All posts tagged: Voice of China

Perhat, a Gracious Uyghur Voice from Northwest China

Published by Darren Byler

To watch a video of the above recording on YouKu please follow this link. Perhat has a lot of fans in Ürümchi. Walking around on college campuses it is not unusual to hear Han students humming a few lines of the chorus of “How Can You Let Me Be So Sad” – the song popularized by the Uyghur rock star Perhat on The Voice of China back in August. Uyghur students are in awe of how he has become so famous so quickly. They say things like, “Wow, now Perhat is hanging out with rock stars like Wang Feng who sold out the Bird’s Nest in Beijing; just a few months ago I said hello to him when I saw him buying stuff at the corner store.” When he competed successfully in the most recent round of the competition on September 5th, Han migrants from Sichuan sat and watched the TV transfixed, amazed that a Uyghur singer from their neighborhood could sing with so much ferocity. Although they didn’t understand the words of the Tracy …

Minor Politics and a Kazakh Singer On “The Voice Of China”

Published by Darren Byler

The first time Tasken competed on the TV show The Voice of China, the Chinese version ofAmerica’s Got Talent, he didn’t get through to the second round.But the second time, he sang the song “A Lovely Rose” in Chinese. The judges were so impressed, they asked him to sing it in his native language – Kazakh. Kazakhs in China The second largest Turkic Muslim group in Xinjiang, with 1.5 million people, Kazakhs in China have a long tradition of pastoral herding between high-elevation summer pastures and lower-elevation winter pastures on the northern fringes of the Heavenly Mountains (Tian Shan). But in recent decades, a combination of state policies and the sense of lack which accompanies rapidly imposed development has radically transformed their way of life.Their rangeland was gradually seized by the Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary established by agricultural Han in China’s border areas as land reclamation and irrigation projects were geared to secure the Chinese-Soviet frontier. This has led many Kazakhs into a more sedentary existence in government housing in small villages, and following the …