From the expansive dunes of the Taklamakan Desert to the snow-capped peaks of Tianshan, Chinese authorities are selling troubled Xinjiang as a tourist idyll, welcoming travellers even as they send locals to internment camps. The government has rounded up an estimated one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic-speaking minorities into re-education camps in the tightly-controlled region in China’s northwest, but it has also created a parallel universe for visitors, who are only shown a carefully curated version of traditional customs and culture. “It didn’t look to me like — unless you were picked up and put in a camp — that these Uighur communities seemed to be living in some kind of fear,” said William Lee, who has taught at universities in China for 10 years and visited the region in June.
