I found this online post published on April 21, 2021 by a Han Chinese who was born in the inland of China but went with his parents to Xinjiang when he was young. I refer to the blogger as “he” purely out of convenience, as the blogger revealed no personal info and offered no clue for gender identification of the author.
Anyway, his is a farming family but no city or prefecture information was given. Currently he lives in Germany after attending a university outside Xinjiang in the mainland.
I was hesitating of citing him (or her) because the personal information was too scanty. Also, this blog was reposted by China digital time, which has shown a clear tendency against Beijing. Nonetheless, the blogger did sound familiar with farming activities and about the past and ongoing prices for hiring seasonal farm labors in Xinjiang. The fact that the person lives in Germany also allows him more freedom in speaking up his/her mind, although only relatively as I have a feeling that his parents are still inside China. I agree with Janssen that personal freedom in the mainland has been improved over time, more than an average westerner may think. But again, this is Xinjiang and Beijing apparently holds stricter policies there.
Matched Evidences
The key reason I decided to use this piece was that I was able to confirm what he said about one sensitive detail in his village: All kitchen knives must be chained in a fixed place inside the house, and registered with a QR code printed on the knives. The QR code will be matched with the owners’ national ID. The idea of course is to quickly track down all the knives found in riots.
Interestingly, in another video by Dumbrill on his trip to Kashgar on April 23, 2021, two days after the above blog was published, he found exactly the same thing from visiting and chatting with locals in Kashgar: Kitchen knives were indeed chained and registered, the only difference is that the knives were not fixed to a place. This small difference is understandable: Dumbrill went to Kashgar and walked around on his feet on April 23, while the blogger lives in Germany so his information is not as current as Bumbrill saw. The locals did tell Bumbrill that things were more relaxed these days. Anyway, I felt comfortable as the two stories proved each other to be right and true.
The other reason this blog is trustworthy is that the blogger was mostly complaining about how the government policies since 2018 brought inconveniences to the life and business of his family. The blogger claimed he’d just put down what he saw, not intended to debate anyone.
A Ground Witness Report From Xinjiang
Below I will translate the original points listed by the blogger from Chinese to English. The original blog was divided into 13 points but I will break them into more to better reflect different facts he reported. I will also use the tone of first person to make the sentences more personal. At the end of each point I will add my own observations in parenthesis.
- Since 2018, houses in isolation, meaning apart from other houses in my village, were all required by the government to install surveillance cameras above the entrance of the house — and we have to pay for it, not to be reimbursed by government. We were also told to keep the surveillance data for at least 90 days, longer than the surveillance data kept by a five star hotel. My parents ended up spending more than 2,000 RMB on the equipment, and we have no choice as the police threated to put a seal on the door to stop anyone from entry — into our own house. (People are willing to sacrifice certain degree of freedom to fight terrorism, but sealing up a house and prohibiting people from entering their own house certainly went too far.)
- They check ID if we need to buy LPG or liquid petroleum gas from the gas station. We also must get permit from the village committee to buy gas. (I can understand ID check for fuel but asking permit from village committee went too far.)
- Sometimes they would raid families to check for explosives. My parents grow fruits for a living so one day they saw several kilograms of the chemistry used for killing insects on the tree, and spent a long time to interrogate my parents for that. (Family raiding requires court order, but I am positive they do not have that, do not even know what it is.)
- Starting from 2019, every week the village would organize a ceremony for raising China’s national flag. Han Chinese will take turns as the security guards, and anyone entering the village will have to be registered (This detail of only using Hans as security guards differs from what I read in other places like Urumqi the capital, where many or most police are Uyghurs. Perhaps his village is mostly Hans, which makes sense as Hans and Uyghurs typically do not mix up at village level.)
- For unknown reasons, they demand Uyghur men to do military training everyday between April and July. I mean they are farmers and should take care of farming business. Nobody seems to care. (Again this violated human rights and if they only asked the Uyghurs to do the training, that would be an textbook example of ethnic discrimination. Not sure what the purpose is, teaching self-defense against riots or terrorist attacks? If that is the case, the Han Chinese should do the training as well.)
