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Pundits, advocates, and scholars have increasingly focused on the strategies of transnational repression employed by autocratic states to deter opposition and control the voices of emigrants abroad. Typically, transnational repression is understood as various forms of state-directed tactics executed by institutional actors who are deployed, trained, and organized by the state. Yet, the tactic of inciting hatred and division among emigrants to undermine dissidents—part of a nationalist strategy that mobilizes non-state actors for repression—has not been thoroughly explored. This article reveals a unique form of diaspora actorhood: the repressive nationalist diasporas, which consist of culturally driven migrants who support their authoritarian homelands and exert significant influence in various aspects of transnational migrants' civic life, including student groups, ethnic associations, and grassroots organizations. Through these networks, diaspora migrants provide autocrats with the means to extend their repressive reach internationally. This paper examines the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a case study, demonstrating how the state leverages nationalist sentiments to alienate dissidents and fuel enmity among its loyalists overseas. The consequences are extensive, involving surveillance, harassment, and assaults on dissidents such as Hong Kongers, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Taiwanese, and mainland Chinese—aiming to silence those who criticize the PRC regime. Ethnographic research, interviews, and publicly available data are used to reveal, describe, and analyze the role and global reach of the repressive nationalist diaspora in the transnational repression mechanism as part of modern autocratic statecraft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over 700 syndromes associated with hearing loss (HL) have been identified. Labyrinthine aplasia, microtia, and microdontia (LAMM syndrome, OMIM: 610706) is a rare HL syndrome characterized by congenital sensorineural HL, labyrinthine aplasia, type I microtia and microdontia, which is caused by biallelic variants in the FGF3 gene. Using Whole-exome sequencing (WES), we identified a novel missense FGF3 variant (c.137G > C, p. Arg46Pro (NM_005247.4) in three unrelated Uyghur ethnic families. This variant is classified as a variant of uncertain significance according to ACMG guidelines, with the applied criteria of PM3, PM2_Supporting, PP3 and PP4. Patients from the three families revealed variable clinical features. We found a novel phenotype, sparse hair, in one of the proband. Our findings expanded the variant and phenotype spectrum of LAMM syndrome and provided new insights to the diagnose and pathogenesis investigation of the disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Ankara-based Turkish Diplomatic Archives (thrown open to the public recently), this paper explores how Turkey’s diplomatic line on (what is currently called) the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) People's Republic of China unfolded through the decade following Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s death on 10 November 1938. The documents studied here are chiefly diplomatic correspondences from the Turkish outposts in China, Japan and Afghanistan dating from 1939–1949. The study outlines how Turkey readjusted itself vis-a-vis the Uyghurs in response to its evolving geo-strategic needs – to which its religious, linguistic, and cultural continuities with the Uyghurs were secondary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China built internment camps officially referred to as training centres within the scope of a policy for countering extremism and terrorism in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 2017. While the repression imposed by China on Uyghurs in these camps has attracted the response of the international community, there has been neither a public protest nor a meaningful government response to China in Turkey, despite it having been the voice of Uyghurs on international platforms before 2017. This study aims to identify the reasons for Turkey's silence on the persecution of Uyghurs by utilizing the legitimation and co-optation strategies of the authoritarian stability framework. The Turkish government's legitimation strategies of "rallying around the flag" via anti-Americanism and the economic expectations of China to boost its performance-based legitimacy are evaluated as reasons for the government's silence on the Uyghur cause. Moreover, it is also discussed how formal and informal co-optation strategies of the government with nationalist and Eurasianist parties are playing a role as a bolstering mechanism of its silence policy on Uyghurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, Turkey has been an ally of the transatlantic bloc. As a NATO member, with a majority Muslim population and a free market economy, it was even hailed by Western powers as a model country in the 2000s. However, due to its acquisition of the S-400 missile defence system from Russia, its desire to be a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and its military presence in Syria and Libya, many analysts have argued that Turkey's foreign policy has experienced a pivot to Asia recently. This article systematically examines the current positions of various political parties in Turkey in this context using first-hand data. Through semi-structured interviews with 14 political party representatives, and by analysing their party programmes, the vision of different political parties in respect of Asia, their relations with Asian actors, their stance on Asian foreign direct investments and its environmental impacts, the Uyghur issue, and their thoughts on the period that will follow the Ukraine-Russia war are studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the challenges of language and cultural maintenance through education among one immigrant ethnic group, the Uyghurs within Turkey, where the Uyghur population has grown in recent years. Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic minority group of some 10 million people within China, originating from China's northwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Data for the paper are based on ethnographic research conducted in Istanbul, where the Uyghur population in Turkey is the largest. The paper illustrates how the local and global environment impact how culture is constructed, and that identity construction and language maintenance projects are not ideologically neutral. It contributes to the understudied link between language, ethnicity, politics, and education by exploring the ways in which the Uyghur community in Istanbul uses non-formal education to maintain and transmit their language and cultural traditions in their host environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Purpose Methods Results Conclusion This study sought to explore dynamic degree centrality (DC) variability in particular regions of the brain in patients with poststroke Broca aphasia (BA) using a resting‐state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs‐fMRI) approach, comparing differences between Uyghur and Chinese BA patients.This study investigated two factors, language and BA status, and divided patients into four groups: Uyghur aphasia patients (UA), Uyghur normal control subjects (UN), Chinese aphasia patients (CA), and Chinese normal subjects (CN) who underwent rs‐fMRI analysis. Two‐way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to calculate the comprehensive differences in dynamic DC among these four groups. Correlations between DC and language behavior were assessed with partial correlation analyses.Two‐way ANOVA revealed comparable results for the results of pairwise comparisons of dynamic DC variability among the four groups in the right middle frontal gyrus/orbital part (ORBmid.R), right superior frontal gyrus/dorsolateral, and right precuneus (PCUN.R), with results as follows: UA < UN, CA > CN, UA < CA, and UN > CN (p < .05, with the exception of the p‐values for UA and UN in superior frontal gyrus/dorsolateral). In contrast, the opposite results were observed for the right calcarine fissure and surrounding cortex (CAL.R, p < .05).The observed enhancement of dynamic DC variability in ORBmid.R and PCUN.R among Chinese BA patients and in CAL.R in Uyghur BA patients may be attributable to language network restructuring. Overall, these results suggest that BA patients who use different language families may exhibit differences in the network mechanisms that characterize observed impairments of language function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In parks and town squares across China in 2023, amateur dance enthusiasts engaged in a nationwide 'Xinjiang dance' craze, a phenomenon reflected and amplified on social media. For outside observers this might seem a bizarre development following the Chinese media discourses of terrorism, and the intense securitisation of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which so recently preceded it, but it aligned neatly with new initiatives across Chinese government, media and heritage to promote the region's burgeoning tourism industry, to fundamentally shift perceptions of the region in the national imagination, and to counter revelations of mass incarceration and cultural erasure in international media. This article highlights the ways that Uyghur heritage, music and dance have been harnessed in government projects to remodel the region's history and situate its peoples more firmly within the sphere of the Chinese nation, thinking through the ways in which the aesthetic formations and imaginaries of Uyghur heritage articulate the links between tourism and territory, colonialism and desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization is one of the milestones in the development of human society. Many regions in the southern parts of 'the old world' demonstrating an early emergence of agriculture also witnessed the flourishing of some of the earliest cities. Recent, yet still sparse, archaeological evidence appears to indicate a relatively later time for early urbanism in central Eurasia. However, given its vital geographic location and cultural nexus between East and West, more attention should be paid to the sedentary communities and their cities in oases amid the vast droughty desert, particularly in light of the rapidly increasing number of publications on early pastoralism and related communication routes along mountain chains and rivers. This study reveals the trajectory of urbanization and its role in the establishment of an exchange network in Xinjiang's oasis region via reconstruction of the chronological sequence of the local societal history of the Baiyang River Basin along the southern piedmont of the Eastern Tianshan Mountains. A thorough archaeological investigation and refined radiocarbon dating programme was carried out and coupled with information from historical documentation within a Bayesian statistical framework. The results indicate three pulses of local urbanization during: the Early Iron Age, Tang–Yuan period, and Qing Dynasty, respectively. Combining this with evidence from other parts of Xinjiang, we re-evaluate the role of oasis urbanism in the promotion of trans-regional exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Old Uyghur language emerged as a result of translating religious texts. Additionally, there are also written works and fragments that are categorized as non-religious. The collection of texts and fragments includes letters, legal documents, celebration records, calendars, and medical texts. Medical texts are based on ancient medical traditions from different cultures, such as folk medicine, Assyrian, Indian, and Chinese. These texts include the names of plants, animals, minerals, drugs, diseases, treatments, and medical interventions. The earliest research on Old Uyghur medical texts involved the editing of texts. Subsequent to this, there were studies focused on lexicon, encompassing plant names, drug compositions, and related subjects. Furthermore, studies in the field of medical history were conducted to examine the development of these texts in Central Asian Turkish medicine. It is worth noting that Old Uyghur medical texts have largely been published and analyzed for lexical and medical history up to this day. This article presents four previously unpublished fragments on Old Uyghur medicine. The fragments, known as Mainz 353 (T II D 177-1), U 116 (T II K x 12), U 238 (T II D 177; Glas: T II D 177 g), and U 239 (T II D 177; Glas: T II D 177 X), are now part of the Berlin Turfan Collection. This paper presents the transcription, transliteration, Turkish translation, explanations, and dictionary of the aforementioned fragments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eastern Tianshan Mountain (ETS) region in Xinjiang, China, has played a crucial role as a major highway for large‐scale human migrations and technological exchanges across Eurasia throughout history. Understanding the genetic makeup of past populations holds significant importance in comprehending human mobility in this region. Here, we report genome‐wide ancient DNA for the two individuals whose origins remain uncertain, found at the Dahe ancient city site in the ETS region. Our results indicate that although both individuals display a higher genetic affinity to Asian populations, one individual shows some genetic sharing with South Asians, while the other shares more affinity with populations from Northeastern Asia. Radiocarbon dating shows that the two human remains were not deposited simultaneously. Overall, the combined genetic, physical