Politics | MCLC Resource Center

A language under attack (1)

June 28, 2019

Magnus Fiskesjö seems to hate China. I do not like his articles. Magnus seems to hate Germany. Please let me ask, the Nobel prize winner Elias Canetti who wrote in German was German? Kafka was German, Rilke was German? They all wrote in German, but they were not Germans at all. German is the language of Nazis? There is something else. Like me. Writing in German and in Chinese I am fighting Nazis etc. all the time.

The late Irene Eber – I loved her very much – once told me there were so many Germans who helped her… There is something else….

Wolfgang Kubin <kubin@uni-bonn.de>

A language under attack

June 26, 2019June 26, 2019

by denton.2@osu.edu at 4:28amJune 26, 2019

China’s banning and suppressing of the Uyghur and other native languages of Xinjiang, and the forced teaching of Chinese there, reminds me of the Nazi occupation of Norway, when kids there were forced to learn German. My mom was one of those kids, and she never regained a respect for the German language; even I, born much later, failed to study German, just because the Nazis forced my mom to study it. Now I wonder, will the Chinese language suffer similarly, because of the vile oppression they are carrying out now? In the camps, people are starved and beaten if they don’t keep up, in singing Chinese Communist songs glorifying their Führer. With this sort of campaign, why would anyone want to study Chinese language any more — the language of the concentration camps?

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: Hong Kong Free Press (6/18/19)
A language under attack: China’s campaign to sever the Uighur tongue
By Rustem Shir, Research Associate with the Uyghur Human Rights Project

Uighur protest in Washington, DC. Photo: Wikicommons.

Of the 7,111 languages being spoken around the world, 41 per cent can be classified as endangered, meaning that face-to-face use by speakers across generations is in decline.

At first glance, it may seem inaccurate to designate the Uighur language as endangered – more than 11 million people speak Uighur as a first language and Uighur is an official language of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (also known as East Turkestan) in China.

Yet, despite these indicators of vitality, the Uighur language is in peril because it has been targeted by the Chinese Communist Party for erasure. Continue reading →

How a journal censored my review on Xinjiang (7)

June 26, 2019June 26, 2019

by denton.2@osu.edu at 4:24amJune 26, 2019

Brill is a publishing house with a long tradition of publishing high quality research in Asian Studies, and in particular in Sinology and Modern China. During the selection and review process for publication, we rely on the expertise of our book series and journal editors as well as peer reviewers from around the globe. High ethical standards are the foundation of this selection process, and Brill authors, editors, and reviewers are expected to follow our standards at all times.

Our newly founded journal China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies is a peer-reviewed English-language forum for historical research on relations between China and other regions of Asia that covers both the pre-modern and modern periods. Its purpose is to promote communication and exchange among the global Asian Studies community, especially among scholars based in Asian countries. At Brill, we strongly believe that our journals should be a platform where the entire academic community can freely share and discuss arguments, ideas, and opinions in order to further the advancement of knowledge. Continue reading →

One more Xinjiang statement

June 26, 2019

by denton.2@osu.edu at 4:21am

Statement by the European Society for Central Asian Studies, on the detentions and deaths of Central Asian Muslims in ‘re-education centres’ in Xinjiang, China: https://escas2019.excas.net/updates/xinjiang-statement/

… this follows on the Association for Asian Studies strong statement, http://www.asian-studies.org/asia-now/entryid/209/aas-statement-on-extra-judicial-detention-of-turkic-muslims-in-xinjiang-prc

… and on the public statement signed by 700+ scholars (still open for signatures), https://concernedscholars.home.blog

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Uighur author dies in ‘re-education’ camp

June 21, 2019June 21, 2019

by denton.2@osu.edu at 9:50amJune 21, 2019

Source: The Guardian (6/19/19)
Uighur author dies following detention in Chinese ‘re-education’ camp
PEN America condemns death of Nurmuhammad Tohti, who had been held in a Xinjiang internment camp, as a grave example of China’s violations of free expression
By Alison Flood

Nurmuhammad Tohti, sitting at a scholarly gathering in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, China. Photo courtesy of Abduweli Ayup.

Nurmuhammad Tohti, pictured in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. Photograph: courtesy of Abduweli Ayup

The death of the prominent Uighur writer Nurmuhammad Tohti after being held in one of Xinjiang’s internment camps has been condemned as a tragic loss by human rights organisations.

