RFA
In 2018, a noted Uyghur professor of literature and culture was arrested and fired from her university job for publishing pointed criticism of China’s policies towards Muslim residents of Xinjiang. This year, she is part of an official propaganda campaign defending and supporting practices she once argued against.
In the three years since Gulnar Obul was detained and removed from her position at Kashgar University, developments in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have made the scholarly policy critiques from 2016 that landed her in trouble seem mild.
In her published dialogue with a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher, Obul said China’s quest for stability “cannot be achieved through documents or commands it requires real cultural strength and ideas.”
Deputy relays fallen comrade s legacy
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Immigration officers from the Pumaqangtang border police station patrol grassland in Nakarze county, Lhokha, Tibet autonomous region, on Aug 8, 2020. (Photo by Wang Jing/China Daily)
Dolatmaan Kamak, a 28-year-old national legislator from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, raised proposals aiming to improve the treatment of border patrollers in plateau regions during his debut at this year s National People s Congress session.
He patrols the border in the Tashikurgan Tajik autonomous county and was chosen at a by-election this year to fill the seat of fellow patrolman Laqini Bayika, one of the initiators of the proposals, who sacrificed his life in January while saving a boy from a frozen lake. Laqini was only 41 years old.