#Xinjiang

[petitworld]

Sailimu Lake, Xinjiang, China by David

[fuckyeahchinesegarden]

blue sky and white clouds in ili by 刘知著

[intersectionalpraxis]

Links that OP also provided: Campaign for Uyghurs Speak Up For The Uyghurs (Carrd) Save Uyghur (Companies Linked to Uyghur Forced Labour) The Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region

There is mass systematic sexual violence being committed against Ugyhur women in these concentration camps as a 'torture tactic'-I have read horrifying reports and details about their many experiences -being violated over and over again and it's just horrifying -these accounts are something I will never forget reading about because it is truly despicable what has been done to them. And the fact that the Chinese government STILL refuses to acknowledge what they have done -and deny these 'allegations,' I hope more people learn about what has been happening in these camps where a genocide is occurring against Uyghur people.

Here are some more links to some articles for folks to look into this and with some more information about what has been happening:

“Break Their Lineage, Break Their Roots”- China’s Crimes against Humanity Targeting Uyghurs and Other Turkic Muslims

China Uses Rape as Torture Tactic Against Uighur Detainees, Victims Say

Abortions, IUDs and sexual humiliation: Muslim women who fled China for Kazakhstan recount ordeals

[i-am-aprl]

In this world, you’re either from a “first world” country and deserve all the sympathy and love that there is or you’re from a “third world” country where time and time again, the world will pretend you don’t exist.

[mioritic]

Painted clay figure of an equestrienne, ca. 7th-9th century AD

Excavated from Tomb No. 187, Astana (Turfan), Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China

Xinjiang Museum

[safije]

Uyghur bread, Xinjiang China.

[sunny-reis]

this world wasn’t made for children — any of us, whether we be palestinian, queer, autistic, or whatever.

tw for death, transphobia, zionism, racism, genocide, and a heavy vent about them all

i’m sitting in my room and i feel so…empty? heartbroken? distraught? i don’t know the right word to describe how i feel after hearing about nex benedict.

nex was a 16 y/o member of the diné/cherokee (i’m so sorry if that isn’t the right term, no ill-intent whatsoever) nation in oklahoma.

they were murdered by three girls in their high school class in a bathroom on february 7th, just this year.

i won’t talk about the system that failed them — that is failing so many others like them, myself included — because i genuinely don’t know what more to say. my heart aches for them and the knowledge that, regardless of them being non-binary, they were a child. nex benedict was younger than me, and should’ve lived a long, happy life. instead, they’re fucking DEAD.

as i sit at my desk, complaining to my own friends my woes and worries, i can feel my heart ripping itself in half. nex benedict deserved just as happy and prosperous of a life as the rest of us. i think about how that could’ve been my own queer friends in my own far-right state, hell, it could’ve been me, and it would hurt all the same. as another non-binary person myself i cry for the life that was stolen from a fucking CHILD. nex benedict was younger than me, and it’s haunting to think about.

i feel the same about the thousands of children being fucking carpet bombed in gaza and lebanon. again, i won’t go into detail about the system of zionist apartheid that is causing so. many. children just like me to toe the line between life and death. i feel the same about the babies starving to death in south sudan, the uyghur women that won’t be able to have children because they’ve been sterilized against their will, the queer tweens in conservative, red-leaning states that have to fight to live in peace.

what is this world, if not made for children? when black kids are shot because fucking pigs see them as threats instead of CHILDREN? when muslim girls are beaten up for wearing hijabs because ignorant bigots fail to see the internal struggle that comes with it, and see nothing but fascist, conservative propaganda? when autistic kids are abused and punished for not being able to conform neurotypical conventions that they physically can’t uphold?

when will this world start giving a fuck about kids like us? kids like hind rajab (6), nex benedict (16), and ahmed mansara?

wake the fuck UP.

[paganimagevault]

The Beauty of Loulan mummy 1800 BCE

"Then a little gasp. “Weiguoren!” (A foreigner!), one young woman exclaimed to her friends. They were touring the museum earlier this month on a Chinese public holiday. Nearly 4,000 years after her death, the so-called Beauty of Loulan still has the ability to amaze. She is one of hundreds of Bronze Age mummies discovered in the shifting desert sands of northwestern China’s Xinjiang region, where thousands more still lie buried. Unlike the embalmed mummies of ancient Egypt, they were preserved naturally by the elements, which in some ways makes them more interesting. They represent an extended span of history dating from 1800 BC to as recently as the Ching dynasty (1644-1912) and a range of human experience. Some were kings and warriors, others housewives and farmers.

“They were ordinary people who lived and died in Xinjiang over the ages,” said Wang Binghua, a retired archaeologist who exhumed many of the mummies. The most famous of them, the Beauty of Loulan, was unearthed in 1980 by Chinese archaeologists who were working with a television crew on a film about the Silk Road near Lop Nur, a dried salt lake 120 miles from Urumqi that has been used by the Chinese for nuclear testing.

