Authorities in the Chinese capital have sent dozens of volunteer teachers to the troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang in a bid to boost comprehension of Mandarin among local ethnic minority Uyghurs, official media reported. The move was promptly slammed by exile groups as a bid to further wipe out Uyghur language and culture, assimilating it into the culture of the majority Han Chinese population. Forty ...

Teaching Uighur children in Mandarin will not bring stability to Xinjiang “I CAN speak Chinese, I’m so awesome!” reads a sign on the wall of the Mingde primary school in Shufu, a town near the oasis city of Kashgar in the far western province of Xinjiang. Nearby, children’s artworks hang beneath another banner which proclaims: “The motherland is in my heart.” Though every pupil at the school is Uighur, one ...

By Tatiana A. Anikeeva Uyghur Initiative Papers No. 3, October 2014 Attributed to the ancient Uyghur literary tradition are some texts written in Uyghur and Arabic script in the 8th-9th centuries and some literary monuments written a couple of centuries later in the 11th. These texts are as a rule connected with the main, established religious traditions (though some of them have only jural or household con ...

Literature of the Uyghurs in Kazakhstan, having common roots with Uighur literature of Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region of China), has evolved by its own historical way. It has been influenced by all social and political perturbations in Soviet society from the first five-year plans up to perestroika. The mass repressions of the late 1930s adversely affected it. The best sons of the peop ...

Joshua L. Freeman The Uyghur people, who live primarily in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, have for many centuries held poetry and poets in high esteem. While many aspects of Uyghur life have been altered by social, cultural, and political change over the last century, the importance of poetry in Uyghur culture remains undiminished. Perhaps that’s why modernist poetry, which burst onto the Uyghur ...