Xinjiang studies

Округ Алтай находится в северной части Синьцзян-Уйгурского
автономного района Китайской Народной Республики. Рус-
ские старообрядцы из Российской империи и Советского Союза
жили в этом округе в деревнях вокруг озера Канас с середины
XIX в. до 1960-х гг. Большинство из них являлись старообрядца-
ми часовенного и спасовского согласий1.
Богатый природными ресурсами, округ Алтай привлекал
внимание Советского Союза, США, Англии, Японии и ряда дру-
гих стран. Вместе с тем округ был постоянным полем сражения
коренных этносов за национальную независимость.
Русские казаки-белоэмигранты играли важную роль в воен-
ном противостоянии в Синьцзяне в первой половине ХХ в. Об их
мобилизации опубликовано много исследований. История же во-
енной мобилизации русских старообрядцев в Синьцзяне изучена
крайне мало, несмотря на то что старообрядцы этого округа тоже
принимали участие в военных действиях в 1933 и 1940-х гг.
Цель статьи – опираясь на изученную литературу и новые
интервью со старообрядцами, показать, как Китайская Республика
(правительство Гоминьдана), Восточно-Туркестанская Республика,
Советский Союз, Соединенные Штаты Америки и
Китайская Народная Республика мобилизовали русских старо-
обрядцев и как они участвовали в войнах в округе Алтай в 1933
и 1940-х гг.

Before the founding of the People’s Republic
of China, Chinese administrations in different
periods had varying approaches and policies
concerning their own ethnic affairs. After 1949
the Chinese Communist Party as well had to deal
with the question of how to transform peoples
and lands of the heterogeneous Qing Empire
into a unified nation state. Ethnic minorities
are scattered across the country but they have
traditionally inhabited in strategically important
border areas which are extremelyrich in natural
resources. Historically relations between
Han majority and minorities have rarely been
easy

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is considered based on its ethnocultural, religious, and historical diversity. In its national security documents, known as the White Paper, China associates the region with extremism, separatism, and terrorism; and thus recognizes the Uyghurs as a threat. At the crossroads of OBOR’s (One Belt One Road) three separate land corridors, Xinjiang, which has a crucial place in Beijing’s hegemony-building process, is a region regarded critical from a geopolitical and geo-economics perspective. In this context, Beijing securitizes the Uyghurs, with whom China claims that its own values, political goals, and perception of the future are not compatible, from the “threat” point of view. This approach can also be interpreted through the conceptual elements envisaged by the Copenhagen School, such as immigration waves, horizontal and vertical competition, and depopulation.

... in the region now known as Xinjiang, the ethnonym 'Uyghur'—formerly associated with the ... over-arching regional identity based on social, cultural and religious factors common to ... their religious awareness 'does not necessarily translate into radical, political behaviour'.22 Rather ...