anthropology and radiocarbon evidence strongly suggests that the ETS region, situated at the heart of the Silk Road, has been a crossroads of diverse populations coexisting between the 8th and 11th centuries. Additionally, the genetic ancestry sharing with the Bronze Age Tarim mummies suggested a long‐term residual of indigenous ancestry in Xinjiang and showed that autochthonous deep Asian ancestry had left their genetic legacy into the historical populations of Xinjiang despite a spanning of over three millennia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many autocrats govern with an in-group, whose support must be secured, and an out-group, which is subject to repression. How do autocrats exploit in-group/out-group dynamics to secure their survival? One strategy, we argue, is to broadcast out-group repression to the in-group as a signal of the regime's capacity for violence. Empirically, we focus on China, where the government represses ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Drawing on 1 million articles from six propaganda newspapers, we show that the regime broadcasts out-group repression to urban elites on each anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when 10% of Beijing residents joined anti-regime protests. To understand its effects, we conducted a survey experiment balanced on the national census during the June 2020 Tiananmen anniversary. Using a list experiment to mitigate preference falsification, we show that CCP propaganda about Uyghurs during the Tiananmen anniversary discourages protests among politically engaged urban elites because they fear repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early or proto-history of the Khazars is still far from being thoroughly investigated, in regard to the world wide popularity of the Khazar studies. There are still many vague points to be discovered, despite the great attempts especially for the last hundred years of modern Khazar studies. We may differentiate between the terms Khazar and Khazarian , the former referring to the ethnie in the core of the process making Khazaria, and thus to the proto stage, and the latter to the well-known imperial formation in Eastern Europe. The scattered but rich sources of Khazarian history are not, on the other hand, very helpful in Khazar history. The debates on the meaning of the ethnonym Khazar are also a part of the proto-history. We are bound, for the early parts of the history, with the eastern, i.e., Chinese and Turkic sources. Previously the Chinese sources were effectively used in that regard, and with the publication of the readings of the two Uyghur inscriptions Tes and Terkhin from the 750s some fifty years ago opened a new chapter for the early history of the Khazars and the etymology of their name. This paper suggests a new frame for the early history of the Khazars in Asia and Europe and slightly revises the etymology of what we may call the French school, supposing that the Khazars came from South Siberia to the Caucasus in the wave of the Suvar union, after being defeated by the Uyghurs during an internal strife likely instigated by the Türks and their overlords Juan-juans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bulletin of Ablai Khan KazUIRandWL: Series 'Philological sciences' is the property of Kazakh Ablai Khan University of International Relations & World Languages and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the lack of support for minority languages, especially Uyghur, the scarcity of Uyghur language corpora in the agricultural domain, and the lightweight nature of large language models remain prominent issues. This study proposes a method for constructing a bilingual (Uyghur and Chinese) lightweight specialized large language model for the agricultural domain. By utilizing a mixed training approach of Uyghur and Chinese, we extracted Chinese corpus text from agricultural-themed books in PDF format using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, converted the Chinese text corpus into a Uyghur corpus using a rapid translation API, and constructed a bilingual mixed vocabulary. We applied the parameterized Transformer model algorithm to train the model for the agricultural domain in both Chinese and Uyghur. Furthermore, we introduced a context detection and fail-safe mechanism for the generated text. The constructed model possesses the ability to support bilingual reasoning in Uyghur and Chinese in the agricultural domain, with higher accuracy and a smaller size that requires less hardware. It (our work) addresses issues such as the scarcity of Uyghur corpora in the agricultural domain, mixed word segmentation and word vector modeling in Uyghur for widespread agricultural languages, model lightweighting and deployment, and the fragmentation of non-relevant texts during knowledge extraction from small-scale corpora. The lightweight design of the model reduces hardware requirements, facilitating deployment in resource-constrained environments. This advancement promotes agricultural intelligence, aids in the development of specific applications and minority languages (such as agriculture and Uyghur), and contributes to rural revitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sought to delineate how English media frame Kazakhstan. We employed co-occurrence network and sentiment analysis across 130 newspaper pieces published in 2022 and 2023. The results showed that the news in the UK and Qatar often associated Kazakhstan with Russia and China, and also referred to it as a Muslim country, which until the events of January 2022 was considered a peaceful and quiet country. Among the prevailing terms, there were "Kazakhstan," "country," "Tokayev," "Russia," and "protest". Kazakhstan was represented as a country ruled by an influential leader (Tokayev), maintaining diplomatic relations with countries in Europe and Asia. Kazakhstan's image suffered due to the violent crackdown on protests during the January events and accusations of supporting Russia to circumvent sanctions, which the government denies. However, the January events awakened a wave of foreign media interest in Kazakhstan, which gradually subsided over time. The sentiment analysis unearthed that the peak of positive sentiment coincided with events such as scientific achievements, cultural successes and progressive changes, while the decline was characterized by coverage of problems within the country facing serious challenges, including worker safety issues, political suppression, economic instability and questions about the legitimacy of elections. Resultantly, a rather ambivalent portrayal emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China, the world's largest carbon emitter, has one of the most stringent provincial emissions reduction programs, incorporated into its Five-Year National Plan to reduce carbon emissions. However, the widening