval for hs-cTnI may aid diagnosis and decision-making. To determine the 99th percentile upper reference limit (URL) of high-sensitivity cardiac troponin I (hs-cTnI) in a healthy population in Xinjiang, China, and investigate the impact of ethnicity, sex, and age on this limit. From September 2018 to March 2022, 5,090 Han and Uyghur adults aged 20–79 years were recruited. After questionnaire screening, 2,970 participants with physical and/or laboratory normality were enrolled. Participants recruited between September 2018 and October 2021 (2,109/2,970) were evaluated by ARCHITECT i 2000 to determine the 99th percentile URL of hs-cTnI. The results were then validated in 861/2,970 participants recruited from November 2021 to March 2022. A criterion of ≤ 10% of test results falling outside the original determined value was used to determine whether the newly established reference intervals were valid. The hs-cTnI concentration was higher among Uyghurs than among Han participants (p < 0.001). The 99th percentile URLs were 17.52 ng/L for all participants, 18.96 ng/L for Uyghur, and 16.93 ng/L for Han. Hs-cTnI concentration was also correlated with sex and age. In the Han and Uyghur groups, male participants had a higher hs-cTnI concentration than female participants (p < 0.001); the 99th percentile URLs of hs-cTnI among male and female participants were 17.80 vs. 13.67 ng/L and 19.47 vs. 16.52 ng/L, respectively. Stratified by age, hs-cTnI concentrations were higher in participants aged > 60 years than in those of other age categories (p < 0.001), in both the Han and Uyghur groups. Finally, <2% of these test results exceeded the newly established reference, validating the results. This study established the 99th percentile URLs of hs-cTnI in the Xinjiang. Ethnicity and sex influence the value and should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article clarifies a mythologized episode in the early development of the South China Sea disputes and shows how it was later 'forgotten' by British policymakers for strategic reasons. Using documents from the UK National Archives it confirms, for the first time, that Qing/Chinese officials did deny responsibility for the Paracel Islands in 1898/1899. It then shows how this correspondence was strategically ignored by British officials during the 1930s in the context of renewed disputes between China, France, and Japan over the sovereignty of the islands. It argues that during the 1930s, British officials sought to bolster the Chinese position in the South China Sea because of a concern that France would remain neutral in any forthcoming conflict. This resulted in Britain taking a view on the sovereignty disputes that was at odds with the evidence in its own archives but which provided useful political support for the Republic of China. [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 article examines the tension between public gender expressions and official regulations in mainland China. Utilizing a critical discourse analysis, we investigate a transition in state-initiated criticism and censorship against the danmei genre and male effeminacy. Focusing on the pandemic period, we use official regulations and state media feature articles as data, 'reticent / han-xu ' politics as a grounding theoretical basis, and statements from mainstream media platforms as secondary resources. We argue that han-xu politics functions as the Chinese party-state's strategic response to a perceived 'crisis of masculinity'. They first invisibilize and marginalize soft masculinities, and if this is not effective, then suppress and prohibit cultural forms that violate hegemonic masculinity, which works to perpetuate the hetero-patriarchal social-familial system. [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]

Summary: The interconnectedness of the ancient European, Eurasian and Chinese worlds is not doubted, but just what was exchanged and how the transmission of ideas took place is a question very much under investigation. This paper examines peculiarities of equid harnessing and draught across this vast area as a case in point to consider such issues as diffusion and independent invention, especially in relation to the emergence of single draught vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]