Skiing where other people are tortured. China is lavishly rebuilding the Xinjiang region - into a huge winter sports resort. This is the region that is home to the minority Uyghurs, where they are oppressed and tortured. But the Communist leadership denies and conceals this.
In the Xinjiang region, the new age of global ski tourism has already begun. Snowcats are rolling through the landscape at 72 winter sports resorts, ski lifts are transporting thousands of recreational athletes from the valleys up the mountains, and there is even snow in abundance. Real snow, not the kind from the cannons in the Olympic villages of Zhangjiakou or Yanqing.
A modern, ideal winter world - just the way the Communist leadership and the International Olympic Committee like it. The best conditions for the 300 million winter athletes that China's head of state Xi Jinping and IOC President Thomas Bach are constantly talking about these days, while remaining ironically silent about the well-documented crimes against the Uyghur minority.
It is based in Xinjiang and has as little to do with the global winter sports industry, which Bach holds in such high esteem, as Beijing's party leadership has to do with an appropriate understanding of human rights. Altay, a city in the border region with Kazakhstan, is home to twelve detention camps where, according to human rights organizations, genocide is taking place. read more