"I knew that they have just one goal: they want to see me out of journalism." The calls came to Tajik journalist Humayra Bakhtiyar at her sports club, at the shopping center and at home.…
Chinese workers have built bridges in Serbia, a huge railroad tunnel in Uzbekistan and a gas and oil pipeline across Myanmar. These are just a few of the dozens of massive foreign infrastructure projects China…
Over the past year, China has vastly increased repression of the country’s Uighur minority. A Turkic group that practices Islam, the Uighurs have long faced restrictions from Beijing – but over the past year as many…
"People from the government burst into my father-in-law's house and told him that I was leading an illegal channel." Distributing independent news in the Central Asian nation of Tajikistan is no easy task. But in…
Most people outside of Central Asia know little about the gas-rich desert nation of Turkmenistan. The former Soviet Republic has virtually no independent media and just a handful of bookstores. Foreign journalists and scholars are…
Repression is legacy of 25-year rule In a country with no independent media, the airwaves are dominated by upbeat government propaganda. So when Uzbekistan's state media announced the former Soviet republic's first and only president…
Independent media in the Central Asian state struggles with repression and censorship. Anna Fergana hasn’t told her family she is a reporter. It’s a dangerous job, and they would try to talk her out of…