If you read every page of Tsering Woeser’s latest book and skip the first and last chapters of Tsering Topgyal’s, the ultimate message about the situation in Tibet is often the same.
This piece is adapted from Tsering Woeser’s
Tibet on Fire: Self-Immolations Against Chinese Rule, translated by Kevin Carrico, which will be published by Verso on January 12.
February 27, 2009, was the third day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. It was also the day that self-immolation came to Tibet. The authorities had just cancelled a Great Prayer Festival (Monlam) that was supposed to commemorate the victims of the government crackdown in 2008. A monk by the name of Tapey stepped out of the Kirti Monastery and set his body alight on the streets of Ngawa, in the region known in Tibetan as Amdo, a place of great religious reverence and relevance, now designated as part of China’s Sichuan Province.
Ilham Tohti - The moderate critic
Ilham Tohti, a well-known Uighur and a moderate critic of Beijing s policy towards the country s Muslim minority, is on trial in China on charges of separatism. DW takes a look at the scholar s life. Ilham Tohti is not a typical dissident – the 44-year-old sees himself first and foremost as an economist. Born in 1969 in the small town of Artux (also spelled Atush or Atushi), in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang, Tohti moved to Changchun for higher education and from there to Beijing to advance his career as a renowned economist. For several years, Tohti researched at Beijing s Minzu University, amongst other things, about the Uighurs social standing in Xinjiang Province. He came to the conclusion that the Muslim minority in the province was not treated the same way as the majority Han Chinese. On the contrary, he learned that there were fewer jobs for Uighurs and they were paid less for the same positions. He also found that the Uigh
CDT Weekly, February 12-18: Ilham Tohti, Xinjiang, and Why Clubhouse Had to Die
Posted by Samuel Wade | Feb 18, 2021
Welcome to the second edition of CDT’s weekly roundup, also available as an email newsletter through Substack. With these updates, we aim to provide an overview of new content across CDT’s English and Chinese sites, as well as the bilingual China Digital Space wiki, and related content elsewhere.
The highlight of our translation content this week was a long essay from 2009 by journalist and website founder Huang Zhangjin, describing his
Some of the views attributed to Ilham in Huang’s paraphrased recollections may be unpalatable: he approvingly quotes Liu Xiaobo’s views on the benefits of Western colonialism, and implicitly disparages the industriousness of people from other developing regions. But the essay clearly conveys Ilham’s vision of an alternative path for Xinjiang within the People’s Republic, far from the aggressive suppression that has inte