(222 plates of illustrations will be in special file. The pages' numeration is special for each big chapter. For real book numeration move the cursor to the right border of each pages / 222 таблицы иллюстраций будут в специальном файле. Нумерация по техническим причинам – отдельная для каждого большого раздела. Подлинную нумерацию стрнице в книге можно выяснить, подведя курсор к правой границе каждой страницы).
ABSTRACT:
In this book, you will find a complex research of the clothes of Iranian-speaking peoples beginning from their appearance in the world politics and in the written sources of the 7th–6th cc. BC and up to the Islamization of Iran and Transoxiana in the 7th–8th cc. AD. The accessories of the costume (except belts), the military costume, the rulers’ crowns and the costume materials themselves are not the subject matter of the text; but the hairstyle and sometimes tattoos are being under consideration. The first three chapters are devoted to analysis of the main periods of pre-Islamic history of the Iranian world (the time bounds being different for different regions): [1] the Achaemenid-Scythian time (the 7th–6th cc. BC — 4th–3rd cc. BC, for Transoxiana—up to the mid. of the 2nd cc. BC); [2] the Parthian-Sarmatian time (the 4th/3rd cc. BC — the 3rd/4th cc. AD); [3] the Sassanid and Early Medieval time (the 3/4th — the 7/8th cc. AD). The sections of these chapters deal with materials on the 13 peoples: (1) the Persians of the Achaemenian time; (2) the Early Scythians; (3) the Scythians of the “classic” period (the 5th–4th cc. BC); (4) the “Pazyrykians” of the Altai; (5) the Chorasmians (for all the 3 periods); (6) the Parnes—Parthians of Iran; (7) the Sarmatians and Early Alans; (8) the Yuech-chihs / Kushans of Bactria; (9) the Sogdians (the 2nd and 3rd periods); (10) the Indo-Scythians of Gandhara; 11) the Persians of the Sassanid time; (12) the Khotano-Sakas of Southern Xinjiang (the 2nd and 3rd periods); (13) the Tokharistanians (with other ethnic elements). As far as each of the above-mentioned peoples is concerned the above-stated ideas are analyzed and new materials (including unpublished ones) are taken into account, the details of many depictions are defined and the data on peoples are generalized for the first time. First of all, we have studied the costume of these 13 peoples, which gives the most abundant and many-sided information on the costume as clothes in real life are a mass phenomenon and can be studied productively and correctly only in big series (in case of single depictions rare costume elements and the looks of gods of foreign origin are mistakenly taken for typical ones).
The main tasks of the book are: 1. The reconstruction of the look of the ethnic clothing complex for each of the above-mentioned peoples: the silhouette, the cut (the information about the latter is limited) and the decorative prin-ciples, the last task being the most labour-intensive. The results allow of a reliable attribution of many artifacts from museums and private collections. 2. Eliciting the aesthetical ideal of different ethnic groups reflected in the costume; the analysis of the depictions of supposed representatives of a certain people in the art of other countries for defining the degree of the authenticity in the costume depiction and its representativeness for this ethnic group. 3. The comparative analysis of the costume of each separately taken synchronous people in each of the three main historical epochs; the analysis of the costume of each ethnic group in different periods for defining the character of the costume evolution and heredity. 4. The retrospective eliciting of the look of the original costume of the most ancient Iranians and the “costume” traces of the Iranian penetration to the west of Iran. 5. Eliciting the type of the costume contacts of ancient Iranian-speaking peoples and the difference in their importance. 6. The analysis of the summarized data on the least studied significant functions of the costume aiming at eliciting the specificity of the Iranian world and some of its peoples.
We suggest a complex approach including following elements: (1) dealing with all kinds of sources alongside ob-serving the most possible scope of facts on each studied people (in case of a technical impossibility, the representative statistic excerpts are studied); (2) the proper selection of the costume décor remnants from burials under analysis (only the accounts and publications of high quality are used) excluding significantly fragmented and stylized depictions and, for some regions, images of gods; (3) the analysis of the material according to the linguistic and ethnic principles—not a regional one (which is not typical for modern research on the costume history); (4) considering all the main costume attributes of the ethnic group as a single costume complex that reflects the specificity of the people; 5) the description of the costume of each ethnic group according to the common program in chapters 1–3; (6) considering ethnic complexes against the background of the synchronous neighbouring ones and both earlier and later ones up to their successors in the 19th–20th cc. AD (otherwise the rightfulness of most conclusions is difficult to guarantee); (7) the analysis of costume evolution of separate ethnic groups under the influence of different factors; (8) compiling a special summary tables on the costume of each people (each drawing in them not being an exact copy of a definite depiction, but given in the most appropriate foreshortening without unnecessary details interfering with perception).
MORE INFORMATION: 2nd Internet ed., Moscow: X-lab, 2011: http://www.narodko.ru/article/yatsenko/eurazia/ .