energy intensity gap between provinces poses a great challenge for carbon reduction. In this study, we analyze the convergence of Energy intensity (EIC), i.e., the time-dependent decrease of differences among regional energy intensity over time focusing on a data set of 30 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2015. Our goal is to identify the provinces that are responsible for the observed divergence in energy intensity and identify the factors causing that divergence in each individual case. The Theil index is used to capture inter-provincial energy inequality. We use the LMDI decomposition analysis to identify the drivers of energy inequality (energy consumption structure, energy efficiency, and industrial structure). The results suggest that reducing energy intensity in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Hebei is the key to solving China's increasing energy intensity "gap" dilemma. The factors causing the energy intensity divergence in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang are related to lagging economic growth and low energy efficiency, which impedes carbon emission reductions significantly. The factors causing the divergence of energy intensity in Hebei are rooted in its heavy industrial structure. Our findings are directly applicable to crafting regional energy policy with more targeted and practical emission reduction programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing end-to-end speech recognition methods typically employ hybrid decoders based on CTC and Transformer. However, the issue of error accumulation in these hybrid decoders hinders further improvements in accuracy. Additionally, most existing models are built upon Transformer architecture, which tends to be complex and unfriendly to small datasets. Hence, we propose a Nonlinear Regularization Decoding Method for Speech Recognition. Firstly, we introduce the nonlinear Transformer decoder, breaking away from traditional left-to-right or right-to-left decoding orders and enabling associations between any characters, mitigating the limitations of Transformer architectures on small datasets. Secondly, we propose a novel regularization attention module to optimize the attention score matrix, reducing the impact of early errors on later outputs. Finally, we introduce the tiny model to address the challenge of overly large model parameters. The experimental results indicate that our model demonstrates good performance. Compared to the baseline, our model achieves recognition improvements of 0.12%, 0.54%, 0.51%, and 1.2% on the Aishell1, Primewords, Free ST Chinese Corpus, and Common Voice 16.1 datasets of Uyghur, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although ethnic governance in the People's Republic of China is often portrayed as a matter of controlling "minority nationalities" in the country's frontier regions, the ethnic affairs bureaucracy operates in every province. The origins of "nationalities work" as a discrete domain of governance can be traced to the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to mobilize scattered Hui communities in the eastern provinces of Shandong and Hebei in the 1930s–1940s. Thanks to the initiative of Hui Communists, local Party leaders came to understand that Hui were not simply scattered but interconnected. They adapted and replicated organizational methods to exploit Hui networks for gathering intelligence, smuggling goods and penetrating enemy-controlled cities. This history offers an instructive case of adaptive governance in the revolutionary period and the role of ethnic minority cadres in policy entrepreneurship. It also underscores the importance of the Party's experience in eastern China in the study of Chinese ethnic policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islam is widely spread throughout every corner of China, with the Hui people, the largest Muslim ethnic group in China, numbering over 10 million people, serving as its main carrier. Their culture types and local features exhibit great diversity across different provinces. The ceremony of Prophet's Day or Mawlid al-Nabi in China, as one of the three fundamental festivals of the Hui people alongside Eid al-Fitur and Eid al-Qurban, appears to be more comprehensive, open, and localized. Drawing from fieldwork in three Hui communities—Xi'an in Shaanxi province, Najiaying in Yunnan province, and Hezhou in Gansu province—this paper approaches the topic from the perspective of inculturation and cultural innovation. It aims to describe the ritual processes observed in these three different Hui communities and discuss how the Hui people integrate Islam with traditional Chinese culture in their local contexts, with the intention of forming and preserving their own cultural characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper systematically presents the development process of studying ancient Chinese ethnic scripts over the past seven decades since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, including the establishment of related research institutions and academic disciplines. Firstly, it records the establishment of the Chinese Association for Ethnic Paleography, the emergence of ancient scripts of ethnic groups in China as an academic discipline, and the conduction of a comprehensive and in-depth study of ancient Chinese ethnic literature in history. Secondly, this paper outlines the establishment of the National Leading Group for Compilation and Publication Planning of Ancient Ethnic Books, the census of ancient books written in ethnic scripts, the specialized preservation and conservation of ancient ethnic books in Xizang and Xinjiang, the promotion of compiling and publishing ancient ethnic books, and how the promotion further drives the protection of and research on ancient books written in ethnic scripts. Thirdly, the paper lists many innovative outcomes in studying ancient ethnic books. Fourthly, the paper proposes to conduct further censuses and in-depth research in this area, establish a grading system for ancient ethnic books, and utilize the resource of ancient ethnic books written in ethnic scripts in a modern context to further promote the excellent cultural heritages of the Chinese nation and enhancing ethnic unity and national unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of TURKAV Institute of Public Adminsitration Journal of Social Sciences / TÜRKAV Kamu Yönetimi Enstitüsü Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi is the property of TURKAV Institute of Public Adminsitration Journal of Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Following the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal in May 2018 and the ensuing reinstalled regime of biting sanctions against Tehran, Iran’s lack of access to the international banking system left it with few options but to rely on some of its major