Television: the great destroyer

Today, a reminder of the transformative force of state power when directed through the little flickering screen. The story is nominally about the spread of off-grid power options among the dispossessed minority populations ofWestern China. But check out the blasé treatment given to a Xinjiang Kazakh woman who announces that TV has convinced her to let her culture die with her generation.

She favors dramas and news programs in Uighur and her native Kazakh language, but after TV opened new worlds, she switched her children from the local Kazakh school to that of the Han Chinese. Her children will be educated in the language of China's ethnic majority.

"From TV I learned [Mandarin] Chinese is very important to the future, to getting jobs," says Sitkan, her voice becoming insistent. "I hope they go to college. I don't want them to be nomads; it's too hard."