Muslim Uyghur Students In A Chinese Boarding School

One of the most controversial policies in Chinese minority education concerns the so-called inland ethnic minority schools or classes in Han-inhabited areas in China. Since 2000, boarding Xinjiang Classes have been established in the eastern cities of China for high school students from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in order to educate young Uyghur and other ethnic minority students through the national curricula. Yangbin Chen conceptualizes the process of Uyghur students' responses to the school goal of ethnic integration as social recapitalization. While their former social capital from families or communities in Xinjiang is constrained in the boarding school, Uyghur youths are able to develop independent and new social capital to facilitate their schooling. Nonetheless, they lack "bridging social capital," which makes the goal of ethnic integration more difficult to achieve. Book jacket.

The first memoir about the "reeducation" camps by a Uyghur woman, describing the insidious nature of oppression, the dehumanizing effects of torture and brainwashing, and the human drive to survive—and resist—under even the most horrific circumstances. This new paperback edition features a new introduction by the author. “I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.” — Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match For three years Gulbahar Haitiwaji was held in Chinese detention centers and “reeducation” camps, enduring interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, rats, and nights under the blinding fluorescent lights of her prison cell. Her only crime? Being a Uyghur. China’s brutal repression of Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide and reported widely in media around the world. In 2019, the New York Times published the “Xinjiang Papers,” leaked documents exposing the forced detention of more than one million Uyghurs in Chinese “reeducation” camps. The Chinese government denies that these camps are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism” and calling them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter, with the help of the French diplomatic corps. Others have not been so fortunate. In How I Survived a Chinese “Reeducation” Camp, Gulbahar tells her story, describing the insidious nature of oppression, the dehumanizing effects of torture and brainwashing, and the human drive to survive—and resist—under even the most horrific circumstances. This new paperback edition includes a new introduction by the author.

This book integrates research in positive psychology, Islamic psychology, and Muslim wellbeing in one volume, providing a view into the international experiential and spiritual lives of a religious group that represents over 24% of the world’s population. It incorporates Western psychological paradigms, such as the theories of Jung, Freud, Maslow, and Seligman with Islamic ways of knowing, while highlighting the struggles and successes of minoritized Muslim groups, including the LGBTQ community, Muslims with autism, Afghan Shiite refugees, and the Uyghur community in China. It fills a unique position at the crossroad of multiple social science disciplines, including the psychology of religion, cultural psychology, and positive psychology. By focusing on the ways in which spirituality, struggle, and social justice can lead to purpose, hope, and a meaningful life, the book contributes to scholarship within the second wave of positive psychology (PP 2.0) that aims to illustrate a balance between positive and negative aspects of human experience. While geared towards students, researchers, and academic scholars of psychology, culture, and religious studies, particularly Muslim studies, this book is also useful for general audiences who are interested in learning about the diversity of Islam and Muslims through a research-based social science approach.

As the regional lingua franca, the Uyghur language long underpinned Uyghur national identity in Xinjiang. However, since the ‘bilingual education’ policy was introduced in 2002, Chinese has been rapidly institutionalised as the sole medium of instruction in the region’s institutes of education. As a result, studies of the bilingual and indeed multi-lingual Uyghur urban youth have emerged as a major new research trend. This book explores the relationship between language, education and identity among the urban Uyghurs of contemporary Xinjiang. It considers ways in which Uyghur urban youth identities began to evolve in response to the state imposition of ‘bilingual education’. Starting by defining the notion of ethnic identity, the book explores the processes involved in the formation and development of personal and group identities, considers why ethnic boundaries are constructed between groups, and questions how ethnic identity is expressed in social, cultural and religious practice. Against this background, contributors adopt a special focus on the relationship between language use, education and ethnic identity development. As a study of ethnicity in China this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, Asian ethnicity, cultural anthropology, sociolinguistics and Asian education.

