Niva Yau
I have lost count of how many times foreign experts have asked me if Central Asians care about the abuses happening in Xinjiang. The Turkic territory, now part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is known locally as East Turkestan. Once part of Central Asia, the language of its people shares the same heritage as those of the wider region, and its food, culture, and religion are similarly inseparable.
What divides Xinjiang from Central Asia is not just the mountainous border but a colonization project that has continued, and in some cases accelerated, even as the rest of the region has begun to move in the opposite direction, decolonizing 30 years after independence from the Soviet Union. This background makes a huge difference. Transitional Central Asian states have not popularized, or even formed, a consensus over the many tragedies from the period of Soviet colonization. Despite an awareness of the PRC’s abuses on the other side of the border, these states have not made sense of them as colonial policies. Instead, they have been susceptible to the PRC’s positive messaging programs and shaping of the region’s information environment (Jamestown Perspectives, September 4).
No comments:
Post a Comment