General Xinjiang

Look, I'm not getting political or anything, but Radio Free Asia is. I take no responsibility for this article being awesome, but I'm going to stick a link to it in cause it's relevant to Xinjiang, which is where I've been travelling. That's all.

An agricultural official in the Xinjiang regional government confirmed the continued existence of a system of forced labor called hasha in remote areas of the countryside, in which laborers are not paid for their work. The official told RFA's Uyghur service, "At the moment, there is no money to pay the peasants. The money given to the government is very limited." more

A couple of interesting Xinjiang tidbits while I'm at it: Uighurs are like, the most physically diverse ethnicity ever. In XinJiang, which is IN CHINA, remember, there are these people walking around with blond hair and blue eyes, speaking Chinese because they're Chinese! And they speak Uighur too, cause they're Uighur. They might look Arab, Persian, Scottish, small-town Nebraskan, or straight out of Beijing, but basically, this is the first time ever in China that anyone has ever had to ask me if I'm a foreigner. It's wild.