commercial partners, China in particular, to sidestep part of those financial and banking restrictions and penalties. Arguing that China has so far left a mixed record in its financial and banking relationship with the Middle Eastern country over the past several years, therefore, the present research tries to shed some light on the nature and scope of Beijing’s anticipated role in easing some of Tehran’s financial and banking troubles in the wake of relentless American pressures. On the positive side, the Chinese provided, either directly or through third parties, a lot of financial and banking services for the Iranians. Not only the Chinese government often looked the other way when such rather furtive interactions were taking place between the two sides, it also turned China into a safe haven for a large sum of the financial reserves which Iran had already moved from Europe to the East Asian country. On the negative side, the Chinese contributed little to Iran’s de-dollarization campaign, while they disappointed gratuitously some pro-China forces among certain conservative authorities in the Islamic Republic by demanding from Tehran to join the FATF before engaging in any close banking and financial partnership involving the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land-use conflicts (LUCs) are pivotal in assessing human–land interaction, reflecting the intricate interplay between natural and anthropogenic drivers. However, existing studies often overlook nuanced non-linear responses and critical threshold recognition, focusing solely on linear correlations between isolated factors and LUCs. This study, situated in Xinjiang, China's arid and semiarid region, introduces a novel analytical framework and threshold application model for LUCs. Integrating land-use and socioeconomic data, we quantified LUCs using Fragstats, correlation analysis, and restricted cubic spline (RCS) regression. Exploring non-linear dynamics between LUCs and 14 potential drivers, including natural and anthropogenic factors, we identified critical thresholds. LUC zones were delineated using a four-quadrant method, allowing tailored mitigation strategies. Our findings reveal Xinjiang's distinct LUC spatial pattern, with intense conflicts surrounding mountainous areas and milder conflicts in basin regions, showing marked diminishment from 2000 to 2020. RCS effectively identifies LUC thresholds, indicating persisting severity pre- or post-specific thresholds. Xinjiang's LUCs are categorized into key control areas, urgent regulation zones, elastic development territories, and moderate optimization regions, each with significant regional disparities. Tailored optimization suggestions mitigate linear analysis limitations, providing a fresh perspective on land zoning optimization. This research supports comprehensive land management and planning in Xinjiang, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion is central to understanding when states enforce human rights abroad. Yet we do not have firm evidence regarding why individuals demand government action in some cases of human rights violations, but not others. I argue that economic interests and shared identity play important roles. I employ a pre-registered survey experiment in Turkey measuring the extent to which individuals support sanctioning China for its repressive policies against the minority Uyghur population. Results provide partial support for my hypotheses. The findings have implications for the question of international human rights enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tahir Hamut Izgil's recent memoir, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, brings to life a cast of poets and intellectuals who used to meet under the cover of darkness, against the backdrop of mass detentions in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang province. In his 2018 poem "Somewhere Else," Izgil, who escaped China, writes with the exile's keen longing: "Of course / I too can only stare / for a moment into the distance." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1997, the Chinese Party-state has engaged in a campaign of transnational repression against the Uyghur diaspora. This campaign has grown in severity since the 2014 declaration of the People's War on Terror and Strike Hard campaigns, which, taken together, involved a program of mass incarceration for the Turkic peoples of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). This article examines the everyday impacts of extraterritorial persecution on the Uyghur diaspora and their ability to successfully integrate into their new host societies and exercise their political and cultural agency. The article draws from nineteen in-depth interviews with Uyghurs living around the world and a dataset of over 7,000 incidents of China's targeting of Uyghurs globally since 1997. We examine how Chinese practices and the everyday effects of transnational repression vary between different regime types. We argue that Uyghurs experience both marginalization in their host country and the threat of transnational repression from China, a particularly precarious situation that we term double precarity. This double precarity is felt most acutely in more authoritarian contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental health and psychosocial support for Uyghurs living abroad need to be acknowledged as an important component of the humanitarian response. To formulate appropriate interventions for promoting mental health, a comprehensive understanding of identified problems is needed. However, several challenges - including language barriers, community perceptions of mental health, and mental health services - must be addressed. In this field report, we draw from our experiences of the Uyghur diaspora in relation to mental health to present the challenges which need to be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a survey of and in-depth interviews with journalists working in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a politically sensitive area with a strong Muslim presence, this study examines how socioeconomic attainments and subjective norms shape journalists' self-perceived status. Linking the study of journalists with social stratification theories, the data reveals that (1) The proportion of journalists who regard themselves as upper-middle and upper class is much higher than the proportion of the general public in this region and journalists in other regions in China. (2) Professional norms and the sense of achievement have more significant influence than income and education in shaping journalists' perceived social status. (3) The ethnic variation of self-perceived social status is manifested through different reference-grouping processes. As the first study on perceived social status of journalists in this region, these findings contribute to the