The traumas of Chinese society over the last seventy-five years, and ongoing censorship, have put into ever greater focus the necessity of alternatives to official propaganda (see Sparks, and China Unofficial Archives). The tribulations of the Han Chinese under Maoism—and since—are an essential theme, extensively covered on this site (e.g. China: commemorating trauma, Cultural revolutions, Memory, music, society, and even The qin zither under Maoism).

Uyghur anthropologist Rahilä Dawut, “disappeared” since 2017.

But we also need to pay constant attention to the plight of the Tibetans and Uyghurs (both within the PRC and in exile), as well as the perspective from the independent island of Taiwan—a trio for which I’ve just alighted on the handy acronym TUT, sounding like an absurdly genteel and futile English rebuke to CCP excesses.

Roundups—part of my attempts to educate myself:

• Uyghur culture: over a dozen posts on shrine festivals, Sufi groups, muqam, and so on, featuring the research of Rahilä Dawut, Rachel Harris, Mukaddas Mijit, Musapir, Darren Byler and others
• Tibet—for Amdo, Kham, TAR, and Dharamsala: over thirty posts on the ravages of Maoism, biography, expressive culture, ritual, opera, and so on, reviewing the work of Jamyang Norbu, Robbie Barnett, Tsering Woeser, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy and others.

For Taiwan, see

• Music–ritual cultures of Taiwan, a survey,
• alongside coverage of Fujian province just across the strait, including
  • Fujian: instrumental groups as a gateway to the study of ritual
  • Fujian, 1961 and onwards
  • Hokkien culture: nanyin
  • Ken Dean: dicovering Fujian ritual life in the early reform era
  • Kristofer Schipper
• Daoist ritual in north Taiwan
• The resilience of tradition
• The Queen Mother of the West
• China has always been part of…
• More muzak: ice-cream vans and garbage trucks.

Taiwan Daoist ritual:
Left, priests of the Hsien-miao altar, Taipei
Right, Tainan priest Chen Rongsheng (1927–2014, see note here).

See also A roundup of roundups!