Nick Holdstock

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.

One way to keep track of the shifts in belief and allegiance as you walk through Beirut is by watching the walls. In the backstreets of Gemmayzeh and Ashrafieh in the east of the city, they are covered in stencil graffiti for the right-wing, Christian Lebanese Forces Party:

A given number of parliamentary seats in Lebanon are proportionally assigned to representatives from different religious communities. In theory, this prevents any one group from dominating the political agenda and encourages compromise (though it’s not really working like that at the moment). It also, however, assumes that everyone is religious, and that they want the country to be governed accordingly. On 20 March, 30,000 people took to the streets of Beirut to call for secular laws to be applied to marriage, domestic violence, child custody, divorce and inheritance, currently under the jurisdiction of the separate courts of each of the 18 recognised religious communities.