general understanding of journalists, the government policies and the political and social landscape in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China (XUARC) harbors almost 50 ethnic groups including the Uyghur (UGR: 45.84%), Han (HAN: 40.48%), Kazakh (KZK: 6.50%), Hui (HUI: 4.51%), Kyrgyz (KGZ: 0.86%), Mongol (MGL: 0.81%), Manchu (MCH: 0.11%), and Uzbek (UZK: 0.066%), which make it one of the most colorful regions with abundant cultural and genetic diversities. In our previous study, we established allelic frequency databases for 14 autosomal short tandem repeats (STRs) for four minority populations from XUARC (MCH, KGZ, MGL, and UZK) using the AmpFlSTR® Identifiler PCR Amplification Kit. In this study, we genotyped 2,121 samples using the GoldenEye™ 20A Kit (Beijing PeopleSpot Inc., Beijing, China) amplifying 19 autosomal STR loci for four major ethnic groups (UGR, HAN, KZK, and HUI). These groups make up 97.33% of the total XUARC population. The total number of alleles for all the 19 STRs in these populations ranged from 232 (HAN) to 224 (KZK). We did not observe any departures from the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) in these populations after sequential Bonferroni correction. We did find minimal departure from linkage equilibrium (LE) for a small number of pairwise combinations of loci. The match probabilities for the different populations ranged from 1 in 1.66 × 1023 (HAN) to 6.05 × 1024 (HUI), the combined power of exclusion ranged from 0.999 999 988 (HUI) to 0.999 999 993 (UGR), and the combined power of discrimination ranged from 0.999 999 999 999 999 999 999 983 (HAN) to 0.999 999 999 999 999 999 999 997 (UGR). Genetic distances, principal component analysis (PCA), STRUCTURE analysis, and the phylogenetic tree showed that genetic affinity among studied populations is consistent with linguistic, ethnic, and geographical classifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a special "bud crown" in the murals of Gaochang Uighur, which contains a unique costume culture. The methods of iconography and history were adopted in this paper to discuss the shape feature, evolution process of the crown and the class of wearer. The results show that the Buddhist lotus is the main reference for bud crown modeling; with the prosperity of Buddhism, the petals and buds of lotus begin to evolve, with the bud crown evolving from the early "double diamond" style to "single or double bud" styles gradually; and the family member of officials wear it, not the royal class. The crown not only improves the lotus crown system, but also makes the national religion and social customs more concrete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This study aimed to evaluate recent trends in physical inactivity prevalence by sociodemographic characteristics and the province of China's residence between 2013 and 2019. Methods: The study included 4,229,616 participants 40 yr or older from 414 geographically defined localities in China during the 7-yr period. Self-reported total physical inactivity was collected to determine the standardized prevalence of physical inactivity. Logistic regression analysis was used to examine the association between physical inactivity and stroke risk, obtaining odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI). Results: Results showed that the standardized prevalence of physical inactivity increased from 22.12% (95% CI = 21.99%–22.45%) in 2013 to 28.79% (95% CI = 28.48%–29.19%) in 2019, with an absolute difference of 6.67% (95% CI = 6.15% to 7.16%) and a yearly increase rate of 5.03% (95% CI = 4.85% to 5.21%). In 2019, physical inactivity was higher in female and rural participants (female = 29.55%, rural = 29.46%) than in male and urban participants (male = 28.03%, urban = 28.26%). The prevalence of physical inactivity also varied by race/ethnic groups, with the highest prevalence observed among Uyghur (47.21%) and the lowest among Yizu (14.84%). Additionally, the prevalence of physical inactivity differed by province, ranging from 14.44% in Beijing to 50.09% in Tianjin in 2019. Multivariate analyses showed that physical inactivity was associated with a higher risk of stroke (OR = 1.17, 95% CI = 1.12–1.21, P < 0.001). Conclusions: In conclusion, our study found an overall increase in physical inactivity prevalence among Chinese adults ≥40 yr old from 2013 to 2019, with significant variation across regions, sex, ages, and race/ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various methods have been proposed to reconstruct admixture histories by analyzing the length of ancestral chromosomal tracts, such as estimating the admixture time and number of admixture events. However, available methods do not explicitly consider the complex admixture structure, which characterizes the joining and mixing patterns of different ancestral populations during the admixture process, and instead assume a simplified one-by-one sequential admixture model. In this study, we proposed a novel approach that considers the non-sequential admixture structure to reconstruct admixture histories. Specifically, we introduced a hierarchical admixture model that incorporated four ancestral populations and developed a new method, called HierarchyMix , which uses the length of ancestral tracts and the number of ancestry switches along genomes to reconstruct the four-way admixture history. By automatically selecting the optimal admixture model using the Bayesian information criterion principles, HierarchyMix effectively estimates the corresponding admixture parameters. Simulation studies confirmed the effectiveness and robustness of HierarchyMix. We also applied HierarchyMix to Uyghurs and Kazakhs, enabling us to reconstruct the admixture histories of Central Asians. Our results highlight the importance of considering complex admixture structures and demonstrate that HierarchyMix is a useful tool for analyzing complex admixture events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rising China has upended the academia in many fronts. One of the challenges has been the reinvented ideal of Tianxia All-Under-Heaven, which first appeared in the eighth century BCE and has been offered by China as the alternative to the Westphalia system of nation-states on the basis that it will bring peace and harmony to the war-ridden international world. Nevertheless, ongoing international controversies regarding the "forced Sinicization" of the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, and the Mongols under its rule has given rise to the questions of the nature of both Tianxia and Sinicization. Analyzing a famous Vietnamese literary trope of the "principal graduates of the two kingdoms" that emerged no later than the 15th century, this essay proposes a concept of civilization envy to discuss the nuances of Sinicization. Civilization envy is a competitive mentality that desires