In an old Silk Road oasis town on China’s western border, these days a thirsty traveller can knock back a cold beer in a local mosque. The former place of worship is now a bar for tourists. And it is with the customers’ views in mind—and, perhaps, the aspirations of China’s leaders—that the place is called “The Dream of Kashgar.”
The NGO Project has discovered that two temporary activities, previously listed on the Ministry of Public Security’s website, have been removed. The website does not provide any explanation for or recognition of this change.
Joanne Smith Finley is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies in the School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University, U.K. Her research interests include the (trans)formation, hybridization, and globalization of identities among Uighurs in Xinjiang, China; strategies of symbolic resistance in Xinjiang (including alternative representations in Uighur popular music); the gendering of ethno-politics in Xinjiang; and gender in Xinjiang and the Uighur diaspora in the context of Islamic revival. She is the author of the monograph The Art of Symbolic Resistance: Uyghur Identities and Uyghur-Han Relations in Contemporary Xinjiang (Brill Academic Publishing, 2013). It is an ethnographic study of evolving Uighur identities and ethnic relations over a period of 20 years, from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union through the 1997 Ghulja disturbances and the 2009 Urumqi riots to 2011. Smith Finley is co-editor of two volumes: Situating the Uyghurs between China and Central Asia (Ashgate, 2007) and Language, Education and Uyghur Identity in Urban Xinjiang (Routledge, 2015), and she is guest editor of a forthcoming Special Issue (2019) for Central Asian Survey, titled: “Securitization, Insecurity and Conflict in Contemporary Xinjiang.”
2018 gave us many opportunities to look back at China’s past—the tenth anniversary of Sichuan earthquake and of the Beijing Olympics, the 40th year since the country began its policy of Reform and Opening. This year also brought changes that thrust the familiar, very suddenly, into history––the only greyhound racing stadium in Asia was shut down, ending its five-decades long operation; the peer-to-peer lending industrycollapsedunder regulation after years of explosive popularity, leaving tens of thousands users bankrupt; and the country entered a trade war with the U.S. 17 years after earning a seat in the WTO.
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Recently, the Guangdong Public Security Bureau (PSB) Foreign NGO Management Office received an award for its innovative work in promoting the law, the Jiangsu PSB Foreign NGO Management office held a conference for foreign NGO representative offices registered in the province, and the Tianjin PSB Foreign NGO Management office visited Tianjin University to publicize the Foreign NGO Law and investigate the school’s related management issues.
A P.R.C. flag flies over a mosque recently closed by authorities, and on which hangs a banner with the slogan “Love the Party, Love the Country,” in Kashgar Old Town, June 28, 2017.
Uighur children sit outside a locked mosque that was closed by authorities, in Kashgar Old Town, June 27, 2017.
The Dream of Kashgar, a mosque converted into a café-bar for Han tourists, in Kashgar, 2018.
A boy puts white sticky labels on his face like a beard, in Kashgar, 2018.
A Hui restaurant with halal characters and mosque insignia removed from the top-left corner of its sign, in Urumqi, 2018.
