World News

Erasing a culture? I feel like there's a word for that.

Had to make sure this wasn’t posted on lemmy.ml before commenting

Think that says enough.

China comments: "nuh-uh, you are rubber I am glue"

China is making the wrong decision:

“These name changes appear part of Chinese government efforts to erase the cultural and religious expressions of Uyghurs.”

Like fascist Italy with South Tyrol... Can we please stop repeating fascist things?

In 2022 the Karakax County village of Dutar – named for a Uyghur traditional instrument – was renamed Red Flag village.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with the $600 billion water megaproject that IIRC is supposed to route the Red Flag river through that village...

Names come with utility and meaning. If a village has a new utility, it typically takes a new name (New Amsterdam -> New York, Ville-Marie -> Montreal). Guardian at its finest.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Hundreds of Uyghur villages and towns have been renamed by Chinese authorities to remove religious or cultural references, with many replaced by names reflecting Communist party ideology, a report has found.

“This is part of the broader efforts by the Chinese government to conflate Islam with terrorism,” said Elaine Pearson, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.

“The names of their villages serve not only as historical records but also embody the community’s ties, distinct town culture, and values.

Since 2017 it has also issued official Chinese names for locations in Arunachal Pradesh, the disputed Himalayan region where China claims territory.

Pearson said: “Part of the reason we know this is happening is that in one case a woman released from a re-education facility tried to get a bus ticket home but found her village didn’t exist any more.”

Since launching its “strike hard” campaign against Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in 2014 in the name of counter-terrorism, the Chinese government has arbitrarily detained millions of people, in re-education camps and jails, criminalising religious acts such as growing beards or reading the Qur’an.

The original article contains 774 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This happens on my country all the time of late . I can't even pronounce the letters in the new name of the hospital where I was born.

They're gonna name the town the same name, so I wonder whether I'll get a passport with a home town I can't say or spell, or a passport with a home town that no longer exists. Either way, I'm getting strip-searched .

sigh

You know what the biggest cities in Xinjiang are? Urumqi, Korla, Aksu, Karamay. Those are some Chinese sounding names /s

Note that some towns have been switched to a Mandarin standard. This is especially true when Han populations dominate a particular city (e.g., Shihezi, set up by a Chinese general in 1951), or when a city relies on tourism from other provinces (e.g., Beitun, a ski towm). But... That's not what the article is discussing, really. The article is much more interested in Romanization of these names.

Officially, the Uyghur name shares equal right as the Chinese one, however, sometimes the Uyghur Romanization is a pain in the ass to pronounce while the Chinese one is far easier (Ürümqi vs. Wulumuqi). This is as true in Xizang as it is in Xinjiang (the name བོད་ is still used to refer to Xizang by official Chinese standards, but that doesn't phonetically map to Tibet). Of course, people are forgetting that English is neither the first nor second most common language in Xinjiang... In fact, given the number of ethnic minorities I doubt it's even on the list. The English name is selected for convenience rather than anything else because nobody except Western tourists will ever use it.

There's an interesting debate happening today in Canada as to whether this Romanization makes sense: while First Nations names like Squamish and Tsawwassen have been Romanized and are used colloquially, First Nations groups oppose Romanization because of its association with colonialism and instead would prefer names like "šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl'e7énḵ". The question is, which do you keep as the English public-facing name?

Of course, this is coming from the same The Guardian that reported that "the last major mosque in China lost its domes and minarets" when the Afaq Khoja and Id Kah exist and are widely known as holy sites in Uyghur Islam. The Guardian's reporting on China has consistently been sloppy because they don't have a correspondent in Xinjiang and their editorial teams don't speak Chinese or Uyghur.