When I was traveling around Xinjiang about two years back it was obvious something was going on.<p>In Korla everyone getting off the train had to submit to a retinal scan, presumably so authorities know all the ingress and egress into town, going to a park involved going through a checkpoint. To get into any train station at all involved 3 levels of checkpoints, the first checkpoint started before you got to the plaza before the train station, so checking in took about 3 hours. In Kashgar the old city had checkpoints at every corner. The entire province only had 3G, the moment you cross over from neighboring Gansu your China Telecom signal dropped from 4G, so sending videos or even pictures is very difficult even on weChat, if you try to do it through a VPN the experience is even slower.<p>Some checkpoints were vigilant, but in my experience most were just bored. One checkpoint basically forgot to check my ID because I was seated all the at the back of a van. Young Uighur men or woman sometimes with a Han standing around or sitting at a chair with a desk in the middle of the street, writing down the names of everyone who crosses his "stand".<p>What surprised me the most was that most of the guards manning the checkpoints in towns, highways, at gas stations (which involved a full car search in order to pull into) were Uighurs themselves. I get the impression you basically went to jail or joined the security apparatus, a modern variation on a old Chinese strategem of using barbarian to fight barbarian I guess.<p>The whole experience changed my perspective on human beings in general. At the end of the day, when I got back home the only conclusion I could come to wasn't even about China or Chinese, if we look at the long span of human history the only thing I can arrive at is human beings in aggregate have a high tendency to do shitty things. Goodness exists in individuals but as soon as we have to appeal to the common denominator of a group or groups more often then not being a piece of shit is the easiest and most expedient.