Love as a Commodity in a Time of Political Crisis: An American-Uyghur Wedding in Rural Southern Xinjiang

Author: Marcel McDonald

27 June 2025

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An unusual wedding ceremony took place on May 7 in Tazghun village in Yengisheher county of Kashgar, in Xinjiang, in the far northwest of China. What made it unusual was that it was a wedding between an American woman from Washington, D.C., and a Uyghur man from this village.

Screenshot from Eysajan’s shared post on Douyin. May 2nd, 2025.

On Uyghur social media in China the wedding quickly became popular. Many people praised the Uyghur man for marrying an American woman. Some commented, “You can achieve anything if you work hard. This Uyghur guy is a great example.”

The man, named Eysajan, is a social media influencer and sports teacher in a village near Hangzhou. He posts videos on Douyin (Chinese TikTok) and Xiaohongshu (known as “RedNote” but literally meaning “Little Red Book”) since June 2024, under the name “Yang Rouchuan” (阳肉串 a changed version of the Chinese phrase meaning “Mutton Kebab”). His videos show his daily life with his American girlfriend, now his wife, in Hangzhou, in eastern China. He usually speaks Uyghur in the videos, so his main audience is Uyghur. However, in daily life, he speaks Chinese—with a strong Uyghur accent—with his girlfriend. One special feature of his videos is that his girlfriend speaks fluent Chinese and is learning Uyghur.

As a scholar of Xinjiang who hasn’t been able to return to the region for over seven years, I started watching Eysajan’s videos as a method of digital ethnography (Dean 2023) to better understand daily life in Xinjiang. But as I watched more, I realized that his girlfriend is actually a famous vlogger in China named “Yang Lizi” (阳离子). She also uploads videos to social media channels, but hers are made in English and are placed on Western platforms like YouTube under the name Katherine’s Journey to the East. Although originally from Washington, D.C., Yang Lizi (or Katherine Olson, to use her real name) got a master’s degree in Nanjing, married a Han Chinese man from Heilongjiang who was nine years her senior, and began vlogging in 2020 during the COVID lockdowns. Riding a bicycle to nearby villages, she made videos about life in rural China. Her story of “true love” with her Chinese husband became famous. People praised her for marrying an ordinary man who gave her no dowry. She was seen as kind, humble, and an example for young Chinese women. However, the couple divorced in late 2022 after five years together.

According to Eysajan’s explanation, Yang Lizi first met Eysajan during a trip to Kashgar in late 2022. Later, he went to Hangzhou to look for work, and there they met again and started living together in her house in rural Hangzhou, where Eysajan found a job teaching sports in a local elementary school. Since then, they have been making videos together, sharing their “unusual intermarriage story.”

Now, Yang Lizi has over 6.44 million followers on TikTok and 142,000 on YouTube. She has won several awards from the Hangzhou government and other officials for having contributed to an ongoing campaign by the Chinese government to “Tell China’s Story Well” (Jacob, 2020; Xu & Gong, 2024).

Many people might ask what’s unusual with an American marrying a Uyghur from Kashgar. In fact, there’s nothing unusual with it. And intermarriage is not rare. But what is interesting about this “true love story” is how it shows that love can become a marketable product at times of political crisis.

State propaganda, intermarriage and love

Since the mid-2010s, personal social media has been used to spread China’s preferred messages about its ethnic policies, particularly in the form of videos made and circulated on social media by young members of minority groups. This “personalized propaganda” (Steenberg & Seher, 2023) became especially common in Xinjiang after 2019. These stories support the government’s version of life in Xinjiang, showing selected moments from rural or urban life. In particular, since 2020, a number of young Uyghur women started to use their personal social media platforms to share their stories of Han-Uyghur intermarriage. The main narrative of these videos, and the source of their attraction to followers, is that marrying a Han man can bring happiness to a Uyghur woman. This is overlaid with familiar governmental narratives promoting ethnic unity, which say that Uyghurs should give up on their backward and conservative thinking, and that Uyghur society should not criticize women who intermarry, since they do not owe the Uyghur community anything and are instead allowed to enjoy their lives with their new Han families. They also claim that love is a matter of the heart, and each person should freely be able to choose without restrictions.