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is China’s largest province, shares borders with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and Mongolia, and possesses a variety of natural resources, including oil. The tensions between ethnic Muslim Uyghurs and the growing number of Han Chinese in Xinjiang have recently increased, occasionally breaking out into violence. At the same time as being a potential troublespot for China, the province is of increasing strategic significance as China’s gateway to Central Asia whose natural resources are of increasing importance to China. This book focuses in particular on what life is like in Xinjiang for the diverse population that lives there. It offers important insights into the social, economic and political terrains of Xinjiang, concentrating especially on how current trends in Xinjiang are likely to develop in the future. In doing so it provides a broader understanding of the region and its peoples.

WINNER – 2020 Central Eurasian Studies Society's CESS Book Award This is the first book-length study of graduates from the Xinjiang Class, a program that funds senior high school–aged students from Xinjiang, mostly ethnic Uyghur, to attend a four-year course in predominately Han-populated cities in eastern and coastal China. Based on longitudinal field research, Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity offers a detailed picture of the multilayered identities of contemporary Uyghur youth and an assessment of the effectiveness of this program in meeting its political goals. The experiences of Xinjiang Class graduates reveal how young, educated Uyghurs strategically and selectively embrace elements of the corporate Chinese Zhonghua minzu identity in order to stretch the boundaries of a nonstate-defined Uyghur identity. Timothy Grose also argues that the impositions of Chinese Mandarin and secular Chinese Communist Party (CCP) values over ethnic minority languages and religion, and physically displacing young Uyghurs from their neighborhood and cultural environment do not lead to ethnic assimilation, as the CCP apparently expects. Despite pressure from state authorities to urge Xinjiang Class graduates to return after their formal education, the majority of the graduates choose to remain in inner China or to use their Xinjiang Class education as a springboard to seek global citizenship based upon membership in a transnational Islamic community. For those who return to Xinjiang, contrary to the political goal of the program, few intend to serve the CCP, their country, or even their hometown. Instead, their homecomings are marred by disappointment, frustration, and discontent. “This study demonstrates persuasively that the Chinese state’s attempts to produce—via delivery of a monolingual ‘Xinjiang Class’ education in inner China—a cohort of Chinese-speaking, Sinicized, secularized, and politically reliable Uyghurs, who will then return to Xinjiang to persuade other Uyghurs to support the Chinese Communist Party line, have had mixed results at best, and at worst constitute a failure.” —Joanne Smith Finley, Newcastle University “This book provides a window into the agency of the Uyghur subjects of the Chinese state-building project. The author’s sustained fieldwork in Xinjiang and efforts to reconnect with Uyghur interlocutors multiple times offer an unprecedented glimpse into how members of the Xinjiang class attempt to negotiate between the state’s objective of producing an educated and loyal Uyghur cohort and their own political, social, and cultural identities and imperatives.” —Michael Clarke, Australian National University

After isolated terrorist incidents in 2015, the Chinese leadership has cracked down hard on Xinjiang and its Uyghurs. Today, there are thought to be up to a million Muslims held in 're-education camps' in the Xinjiang region of North-West China. One of the few Western commentators to have lived in the region, journalist Nick Holdstock travels into the heart of the province and reveals the Uyghur story as one of repression, hardship and helplessness. China's Forgotten People explains why repression of the Muslim population is on the rise in the world's most powerful one-party state. This updated and revised edition reveals the background to the largest known concentration camp network in the modern world, and reflects on what this means for the way we think about China.

In 2000, the “Western Development” plan of the Chinese Mainland attracted attention of educators and policy makers. Around that period, the Chinese government also launched large scale and systemic curriculum reforms in basic education and secondary education in achieving quality education across the vast country. Despite significant progress that has been made in educational investments and attainments in China, issues of quality and regional disparities across China remain, especially in the less developed, western part of China where the significance of ethnic diversity, urban-rural disparity and variations in school development exists. In addition, there have been entrenched problems of teacher and teaching quality, resources inadequacy and ‘left-behind’ children. Written by a group of Chinese and international scholars, the book provides an updated analysis and discussion of educational development and related issues in the less developed part of Western China. These chapters cover broad contextual issues of educational development and reforms, issues of quality and equality in different sectors of education, as well as curriculum implementation, teaching innovations and professional development of teachers.