Taking a short break from my regular dire posts (my areas of expertise/interest are Chinese ethnic politics, UK migration policy and UK academia, there's just so much dire), as I am about to take off for the Association of Asian Studies conference in Vancouver and I am really very excited.

That Starmer keeps Mahmood in post shows this is not just the actions of an inhumane Home Secretary, but a deeper rooted ideology of hostility and xenophobia within this government. No-one benefits from blocking Chevening scholars. This is cruelty for sake of it. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Am I surprised? No, not in the slightest; this is everything I've been observing in Xinjiang and sinicisation policy more broadly for years now. I've been warning people for years that these policies were not exceptions, but rather the rule.

#China law to be passed this week lowers status of other languages at the expense of Mandarin; encourages intermarriage between the dominant Han Chinese and other ethnicities; requires parents to "educate and guide minors to love the Chinese Communist Party"… CLICK LINK www.bbc.com/news/article...

#China’s new “ethnic unity” law, to be passed this week, will accelerate the attempted forced assimilation of the country’s ethnic minorities into the dominant Han culture, according to academics and human rights groups. A piece by me: CLICK LINK TO READ www.bbc.com/news/article...

They killed 180 children and their teachers in a double-tap strike on a school. The girls were 7 to 12 years old.

"One clause says that only the state has the right to promote “a system of symbols of Chinese civilisation”" civilisational discourse in action: as I've been saying, it's about claiming difference internationally and erasing difference internally.

You’re not going to believe how dumb the origin story for this is

Claiming asylum is a right; getting a UK student visa is also both expensive and quite hard in the first place. This is punishing folks from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan for daring to dream of studying here, and daring to wish to be safe. This is, once again, so needlessly cruel.

I actually don't have words as to how angry I am. Wonder what happened in these countries that people on student visas in the UK found themselves needing to apply for asylum instead of going home post 2021. UK Labour are heartless bastards & apparently have bo idea whats happening in the world.

Benno Weiner, a historian of modern China, Tibet and Inner Asia at Carnegie Mellon University: “such policies, if enforced, meant there was ‘no way’ that non-Han people would be able to safely express ‘any type of discontent without being accused of being essentially separatists or terrorists’.”

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed. Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

'there is a demon that lives underneath Downing Street and possesses every Home Secretary' remains a pretty strong theory tbh

Reflecting on this and the fact that the UK is actually very good at economic and social outcomes for immigrants… What if we built our immigration policy around the fact we’re GOOD at this stuff? And used the lessons of what has worked well to talk about national identity, welcome and integration?

Utterly cruel, pointless and harmful. It does not minimise how bad Conservatives were to say Labour are now the most anti-asylum government in most people's living memory. This prevents people feeling any sense of safety and security after fleeing persecution. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

I'm not sure if ppl outside academia realise that if you quit a permanent post in this job market you will amost certainly never get another one, esp in arts & hums. All that post graduate training, the years of precarity, not being able to choose where you or your family live. Pffft. For nothing.

Didn't expect but Hell Yeah! High court rules proscription of Palestine Action unlawful! Shabana Mahmood, Starmer & the rest of the gov't can shove it. "“a very significant interference” with the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association"

Only 24 hours left for people to fill in the consultation on the "Earned Settlement" proposals. Join other 130k people and make your voices heard. Settlement should be a right for everyone not a privilege for few high earners. ukhomeoffice.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

PS. Not too late to tell the government what you think about their proposed changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain - the public consultation is open until 12th Feb. www.gov.uk/government/c...

Breaking: Guan Heng has just been released from detention and is now reunited with his mother, a long-awaited and joyful reunion. DHS has not yet decided whether to appeal his asylum. We extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who stood by him and helped make today possible.

Former Party cadre Ma Ruilin speaks with @liyuan6.bsky.social about his work on surveillance systems in China: “I realized that the very systems I helped build in 2008 had become shackles for Muslims [...] I had handed a demon’s whip to the state to use against my own community.”

Thank you to everyone who has shared this. The hearing is over for today. DHS has filed a motion to pretermit (end Guan's asylum application in the US) and have him sent to Uganda - where he'd be at risk of being sent to China. The hearing to decide that will be held 12 January.

'There in the shadows [of the White Paper] lies the call for HE institutions to specialise, with the lurking threat that many will lose their research funding in some, but perhaps many, areas, in order to better fund those with more intensive research.'