Radio Free Asia reported that Tohti, who was 70, had been detained in one of the controversial “re-education” camps from November 2018 to March 2019. His granddaughter, Zorigul, who is based in Canada, said he had been denied treatment for diabetes and heart disease, and was only released once his medical condition meant he had become incapacitated. She wrote on a Facebook page for the Uighur exile community that she had only learned of his death 11 days after it happened because her family in Xinjiang had been frightened that making the information public would make them a target for detention. Continue reading →

Shanghai professor tells grads to fight for liberty

June 21, 2019June 21, 2019

by denton.2@osu.edu at 9:49amJune 21, 2019

Source: Inkstone (6/19/19)
Shanghai Professor tells graduates to fight for liberty
By Qin Chen

Qu Weiguo went to Harvard University in 2004 as a visiting scholar for the Fullbright program. Photo: Weibo

It’s graduation time around the world, including in China, where students don their caps and gowns and listen to speeches that endeavor to offer insight into the meaning of life.

Qu Weiguo, the head of the English department at the prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai, took this opportunity seriously.

This week, he gave the class of 2019 an audacious speech praising the importance of fighting for individual liberty, talking with the world outside China and encouraging students to think independently. Continue reading →

Chan Kin-man and the spirit of dissent in HK

June 21, 2019June 21, 2019

by denton.2@osu.edu at 9:48amJune 21, 2019

Source: Dissent Magazine (6/18/19)
Chan Kin-man and the Spirit of Dissent in Hong Kong
Chan was given a sixteen-month sentence in April for his role in the pro-democracy protests that began in 2014. While he remains imprisoned, his successors have taken to the streets.
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Chan Kin-man in 2017 (Flickr/inmediahk)

On this long and distant road, sometimes I feel that the road ahead is boundless and obscured, and sometimes the light is very dim. What can I do in this dark night? All we can do is look at the stars. –Chan Kin-man, November 14, 2018

The best panel I attended at the 2015 Association for Asian Studies meeting in Chicago was on dissent. Chan Kin-man, a sociology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), was a fitting person to include in the session, which featured a mix of activists, journalists, and academics. He was one of the three main organizers of Occupy Central with Peace and Love, a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that morphed into the Umbrella Movement when Joshua Wong and other student activists in their late teens and early twenties began to take leading roles in the struggle. Continue reading →

A letter to my son

June 21, 2019June 21, 2019

by denton.2@osu.edu at 9:47amJune 21, 2019

Source: Cha Journal (6/16/19)
A LETTER TO MY SON WRITTEN OUTSIDE OF LEGCO AT 4 AM, WEDNESDAY MORNING, JUNE 12
BY JASON G. COE
[“A Letter to My Son” will be included in the “Tiananmen Thirty Years On” feature of the June 2019 issue of Cha.]
Dear Meatball,

Sorry I haven’t written in so long. Although, for you reading this, it’s probably just moving from one email to the next. In about four days, you will have been in our lives now for 6 months. It’s really been a wonderful and happy time for us both. Mom’s maternity leave ends on Friday, so we won’t all be at home all day with you anymore. But it was really nice while it lasted. Of course we will spend the rest of our lives together as a family, but these six months being with you nearly every moment has been really special and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Right now, it’s 3 am and I’m sitting on a footbridge that connects the Hong Kong legislative council building to an office building. It offers a great vantage for the protests that are starting and will continue over the next few days against an impending extradition bill that would allow the mainland Chinese government courts to compel the HK courts to send people in Hong Kong to China to be prosecuted. Of course, it doesn’t sound like a really big deal on the surface, but it would allow courts in China (which are not transparent and do not follow a clear rule of law) to persecute people here for political reasons. So for example, if one day you are in Hong Kong and decide to exercise your right to express your political opinions, a court in China could come up with a reason (valid or not) to have you tried there, and the HK government would then be expected to deliver you to that court. This type of agreement erodes the autonomy of Hong Kong, which is supposed to be a completely separate political system until 2047. Continue reading →

The 800 Hundred pulled from Shanghai Film Fest

June 19, 2019June 19, 2019

by denton.2@osu.edu at 10:25amJune 19, 2019

Source: SCMP (6/17/19)
Why the first Chinese Imax war film The Eight Hundred was pulled from Shanghai film festival
By Elaine Yao
The film, telling the story of the defence of the Sihang Warehouse against the Japanese army, was cancelled for ‘technical reasons’. The cancellation led to online anger with some saying the film was cancelled for glorifying the Chinese Nationalist army.