- All the major roads in the village are locked with checkpoints, Han Chinese are free to pass but the minorities under 70 year old of age are subject to ID checks. It is also mandatory to hand over their phones to the police for inspection. No privacy at all. (Sad example of ethnic discrimination; phone inspection violates human rights and privacy for sure. Later the blogger mentioned that currently in Xinjiang anyone with a uniform, without showing any legal document, could randomly stop someone for questioning. Anyone with a Xinjiang ID, Han or Uyghur, would face some trouble in the inland as people look at them differently. Many mainlanders still support Beijing policy and believe it necessary to bring peace to the country.)
- Between the second half of 2018 to the beginning of 2019, there was a project called “Two jobs” and not sure what exactly it meant. All we knew was someone coming to collect blood samples, DNAs, fingerprints and eye scanning for everyone, regardless of age, ethnicity and gender. These are done by people in military uniforms. Some farmers were scolded for having unclear or bad fingerprints due to years of farming work. (I suppose collecting DNAs and fingerprints are understandable, but no need to do that for everyone. Scolding people for something not their fault is ridiculous! More importantly, this seemingly trivial detail reflects a fundamental problem in China: The so called “public servants” act like “public supervisors” and can scold or do something even worse to the public anyway they want.)
- At the center of our town were kindergarten, primary school and residence units surrounding the government building. Later all the buildings were demolished for a gentrification. This time however the government building were only surrounded by green spaces spanning 500+ meters, no other building was near it. (I assume this was designed so the government building can be an easy target for terrorist attack so they need a buffer safety zone of 500 meters?)
- During all holidays all major roads of our town were guarded by security spot every 100 meters away from each other, every spot has 3 people, one of them carried a rifle. The three of them will have one three-wheel police motorcycle, plus patrolling cars going between security spots. Our town has fewer than 20,000 people but was guarded by more than 100 security officers. The human capital and the money should be better spent on education I think. (I can understand doing these things during holidays for one or two years, but not forever. This video by a guy named Fernando originally from Columbia made a good point that right after the January 6 riot, the US sent many national guards to the DC to protect the Congress. But those are one time deals or working for emergency situations. I also want to cite Dumbrill from his trip to Kashgar in April 2021, from which he learned that the standard police response time is 60 second or less from the report of a fight, a riot or an attack. Local residents were feeling completely safe and they boast about the safety. They don’t need to lock their doors at night. If one lost his or her phone, it will be found in 5 minutes! Still, Xinjiang needs relax after years of peaceful time. The cost of keeping such a high alert status is getting too high and unsustainable. It is more reasonable to keep a focused approach on suspicious targets but not the entire society.)
- Cotton produced in Xinjiang is hot and popular. 10 years ago, from third graders to high schoolers, every year the schools would organize students to pick cotton for 20 to 30 days. Every day we were required to pick up certain amount for everyone, and were paid for any amount above the daily quota. (This tells us that in the old days or 10 years ago Xinjiang did have forced labor for schoolers, as they had no choice but to go to the cotton field to pick up cotton. The defining feature of forced labor is lacking choices, not whether paid or not.)
- Nowadays we do rely on machines to pick cotton, because we can’t find seasonal workers doing that at cheap price. The problem with machine is that the cotton is very dirty, lowering its grade and lower selling prices. (This effectively denied forced labor in Xinjiang and instead of forced labor, they switched to machines, even though the latter lower down the cotton quality significantly and the selling prices.)
- 10 years ago, hand picked cotton can sell for 10 RMB per kilogram. Seasonal labors were paid from 1 to 1.5 RMB per kilogram. The best seasonal worker can harvest up to 150 kilogram per day, although picking 90 kilogram a day can be done easily. I was able to pick 100 kilogram a day. (Sounds like personal and believable experience. By the way, the price of 1 to 1.5 RMB per kilo has been confirmed by Dumbrill in his video from Kashgar, where an owner showed him pictures of his cotton field of roughly 5 acres (30 mu or 亩) that is 15 kilometers away from the city of Kashgar. Dumbrill was able to find out exactly the same price of 1.5 RMB per kilogram of picked cotton.)
