‘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 (East Turkistan).’ (The New Statesman)
‘In China’s Forgotten People, the Edinburgh-based writer Nick Holdstock sets out to ‘reveal truth from facts’ in Xinjiang (East Turkistan), 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 (East Turkistan), 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 (East Turkistan)…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 (East Turkistan) 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 (East Turkistan) 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)
