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.
Erasing a culture? I feel like there’s a word for that.
Not on lemmy.ml there isn’t!
Had to make sure this wasn’t posted on lemmy.ml before commenting
Think that says enough.
Like fascist Italy with South Tyrol… Can we please stop repeating fascist things?
What did they do to south tyrol?
At the time it was annexed (after ww1) it was about 99% German, 1% Ladinian and 0% Italian (obviously, since it never was affiliated with Italy), so they had to try really hard to change that. To do that, they created Italian names for all places (ironically English-speaking people typically use the Italian names nowadays that haven’t even existed before), made the native language illegal, made the native culture partly illegal, taught alternative history in school (saying it always was that way and it just was a missing part of Italy despite having been Tyrol for over a thousand years), deporting the native population to Germany, etc. Fascism doing fascism things.
After Italian fascism ended in 1945 it got better, but it took until the 70s for South Tyrol to gain autonomy in most regards and for the native population to gain back their rights. And that also only happened because of a lot of protesting (going as far as blowing things up).
The result of all: Still >70% German, a few % Ladinian, rest Italian. But it would’ve been different if they hadn’t had as much support (from North Tyrol for example) and if it wasn’t mountainous (that really helps with doing things secretly that have been made illegal.
Now that less and less people still are here who have experienced fascist oppression it’s our task to ensure that it isn’t forgotten, forgetting fascism’s crimes is the first step towards the return of fascism. Right-wing populist parties are becoming stronger again all over Europe right now, and a few of them have been downplaying fascist crimes already - which wouldn’t even be possible if everyone was well informed.
(Btw it already was a widely controversial topic back then - on one side the UK had promised Italy that they’d get South Tyrol (among other areas, some that they also got and some that they didn’t get because of mainly USA’s concerns) if they joined their side in the war, on the other the USA for example saw the problems that’d be coming with annexing a culturally and historically 100% different region (and trying to replace the native culture) and was firmly against it)
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.
Curious to see a deep and detailed explanation of current events get a moderate mix of love and hate, but a generic “lemmy.ml is pro-genocide” post get universal love.
Almost like folks are more interested in Lemmy internal politics than world events.
Nobody commenting on this has ever visited Xinjiang. Nobody writing these articles has ever visited Xinjiang. Can you blame people for listening to the media they have access to?
There’s a funny thing about the notion of media literacy in China vs. the US: in China, media literacy is mostly “what is the media not telling me?” while in the US, media literacy is mostly “which media source is telling me the right thing?”
