While I am tarred by the brush of studying Han Chinese cultures—themselves long accustomed to state brutality—the traditions of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang also feature in several of my posts, collected under this tag. Now painfully aware that my review of the film Ashiq: the last troubadour already needs revisiting in the light of the recent cultural genocide in Xinjiang—reminiscent of Stalin’s nationalist purges yet much more efficiently hi-tech and far-reaching—I’ve just done a distressing update to that post, with some further links.

Yet again this illustrates the vacuous, duplicitous claims of heritage pundits (note this post), whose reified presentations (for the Han Chinese too, if less fragrantly destructive) serve mainly to consolidate the ideological agenda of the modern state. But such polite, subtle manipulations are now rendered brutally obsolete.

Other posts under the Uyghur theme should also be read with this picture in mind.