2 American friends were traveling in Xinjiang this month and asked me to share some photos and observations in a thread. They came away shocked at the level of militarization. As tourists they moved around freely in a way that's become tougher for journalists to do.
About them — they lived in Beijing for many years, speak Chinese perfectly & know the country well. They are both white (can't pass as either Han or Uighur). Neither works on human rights, foreign policy or anything "sensitive." Asked not to be named because of visa concerns.
In Kashgar on a weekend, they saw a military parade on Jiefang Lu, a major street. "All traffic on the street was blocked off by a line of city buses as what must have been at least five hundred police, military police and soldiers marched down the main road in formation..."
... interspersed with police vans and with an armored personnel carrier bringing up the rear. I was able to snap a few seconds of video before a cop saw us filming and waved us away."
"Walking around Kashgar you can’t go two blocks without running into police," my friend added. Every entrance to a public place has a police checkpoint, where police individually check the ID card of every Uyghur walking by and record down their name and information by hand."
Here's a security checkpoint before getting into a marketplace where handicrafts, snacks and other goods are sold.
Here's one outside an elementary school. 
"We also ran into frequent patrols of uyghur civilians wearing armbands designating them as “security volunteers” (安全员）walking around the city carrying simple blunt weapons — usually either a crude wooden bats or a length of metal pipe," my friend said.
They tried to visit the Id Kah Mosque in the city's center but found it empty during Friday prayers. "It seemed as if the mosque was maintaining the pretense of conducting prayers but that locals had been discouraged (or banned) from actually attending prayers there."
"Every time we took a cab we were stopped at a police checkpoint & had our passports checked. Same for every time we took a train," my friend adds. BUT — "Was obvious that the police had been ordered to stop & check foreigners but that they didn’t actually have clear orders..."
"...on what to do with us." When traveling in Xinjiang, "every 'check' was different. Sometimes they just wrote down our passport information by hand, sometimes they had a phone app to enter in our information, sometimes the cop just took a photo of the passport."
"During one check, we were pulled into a police station where two cops at a desk questioned us, then called a superior on the phone who proceeded to ask me the same set of questions by phone," says my friend. Eventually the officers manually wrote down their passport info.
I include this anecdote because it shows how despite all the modern/expensive surveillance technology, police officers on the ground vary widely in terms of enforcement and a lot of it still feels very arbitrary & like security theater. Doesn't make it any less intimidating.
"As with a lot of Chinese administrative procedure, people executing on the front lines had a lot of leeway to figure out what to do with orders from the top," my friend commented ...
"It seemed no different form the arbitrary enforcement of law around China that for foreigners is usually just a nuisance (or funny) but which for locals leaves space for abuse," he added. End of this (very long) thread, thanks for reading.
