Nick Holdstock

A friend who works in my local Blackwell’s told me that Conservative Party members get a discount at the bookshop. This seemed so unlikely that I phoned the Blackwell’s helpline pretending to be a paid-up Tory, and sure enough was told that I would get 20 per cent off. Joining the Conservative Party costs £25 a year: if you spend £125 a year on books at Blackwells you essentially get your party membership for free (a less catchy offer perhaps than ‘3 for 2’). It’s unclear, though, how the Tories’ encouraging people to shop at Blackwell’s fits in with their alleged support for small shops, unless they mean the smaller branches of Blackwell’s.

Yesterday the People’s Daily reported that there had been an explosion in Aksu in southwest Xinjiang. Seven people were killed and 14 injured when a Uighur man drove a three-wheeled vehicle into a crowd and detonated explosives. This is the first major act of violence in the region since the Urumqi riots in July 2009, which led to more than 200 deaths.

In the past 18 months, Ürümqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang province, has been subject to riots, syringe attacks, further riots, and an elevated military and police presence. Last week the provincial authorities announced their plans to transform the city into 'a bright pearl of the western region' (perhaps a more achievable task than making the city deserve its name, which means 'beautiful pastureland' in Mongolian).

I took these pictures in the villages around Turpan, a small oasis town an hour's drive from Ürümqi, earlier this year. Propaganda murals used to be common throughout the Chinese countryside, but are much rarer now. The slogans are in both Uighur and Chinese. Language is a tricky political subject in Xinjiang at the moment, as it is in Tibet – there have been protests over plans to phase Uighur and Tibetan out of classrooms.

The Chinese New Year begins on Thursday, the Year of the Tiger giving way to the Year of the Rabbit. The government in Beijing recently removed from the internet an extremely violent cartoon called Greeting Card for the Year of the Rabbit, in which a group of oppressed rabbits overthrow an abusive government of tigers.

The cartoon claims to be ‘meant as an adult fairy tale’, with ‘no connection to real life’, but most of the events it depicts will be familiar to a Chinese audience.