CONTENTS:
PREFACE 5
CHAPTER 1. The Achaemenian-Scythian time (7th/6th cc. — 4th/3rd cc. BC) 29
1.1. The Persians 29
1.2. The European Scythians 47
1.3. The Pazyryk culture of the Altai Mountains 83
1.4. The Khorasmians 102
The main conclusions 106
CHAPTER 2. The Parthian-Sarmatian time (3rd cc. BC — 3rd/4th cc. AD) 112
2.1. Parthian Iran 113
2.2. The Sarmatians, the Early Alans and the “Late Scythians” 131
2.3. The Yuech-chihs/Kushans 170
2.4. The Khorasmians 187
2.5. The Indo-Scythians 192
2.6. The Sogdians 197
2.7. The Khotano-Sakas 201
The main conclusions 207
CHAPTER 3. The Sasanian and Early Medieval (Pre-Islamic) time (3rd/4th–7th/8th cc. AD) 212
3.1. Sasanian Iran 213
3.2. The Sogdians 231
3.3. Tokharistan and the neighboring regions to the South 247
3.4. The Khorasmians 262
3.4. The Khotano-Sakas 266
The main conclusions 274
CHAPTER 4. The mechanisms of the costume contacts and
the ways of evolution of the costume of ancient Iranians.
The symbolism of costume 279
4.1. The mechanisms of the costume contacts 280
4.2. The ways of evolution of the costume of various peoples 314
4.3. The sign functions of the costume 322
The main conclusions 362
CONCLUSION 364
APPENDIX. The suggestions on the methods of fixation and description of the costume relics
in burial complexes 367
Glossary 370
BIBLIOGRAPHY 371
Abbreviations 416
List of Iluustrations (in English)          418
List of illustrations (in Russian) 423
Illustrations 435-657
Summary                    658
Contents                      663

At the easternmost edge of the Iranic world, settled rather than saddled Scythians ran the kingdom of Khotan as Iranian-speaking Buddhists who traded and tussled with their T’ang and Tibetan neighbours. Straddling the Sino-Tibetan and Irano-Indic oecumenes, these Saka dynasts of the southern ‘Silk Road’ were conquered and converted by the Turkification and Islamisation of the Tarim Basin. Their effect, both historical and artistic, merits consideration in Scythian studies for their own achievements. This survey is based on the existing corpora of administrative and religious texts in Khotanese, an amply documented Middle Iranian language, which enables the tracing of the trajectory of these Scythian legatees until the end of antiquity.

This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group before the construction of the “Uyghur” identity. In the absence of a national history, separate histories of local heroes were linked together through custom anthology production and networked travel to shrines, yielding a modular historical tradition that accommodated local interests in regional narratives. Central to the operation of this system were community authorship in the manuscript tradition, the creation of a new genre for local history, and the publicly recorded circulation of pilgrims who heard performances of historical texts. This constellation of phenomena underpinned an alternative type of imagined community: a reasonably homogeneous, regional, writing-facilitated identity system flourishing in a nonmodern context.

