Michael Dillon

Compiled by specialists from the University of Durham Department of East Asian Studies, this new reference work contains approximately 1500 entries covering Chinese civilisation from Peking Man to the present day. Meer

Xinjiang, China's far northwestern province where the majority of the population are Muslim Uyghurs, was for most of its history contested territory. Meer

There has been a significant increase in the twenty-first century in the frequency and intensity of violent incidents in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the far northwest province of China, where the Uyghurs, the Turkic-speaking Muslim people who historically constituted the majority population, feel themselves displaced and discriminated against by the growing in-migration of Han Chinese. Meer

China has become accessible to the west in the last twenty years in a way that was not possible in the previous thirty. The number of westerners travelling to China to study, for business or for tourism has increased dramatically and there has been a corresponding increase in interest in Chinese culture, society and economy and increasing coverage of contemporary China in the media. Meer