China's Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State

by Nick Holdstock

Overview

After isolated terrorist incidents in 2015, the Chinese leadership has cracked down hard on Xinjiang and its Uyghurs. Today, there are thought to be up to a million Muslims held in 're-education camps' in the Xinjiang region of North-West China. One of the few Western commentators to have lived in the region, journalist Nick Holdstock travels into the heart of the province and reveals the Uyghur story as one of repression, hardship and helplessness. China's Forgotten People explains why repression of the Muslim population is on the rise in the world's most powerful one-party state. This updated and revised edition reveals the background to the largest known concentration camp network in the modern world, and reflects on what this means for the way we think about China.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788319812
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	06/13/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Nick Holdstock is an award-winning writer of fiction and journalism who work appears in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, Financial Times, n+1, Dissent and Literary Review. He is the author of three non-fiction books about China, The Tree That Bleeds (Luath, 2011), China's Forgotten People (IB Tauris, 2015) and Chasing the Chinese Dream (IB Tauris, 2017) and a novel, The Casualties (St Martins, 2015). His first short story collection, The False River, is due out in late 2019. He is a frequent commentator on China for a variety of media outlets

Table of Contents

Maps viii

A Note on Place Names xi

Preface xiii

Introduction 1

1 Drawing Boundaries 9

2 'Liberation': The Communist Era Begins 35

3 Opening Up' 49

4 Striking Hard: The 1990s 81

5 Exiles 119

6 The Peacock Flies West 143

7 Urumqi and After: Learning the Wrong Lessons 183

8 'A Perfect Bomb' 215

Afterword: 'As close as pomegranate seeds' 247

Sources and Recommended Reading 267

Index 291

Editorial Reviews

Extraordinarily insightful and informative...Holdstock is a journalist who has travelled and lived in Xinjiang on and off since 2001. His new book will make anyone who writes about the region think more deeply
Literary Review

Lucid and up-to-date [Nick Holdstock] makes the case for a deeper understanding of Xinjiang at the moment, a combination of official defensiveness in China and politicisation of agendas outside means that dialogue on this crucial issue barely exists. It is to be hoped that Nick Holdstock s book and others like it will stimulate precisely this sort of dialogue. Without it, a real, and lasting, tragedy is threatened: for the people of Xinjiang and of China, but also those of the region and the wider world.
Open Democracy

Refreshingly, this is a work of scepticism rather than sensationalism...the author's experience in the region and his incorporation of the latest scholarship make this the most reliable journalistic account of Xinjiang published in the past few decades. For the policy-maker or the general reader seeking an overview of what is known about Uyghur resistance to Chinese rule, this is a much-needed resource.
Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

‘Extraordinarily insightful and informative…Holdstock is a journalist who has travelled and lived in Xinjiang on and off since 2001. His new book will make anyone who writes about the region think more deeply’

Jonathan Mirsky

‘Lucid and up-to-date…[Nick Holdstock] makes the case for a deeper understanding of Xinjiang…At the moment, a combination of official defensiveness in China and politicisation of agendas outside means that dialogue on this crucial issue barely exists. It is to be hoped that Nick Holdstock’s book and others like it will stimulate precisely this sort of dialogue. Without it, a real, and lasting, tragedy is threatened: for the people of Xinjiang and of China, but also those of the region and the wider world.’

Kerry Brown

'In China’s Forgotten People, the Edinburgh-based writer Nick Holdstock sets out to ‘reveal truth from facts’ in Xinjiang, to appropriate one of the Communist Party’s pet phrases. Holdstock’s central contention is that there is little proof of either organised Islamic terrorism or widespread separatist agitation in Xinjiang, where he used to live. Instead, the spiralling violence witnessed over the past few years is itself a reaction to repressive government policies put in place to control ‘terrorism’ — a self-fulfilling prophecy that is, tragically, now inciting the real thing…He is admirably even-handed… This meticulously researched book is anything but a crude exercise in China-bashing.'

Tom Miller

‘China’s repressive policy towards its Islamic fringe has badly backfired - there was no Islamic extremism in China until Beijing inadvertently created it, according to Nick Holdstock’s measured history of the Uighurs of Xinjiang.'

The New Statesman

‘As someone who has extensively travelled in the region for 15 years, Holdstock’s book gives us a rare glimpse into the land and its people, and how the policies of the Chinese state have led to an extreme sense of alienation among the Uighurs, with some of them turning to radical steps and violence.’

Gulf News