Elliot Sperling was Chair of the Indiana University Department of Central Eurasian Studies. He had been a faculty member in that department’s Tibetan Studies Program since 1987. In addition to his scholarly writing on Tibetan history and Tibet’s historical and contemporary relationship with China, Sperling wrote op-ed pieces about and analysis of Tibet for The New York Times, The Far Eastern Economic Review, and other publications.
Matthew Neiderhauser is a photographer and artist whose work is influenced by his studies in anthropology. He lived in Beijing for six years and recently returned to the United States. His pictorial book Sound Kapital, published in 2009, documented Beijing’s underground punk rock scene.
Nathan W. Hill is a Lecturer in Tibetan and LInguistics with a joint appointment in the Department of China and Inner Asia and the Department of Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), at the University of London. His research focuses on Old Tibetan and Trans-Himalayan historical linguistics. His publications include A Lexicon of Tibetan Verb Stems as Reported by the Grammatical Tradition (2010), and Old Tibetan Inscriptions (2009), co-authored with Kazushi Iwao. His current projects include the creation of a Tibetan diachronic part of speech and the search for sound laws relating Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese.
Uradyn E. Bulag is a Reader in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. His interests broadly span East Asia and Inner Asia, especially China and Mongolia, the Mongolia-Tibet interface, nationalism and ethnic conflict, geopolitics, historiography, and statecraft. He is the author of Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China’s Mongolian Frontier (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), The Mongols at China’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), and Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (Clarendon Press, 1998).
Rachel Harris is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London, specializing in music in China and Central Asia. She has published widely on the politics of Uyghur expressive culture. Her research interests include global flows, identity politics, Islam and soundscapes, and she currently leads the U.K. government-affiliated Arts and Humanities Research Council network Sounding Islam in China. She is actively engaged with outreach projects relating to Central Asian and Chinese music, including recordings, musical performance, and consultancy.
James Leibold is a Associate Professor in Chinese Politics and Asian Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include Chinese nationalism, ethnic relations, and ethnic policy and ethnic identity articulation on the Chinese Internet. He is the author of Ethnic Policy in China: Is Reform Inevitable? (East-West Center, 2013) and Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and co-editor (with Chen Yangbin) of Minority Education in China: Balancing Unity and Diversity in an Era of Critical Pluralism (Hong Kong University Press, 2014) and (with Thomas Mullaney, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche), Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority (University of California Press, 2012). His work has also appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, The China Journal, The China Quarterly, Modern China, and other publications.
Stills from the production Kapital Creation, a new film by photographer Matthew Neiderhauser and filmmaker John Fitzgerald. In the winter of 2014 the two launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the final stages of production.
James A. Millward is Professor of Intersocietal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, teaching Chinese, Central Asian, and world history. His specialties include the Qing empire, the silk road, Eurasian lutes and music in history, and historical and contemporary Xinjiang. He follows and comments on current issues regarding Uyghurs and Xinjiang and People’s Republic of China ethnicity policy.
Millward has served on the boards of the Association for Asian Studies (China and Inner Asia Council) and the Central Eurasian Studies Society, and was President of the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2010. His publications include Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (Columbia University Press, 2007, 2021), The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013), New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (Routledge, 2004), and Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864 (Stanford University Press, 1998). His most recent album, recorded with the band By & By, is Songs for this Old Heart. His articles and op-eds on contemporary China have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, and other media.
Beijing, China—It’s well after lunch and Liu Fengju still hasn’t gotten her food. The sixty-seven-year-old wife of a retired railway worker came to Beijing to spend Spring Festival, the annual seven-day Chinese New Year celebration, with her niece. Wearing brown-colored glasses, a red sweater, and a purple padded jacket, and with her husband, sister, daughter, and sister’s granddaughter in tow, she complains that she arrived at Qingfeng Dumpling Eatery at noon—and now it’s 3:30 pm on February 5, a chilly and smoggy winter day.
On December 31, President Xi Jinping appeared on CCTV and extended his “New Year’s wishes to Chinese of all ethnic groups.” On January 15, Beijing officials detained Ilham Tohti, a leading Uighur economist and subsequently accused him of “separtist offenses”; a fresh report shows arrests of Uighurs for “endangering state security” in Xinjiang
