Not Sapna Patel-Wheeler

I long knew that Bill Bishop was the high priest of these so-called "China experts" who systematically promote a negative image of the country. What I didn't know is that he was a straight-up conspiracy theorist, I thought he was a tad more subtle than this. This article he's pushing - written by an anonymous account (these people are always so courageous) - says my trip to Xinjiang this summer was part of a promotion campaign by the Chinese government. Which is of course completely false, and I can prove it: I personally paid for everything and I have the receipts. My two biggest expenses, given this was an RV trip and we were sleeping in the RV (as everyone who followed the trip here on X knows) were: A) the RV rental fee B) the plane tickets to travel to Xinjiang from Malaysia and back All four receipts are attached. The RV cost us RMB 18,000 (about US$2,650) for the month, paid in two installments: a RMB 3,000 down payment to the rental company in May to reserve it, and the RMB 15,000 balance when we picked it up. The plane tickets for the four of us cost RM 8,164 (about US$2,050): RM 3,915 to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Urumqi and RM 4,249 to fly back. Except for these, all our other expenses were relatively small: mostly restaurants, snacks, attraction fees and a hotel in Urumqi for the last 10 days, during which our daughters were at a holiday camp to perfect their Chinese with local kids. I also, unfortunately, had some medical fees because, as followers know, I ended up having health issues during the trip. Happy to show receipts for all of these too... The supposed "proofs" that this was a promotional trip in Bishop's promoted article are 1) that I got interviewed by Chinese media at some point towards the end of my trip, and 2) that I met up with my friend Daniel Dumbrill and his family. The second one is particularly hilarious. They write "One foreigner spending weeks touring Xinjiang in an RV with his young family is odd. Two is odder." That's it, that's the extent of the proof: it's "odd" 🤷 Yes, super odd indeed that two friends would meet up on holiday, completely unheard of! What a joke... Plus, it's anything but "odd" for me to travel in China in an RV with my family: as people who follow me are (maybe painfully) aware, it's the third summer we've done this. Before Xinjiang we'd toured Dongbei in an RV in 2023 (China's northeast) and some of the central provinces like Gansu in the summer of 2021. It's even less odd for my friend Daniel who owns his RV and lives in China: he travels in his RV with his family all the time. And it's actually the third time our 2 families have met during trips to China: friends, oddly, have this strange habit of wanting to see each other. Deeply suspicious behavior, I know. As for the first "proof", the fact I got interviewed by Chinese media, it's such a stupid accusation. For better or worse (I'd argue for worse, and because of people like Bill Bishop), a foreign family travelling to Xinjiang is indeed news in China. It shouldn't be, it should be normal, but the geopolitical climate is such that it is. I agreed to meet up with @FriedaLi3 from Beijing Review by the end of our trip because we already knew each other and I like her work, which I find nuanced and thoughtful. It's basically the equivalent of, say, a Uyghur family from Xinjiang doing an RV trip in France: it's a good story and I'm sure French media would want to interview them. I don't see how it'd be scandalous, unless of course you're Bill Bishop, in which case it'd be irrefutable proof of an Orwellian French influence operation. Bishop's promoted article also points out the Substack post that I wrote at the end of my trip (substack.com/@arnaudbertrand…) as some sort of propaganda piece, cherry-picking one line and the title. And the one line they "quote" isn’t even my wording: they apparently took a Chinese translation of my article, ran it back into English, and passed the result off as a direct quote from my Substack, grammar mistakes included. That’s the level of rigor we’re dealing with here... Also, anyone who actually read my Substack post knows how intellectually dishonest this framing of it is, given how I wrote at length about the heavy-handed security we encountered in Xinjiang, the climate of "institutional paranoia" that I describe alongside the resentment some Uyghurs feel toward Beijing. Believe me, no censor in China would read those paragraphs and think "great job, Arnaud, exactly what we ordered", and that's an understatement 😅 Last point: that's not to say that sponsored trips in China don't exist, there are plenty but they look nothing like what we did. You travel as part of a group - never individually - and are accompanied all the time by official minders, with an itinerary fixed weeks in advance and every hotel, meal and visit arranged for you. We were alone as a family in a rented RV, with two kids fighting in the back... I've been offered actual sponsored trips many times and I've always refused them with one exception: when I was with an official French delegation with the French minister of the interior (Christophe Castaner) and other French officials. Precisely because in that instance there was zero ambiguity and I couldn't be accused of being a Chinese agent or a traitor to France: hard argument to make when you're traveling alongside the minister in charge of its counterintelligence... The fact that Bill Bishop and this anonymous writer want to push the narrative that any travel to Xinjiang is inherently suspicious is, of course, no accident and exactly why you too should go. See it for yourself, film whatever you want, talk to whoever you meet. The more "odd" foreigners driving around Xinjiang, the less odd it becomes, and the harder it gets for people like Bishop to sell their "open-air prison" story. If the witnesses are few, you can always discredit them one by one. When there are thousands of them, what they describe has a name: reality.