Wang Qianyuan (top) and Zhang Junyi in The Eight Hundred, a film about the Battle of Shanghai which was pulled from the Shanghai International Film Festival.

The official release date of China-produced World War II epic The Eight Hundred is in the balance after its world premiere at the 22nd Shanghai International Film Festival was cancelled. The decision came to light one day before the opening of the festival, which runs from June 15 to June 24.

The official Weibo account of the film said the premiere, scheduled for its opening day, was cancelled due to technical reasons. A series of promotional events planned for the film at the festival were also cancelled. They included a screening on Tuesday at Tongji University in Shanghai, and sessions at which cast and crew members were to meet the media and public in Shanghai. Continue reading →

2 million protest in HK

June 18, 2019June 18, 2019

by denton.2@osu.edu at 10:06amJune 18, 2019

Source: SupChina (6/18/19)
Two million Hong Kongers march on the streets

Photo credit: Anthony Wallace / AFP

WHAT HAPPENED?

For the third time in a week, enormous numbers of people in Hong Kong took to the streets on June 16 to demand government accountability to their voices and the permanent cancellation of a controversial extradition bill.

As many as TWO MILLION attended, organizers said. Given the way people spilled out onto and filled multiple parallel streets (last week’s protests were mostly confined to one thoroughfare), the number seems reasonable.
That makes this the largest protest in Hong Kong history, and a stunningly large demonstration by percentage of population: About 25 percent of the city protested on one day — Hong Kong has 7.5 million residents.
The extradition bill that the people feared would fracture Hong Kong’s independent judiciary and give Beijing the ability to scoop up dissidents in the city has been shelved, for now. The city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥 Lín Zhèng Yuè’é), has given a public apology. But the protesters have clear and specific further demands, for example:
“Withdraw the extradition bill. Carrie Lam step down. Drop all political prosecutions!” is what Joshua Wong (黃之鋒 Huáng Zhīfēng), the famous student protester, tweeted as he left prison the day after the protests. (Wong is one of several leaders of the 2014 Occupy protests to be sent to jail for “unlawful assembly” back in 2017.)

Continue reading →

Protest forces public apology

June 17, 2019June 17, 2019

by denton.2@osu.edu at 10:21amJune 17, 2019

Source: SCMP (6/17/19)
‘Nearly 2 million’ people take to streets, forcing public apology from Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam as suspension of controversial extradition bill fails to appease protesters

Centre of city brought to a complete standstill as the masses march to chastise Lam for refusing to withdraw bill or apologise when first asked to
Six hours after protesters transform Central, Wan Chai and Admiralty into a sea of black, public apology comes in the form of government statement

By SCMP Reporters

Hongkongers of every age, profession and background, from every corner of the city, march in a massive show of solidarity and defiance. Photo: Sam Tsang

Nearly 2 million protesters flooded the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday, organisers claimed, delivering a stunning repudiation of Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s governance and forcing a public apology out of the city’s leader over her campaign to bulldoze a controversial extradition bill through the legislature.

A day after Lam suspended her push for the bill, expecting it to defuse a crisis that has seen violent clashes between mostly young protesters and police, the centre of Hong Kong was brought to a complete standstill as the masses marched to chastise her for refusing to withdraw the bill or apologise when first asked to, and declaring that nothing short of her resignation would satisfy them now. Continue reading →

HK suspends extradition bill

June 15, 2019June 15, 2019

by denton.2@osu.edu at 10:19amJune 15, 2019

Source: NYT (6/15/19)
Hong Kong’s Leader, Yielding to Protests, Suspends Extradition Bill
Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, on Saturday expressed “sorrow and regret” for having failed to convince the public that an extradition bill was needed.
By Keith Bradsher and Alexandra Stevenson

CreditHector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

HONG KONG — Backing down after days of huge street protests, Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, said on Saturday that she would indefinitely suspend a bill that would allow extraditions to mainland China.

It was a remarkable reversal for Mrs. Lam, the leader installed by Beijing in 2017, who had vowed to ensure the bill’s approval and tried to get it passed on an unusually short timetable, even as hundreds of thousands demonstrated against it this past week.

But she made it clear that the bill was being delayed, not withdrawn outright, as protesters have demanded. Continue reading →