Amir&Jeff’s Excellent China Adventure #40: Preservation of China’s 55 minority groups’ cultures and languages is everywhere you look. Amir’s scathing commentary with 13 photos.

2026-08-09

Table of Contents

Amir&Jeff’s Excellent China Adventure Series. 2026: Xinjiang Province Red Tour. Photos and commentary. The REAL Chinese people you do not know!

Amir&Jeff’s Excellent China Adventure Series. 2026: Xinjiang Province Red Tour. Photos and commentary. The REAL Chinese people you do not know!

Amir&Jeff’s Excellent China Adventure Series. 2025: Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian and Shaanxi Provinces’ Red Tour. Short videos with transcripts, captioned photos, articles and commentary. The REAL Chinese people you don’t know!

https://radiosinoland.com/2025/07/27/amirjeffs-excellent-china-adventure-series-2025-hunan-jiangxi-fujian-and-shaanxi-provinces-red-tour-short-videos-captioned-photos-articles-and-commentary-the-real-chinese-people-you-don/

Short intro to Xinjiang by Jeff

Xinjiang is huge, 1.66 million square kilometers, which is three times the size of France, or bigger than Alaska in North America. It is mostly desert, mountains, basins and high plateaus, with a few beautiful lakes. Weather is harsh here. When we arrived on 5 August, the temperature was 41 degrees. In the winter, it can drop to minus twenty.

For our one-month Red Tour adventure in Xinjiang, we will get a far west as Aksu and as far south as Korla. It is already starting out as an amazing lunar cycle.

The Uyghur people in China are members of the Turkic language group, of which there are many derivatives, starting in Turkey, of course, and there’s a swath going from there to the east through South Central Asia. They are, at varying degrees, mutually understood, from 0 to maybe 75%, depending on the dialect. For example, Turkish and Uyghur are 30% mutually comprehensible.

So Uyghurs are, in fact, Turkic people.

Comments by Amir

I find Western scholarship on Xinjiang difficult to digest; readers here can obviously sympathize. Part of me wants to say I am well versed in such scholarship, if only to refute it. Were I a younger man, I might have sufficient energy to drink poison. Not so long ago, I routinely digested Western scholarship on China in order to refute it; yet prospects now seem to me increasingly maddening. Why read only to refute? Western lies about China and Xinjiang are all-pervasive and tied intimately to a capitalist power structure. A rewrite of history can only begin after some manner of Western collapse. I have abandoned any hope of piecemeal intellectual reform. Why bark up the tree of imperialism?

In order to publish intelligent scholarly treatises on Xinjiang requires drinking poison. You must accept some manner of overarching narrative that suggests that in building its nation, China has indubitably practiced necessary forms of cultural suppression. Western capitalist discourse, after all, loves to smear progressive attempts at nation-building. Right-wing Comrades (largely unknowingly) are compelled also to douse abstract “nationalist” sentiment in favor of a supposedly reified and “universal class-consciousness.” Doing so, in my view, is precisely to drink the poison. Taking away a country’s right to define itself as a nation is only doing imperialism’s bidding.

Many misguided Comrades want the people of Xinjiang to abandon religious and cultural sentiment in favor of Party loyalty. Yet a trip to the exquisite Xinjiang Museum (three floors and 13 exhibition rooms) betrays an opposing and I would say productive tension. It is not Xinjiang that seeks to ingratiate itself within a grand national narrative. The opposite is true: one sees how much China itself values Xinjiang, its culture and cultural artifacts, and how much the government is willing to spend to entrench, uphold, and propagate the stories and discoveries of its Western “hinterlands.” Xinjiang, after all, has been around for millennia; the Communist party is only 105 years old. Who should draw legitimacy from whom?

Xinjiang is not some remote cultural outpost; it is a living, integral and sacred part of China. China courts Xinjiang and is proud of its heritage, not the reverse. All one has to do is take a look at the local Urumqi street signs and even the national Chinese currency; both are adorned with Uyghur’s Arabic script!

China protects the languages of 55 minorities under its Constitution. This means the state is willing to go to great lengths not simply to fund alienating exhibits as some token of “remembrance,” but to ensure these languages are spoken by living human beings.

Canada has two official languages, neither of which have any basis in indigenous culture. We learn about Haisla culture in BC, for instance—but I have never been to a Haisla museum. No one I have ever met has ever spoken a word of Haisla. Occasional Haisla street names and monuments are transliterated; but the language itself is extinct.

Before the arrival of Samuel de Champlain in 1603, Canada spoke over 80 languages and dialects; all are now dead. Nor is a single one “protected” in any meaningful sense by Canada’s bourgeois Constitution; French and English Canada simply belabor over the parameters of “patriation.”

China has maintained the existence of 55 (in both written and oral form) indigenous languages, some of which go back 4000 years or more. Yet China is somehow accused of cultural suppression and genocide. One can only marvel.