In a former mosque in the city of Kashgar, two baby camels are waiting for customers. They are standing in a small enclosure in the courtyard, next to a make-up studio and mannequins in colorful traditional dress.

The camels are the accessories for a trend that tourists from other parts of China love: They dress up as Uighur princesses for photos. The studio in the former mosque specializes in this kind of "ethnic" travel photography - and business seems to be good.

The Chinese, who are once again traveling extensively following the lifting of the country's zero-COVID policy, increasingly view the Xinjiang region as an attractive tourist destination. In just the five days of holidays in early May, the region recorded 8 million visitors, an increase of 140 percent over the same period last year. The increase was twice as high as the national average.

In the West, by contrast, Xinjiang is primarily associated with the oppression of the Uyghurs. After Beijing unleashed its "Strike Hard" campaign in 2014, hundreds of thousands of women and men were shipped to camps, with some estimates putting the figure at more than 1 million.

The Xinjiang Police Files, leaked police documents from the internment camps that DER SPIEGEL and other media published  in 2022, were just further evidence of events that the UN human rights chief at the time determined could constitute "crimes against humanity."

The repression reached its peak after security hardliner Chen Quanguo took over as party secretary in Xinjiang in 2016. He was known for his merciless approach, previously displayed in Tibet. But the 67-year-old has since left his Xinjiang post.

His successor has a very different image: Ma Xingrui made a name for himself not within the security apparatus, but in the aerospace industry. The politician, who holds a doctorate in engineering, was the chief commander of the Chang'e 3 mission in 2013, the first successful landing of a Chinese spacecraft on the moon. Most recently, he served as governor in the comparatively cosmopolitan, well-developed coastal province of Guangdong.

Since he took the position in Xinjiang, a lot has changed. The repression hasn't exactly gone away, but it looks quite a bit different now.

A team of journalists with DER SPIEGEL spent a week and a half traveling through southern Xinjiang at the end of April. Our journey took us along the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, from Korla through Hotan to Kashgar, including stops in the desert town of Qakilik and rural Karakax. In southern Xinjiang, the Uyghur share of the population is higher than in the north, and their culture is traditionally strong. When the campaign of repression was at its most rabid, this part of the country appeared to be under siege.

Now, it seems that three worlds exist simultaneously in Xinjiang: A wonderland full of orientalist kitsch that has been concocted for tourists. A shadowy world of continuing repression, although it is harder to see than it was a few years ago. And an in-between world in which most Uyghurs probably live: no longer in an absolute state of emergency and yet far from normality.

Wonderland

The mausoleum of Afak Hodja rises on the outskirts of Kashgar. A dome arches over the 17th-century building, sunlight shimmering on the glazed tiles that clad the four minarets. A spacious park with rose beds has been built around it.

Pilgrimages to the Sufi master's resting place have been forbidden for years, but now tourist groups come, largely because of Afak Hodja's most famous descendant.

Xiang Fei, the "fragrant concubine," was the only Uyghur in Emperor Qianlong's harem. According to Chinese legend, he fell in love with her because of her enchanting scent. To help alleviate her homesickness, he built her a mosque and a bazaar in faraway Beijing, which she could view from her palace window. The Uyghur lore is less romantic: In their telling of the story, Xiang Fei resisted Qianlong and was eventually poisoned.

The latter version finds no mention in the 45-minute musical that is performed in a theater at the entrance to the park. To be sure, her friends are initially saddened when Xiang Fei is picked up by envoys from Beijing. But then one of the performers shouts that the farewell is a cause for joy after all: "She may enter the capital and approach the emperor. This will bring glory to the ancestors and will certainly promote unity!" Joyful music breaks out and the Uyghurs perform a spirited dance.

It’s a message that fits neatly for Beijing: a Uyghur woman who submits to the central power for the sake of national unity, which in turn takes care of her affectionately.

The audience in the theater applauds. Then the tourists go out to the park, eat pork sausages and ride ostriches with small embroidered saddles.

Efforts are obviously being made in Kashgar to implement the instructions issued by China's state and party leader. "We should fully showcase the Chinese culture by displaying what can be touched and seen to strike a common chord," Chinese President Xi Jinping said during a visit to Xinjiang in July 2022.

It was the first time Xi had traveled to the region since the wave of repression began in 2014. It could be interpreted as a victory tour, a signal that he believes the population is now sufficiently integrated.

Xinjiang's new party boss concurs. "People of all ethnic groups are following President Xi Jinping's wonderful plan to push forward high-quality development," Ma Xingrui said just a few weeks ago. "The overall social situation in Xinjiang is stable."

Many of the police stations, lined up like shoe boxes every few hundred yards along the roadsides, are indeed abandoned, their metal doors barricaded. At market gates and the entrances to the Old Town of Kashgar, there are still security checkpoints, but the metal detectors are turned off and don’t beep. Guards fiddle with their mobile phones in boredom.

If they took their job more seriously, they would hardly be able to keep up with the crowds in the pedestrian zone that runs through the eastern part of the Old Town. Street food is to be found every several feet. Late at night, a light show featuring dancing waters is staged in a newly created park; the morning begins with firecrackers set off in front of the hotel.

Kashgar now belongs to the tourists rather than the security guards. Never before has a more consumable and domesticated – or developed, as Beijing would say – Kashgar existed than this. The Uyghur city of yore, on the other hand, is fading.

