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, 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
“Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble!”
Macbeth hears the chants of the weird sisters and is dumbfounded.
He goes on to hear the prophecy and is immediately spooked—that is alienated. He suddenly realizes that he is possibly under the control of material forces not only out of his control, but outside of his own cognitive worldview.
According to Marx, we are all Macbeth, meaning we are all alienated from the products directly in front of us (whether we consume or produce them).
For instance, I have never once seen the proverbial “black gold” that is what all great powers in the 20th century and beyond have fought over. Yet a visit to the Black Oil Mountain in Karamay effectively douses otherwise reeling notions alienation bred of transnational capitalist reification of a single all-important natural resource.
We all saw on TV the scorched oil fields of Kuwait in 1991, as well as the commandeered oil fields of Iraq set ablaze just over a decade later. We also understand that such oil fields exist in Iran, the current global hotspot of acute imperial geostrategic interest. We know that something of our ability to survive on this planet (whether in old age through 401ks, or much earlier through energy commitments required to mine crypto) is tied to the price of oil.
But what is oil? We’ve seen gold and silver in jewelry stores and pawn shops—minerals known as a suitable index for the value of money. Oil carries the same status in our imaginations. But what does it really look like?
Luckily enough, the Comrades in Xinjiang managed to strike oil in 1955. Sometime in the aftermath, they have built a tourist attraction complete with wooden boardwalk allowing anyone to traverse around actual oil wells. You can see for yourself what this all-dominating natural resource looks like in its natural, bubbling habitat:
All this to say that a visit to the Black Oil Mountain in Karamay is an exercise in defusing feelings of alienation. So many of the global wars being fought the world over (against Muslims or whomever) have something to do with this banal looking dark liquid.
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