Included in a post on the Chinese social media site Meipian, in which the blogger Shanghai Lao Xu writes about the “Focus on Kashgar, Aid Xinjiang through Tourism” trip they participated in in October 2018. The post indicates that the trip, conducted under the auspices of Shanghai’s Paired Assistance program, brought photographers from Shanghai to the greater Kashgar area.
Tourists visit the Sayram (Sailimu) Lake ice and snow festival, in Bortala Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang, January 18, 2020.
Eva Xiao is a data journalist at the Financial Times, based in New York. Previously, she was a ChinaFile Research Fellow and worked as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and Agence France-Presse, in Hong Kong and Beijing, respectively. While in China, she reported on tech, politics, and society, covering everything from tech tycoons and luxury nursing homes to the mass destruction of graves in Xinjiang using satellite imagery. In 2021, one of her stories for The Wall Street Journal, which detailed China’s ethnic policy under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, was part of a series that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. While based in Beijing, she also spent a year co-hosting the biweekly podcast Digitally China, which focused on the country’s fast-growing tech sector, including episodes on e-commerce, gaming censorship, and artificial intelligence.
