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!
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Short intro to Xinjiang by Jeff
Xinjiang is huge, 17% of the country’s landmass, 1.66 million square kilometers (China’s total land area = 9.6 million), 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 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.
Xinjiang’s population is 26 million, 58% Muslim. The capital is Urumuqi. It has four million residents. Hami has 670,000 citizens. Shihezi, Karamay, Korla, Yining and Aksu are other cities we are visiting each have about 500,000 souls.
West to east, Xinjiang has common international borders with Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia. Internally, it borders the provinces of Gansu, Qinghai and Tibet, north to south. It is now a hugely important nexus in Asia’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), connecting the rest of China with the rest of Mackinder’s Heartland. On that note,
Jeff J. Brown comments on Sputnik News- Putin: China’s Belt and Road Initiative ‘in Sync With Russia’s Ideas on Large Eurasian Space’. China Rising Radio Sinoland 231027
Not only industry and commerce, Xinjiang is a massive producer of high value crops, including a huge variety of fruits, vegetables and cotton. We see lush, green fields and orchards stretching kilometer after kilometer, thanks to one of the biggest water canal and irrigation systems in the world, starting in the Altai Mountains, over 400km away. The BRI has made it possible to ship large quantities of this produce all over Asia.
Amir’s comments and photos
Species-being is a fundamental Marxian axiom. It’s the simple answer to the perennial question: “What is the meaning of life?”
Have you ever wondered about this? Marx gives an unequivocal answer:
“The productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life.”
The meaning of life is to reproduce itself.
Life is energy, and all of us possess life-energy. Have you ever been inspired? —by anything at all: a movie, a piece of music, a landscape? If you have, you have experienced what Marx calls “species-being.” And the first thing you ought to want to do when you have experienced species-being is share this feeling with others. Life-energy is not satisfied in simply appreciating itself. Real life-energy wants to live again, in others. Whatever you feel to be of utmost consequence to you depends on your ability to recreate the same feelings in someone else. Otherwise, what you feel is merely a contingency, a one-off.
At risk of sounding terrifically conservative in today’s woke, feminist, linguistic horizon, I will say that any civilization that has lost the incentive to reproduce is incapable of understanding revolution.
Note this quotation by the great Comrade Amílcar Cabral, speaking on behalf of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in 1965:
Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.
We all know that China overall is showing signs of revolutionary fatigue. China is an aging population, like Japan. Innovations in high-speed rail and AI technology do not necessarily underwrite a lived prosperity for all moving forward. AI may allow us to finish tasks faster; but AI does not reduce average weekly work hours. AI simply creates higher expectations for workers to produce for the benefit of the ruling classes. Technology advances while working hours do not diminish.
China is on a quest to urbanize, which is often parroted as the only path to real material success. But concomitant with urbanization is the desire not to reproduce, which is an exit from species-being.
I was startled at these photographs below, mounted passingly within an exhibit at the Shihezi XPCC Museum, reported on in an earlier post,
Amir&Jeff’s Excellent China Adventure #43: China’s military reclamation and border defense system “XPCC” has transformed Xinjiang into an agricultural, economic and developmental powerhouse. Amir sounds off on what it all means. With 17 photos.
I teach English literature which tends to draw girls as majors. Many of the Comrades pictured above could easily be my students. In all honesty, the girls above have much more to live for than the ones graduating from my university today. The exhibit, perhaps in rather old-fashioned register, celebrates marriage and families as a means of populating an empty space; but in more metaphysical and meaningful register, the exhibit celebrates marriage and procreation as a means of furthering species-being.
To some, such an exhibit might seem obtuse and misplaced. Equating revolution with procreation seems to be a patriarchal tendency of yesteryear.
But what does the revolution matter if people themselves no longer wish to create new revolutionary subjects?
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