Since 2018 criticism of China’s human rights record has intensified and China’s government has been challenged in the international court of public opinion with respect to its mass detention of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. After initial denial of the very existence of ‘re-education camps’, China’s leadership changed tack and admitted it had built ‘vocational education and training centers’ (‘VET centers’) for them. The purpose of these was said to be ‘de-radicalization’ of those suspected of being influenced by ‘extremists thinking’ and training them in Chinese language, legal knowledge (including patriotism) and occupational skills. This was said to foster the economic development of the region while eradicating the socio-cultural basis for ‘[ethnonational] separatism, [religious] extremism and terrorism’. Yet among Western observers these official claims were widely dismissed as a thin veneer of forced political indoctrination and even ‘cultural genocide’ (Roberts 2020). Compounded by other pertinent topics, such as Sino-U.S. frictions, protests in Hong Kong, COVID-19 etc., it is fair to say that the Chinese government faces a veritable crisis of its international image (Jacob 2020; Silver, Devlin & Huang 2020; UHRP 2020: 12).
In response to this crisis, the government has taken a range of countermeasures to mitigate the fallout, manage its image and, if possible, create a counternarrative that casts China in a more positive light. One of the forums in which this contestation over meaning-making has played out most directly and prominently is the video-sharing platform YouTube. Though blocking it for domestic users, China’s government is, ironically, making highly active use of this platform to advance its messages globally. This paper focusses on the role played by Chinese state media – exemplified by China Global Television Network (CGTN) and New China TV (Xinhua) – in this contest. Our hypothesis is that China has stepped up its game in three main ways: First, it has intensified the propagation of its messages in quantitative terms to counter the international image crisis created by Xinjiang-related criticism. Second, the content of its messaging has become more varied as it has intentionally tried to link Xinjiang policies with international terrorism, but at the same time, also use it for a more general critique of ‘Western double standards’ and promotion of its own perspectives on human rights. Third, and most intriguingly, it has used innovative and creative ways of reporting to generate higher impact and more trustworthiness. CGTN/CCTV has long copied the style of CNN, BBC, Al-Jazeera and other international news networks to stake out its own ground in terms of content. But more recently, China’s media products have become even more variegated, trying to make full use of social media to disseminate its messages.
Our primary data consists of all CGTN and Xinhua videos relating to Xinjiang posted on YouTube from the start of 2018 through September 2020.  In total, the sample contains more than six hundred files of varying length. Inspired by Vergani and Zuev (2011), we use a mixed-methods approach for analysis. First, we present a quantitative overview based on content analysis to outline the general trends of Chinese state media strategies on Xinjiang as found on YouTube. Second, we employ discourse analysis (Keller 2011) for a more in-depth examination outlining the main features of the discursive strategy adopted by Chinese state media in this case. Thus, our study contributes to an understanding of China’s crisis management – which can be compared to other crises such as the on-going COVID-19 pandemic. It also sheds light on China’s participation in media globalization more generally as well as on the specific representations and constructions of China’s Xinjiang policies and issues. It shows how the channels adopt Western (primarily American) media formats and discourses to frame their policy agenda in terms familiar to the target audience, while bandwagoning on the current fragmentation and politicization of news media in an era in which the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ have  become everyday accusations. But first, we discuss the internationalization of China’s state media influence more broadly.

This article tracks the evolution of contemporary violent resistance to the Chinese state in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). It does so by reviewing and analyzing the nature of the main episodes of violence reported in the region since the  beginning of the Chinese 'reform and opening up'  period  (1978-2012). It finds that violent resistance, not necessarily resulting from ideological or separatist agendas, has been present in Xinjiang in the form of low-scale insurgency, ethnic riots, and terrorism. The article forecasts that violence will remain a regional issue in the future considering the long-standing frictions with the Uyghur ethnic minority and the crackdown 'strike, hard' (yanda) campaigns of the Chinese government.

新疆史前考古一直是西方学术界关注的重点#与中国和俄罗斯采用的考古学理论不同,现代 西方考古学理论形成于 1# 世纪 -# 年代,即所谓的 !新考古学",其流行范围包括欧洲$美国$ 加拿大和澳大利亚#当前西方学者对中亚$新疆史前考古研究方兴未艾,因此,笔者旨在回顾近 1/ 年来西方学者的研究成果,并在此基础上对西方相关领域的高校和科研机构进行介绍,以期 促成不同文化背景下的学术交流与互动,为未来的合作研究提供更多便利#
苏联解体和中国改革开放之前,除有限的俄文和中文材料外,西方学者对于中亚和新疆的考 古发掘工作知之甚少#由于研究材料的缺乏,西方学者在研究世界史前史时,常将中亚与新疆排 除在外#1# 世纪 "# 年代以来,这一情况开始改变#有关欧亚草原的考古发掘与研究资料逐渐开 始向西方开放,这一切也有利于东西方之间展开更好的合作研究#克服语言障碍使得获取信息变 得更为容易,但有关考古学理论与方法上的分歧却是在短时间内无法消除的#
事实上,这种理论和方法上的思想碰撞不但引起了学者间的激烈辩论,同时也有助于我们更 全面地诠释欧亚史前史#在这一方面,联合研究项目起到了重要作用: 在石器时代考古方面,中 国$俄罗斯与西方团队的合作研究早已轻车熟路,这也为双方共同研究新问题和创造新理论奠定 了良好基础