In early 2021, one would often see a number of comments under these intermarriage-celebration videos criticizing the woman. These had been evidently posted by Uyghurs. But quite soon, other commentators would add warnings as replies to these critical comments, such as “do you want to go to eat momo?” (你想去吃馍馍吗)[1], a phrase that refers to being sent to a detention center or re-education school [2]. Quite soon, almost all the negative comments disappeared from these videos and only positive ones remained.

These videos of Han-Uyghur intermarriage gain followers by supporting state propaganda and critiquing traditional views within the Uyghur community. Their purpose, however, is not just, and perhaps not even primarily, the promotion of ideas, political or otherwise. By attracting followers, they aim to conduct e-commerce through live streaming (直播带货).The hosts of the videos sell daily goods such as cosmetics, beauty products, clothes, and so on. This combination of propaganda and commerce can therefore be read as a commodification of interethnic marriage (Wang & Chang 2002) at a time of political crisis. Eysajan and Yang Lizi’s videos also fit this type of hybrid communication. In their case, however, the object of commodification is international, not interethnic, marriage.

Objectification of Culture

In the case of the Yang Lizi videos, the objectification and commodification of culture is not because she uses a culture or a people to sell an unrelated product. It is because Uyghur culture and the Uyghur people become objects in her story. Objectification as an analytic concept was developed in the 1980s by writers like MacKinnon and Dworkin to describe gender inequality in society, and to demonstrate how male dominance is expressed through objectifying women and their bodies, while female sexuality is expressed submissively through acceptance of objectification or engaging in self-objectification (1997). Yang Lizi’s videos also involve a form of domination, one that is based on her power as a foreign influencer engaged in contributing to the dominant political narrative regarding a politically vulnerable community. She expresses that power not through sexuality but by objectifying the Uyghurs whom she meets in the villages. In short, she treats the Uyghurs and their culture as things to show and talk about in her videos.

This was signaled by Yang Lizi herself during the wedding in Kashgar, which she turned into the subject of seven of her videos. These showed that her wedding to Eysajan was indeed a visually impressive, multi-cultural and international event with “exotic” Uyghur traditional clothing, dancing and singing. But they also showed her attitude to that event, one that would not have been expected or perhaps even tolerated in a normal wedding in her home country. For example, when she began filming the event, a foreign friend of hers, who was a guest at the wedding, suggested that Yang should sit still and take part in the ceremony as a bride. Yang replied, “The vlog comes first.” The wedding seemed, at least at that point, to be more about producing content than celebrating a marriage.

There were more subtle examples of objectification, too. In Yang’s videos about the wedding, her American parents and her cousin (whom she refers to as her brother) get to speak, while Eysajan’s parents and other relatives are shown frequently as serving or hosting Yang’s family or as busy with their household chores, similarly they also do not speak in Eysajan’s video channel either. They do not get to speak. In her other videos about Xinjiang, in general it is foreigners who speak, primarily her western friends who joined her for the wedding. They include a British influencer who also makes videos about the happiness of life in Xinjiang (he became well known for a video about Kashgar about which he wrote “the BBC owes me an apology”’ for their reporting about Xinjiang). Yet, none of the local people at the wedding or in the villages, including Eysajan’s family members, speak in Yang’s videos. At one point, Eysajan’s mother tried to give her some clothes as wedding gifts, but Yang shows no reaction to her. Instead, she explains to her viewers that giving clothes as gifts in a Uyghur wedding is a part of Uyghur culture. As for Yang’s parents, who had travelled from the United States to attend the event, they do speak in the video: they describe Xinjiang as “colorful” and say that the region as “dry” and “far away”, as if they viewed Xinjiang and its people primarily as something to look at or as something to consume. They added that, because of the long distance, they would not be returning there. Of course, the reality might differ, but the video gives no sense that she or her parents saw themselves as new members of a family or that her parents saw their daughter’s in- laws as part of their extended family (Beller-Hann 2008, Dautcher 2009).

Besides her several wedding videos, Yang also made ten or more videos about details of daily lives in rural Xinjiang. She describes her project as documenting “true rural Uyghur life”, but does not speak much with local people, presumably because of the language barrier and because locals have been warned against interactions with foreigners. Unlike local producers of personalised propaganda, Yang does not focus on a specific topic in her videos; instead, she lets her subscribers reach their own conclusions about life in rural Xinjiang. And what she is showing

from rural Xinjiang is no doubt true.

