Curator of @shahitbiz. Only use this account for rare personal comments, not much sense in following.
Joined August 2021
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My testimony from 2018 (as the single most useful thing I can post here):
livingotherwise.com/2018/07/…
5 years later, this is still the world I live in, and it remains the strongest thing I've ever written, and probably will ever write. Translations attached.
Just a quick public note to @Starbucks:
I have boycotted your stores and products, in view of your opening branches in Urumqi: kozet.org/starbucks-opens-fi…
Opening stores + profiting in a region where 100000s remain incarcerated for political/religious reasons is too much. (1/7)
Personally, I'm embarrassed to admit that I've been a patron of yours for ~30 years, and probably spent 10000s of $ on your drinks/snacks.
As a PhD student in Lausanne, your cafe in the center was often a study space in between trains home. Spent 10k in just those 4 years. (6/7)
While I am sympathetic to Uyghur advocacy groups, uninformed posts like this do not help.
There are too many errors and inaccuracies, to the point where it can be called misinformation.
Since I've met the person in the video personally, I'm going to comment this. (1/6)
RFA originally misreported this as 18% of a "narcotic" (毒品) in their report, and seems to have fixed to ng/mL now, but without removing the 毒品 wording (药品 would probably be more appropriate here). (5/6)
Documenting the Atajurt arrests + sentencing has been a slow grind given the massive workload of everything else, but I've finally finished the subtitles for the flag-burning protest/video that prompted their arrest (full version in link): youtube.com/watch?v=bKmTWHx0… (1/3)
A day after the protest (Nov. 13, 2025), the Chinese consulate in Almaty, Kazakhstan sent a note to the Kazakhstan MFA claiming that this act had an "extremely negative impact on the friendship between the two countries" and asking for "appropriate measures" to be taken. (2/3)
11 of the 19 participants were subsequently given 5-year prison terms, with the others given non-custodial terms. Haven't done a polish of the English-language verdict yet, but it reads pretty dystopian.
Relevant press coverage: apnews.com/article/kazakhsta… (3/3)
Two bits of irony (satire?) here:
1) 6 weeks is considered "depth", while 1000s in the diaspora who were born/raised there and scholars who spent years there = "slogans".
2) "this is not propaganda" followed by an MFA-style headline that instantly accuses everyone else of lying.
I'm typically not one to toot my own horn but I think I may have written the single best article on Xinjiang this past decade.
Never has writing an article taken me so much time: almost two months.
It involved, as amply documented on this platform, a six-week RV roadtrip through Xinjiang during which I posted so relentlessly that I suspect several of you muted me somewhere around day six, and are only reading this now because someone told you the ordeal was finally over 😅
More seriously, I did what unfortunately all too few writers do these days when writing about a topic: I genuinely went deep.
Not only did I travel almost everywhere in Xinjiang and spoke with hundreds of people in the process, but I also spent a further 10 days afterwards in Urumqi - the province's capital - to engage with the local intelligentsia (journalists, university professors, public servants both junior and senior, XPCC/Bingtuan executives, businessmen, etc.) to get as accurate a read on the place as I could.
Meanwhile, when back in Urumqi after our roadtrip, I placed my 2 daughters in a holiday camp with local Uyghur kids - learning as a result something no discussion with an adult could ever tell me: what life is actually like for Uyghur kids in today's China.
On top of all this, I read widely and voraciously. The academic historians - Brophy, Gladney, Rudelson. The UN reports. But also books like Li Juan's wonderful Winter Pasture, a Chinese writer's account of living through a winter with Kazakh nomads in the Altay region.
The end result is an 8,000-word article that, I hope you'll agree, does something no article on Xinjiang has done in a very long time: treats the place and its people with the depth they deserve.
Maybe uncharacteristic for me, I don't shy away from the uncomfortable parts - on either side. I write about the omnipresent police checkpoints and the institutional paranoia as candidly as I write about the breathtaking shallowness and lies of the Western discourse on the topic.
If you're looking for propaganda - whether pro or anti-China - you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for honesty and nuance, however, I think you'll like it.
Enjoy the read here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…
We still need to raise around 400USD to help three former camp detainees with their general expenses this month: gofundme.com/f/general-aid-f…
Thank you in advance to anyone who can chip in.
Original broken. Archived version: web.archive.org/web/20180927…