to prove one's civilizational parity with or even superiority over China, the center of Tianxia. This mentality of civilization envy continues to modern era, and the "principal graduates of the two kingdoms" have been promoted to national heroes to show that Vietnam is a "Domain of Literature." The evolution of the trope shows that China and Vietnam had different understanding of civilizing missions. For China, it involved transforming mores and customs of the peoples under its direct control. For Vietnam, when dealing with China, it involved acquiring literary competence, especially the skills in mastering Sinitic script and poetry composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research on scene text recognition primarily focuses on languages with abundant linguistic resources, such as English and Chinese. In contrast, there is relatively limited research dedicated to low-resource languages. Advanced methods for scene text recognition often employ Transformer-based architectures. However, the performance of Transformer architectures is suboptimal when dealing with low-resource datasets. This paper proposes a Collaborative Encoding Method for Scene Text Recognition in the low-resource Uyghur language. The encoding framework comprises three main modules: the Filter module, the Dual-Branch Feature Extraction module, and the Dynamic Fusion module. The Filter module, consisting of a series of upsampling and downsampling operations, performs coarse-grained filtering on input images to reduce the impact of scene noise on the model, thereby obtaining more accurate feature information. The Dual-Branch Feature Extraction module adopts a parallel structure combining Transformer encoding and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) encoding to capture local and global information. The Dynamic Fusion module employs an attention mechanism to dynamically merge the feature information obtained from the Transformer and CNN branches. To address the scarcity of real data for natural scene Uyghur text recognition, this paper conducted two rounds of data augmentation on a dataset of 7267 real images, resulting in 254,345 and 3,052,140 scene images, respectively. This process partially mitigated the issue of insufficient Uyghur language data, making low-resource scene text recognition research feasible. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed collaborative encoding approach achieves outstanding performance. Compared to baseline methods, our collaborative encoding approach improves accuracy by 14.1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While modern family-related ideas and behaviors have become more widely accepted in contemporary China, Chinese Muslim minorities continue to hold on to traditional religious practices. Surprisingly, data from our survey conducted in Gansu province in China's northwestern borderlands reveal that Muslims of the Hui and Dongxiang ethnicities reported much higher rates of cohabitation experience than the secular majority Han. Based on follow-up qualitative interviews, we found the answer to lie in the interplay between the highly interventionist Chinese state and the robust cultural resilience of local Islamic communities. While the state maintains a high minimum legal age of marriage, the early marriage norm remains strong in Chinese Muslim communities, where religion constitutes an alternative and often more powerful source of legitimacy--at least in the private sphere of life. Using the 2000 census data, we further show that women in almost all 10 Muslim ethnic groups have higher percentages of underage births and premarital births than Han women, both nationally and in the northwest where most Chinese Muslims live. As the once-outlawed behavior of cohabitation became more socially acceptable during the reform and opening-up era, young Muslim Chinese often found themselves in "arranged cohabitations" as de facto marriages formed at younger-than-legal ages. In doing so, Chinese Muslim communities have reinvented the meaning of cohabitation. Rather than liberal intimate relationship based on individual autonomy, cohabitation has served as a coping strategy by which Islamic patriarchs circumvent the Chinese state's aggressive regulations aimed at "modernizing" the Muslim family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on archival materials from late Qing Turpan Prefecture to explore Qing colonialism within the context of mass vaccination efforts in Xinjiang from 1880 to 1911. Following the reconquest of the region in 1877, Xiang Army leaders established official vaccination bureaus across Xinjiang—a colonial administration that encompassed all of East Turkestan—to combat smallpox outbreaks within Musulman (Uyghur) communities and the Qing army garrison. The vaccination bureau in Turpan, although led by Han vaccinators from Inner China, depended heavily on the labor of Musulman graduates from the region's assimilationist Confucian schools. The Turpan Vaccination Bureau reinforced the Xiang Army's broader project of colonial assimilation by training Musulman apprentices in various Chinese medical texts and using them to disseminate these ideas across the prefecture through the medium of vaccination. However, Turpan's Musulmans possessed their own sophisticated body of knowledge regarding epidemics and healing and routinely resisted the imposition of normative Qing/Chinese medical behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity in sports forms a key stage in which globalization is both constituted and resisted and where various contentions and nuanced dynamics remain to be unpacked. In this paper, we examined the media's ability, from China and the US separately, to construct and deconstruct the national identity of a naturalized athlete, Eileen Gu (Gu Ailing), an American-born Chinese athlete, during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games. By combining frame analysis with critical discourse analysis (CDA), salient differences were found in terms of the media frames and discourses used by China and the US in their adoption and interpretations of "sports role", "ethnic role", "social role", and "entertainment role". Furthermore, we pointed out that the national media from both countries simultaneously attempt to legitimize their stance on Gu's national identity and stress the maximization of each nation's own interest. The findings shed light on our existing understanding of the complex identity of naturalized athletes in the context of globalization and argue that media discourses, as constructed by the two countries, remain deeply rooted in an overdetermined East-West binary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Several studies indicated that chronic periodontitis (CP) and its subgingival bacteria correlated with IgA nephropathy (IgAN). Previous research has shown that prevalence of IgAN