Benno Weiner

Tsering Döndrup’s defiant reckoning with Tibet’s legacy of violence I FIRST MET Tsering Döndrup at his home in Xining – the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau, located in Qinghai province in western China. This was in early 201

"The personal cost Tsering Döndrup has paid for ‘The Red Wind Howls’ is further evidence, if it were needed, of just how taboo his tale is."

Christopher Peacock on Tsering Döndrup’s defiant reckoning with Tibet’s legacy of violence:

Job Announcement: History/Anthropology of Science, Technology and Medicine.

The Department of History at Carnegie Mellon seeks to hire up to two scholars at the rank of assistant and/or associate professor.

Please share and note Sep 15 deadline! Happy to answer Qs
apply.interfolio.com/170040

Rather beautifully, Professor Mahmood Mamdani's dedication in "Neither Settler Nor Native" is to his trail-blazing son, @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social.

He quotes the revolutionary Chinese writer Lu Xun's famous concluding lines in "Hometown":

「其實地上本沒有路，走的人多了，也便成了路。」

-魯迅，故鄉
#everynightapoem

Thanks @robbiebarnett.bsky.social for referring to work by @bennoweiner.bsky.social and me for this ChinaFile discussion on the Dalai Lama’s succession www.chinafile.com/conversation...

《被眼泪浸湿的土地》：一部维吾尔族“右派”的苦难史 The Land Drenched in Tears: A History of Uyghur “Rightists”

As part of our efforts to include the erased histories of all ethnic groups in China, @minjianarchives.bsky.social
newsletter today discusses a key work of Uyghur resistance: A Land Drenched in Tears. This is also our first trilingual newsletter!
chinaunofficialarchives.substack.com/p/a30?utm_ca...

Thank you to all the participants of the 5th International Amdo Research Network workshop at the University of Leeds. Looking forward to continuing our conversations at IATS next summer in Kathmandu!

🪖 I dunno man. Just, like, suddenly wanted to share photos of the time I covered Kim Jong Il's Pyongyang military parade from 2010. Enjoy!

Two Maoisms | Los Angeles Review of Books Guobin Yang dives into two new books on Mao-era China.

"Every chapter is a gem"!

Lovely review by @guobin-yang.bsky.social of How Maoism was Made. "Weiner’s chapter... reveals the [early Maoist] state’s ethnopolitical anxieties and efforts to create ethnic minority categories."
@aaronwmoore.bsky.social
lareviewofbooks.org/article/two-...

A very thoughtful review from @guobin-yang.bsky.social on the book Jennifer Altehenger & I edited over the last few years w/ support from @britishacademy.bsky.social. We indeed struggled with excluding 文革, but thought this story needed to be told 1st--'The future still held multiple possibilities.'

YouTube video by shichwan 崔健 - 一無所有 / Nothing to My Name (by Cui Jian)

Today's banger:

youtu.be/m7uk0-vlpP0?...

#崔健 #一無所有

First day of the #AASinAsia2025 @bennoweiner.bsky.social Levering the Margins #kathmandu

REMINDER: join us Tomorrow May 29 @4pm for the first ARN New Books on Amdo talk w/ authors Shannon Ward, Tim Thurston and moderator Huatse Gyal! Details 👇

The Red Wind Howls | Columbia University Press A remarkable novel by one of Tibet’s foremost authors, The Red Wind Howls is a courageous and gripping portrayal of Tibetan suffering under Mao’s regime.... | CUP

"a masterpiece of world literature... Produced at great personal cost, Tsering Döndrup's novel is one of the most important and dangerous in the Tibetan canon."
-Tsering Yangzom Lama
tinyurl.com/8n64657x

Excited to have received an advanced copy of Tsering Döndrup’s remarkable novel, The Red Wind Howls, which recounts the Maoist period in the Amdo grasslands.

