China ‘in danger of losing its grip’ over Tibet and Xinjiang

There was an interesting post at Democracy Digest.

China is in danger of losing its grip over Tibet and Xinjiang and needs a radical reset of its ethnic policies, experts suggest.

In September last year, Shohret Hoshur, a Uighur journalist for Radio Free Asia, a non-profit broadcaster based in Washington DC, received an email titled “Cry from the Homeland”. It described a documentary being screened to students, teachers and education officials in Xinjiang, FT Beijing correspondent Christian Shepherd writes in a must-read analysis:

Called The Plot Inside the Textbooks, the film revealed for the first time the alleged “crime” that Chinese authorities were using as a reason to detain and jail hundreds of Uighur intellectuals. According to an audio recording reviewed by the FT, the documentary warns viewers to be on guard against “two-faced people” who “secretly acted to split the motherland”. With dramatic music and sotto voce narration, it tells the story of 88 individuals who “with malicious intent” had compiled and edited school textbooks in Uighur.

When Kamaltürk Yalqun, a Uighur who lives in exile in Philadelphia, read about the film on the Radio Free Asia website, it confirmed his worst fears about the fate of his father, Yalqun Rozi. A prominent Uighur intellectual, Rozi had been an editor for the official Xinjiang Education Publishing House and one of the main editors for the textbooks. Among Uighur literati, Rozi is best known for his sharp but fair essays on Uighur art and culture. According to Yalqun, his father’s essays were, more often than not, critical of Uighur lifestyles.

See full story here.