Во втором томе многотомного издания «Восточный Туркестан и Монголия. История изучения в конце XIX – первой трети XX  веков» представлены материалы архивных собраний Российской академии наук (Санкт-Петербургский филиал Архива РАН, «Архив востоковедов» Института восточных рукописей РАН), относящиеся к истории географического и археологического исследования этих регионов: «Отчет по объезду округа консульства в Кашгаре, совершенного секретарем консульства Михаилом Ивановичем Лавровым (1902–1906)», предварившее отправку российских археологических экспедиций в Восточный Туркестан, фотоархив экспедиции Д.А. Клеменца 1898 г., записные книжки и дневники экспедиций М.М. Березовского за 1907, С.М. Дудина за 1909 и С.Ф. Ольденбурга за 1909–1910 гг., лекции С.Ф. Ольденбурга, посвященные истории российских научных экспедиций и ранее не издававшаяся на русском языке работа В.В. Бартольда «Историческое значение древнетюркских надписей».

В первом томе многотомного издания «Восточный Туркестан и Монголия. История изучения в конце XIX – первой трети XX  веков в документах из архивов Российской академии наук и “Турфанского собрания”» представлены эпистолярные материалы архивных собраний Российской академии наук (Санкт-Петербургский филиал Архива РАН, «Архив востоковедов» Института восточных рукописей РАН) и «Турфанского собрания» Музея азиатского искусства (Берлин), относящиеся к истории исследования этих регионов: переписка участников экспедиций – российских (М.М. Березовский, С.М. Дудин, Д.А. Клеменц, П.К. Козлов, С.Е. Малов, С.Ф. Ольденбург), немецких (А. Грюнведель, Ф. фон Ле Кок, Г. Хут) и английских (М.А. Стейн), представителей дипломатического корпуса (А.А. Дьяков, С.А. Колоколов, Н.Н. Кротков, Н.Ф. Петровский, В.М. Успенский, Дж. Макартни) и научного мира (Г. Бюлер, Р. Пишель, В.В. Радлов, В.Р. Розен), участвовавших в изучении древней и раннесредневековой истории Восточного Туркестана и Монголии, а также географии и языков этих регионов. В научный оборот вводятся ранее неизвестные источники, относящиеся как к истории востоковедения, так и к истории внешней политики России в конце XIX – начале XX вв.
Документы, составленные на иностранных языках, публикуются как в подлиннике, так и в переводе.

Before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Chinese administrations in different periods had varying approaches and policies concerning their own ethnic affairs. After 1949 the Chinese Communist Party as well had to deal with the question of how to transform peoples and lands of the heterogeneous Qing empire into a unified nation state. Ethnic minorities are scattered across the country but they have traditionally inhabited in strategically important border areas which are extremely rich in natural resources. Historically relations between Han majority and minorities have rarely been easy.  In this regard, today, Chinese control in the remote regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, two western provinces where the minority proportion is greatest, remains particularly problematic and both longstanding and recent policies of Beijing suggest failures in the strategy of integration of minorities in the Chinese nation.

Archaeologists across all fields of research make generous use of the concepts ‘prestige’ and ‘prestige goods.’ In the process, prestige and social status are usually conflated. It follows that discussions of prestige goods solely focus on their active use in the struggle for social dominance. This article will argue, however, that prestige is not equal to social status. Instead, prestige is one of several contributing factors to status. More precisely, prestige is akin to the German noun Ansehen, which expresses the notion of looking up to someone due to certain qualities. This has serious ramifications for the traditional understanding of prestige goods. Fixating on their active role as socially structuring agents misses the point. In order to really grasp genuine prestige goods in the archaeological record, it is necessary to look beyond the motives of individual signalers or signaling groups and instead focus on the responder(s) to whom such behavior was addressed.  Instances of emulation in mortuary contexts reflect the perspective of the recipient(s). Imitations of objects and associated behavior are tangible manifestations of Ansehen / prestige. They convey that the original items were more than luxury products or status symbols. To be sure, such artifacts were most likely of high relative value, but they operated on a deeper social level as they highlight interpersonal relationships rather than general social mechanisms. An in-depth analysis of various silk fabrics and imitations of warp-faced compound tabby weaves (jin 錦) from second to early fifth century CE burials in the Tarim Basin in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, PR China along with a brief survey of Byzantine solidi and their imitations from early sixth to mid-eighth century CE tombs in northern China will serve as the basis on which I develop a method to identify genuine prestige goods.

