China's Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State - Softcover

Holdstock, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784531405 ISBN 13: 9781784531409

Publisher: I.B. Tauris, 2015

Synopsis

One of the few Western commentators to have lived in the region, journalist Nick Holdstock travels into the heart of the province reveals the Uyghur story as one of repression and hardship. With Islamic terrorism in China likely to increase over the next decade, how the Party responds will have global repercussions. China's Forgotten People explains why terrorism is on the rise in the world's most powerful one-party state, and what this means for the way we think about China.

About this title

About the Author:

Nick Holdstock is a journalist and writer. He has written on Xinjiang for the London Review of Books and his writing can also be found in Vice, the LA Review of Books, n+1, the Independent, the Dublin Review, the Edinburgh Review, Dissent and Salon.com amongst others. He has worked with Isabel Hilton at China Dialogue - part of the Guardian Environment Network. His first novel, The Casualties, is forthcoming from Macmillan US. His first book, The Tree That Bleeds, was about the year he spent living in Xinjiang.

Review:

‘As someone who has extensively travelled in the region for 15 years, Holdstock’s book gives us a rare glimpse into the land and its people, and how the policies of the Chinese state have led to an extreme sense of alienation among the Uighurs, with some of them turning to radical steps and violence.’ (Gulf News)

‘China’s repressive policy towards its Islamic fringe has badly backfired - there was no Islamic extremism in China until Beijing inadvertently created it, according to Nick Holdstock’s measured history of the Uighurs of Xinjiang.' (The New Statesman)

'In China’s Forgotten People, the Edinburgh-based writer Nick Holdstock sets out to ‘reveal truth from facts’ in Xinjiang, to appropriate one of the Communist Party’s pet phrases. Holdstock’s central contention is that there is little proof of either organised Islamic terrorism or widespread separatist agitation in Xinjiang, where he used to live. Instead, the spiralling violence witnessed over the past few years is itself a reaction to repressive government policies put in place to control ‘terrorism’ ― a self-fulfilling prophecy that is, tragically, now inciting the real thing...He is admirably even-handed... This meticulously researched book is anything but a crude exercise in China-bashing.' (Tom Miller, Author of China’s Urban Billion writing in The New Statesman)

‘Lucid and up-to-date...[Nick Holdstock] makes the case for a deeper understanding of Xinjiang...At the moment, a combination of official defensiveness in China and politicisation of agendas outside means that dialogue on this crucial issue barely exists. It is to be hoped that Nick Holdstock’s book and others like it will stimulate precisely this sort of dialogue. Without it, a real, and lasting, tragedy is threatened: for the people of Xinjiang and of China, but also those of the region and the wider world.’ (Kerry Brown, OpenDemocracy)

‘Extraordinarily insightful and informative...Holdstock is a journalist who has travelled and lived in Xinjiang on and off since 2001. His new book will make anyone who writes about the region think more deeply’

(Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review 2015-11-30)

About this edition

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1784531405
• ISBN 13: 9781784531409
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288