Truly a must read, thanks to Chris Peacock for the English trans. of this essential story. Highly recommended
@columbiaup.bsky.social

This should be a great discussion on language and the politics of language in Amdo

Live at Pitt: CMU's Benno Weiner on the Evolution of China's Minzu Policy This week on Sinica, in a show recorded at the University of Pittsburgh, I speak with Benno Weiner, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, about how China's policy toward its mi...

Appearing on the Sinica podcast was a bucket list sort of thing. Thanks to @kaiserkuo.bsky.social for having me on to talk about ethnopolitics in China. There's more I wish I had said, and some things I wish I had said differently, but give it a listen!

www.sinicapodcast.com/p/live-at-pi...

Satirical Tibet *Furthering my education in the travails of modern Tibet* Within the Tibetan cultural world, research on the Amdo region (see e.g. here) has become a remarkably dynamic field of scholarship. A fine…

NEW: Timothy Thurston’s book Satirical Tibet, another contribution to the thriving field of Amdo studies
stephenjones.blog/2025/04/13/s...

Fascinating new article by Li Gang in the Journal of the EACS on perceptions of Muslim demographics in China: “Recognition through Numbers:
Muslim Population Numbers and the Hui in Modern China”

journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/je...

ICYMI, this 2002 PhD dissertation by Pan Yue, current head of the national ethnic affairs commission, drew up a blueprint for settler colonialism 20 years ago. he specifically wrote that China should learn from the experience of the westward movement

Finally got my printed copy of Tim Thurston's outstanding «Satirical Tibet». Congratulations once more to Tim on a creative and insightful book.

Photo of a computer screen showing a PowerPoint slide and inset of a man standing at a lectern.

I didn’t make it up to campus for the Michigan China lunchtime lecture by @bennoweiner.bsky.social, but am luckily able to listen in via Zoom.

Emily Feng on Identity in Xi Jinping's China NPR correspondent Emily Feng speaks with China Books Review editor Alec Ash about her new book, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom.

One of the extraordinary anecdotes from @emilyzfeng.bsky.social book:

A Salar watchman punched Chen Quanguo in the face after Chen attempted to enter a mosque in Qinghai with his shoes on.

Listen to her talk tonight at Asia Society New York!

asiasociety.org/center-us-ch...

TODAY @ NOON ET in NYC:

COLUMBIA PROFESSORS TO HOLD EMERGENCY VIGIL AGAINST ADMIN CONCESSIONS TO TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.

Columbia gates at 116th & Amsterdam Ave (Not Broadway)

• Hands Off Our Students, Faculty, & Research

• Defend Science

• Defend Academic Freedom

• Defend Freedom of Speech

Day 1? I guess we're "leveraging the margins"

Leveraging the Margins of the “Middle Kingdom”: Frontier China in East Asia’s Hot and Cold Wars
Time: 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM
Organizer(s): Hao Chen
Chair: Noriko Unno
Discussant(s): Peng Hai
Presentations: Hao Chen, Junyi Han, Anran Wang, Benno Weiner

See you there. Judging from the panel titles, we’re going to be doing a lot of reframing, negotiating, mediating, and border crossing!

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Thrilled to be welcoming Professor Norkiko Unno (Osaka University) to Pittsburgh tomorrow, Wednesday March 12, for this fabulous looking talk. Thanks to the Asian Studies Center at UPitt for hosting. Details below.

Missed getting my name in the program, but at AAS i'm on panel 9-013. China in the Context of Comparative Colonialism Hyatt, Knox, 2nd Floor Saturday 4:00 PM-5:30 PM. Also: Guldana Salimjan, Dawa Lokyitsang, Yu Liang. Benno Weiner is our discussant. www.asianstudies.org/wp-content/u...

History Now! - The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps: A Vital Stabilizer in China’s Western Region - Huron University The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps: A Vital Stabilizer in China’s Western Region  Featuring: Prof. Jun Fang

In Defense of Colonialism... coming to a campus near you