The province of the People's Republic of China, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has historically been known under various names-Eastern Turkestan, Chinese Turkestan, Kashgaria, etc. In the early 19 th century this region was one of the least explored in Western scholarship and of Kashgaria. Accordingly, in the second half of the 19 th to early 20 th centuries, several expeditions were organized that pursued serious academic goals alongside military, diplomatic, and commercial purposes. One of these Turkestan, the northern outskirts of the Tibetan Plateau, and Dzungaria studying this vast region's geography, topography, nature, climate, and population. The results of this investigation were presented by M.V. Pevtsov region's ethnic composition, religious beliefs, language, customs, and rituals. This article offers insights and analysis of the content of Pevtsov's report, which provides valuable information about the daily life of the population of Kashgaria at the end of the 19 th

Runik harfli eski Türk yazıtları Moğolistan, Tuva, Hakasya, Dağlık Altay, Kırgızistan, Kazakistan, Çin Halk Cumhuriyeti gibi farklı yerlerde bulunmaktadır. Bu farklı bölgeler içerisinde en tanınmış olanları Moğolistan sınırları içerisinde bulunan yazıtlardır. Daha çok Yenisey adıyla bilinen Tuva ve Hakasya’daki yazıtlar, bugün itibarıyla en fazla yazıt bulunduran bölgedir. Eski Türk yazıtlarının en önemli sorunu adlandırma, numaralandırma ve envanter bilgilerindeki karışıklıklardır. Yeni bulunan yazıtların bulunduğu yörenin adıyla ve yöredeki dille anılması, yazıtları yayımlayan kişilerin türlü adlar ve kısaltmalar kullanması birçok soruna neden olmaktadır.

В четвертом томе многотомного издания «Восточный Туркестан и Монголия. История
изучения в конце XIX – первой трети XX века» представлены результаты исследований Первой и Второй Русских Туркестанских экспедиций, работавших под руководством академика С.Ф. Ольденбурга в 1909–1910 и 1914–1915 гг. в Северо-Западном Китае: полевые дневники участников работ, архитектурные планы; освещается история музейных фондов, в которых хранятся материалы экспедиций, вводятся в научный оборот эпистолярные источники, отражающие историю исследований Восточного Туркестана,  реконструируются биографии участников исследовательских работ.

Kashgar's seventeenth-century ruler-saint, Afaq Khoja, is remarkable for the amount of historical writing he has inspired, both outside and within Chinese Turkestan. His reputation among Uyghur historians is one of the few aspects of local Uyghur historical knowledge production that has attracted the attention of foreign scholars. In this essay the author uses the now-familiar example of Afaq Khoja's reputation to show that much of what is distinctive about local Uyghur approaches to history has been so little understood as to be missed even in this often-discussed case. This article describes how the local historical appropriation of Afaq's reputation, particularly the recording of narratives about Afaq in writing, began as a typical product of the Naqshbandi maqāmāt tradition, was reshaped into Kashgarian local history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then reshaped again as an ethno-national history beginning in the 1930s, culminating in the publication of the popular historical novel, Apaq Khoja, and its subsequent burning by officials of the People's Republic of China. While the reputation of Afaq in the present certainly reflects the current political context, it also bears significant marks of these earlier traditions through which it has passed. Thus this article argues for an understanding of ‘local history’ as a form of knowledge production that embraces a host of historical approaches, including transnational devotional literature, popular local oasis history and nationalist historical fiction. The author also suggests that these transformations of local history have reflected shifting senses of what is ‘local’ over the last 300 years. The argument is advanced through philological investigation of the manuscript sources, ethnographic fieldwork and literary analysis of the recent novel Apaq Khoja.