in chronic periodontitis patients is significantly higher than that in non CP patients in Xinjiang especially in ethnic Uyghur. The aim of this study is to investigate the distribution of plaque bacterial microbes in CP and IgAN patients and to find correlation between CP and IgAN. Methods: All of the subgingival plaque samples including 7 healthy controls (N group), 8 CP patients, 14 IgAN patients, and 14 CP with IgAN patients were obtained from ethnic Uyghur people. To investigate the distribution of plaque microbe in Uyghur CP and IgAN patients, the 16s rRNA sequencing and comparative analysis of subgingival bacteria were performed. Results: There were no statistically differences in the community richness estimator (Chao) and the diversity estimator (Shannon index) among four groups. The abundance of Burkholderiales (order), Ottowia (genus) in the plaque microbes were significantly higher in CP with IgAN patients than CP patients. The abundance of Eubacterium (genus) was significantly higher in CP with IgAN patients than IgAN patients. The abundance of Veillonella (genus) was significantly higher while Streptococcus (genus), Tannerella (genus) were significantly lower in CP patients than healthy volunteers. Conclusions: The composition and abundance of subgingival plaque microbes in Uyghur CP and IgAN patients were significantly different at several levels. Which suggested that abundance of subgingival bacteria is correlated to CP and IgAN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores whether minority group members with multicultural experiences tend to process information locally. To Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, some Chinese Uyghur college students were exposed to multicultural priming (Han-Uyghur culture) and some to mono-cultural priming (Uyghur culture only). The results of the experiment indicated that the multicultural priming group responded more quickly to local letters than mono-cultural priming group (Experiment 1) and were inclined to find out differences between objects (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 excluded the possibility that the results of experiments 1 and 2 were caused by the minority group's inherent tendency to process information locally. These findings indicate that minority group members with multicultural experiences tend to process information locally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of rural origin on higher education access among one ethnic group, the Uyghur, a Muslim minority group who reside mostly in China's northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Uyghur university students, graduates, and the faculty who teach them. Since the time of the research, changes in China and in XUAR have impacted education policies, many of which had been developed to provide ethnic minorities in China with better access to higher education. This article discusses some of these policy changes to illustrate that the ways in which policy issues are framed also defines what constitutes the "problem" and thus also constrains the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how the legendary general Yue Fei (1103–1142) and his legacy have been perceived and appropriated in Chinese history. Twentieth-century historians approached Yue's career by highlighting the tension between his dedication to the nation (baoguo) and his personal loyalty (jinzhong) to Emperor Gaozong (1107–1187) of the Song. I argue that for Yue Fei himself and those who wrote about him in late imperial China, Yue's guo , from which he derived his political identity and toward which he devoted his service, meant first and foremost the Song dynastic state. The pushing and pulling of multivalent themes of loyalty and state service in the "historic assessment" of Yue Fei since the turn of the twentieth century speak to the complexities embedded in different Chinese governments' navigation of ethnic and class politics in their pursuit of a new national identity for China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical Turkic texts, starting from Orkhon Turkic and progressing on the basis of Eastern and Western Turkic until the 20th century, contain daily vocabulary on many conceptual areas, especially religious teachings. Turkic languages developed as a result of cultural and religious changes and have been represented for centuries by literatures under the influence of Manichaeism, Buddhism and Islam. The present study consists of evaluations of the verb alar- and its derivatives, which mean “to dazzle, to blush, to catch leprosy” in Eastern and Western Turkic. The verb alar-, which was first witnessed in Old Uyghur Turkic, is a cognitive verb that has taken place in the minds and literary languages of the people who speak the Turkic language from the 10th century to the present day. Alar- is a word related to the conceptual field of “seeing/looking” and has been seen in new words during historical periods by taking various morphemes in line with the derivational power of the Turkic language. In this respect, the study first traces alar- and its derivatives in historical texts, processes examples of the relevant phrase in terms of language, and reveals the appearance of the verb alar- and its derivatives on the basis of both etymology and linguistics. In addition, the study show the verb alar- to have experienced contamination in both Eastern and Western Turkic due to the influence of the verb alart-, and instead of having two different meanings in a single article, it became represented by homophonic structures. Here the study attempts to determine the boundaries of the conceptual area of the verb alar- by taking into account the meanings of the word during both historical and modern periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines why 23 Muslim-majority countries supported China at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UN/HRC) in 2019, despite allegations of human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Using a fuzzy-set qualitative-comparative analysis (fsQCA), we compared the factors that led Muslim-majority and non-Muslim countries to support China. Our analysis found that Political Regime Affinity (PRA) was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for Muslim-majority countries to support China, while China's Foreign Aid (ODA) was a necessary but not sufficient condition for non-Muslim countries. These findings suggest that ideological factors, related to the autocratic political regime (PRA), played a significant role in Muslim-majority countries' decision to support China in the UN/HRC in 2019. However, it is important to note that other factors may have also been involved. These findings have important implications for understanding the complexities of international relations and the factors that shape states behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]