Thanks to the extreme dryness and the preservative properties of salt, the corpse was remarkably intact — her eyelashes, the fine hair on her skin, even the lines on her skin were visible. She was buried face up about 3 feet under, wrapped in a simple woolen cloth and dressed in a goatskin, a felt hat and leather shoes. But what was most remarkable about the corpse — believed to date to about 1,800 BC — was that she appeared to be Caucasian, with her telltale large nose, narrow jaw and reddish-brown hair. The discovery turned on its head assumptions that Caucasians didn’t frequent these parts until at least a thousand years later, when trading between Europe and Asia began along the Silk Road."

-Cultural Exchange: China’s surprising Bronze Age mummies. Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

[thejackrandahotel]

Hi tumblr.. Please pay some attention to the incident happened in my country China, city Urumqi, Xinjiang. The city was blocked for more than 100 days due to the epidemic, which seriously affected people's life. On November 24, a fire broke out in a community in Urumqi, but the firefighters were unable to put out the fire in time because of the blockade. In the end ten People died, including a 3-year-old child. Last night (11.25) the people of Urumqi finally took to the streets out of despair and anger. They went to the city hall to march and protest, and confronted the police. This was extremely brave but also very dangerous.

Chinese Internet is extremely closed, and all content posted online is subject to examination and control. We are trying our best to convey this message to more people.

I'm very sorry if I disturbed you all, but if possible, please give the people of my country a little international attention and support, thank you😢If you need more content please check this twitter account:

I am really desperate and terribly worried for people of Urumqi right now and I hope this incident could reach to more people around the world. Thank you.

[odinsblog]

On Thursday, the human rights group Dui Hua Foundation confirmed that Chinese authorities have handed down a life sentence on the internationally renowned Uyghur ethnographer Rahile Dawut. This outrageous sentence follows Dawut’s six years of arbitrary detention, punctuated only by a secret trial in December 2018 in which the court found her guilty on baseless charges of “endangering state security.”

The news comes on the anniversary of another Uyghur scholar, the economist Ilham Tohti, being sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014. Meanwhile, the Uyghur Human Rights Project has documented that Chinese authorities have forcibly disappeared more than 500 Uyghur intellectuals as of December 2021.

(continue reading)

[pangeen]

" The guardian of the Gobi " //© Jinyi He

[ammg-old2]

How do you protect a culture that is being wiped out?

For Uighurs, this is more than just a hypothetical. Repressive measures against the ethnic minority have progressively worsened: The Chinese government has corralled more than 1 million of them into internment camps, where they have been subjected to political indoctrination, forced sterilization, and torture.

The targeting of the Uighurs isn’t limited to the camps. Since 2016, dozens of graveyards and religious sites have been destroyed. The Uighur language has been banned in Xinjiang schools in favor of Mandarin Chinese. Practicing Islam, the predominant Uighur faith, has been discouraged as a “sign of extremism.”

Beijing frames these moves as its way of rooting out terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism. But the aim of China’s actions in Xinjiang is clear: to homogenize Uighurs into the country’s Han Chinese majority, even if that means erasing their cultural and religious identity for good. What is taking place is a cultural genocide.

The repercussions bear heavily even on Uighurs living outside the country. Their burden is more than just raising awareness about what is taking place in their homeland—a task many have taken up at great cost to themselves and their families. It’s also about preserving and promoting their identity in countries where few people might know who the Uighurs are, let alone what the world stands to lose should their language, food, art, and traditions be eradicated.

In an effort to understand what this kind of cultural preservation looks like in practice, I spoke with seven Uighurs residing in Britain, France, Turkey, and the United States. As chefs, poets, singers, filmmakers, language teachers, and musicians, each of them is contributing to this work in different ways. All of them are passionate about ensuring that their heritage will be passed on to future generations. None of them is under any illusions about what’s at stake if they fail.

“Every Uighur now is under very big psychological pressure,” Omer Kanat, the director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit, told me. “We cannot sleep at night.”

[fuckyeahchinesegarden]

swan lake in 伊犁ili by 新疆旅行沙笛

[vintagegeekculture]

there was Chinese interest in the Out Of Asia theory, in both the Republic, Chiang Republic and People’s Republic periods before the Out Of Africa theory became commonly accepted. Was the 1954 Yeti expedition done just from the Nepalese-Indian side or were the American agents and “anthropologists” given access on the Sino-Tibetan side of the Himalayan border?

During the early part of this century, it was absolutely believed for a long time that the deserts of Western China were the most likely place of human origins, as seen in this migration map from 1944, made from the best available knowledge of the time:

Remember, the oldest fossil remains at this point were in China, where Homo erectus was discovered (originally known by his initial place of discovery in Chungkotien Cave, nicknamed "Peking Man"). The discovery of Australopithecus and Homo habilis in Olduvai Gorge and South Africa, which place human origins in Africa, were not until the 50s and 60s, so it seemed entirely reasonable that Homo sapiens evolved in Western China.

The idea that China's desert regions were the origin of modern humans and culture is seen a lot in pop culture from 1900-1950, mainly because there were tremendous explorations in the region, especially Aurel Stein's expedition of 1908, who ventured into the Taklamakan Desert to find the Dunhuang Caves and Khara-Khoto, a city destroyed completely by Genghis Khan and vanished in the desert.