- Now with the machine picked “dirty” cotton the most you can sell is 6 RMB per kilogram, while occasionally you may have to pay a seasonal worker for 2.5 RMB per kilogram. (These numbers sound about right. Note the hand picked cotton was selling for 10RMB for kilogram, but with machine picked the price dropped by almost 50%. I guess the only way to be able to make money is through economy of scale, owning a huge piece of land and use machines to pick up. The other way is to improve the machine so that it can comb the cotton to get rid of the leaves or plant debris that make the cotton “dirty”. This should be doable. Innovations are the ultimate way out.)
- 10 years ago, there were always seasonal cotton picking workers from the inland in the fall. A hard working couple can work for three months to take home 50,000 RMB for the new year, while the cotton farmers can still make 100,000 RMB a year. (Notice the seasonable cotton pickers were mostly Han Chinese from the inland, although the Uyghurs did that too. Can two people make 50,000RMB? It is tough but still doable: If the two can pick 300 kilograms one day, times 90 days no breaks or rest, and assume they got paid 1.5 RMB per kilogram, they would take home 40,500 RMB. But if they were paid 2 RMB per kilogram then the total would be 54,000 RMB. If their unit labor price was 1.8 RMB per kilogram, then the take home pay would be 48,600 RMB. They need to negotiate with the owner of cotton field. Perhaps the latter is willing to pay them a big more to keep them next year.)
- Today cotton farmers can hardly make money, and nobody wants to be seasonal labor for picking cotton anymore. My sense is that this year with reports on forced labors the cotton selling price will be lower and I wonder if the cotton farmers may have to pay the price for patriotism (The biggest victim from the forced labor reports is the cotton farmers in Xinjiang, although the people making up the rumors cannot care less about them.)
- Forced labor? I don’t know if it exists or not. I just know that Xinjiang now faces big shortage of farm labors. With cotton we can switch to machines, but for harvesting fruits no machine is available (Again if labors can be forced, there should be no shortage of labor, duh! The whole story of forced labor is off that it is really laughable. Only westerners who had never been in China would be convinced. For Chinese in the mainland, it is a common knowledge that forced labor has long gone for good, because Deng Xiaoping believed strongly in material reward 物质刺激. To say China has widely spread forced labor is like saying all Chinese men today still have long pigtails like in the Manchu time or Qing dynasty.)
- The real impacts to my parents: We relied on seasonal workers in the past for harvesting fruits. Every year we must hire 20 to 30 workers and it used to be no problem finding these people, as Uyghurs from neighboring counties of townships would come to work for us. They tended to know each other and they asked for reasonable prices. Sometimes we may have language problem but for the most part they did a good job. (This guy sounds familiar to the hiring of seasonal workers for harvesting fruits.)
- However, since 2016 we were no longer allowed to hire Uyghur workers. The government said you can hire the Uyghurs but we must register and the workers must be certified and guaranteed by someone. (Again, this is a policy that makes little sense, as it hurts both Han and Uyghurs. The blogger sounds like a descent human being, as he felt bad anytime when he saw the Uyghurs were asked to get out of bus for inspection by police but not the Han Chinese.)
In sum, there are plenty of verifiable evidences for human right violation in Xinjiang, which the US should have been targeting on. It is a waste of time to presume an accusation and then try to find evidences for it. Guess what? The “evidences” will always show up and your suspicion will always prove itself right — all because someone will always try their best to give you the evidences you want, for the simple reason that they expect to gain handsomely from making you happy. In the end, everyone wins except the taxpayers must foot the bills for the wrong moves. This is real lesson from the war in Iraq.
Made an appointment tomorrow later morning for my first vaccine shot in San Pablo at the Walgreens.