'Every place you go, you are being watched': reporting from Xi's China
The Guardian’s outgoing Beijing correspondent reflects on six years of increasing repression
“You don’t work out, do you?” inquired one of the officers who had summoned me to my hotel lobby in China’s pre-eminent police state. We had only checked in 10 minutes earlier and, after an exhausting week reporting along Xinjiang’s spectacular high-altitude border with Pakistan, I was desperate for a hot shower and a snooze.
But “Mike” and his partner “Max” – two Uighur police officers tasked with thwarting even the slightest hint of hostile foreign journalism in this ever more repressive region of western China – were insistent.
Could I pop down for a chat?
Over afternoon tea in the lobby of Kashgar’s Radisson Blu, we pondered my spindly, gym-deprived physique and Mike’s love of