This paper gives an overview of the various expeditions to the Tarim Basin at the beginning of the 20th century. Knowing where the manuscripts come from, and under what circumstances they were found, is not only a matter of historical interest, but is vital for two reasons. For one thing, it helps understanding how the different collections were compiled – and there is no collection of Tocharian texts that did not have a complicated fate of one kind or another. For another, it is linguistically important to locate the respective site a manuscript hails from, because the linguistic remnants of Tocharian B are to be subdivided into different varieties, a fact discovered by Werner Winter in 1955. For this reason, the question of allocating manuscripts to Turkestan find spots is a topic in the articles concerned with the collections and concordances.

The purpose of this study is to analyse whether and to what extent the jihadi ideology has influenced and exploited the difficulties of the Uighur minority in preparing and implementing the terrorist attacks that hit the city of Kashgar, Xinjiang, in 2008 and 2011. In order to better address the issue, the author intends primarily to present the Uighur minority and describe its history, to understand its grievances against Beijing; then, the author will give a presentation of the latest attacks happened in the Xinjiang from 2007 onwards, before analysing the potential jihadi influence.

The bulk of academic debates has centred on the media representation of Muslims in the Western context. A generic framework shows that Muslim figures have been repeatedly stereotyped, stigmatised, and terrorised by the Western media coverage, especially since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (Morey & Yaqin 2011: 18). However, a dearth of research discusses media representation of Muslims outside the Western scholarship. This case study is of critical significance in terms of filling this gap. It endeavours to investigate how the mainstream Chinese news media construct the representational tropes of the Chinese-Muslims, through drawing upon the case study of 7/5 Urumqi riot. This case study contends that Chinese media discourse shows similarities but also differences with the Western media narratives, in regards to constructing stereotypical images of Muslims. It further argues that media stereotyping of Uyghur-Muslims perpetuates the intensification of inter-ethnic relationships between Uyghur and Han people.

What kind of nuances can be found in Chinese media representation of Muslims in the post-riot reports in 2009 in Urumuqi.

The territorial expansion and bureaucratic apparatus of Qing rule in Inner Asia was unprecedent size. In the mid 18th century the empire ruled from Beijing reached its greatest extent ever. With a series of military campaigns Qing rulers defeated their major rivals, the Zhungar Mongols, brought Tibet, Zhungaria and Mongolia under their control and opened up new terrain for colonial settlement, trade and administration. Unlike their predecessors the Qing rulers were able to preserve their control in the region by pursuing administrative means distinct to local inhabitants, promoting migration and trade networks.
This paper aims to examine the Qing expansion and rule of Zhungaria and Altishahr in 18th century. This paper will seek to adress three primary basic questions: What motives might have driven Qing expansion into Inner Asia? How was Qing dominion established and maintained in Zhungaria and Altishahr today known as Xinjiang? And what kind of multiethnic measures that the Qing employed to govern such "outer provinces"?

In 2018‒2020 members of the research group within the framework of the project “Second Russian Turkestan expedition of 1914‒1915 of S.F. Oldenburg. Unpublished materials from the archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences” (No. 18-09-00213), supported by RFBR, revealed and prepared for publication the entire scope of basic scientific documentation from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which fully covers the activities of Russian researchers to study the Qianfodun and Turfan oasis. The works, which are undoubtedly the most important achievements of Russian oriental studies in its entire history, have been introduced into scientific circulation. To a large extent, biographies of all participants in the work were reconstructed; previously unknown correspondence was prepared for publication. The main result of the work is the preparation for print of the work of S.F. Oldenburg “Description of the caves of Chan-fo-dong near Dun-huang”, the importance of which for the study of the monument over the past hundred years has only increased.
The most important promising direction for the continuation of work is the restoration and preparation for print of the photo-archive of the II Russian Turkestan expedition, stored in the State Hermitage, which contains more than 2000 pictures. The publication of this photo-archive will completely close the largest lacuna in the history of Russian oriental studies.