I feel really sorry for these people in Xinjiang. A friend of mine (American Chinese born in China and left in the 1980s) is working on a similar story about Xinjiang (he works for Buzzfeed which has an office in Beijing) and he has been denied the renewal of his Work Visa just a few months back so he is back in New York now still figuring out a way to get into China. In China people outside of Xinjiang in general have no idea what is going on in Xinjiang except that it has become "peaceful". And many Han people in China actually like the idea that the government is doing something about Xinjiang because of the incidents happened in Kunming, etc. In Xinjiang they even have a separate security-check channel (a much faster one e.g. without checking the luggages, etc) for you if you are Han Chinese v.s. if you are Uyghur. This further reinforces the reality bubbles for the Han Chinese where Uyghurs are viewed as potentially dangerous, and they deserve the current treatment because they oppose the Central Government, and reinforces the reality bubbles for the Uyghurs that the Han Chinese are more superior and this is what happens when there are people in your community opposing the Central Government (i.e. the extremists). Now that I have lived in China for a while I can see that reality bubbles are extremely ubiquitous here (one example: so many tech conferences here are branded as "international" so for the none-tech Chinese people they were surprised when I, coming from Singapore, told them I had never heard of the "X International Conference" took place in some Tier 2 city; I had the chance to visit one before and it was just filled with Chinese people and bad English translations). I'm starting to believe the main function of the Central Government in China is to mass-control the reality bubbles of its citizens. Economy and everything else actually come second.

And since I saw a lot of comments about Trump here, I just want to point out that if Trump runs for president as a Democrat, which he will certainly do in order to maximise his chances in the case that the previous president is a Republican (also, if he were to do so he will do everything he could to appear extremely left-wing and liberal), as a President from the Democratic Party he will certainly use Xinjiang as among the many main reasons to start a trade war with China (which we will soon see that he and his friends will benefit hugely from). The main difference would be that everyone on the Internet will cheer for him when he starts the trade war, and there won't be as many people as there are now who had experienced the bursting of their reality bubbles back in 2016. Reality bubbles are ubiquitous in the west too. The difference here is that no central system is trying to control these reality bubbles. Instead, the problem in the west is that there are platforms like Facebook which, for the sole purpose of their business interest (e.g. user retention), reinforce people's reality bubbles to be more monochrome with views on things that is very one-sided. But given the rapid advancement in technologies and an increasingly larger proportion of the human population becoming more intelligent and intellectual, eventually platforms like Facebook will collapse as everything becomes more decentralised.

And I'm looking forwards to something like this happening in China too in the next 30 years. I heard from friends working in AliCloud that they are doing some experimental projects to build an AI for decentralised governance for the Central Government. Sounds ironic but this may just be the best way to combat corruption and improve the Chinese economics and for Xi to make sure him and his friends continue to stay in power. The Central Government will be rebranded as an organisation in charge of these decentralised AI governments for cities designed to serve its citizens' needs and there will be no need to mass-control the reality bubbles of Chinese citizens. And there will be no need to resort to doing horrible things to places like Xinjiang and Tibet too.