SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The national hit song Little Apple released by the Chopstick brothers in May 2014, was a catchy, synthesizer-heavy, retro-style love song with an insistent beat. The song also resounded across the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region in north-west China, but in this predominantly Muslim region – known to Uyghurs in exile as East Turkestan – which had seen a striking growth in religious piety since the 1990s. Tensions in the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous Region had been on the rise since the 1990s, as China sought to quell any possibility of a Uyghur independence movement in this Central Asian borderland. Too often this policy meant that legitimate calls for Uyghur rights were regarded as threats to national stability and were met with state repression and violence. The anti-religious extremism campaign made a powerful intervention into these processes of Islamic subject-formation, and it acted to replace them with forms of habitus developed in the course of China’s cultural revolution.