There are some places in the world that everybody knows the name of, and has an opinion on, but that almost no-one has been to. Sometimes it’s for positive things (think Bhutan) and sometimes not.
Xinjiang, unfortunately, belongs to the latter category: go to any random Western country and ask anyone on the street what they associate Xinjiang with and their response will be almost eerily uniform: concentration camps, forced labor, and genocide.
I’ve traveled enough in my life to have learned one thing: extreme opinions - on the positive or negative spectrum - about distant places rarely survive contact with the place itself. And that this is all the more true for places few people have visited.
It makes sense, these are the types of places for which wild claims face the least resistance: there is simply no accumulated weight of ordinary firsthand experience to push back against them.
I also know, of course, that the West has a strong tendency to manufacture stories about its geopolitical adversaries, like China.
So when you combine both, a place that almost no foreigner visits and one that happens to be in China, I fully expected a wide gap between the narrative and what I'd actually find. What I did not expect was that the gap would be this wide.
Before traveling to Xinjiang, I had a few requirements to try to understand the place as best as I could:
I wanted to spend a lot of time there - this is such a massive region that you just cannot begin to understand it if you just spend a few days there
I wanted to see a lot of it, as I understood that the situation could widely differ between, say, wealthy cities like Urumqi and the deep countryside
I wanted to travel entirely freely on my own terms - not in, say, a guided tour by the Chinese government (as a very large proportion of the few foreigners who visit this place do, even though they don’t have to)
I wanted to go to places completely off the beaten track where tourists never go
I wanted to meet and speak with as many locals from as many walks of life as I could
We decided on the following, with my wife and 2 daughters (aged 7 and 10): we’d rent an RV in Urumqi and tour the whole province, North and South - sleeping in our RV - during 5 weeks. At the end of our RV trip, we’d stay a further 10 days in Urumqi where we’d put our daughters during 1 week in a holiday camp with local (mostly Uyghur) kids when we, the parents, would discover Urumqi further and try to meet with the local intelligentsia.
We met every one of those conditions, and then some. Five weeks in the RV; close to 6,000 kilometers driven; north and south; cities, county towns, villages, grasslands, high mountains, deserts; and meeting hundreds of people in the process. No guide, no minder, no itinerary filed with anyone. We went where we felt like going and stopped when we felt like stopping.
Back in Urumqi, our 2 daughters spent 1 week in a military-themed holiday camp organized for local kids (and, believe me, it wasn’t easy to enroll them in that one!) while we - the parents - met with a fascinating range of journalists, university professors, public servants both junior and senior, people working for the famous Bingtuan (the XPCC, basically a state within a state in Xinjiang), community workers, and businessmen.
In short, we saw a great deal of Xinjiang and its people, on our own terms, over a long enough period that I feel I can now say something meaningful about it - unlike most people who have written about this place.
