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 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 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.
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 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
Amir’s critical comments
Intro to the XPCC
I’ve mentioned this to many Comrade acquaintances before: I would be useless on the Long March. I’m too gentrified/ urbanized to actually struggle in any meaningful way. Intellectual struggle is necessary at times; but undertaking revolution has nothing to do with education. Education in the everyday sense has little to do with risking it all. For example, I like hot showers and cappuccinos too much to dawn a pair of straw-fitted sandals and actually take up arms and fight, despite however many books or articles I publish. Books and articles don’t change history. China is forever indebted to its underclasses who understood less intellectually and more viscerally one thing: exploitation.
Formal education is largely an exercise in papering over and apologizing for real exploitation, mostly because the societal conditions of exploitation create the conditions for “education” to happen: if you have privilege and luxury enough to study at a university (and especially to teach at one), it means that you are not the one growing your own food or making your own shoes. Someone else has done this for you.
How likely is it that you would manage to intellectualize your way to an understanding of your own efforts as incapable of initiating real change? The likelihood is zero. So much better to ingratiate yourself with the masses and pay attention to the efforts of Comrades operating at geographical margins, which means appreciating the efforts of continuous struggle happening at the cultural peripheries and hinterlands. To me, the lesson of “Maoism” is that one must at some point abandon one’s central identity and embrace the far less romantic, far less philosophically put, efforts ongoing in boondock nowhere places like Shihezi.
The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) was founded in 1954, tasking former CPC military brass with carrying on the revolution beyond 1949; th/6at is, once the new China was proclaimed, it wasn’t enough to simply sit back and watch prosperity take hold. The imperative of any post-revolutionary victory is to carry on the revolution. And this no longer requires grandiose ceremonies at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, but dogged, day-to-day material struggle and hardship which virtually all intellectuals are uncut for.
The XPCC, as a unique revolutionary organization, combines agricultural, industrial, administrative, and military and defense initiatives into one organic whole. Rather than functioning as either an army outpost (martial law) or an agricultural organization exclusively, the XPCC has found a way to blur a type of alienation that naturally arises with the division of labor. One class of society is not charged with defense, another with farming. The mandate of the XPCC is that all roles function together. This sort of organizational structure simply could not exist in central urban locales, i.e., first-tier Chinese cities like Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen. Another reason to suppose that China’s true revolutionary heritage carries on outside of the flagship central locales that comprise China’s outward “face” to the world. In short, evidence of China’s commitment to Communism and socialism comes by visiting its marginal, rather than central, cities.
Photos of the XPCC Museum in Shihezi, by Amir
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