Dark Places

It appears that mass tourism and mass incarceration are not mutually exclusive. The high-security facility is located among sand dunes in the desert northwest of Hotan. "Loyalty to the Party, strict discipline," a quote from a Chinese police oath, is written in red characters on the flat roof. Several rows of buildings are located behind a high wall, in front of it a fence, barbed wire, electric wire and a watchtower.

It could be a regular prison. But might it also be one of the infamous internment camps? Either way, there is a high probability that a disproportionate number of Uyghurs will be imprisoned there who were not convicted according to the rule of law.

China declared at the end of 2019 that all those detained in what it called "vocational training centers" had "graduated," meaning they had been released. Beijing is less keen to talk about the fact that during the same period, the number of criminal prosecutions in Xinjiang increased dramatically.

This is evident from statistical data released by the region’s top prosecutor, the Xinjiang People's Procuratorate. Whereas some 41,000 criminal cases were opened in 2016, one year later, after hardliner Chen Quanguo had assumed leadership, the number jumped to more than 215,000.

In total, roughly 540,000 people were tried in Xinjiang between 2017 and 2021. And around 99 percent of court cases in China, where the judiciary is under the control of the Communist Party, end in a guilty verdict.

Hundreds of thousands of those who were originally arbitrarily detained in a camp are thus now likely to have been sentenced. From China's perspective, now they’re just common criminals.

But the places where they are imprisoned may no longer be the same. In 2020, research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) caused a global sensation. The researchers examined thousands of satellite images of Xinjiang at night, zooming in on places where lights could be seen in remote areas. By doing so, they identified 380 facilities in Xinjiang, some of them high security, that they believed to be camps.

Foreign journalists accredited in China went to the camps and verified the existence of some. By now, many of the suspected camps are apparently no longer used for that purpose.

On this reporting trip, the team from DER SPIEGEL attempted to visit around a half dozen of these locations. Two of them are definitely in operation, heavily secured and well shielded. Another now houses a technical college.

Another site in Karakax near Hotan, described by the German Xinjiang researcher Adrian Zenz in 2020, appears to be abandoned. The facility looks forbidding, cameras are mounted on the corners of the walls, and the masts of floodlights can be seen behind them.

But the police station on the access road has apparently been out of service for quite some time. There's no delivery traffic and only one car parked nearby at all. A Uyghur man of about 50 years gets out of the car and introduces himself as the person responsible for security at the facility.

He says that no journalists are allowed to approach the site without permission from the local propaganda authority. Company policy. No, he says, by no means was anybody locked up here. The conversation ends there. That happened often during the trip, leaving our impressions fragmented and contradictory.

At the beginning of May, analysts at IPVM in the United States published a new report in which they reveal that a Shanghai police department is having a digital warning system built that will alert them as soon as any Uyghur person arrives in the city. It’s obvious that the persecution and monitoring of Uyghurs in China persists.

A World In-Between

In Korla, Uyghur music resounds from a park near the river, a strong rhythm, a languished female voice. Men spread their arms, snap their fingers as they spin around. As is common everywhere in China, local residents have gathered in the evening to dance together. This isn’t a show for tourists. In the moderately attractive Korla, there are practically none.

Three young Uyghur men want to talk, they are curious and clearly did not expect to meet a German here. Did we come to Xinjiang by plane? Do we like the food here? Their carefree attitude suggests that they’re not worried about getting into trouble if they’re seen with us.

One of them works in a meat factory and reports that he skins 30 sheep each day. Another is a police officer and describes his job by saying: "I arrest the bad guys – drunks who start fights."

Most of all, though, he wants to talk about his girlfriend, who he has been dating for three years, and about their upcoming wedding. We see at least five or six Uyghur wedding parties on our trip – the creation of new families and new beginnings.

The three men want to take us to a place across the river where more people gather to dance. On the way there, the butcher runs across a vending machine and wants to buy some water. We continue our stroll. But when he doesn’t reappear after a few minutes, his friend goes to find him. He doesn’t come back either. The policeman also suddenly disappears without saying goodbye.

During our trip to Xinjiang, we are monitored nonstop by unidentified persons in plainclothes. We understand that they will interrogate any of our random acquaintances as soon as we are out of sight.

In one instance, we stepped out onto the first-floor balcony of a carpet store. In the street below, we could see a person with whom we had just been speaking being approached by someone who had been shadowing us.

Another time, a waitress tried out her English on us and wanted to exchange contacts using the messenger app WeChat, only to delete them again less than an hour later. The next day, we stopped by again and the waitress was there, but she showed no recognition whatsoever.

At Kashgar's livestock market, some of the traders clearly hadn't shaved for a few weeks – something you didn't see in 2021, since wearing a beard could land you in a camp. But none of them were wearing a full beard of the kind that pious Muslims in the rest of Central Asia often wear.

In and around Hotan, clusters of boarding schools and technical colleges have gone up in recent years, preparing thousands of young Uyghurs for a productive life in blue-collar jobs. Additional such educational facilities are under construction – even in the middle of the desert, right next to the high-security facility with the police oath on the roof.

It's recess time in one of the huge complexes, and children in school uniforms are running around the grounds screaming. There is neither barbed wire nor watchtowers there.