It's official: 400 redundancies and a campus closure. At-risk staff will get a letter next week. Absolutely no serious consideration of any of the union's counterproposals. Please share widely.

Some good news this morning - exports of Xinjiang tomatoes have collapsed. Last year I worked with the BBC to expose how XJ tomatoes produced with forced labour were making their way to UK supermarkets via Italy. 🧵

Compulsory team teaching on every module is perhaps the biggest ever threat to the quality of teaching in UK universities. It causes chaos on the ground for timetabling, ruins course coherence and turns lecturers into permanent supply teachers. It is pedagogically incoherent… 1/

Absolutely shocking that the Chinese govt pressured a UK university to shut down research about forced labour in Xinjiang and the links to global supply chains. The work of Laura Murphy and her team had been instrumental in getting Chinese companies sanctioned. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

UK university halted human rights research after pressure from China

"In total, the documents show Sheffield [Hallam University] had earned £3.8m in 2021/22 from China and Hong Kong." That's how little was enough for them to sell out.

'In February, Sheffield Hallam University, home to the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), a leading research institution focused on human rights, ordered one of its best-known professors, Laura Murphy, to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China.' 1/3

I wrote a story @theguardian.com about Zhang Yadi, a London-bound Chinese student and Tibetan rights advocate who was arrested over the summer on suspicion of “inciting separatism.” If found guilty, she faces a prison sentence of up to 15 years. Read the story, with comments from @hrw.org, below:

There is no such thing, as Starmer well knows, as a "golden ticket of resettlement and family reunion" for people who have been granted refugee status. This is meaningless guff aimed to play to populist fantasies that refugees get provided with everything. 1/ www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

New today: my essay in @jodemocracy.bsky.social on The Golden Age of Transnational Repression: www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the...

Most of the restrictions mentioned in this article are in 2021's Internet Religious Information Services regs. www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/internet-... What is new in the Code of Conduct is that it impacts online conduct of registered clergy in their personal, as well as professional capacity.⏬

My head is actually spinning at how many current and future colleagues, both in the China field and beyond it, we are about to lose because of this

Most humanities research — including the best, most world leading research by people we’ve all heard of — is unfunded, by which they mean produced as part of one’s routine job as a university lecturer, just “not funded by a big competitive external grant”. This would mean the death of research.

This is a jaw-dropping statement from anyone in a uni leadership role — but also — what exactly is ‘low-quality’ and ‘hobbyist’ research? Nearly every academic I know is burning the candle at both ends and STILL producing important work in their fields. This feels like an anti-humanities dog whistle

Tens of thousands of people in China are barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest surveillance apparatus. An AP investigation finds much of this technology came from U.S. companies.

We just released IMMARKUS 1.0 - our first full release! An open-source tool for semantic image annotation: multi-image workbench, AI-powered selection tools, ontology builder, knowledge graph, #IIIF support. Runs fully local–no login, no-signups, no data sent to the cloud! 👉 immarkus.xmarkus.org

From Sanmenxia and Three Gorges to the Yarlung Tsangpo Dam, China has long relied on monumental hydropower to prove state capacity. @zenel25.bsky.social and @pguer.bsky.social show how such projects, while promising development and security, often deepen the very insecurities they claim to resolve.

Lovely to hear Melvyn Bragg talking about the big idea behind "In Our Time": to get academics on the air, talking about the subjects they were most passionate & knowledgeable about, without worrying about whether they had "media training". It's remarkable that this was (& remains) such an odd idea!

Oh damn, always my dream to one day make to In Our Time, so I am delighted it will continue. But this still feels huge to me - so much admiration for Bragg and his curiosity about absolutely everything.

A reminder that it is not illegal to claim asylum in the UK, no matter how you arrived here.

CFP: Joint Conference of the Historical Society for 20th Century China and the Institute for Modern History, Academia Scinica Deadline: October 15 Please note that papers/panels can engage any aspect of China and/or Taiwan's long 20th Crntury All the info: hstcconline.org/announcements/

CDT Quote of the Week: chinadigitaltimes.net/2025/08/inte...

This is terrorism.

Would any Xinjiang scholars be interested in chatting with me for a newsletter issue 👀

not really beating the "authoritarian government" allegations by demanding a gallery in ANOTHER COUNTRY censor artwork about..........authoritarian governments

🚨 New research report 🚨 “Preventing Transnational Repression: the case of the Uyghur diaspora” By David Tobin and @nyrolaelima.bsky.social sites.google.com/sheffield.ac...

grotesque abuse of law