came to power in mainland China,
George Orwell published 1984,
a hugely-influential book
recently translated into Uyghur
and published far to the west in Turkey.
Many of the horrible predictions
that Orwell made have come to pass,
not in Russia nor elsewhere (apart from North Korea)
but in Xinjiang,
so as to wipe out the 'dangerous'
Muslim and Turkic culture of the Uyghurs.
Children are taken away to be 'educated',
women are 'encouraged' to marry
Han-Chinese men,
and all are instructed to sing
happy songs of love for China, the Party
and Big Brother, Xi Jinping.
Xinjiang's capital, Kashgarh is an oasis
between a sand-desert to the east
and the mountains to the west
shown on this satellite view.
The Uyghurs have enough to contend with
besides forced education and suppression of their language.
If copies of 1984 in Uyghur are smuggled into Xinjiang,
will it do anything to help the huge province's
small number of Turkic inhabitants ?
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