Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
A contemporary, comprehensive, multi-authored study of Xinjiang, benefiting from the kind of funding and resources that only the United States can supply.
And your final book is S. Frederick Starr’s Xinjiang: China 's Muslim Borderland. Does that echo some of those themes?
Well I picked this because it is a modern and fairly comprehensive study of Xinjiang and because in many ways it echoes the work that Lattimore did in the 1950s by getting together a group of people in a workshop and providing them with the kind of resources that only the United States can manage. I think there a dozen or so authors and, between them, they have looked at the same kind of issues that Lattimore examined in the 1950s and their work brings the story up to the present day. Different sections of the book consider topics as diverse as the economy, demography, education the current state of Islam and the presence of the military in Xinjiang. Many books on Xinjiang have appeared over the last 10 years and this is one of the more substantial of them.
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The visiting Professor at Tsinghua University explains the recent unrest in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China was not unprecedented. During the 1990s there were demonstrations and riots - attacks on police stations, prisons and army bases and on Uyghurs who were deemed to be collaborators with the Chinese authorities.