If you've ever heard of Roy Chapman Andrews and his famous expeditions in the 1920s, it's worth noting that he ventured into the Gobi Desert looking for human remains....not dinosaurs, and the discovery of dinosaur eggs was an unexpected surprise.

For that reason, there was a short lived Silk Road Mania that seemed to be a smaller scale predecessor to the pop culture dominating Egyptomania of the 1920s. It's bizarre to read adventure and fantasy fiction of the 1910s-1920s that features mentions of Silk Road peoples like the Kyrgyz, Sogdians, Tajik, Uigurians, and Tuvans. The best example I can think of would be the Khlit the Kossack stories of Harold Lamb (who also wrote a biography of Tamerlane), which together with Tarzan and Tros of Samothrace, formed the core inspiration for Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian.

The most interesting example of this would be A. Merritt's Dwellers in the Mirage, which featured a lost city in Xinjiang that was the home of the Nordic race, who worshipped their original religion, the kraken-like squid devil god Khalkru. It was widely believed in this era that Nordics emerged from Central Asia originally, and while it's easy to write this off as turn of the century racialist claptrap pseudohistory (along with Hyperborea legends), in this case, it is actually true: a branch of the Indo-European family lived in West China, and 5,000 year old redheaded mummies have been found in the region. As usual, A. Merritt was right on the money with his archeology, more so than other 1920s authors. After all, his "Moon Pool" was set around the just discovered ruins of Nan Madol, the Venice of Micronesia.

Jack Williamson's still chilling Darker Than You Think in 1948 was also set in the Silk Road/Central Asian region, as the place the race of shapeshifters emerged from, Homo magi, who await the coming of their evil messiah, the Night King, who will give them power over the human race.

H. Rider Haggard set "Ayesha: the Return of She" (1905) in Xinjiang, among a lost Greek colony in Central Asia (no doubt based on Alexandria on the Indus, a Greek colony in modern Pakistan that was the furthest bastion of Greek Culture). This was also two years after the Younghusband Thibetan Expedition of 1903, where the British invaded Tibet. At the time, the Qing Dynasty was completely declining and lost control of the frontier regions, and the power vacuum was filled by religious authority by default (this is something you also saw in Xinjiang, where for example, the leader of the city was the Imam of Kashgar).

This is one of the many British invasions they have attempted to cram down the memory hole, but if you ever see a Himalayan art piece that was "obtained in 1903-1904" ....well, you know where it came from.

Incidentally, there's one really funny recent conspiracy theory about paleontology, fossils, and China that I find incredibly interesting: the idea that dinosaurs having feathers is a lie and a sinister plot spread by the Communist Chinese (who else?) to make American youth into sissy fancylads, like Jessie "the Body" Ventura. How? By lying to us and making up that the manly and vigorous Tyrannosaurus, a beast with off the charts heterosexuality and a model for boys everywhere, might have been feathered like a debutante's dress. What next - lipstick on a Great White Shark? The long term goal is to make Americans effeminate C. Nelson Reilly types unable to defend against invasion. This is a theory that is getting steam among the kind of people who used to read Soldier of Fortune magazine, and among abusive stepfathers the world over.

...okay, are you done laughing? Yeah, this is obvious crackpottery and transparent sexual pathology, on the level of the John Birch Society in the 60s saying the Beatles were a Communist mind control plot. Mostly because animals just look how they look, and if it turned out that the ferocious Tyrannosaurus had feathers and looked like a fancylad Jessie Ventura to you, well, that's your problem and mental baggage, really.

I was left scratching my head over this one. But there is (kind of) something to this, and that is that a huge chunk of recent dinosaur discoveries have been in China. I don't think it has anything to do with a Communist plot to turn American boys into fancylads, but more to do with a major push in internal public investment in sciences in that country, and an explosion of Chinese dinosaur discoveries. If you want to see a great undervisited dinosaur museum, go to the Zigong Dinosaur Museum in Sichuan.

Pop quiz: what living scientist has named more dinosaur discoveries? It's not Bakker or Horner. The greatest living paleontologist, Xu Xing, which is why a lot of recently found dinosaurs are named things like Shangtungasaurus.

[ektenia]

There is a common preconception about what Chinese people look like, but the country’s population—which includes 56 different ethnic groups—is far from monolithic. For photographer Hailun Ma, a desire to showcase the melting pot of cultures that make up her native Xinjiang, in northwestern China, has informed some of her most compelling work.

[...] In her work, she wanted to promote the cultural richness of her hometown, a facet that tends to be overlooked in mainstream depictions of China. “When you walk along the streets, you see people who are fair with blue eyes or those that look more South Asian, so I never grew up thinking all Chinese looked the same way I do,” she says. “If you search for images of Xinjiang online, you get these very National Geographic images—stunning landscapes and maybe a smiling old man from a nomadic tribe. I wanted to present a younger perspective of what is happening.”

A young Uyghur woman photographed by Hailun Ma, from A Distinctive Soul: Hailun Ma’s Diverse Portraits of China

[aswiya]

Three Tajik teenage girls chat with each other in Tashkurgan. Pamir Mountains, Xinjiang Province, People's Republic of China.

Earl & Nazima Kowall