But what is interesting is her choice of which details to include in her presentations and which to omit. Her wedding, for example, shows that at least 15 foreigners and many Han influencers from mainland China travelled to Kashgar to join her. This gives the impression that the rural areas of Xinjiang are open for everyone to visit, including foreigners, a claim that is often made to foreigners by the Chinese authorities. She chose to not record or describe the “permission” procedures she and other foreigners needed go through with the local authorities in the rural areas of Xinjiang. She also chose not to mention the religious and traditional barriers to a marriage in present-day Xinjiang, which she must have noticed, since there is no religious ritual, element, or imam, at the wedding. She does not explain why what she herself depicts as a highly traditional family in a religious community is holding a totally secular wedding. That may now be typical of weddings in rural southern Xinjiang, but it is because religious rituals for marriage have been banned in Xinjiang since the mid-2010s. There is no mention of this in the videos, just as there is no mention of the different religious backgrounds of the newly-weds.

There is also no mention of the fact that in rural areas of southern Xinjiang– at least when I was living there – filming is strictly prohibited by the local government, especially for foreigners.

Such filming requires official permission.

This question of selectivity is not unique. Among recent debates between China scholars in Europe is a 2023 controversy over an op-ed published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NNZ) by two well-known senior German sinologists, Thomas Heberer and Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer. After spending less than a week in Xinjiang that year, the two scholars wrote about the “normalcy” of people’s lives in Xinjiang, refuting foreign media descriptions of a climate of mass abuse and intimidation there. Like Yang, they presented Xinjiang at that time is a region which can be visited anytime by foreigners without any difficulties. In fact, as Darren Byler has shown (2022), foreigners are rarely allowed to stay overnight in a rural area of Xinjiang.

In particular, to show that surveillance and intimidation had been relaxed, the two scholars noted that they saw little or no sign of checkpoints in Xinjiang. But in doing so, they chose not to mention the number of cameras installed in public spaces in almost all corners of the region. Yang’s approach and narrative are somewhat similar. In both cases, their evidence is selective. Both the sinologists and Yang went to the region and found evidence from the field for supporting their perspective. That is not unusual and to some extent might be inevitable for any ethnographer or journalist. But what is noticeable is that in both cases, almost all the selected details follow the Chinese government’s current narrative about the stability and openness of region and the contentment of its residents.

A Paved Road to the “China and America Dreams”

Yang and Eysajan’s story of international and multi-cultural marriage is interesting in another way: besides the elements of love and romance that it no doubt includes, it represents, like many marriages throughout history and across the world, a form of opportunity and potential benefit for both actors in this story. From the videos it can be seen that Eysajan and his family accept the objectification that follows from being used as largely mute content for the videos, presumably because of the potential benefit that will come from their performance in the videos. Those benefits, however, are defined and limited by the particular conditions of Chinese rule in Xinjiang at the present time. For Eysajan, the benefit will be partly financial, since it will contribute to his stature and thus to his e-business. But in the Xinjiang context, material benefit is probably of secondary importance to another form of profit: political benefit. For Yang, that might mean more audiences and political connections. For Eysajan and his family, however, it will mean a ‘safer’ life in Xinjiang.

Drawing on Xi Jinping’s concept of the Chinese people’s current goal as a dream, we might call the couple’s aims their “China and America dreams.” Yang’s “China dream”, which she says tell the China story to the world that she has held since her early youth, has taken the form of wanting to show the world “real life in rural China”. Access to rural areas in eastern China, and to private households in those areas, has provided her with material for that project. This might bring financial benefit to her from the platforms where she uploads her videos together, but it is also likely to bring closer ties to the Chinese government. That is exceptionally valuable in a region like Xinjiang, where only certain urban areas are open to foreign tourists and where entering a rural area, let alone living in one, is now almost impossible for an American citizen.

Yang’s marriage with Eysajan brought with it the benefit of such access, and the videos celebrate, and in a sense marketize that benefit.

That access would not have come without some assessment of Yang’s record in China. We can assume that it depended on the trust she had earned from officials previously, a type of benefit or capital called political currency (Seher 2023), which is generally essential to gaining official approvals and opportunities in an area like Xinjiang, if not in China generally. Her application to film in the Kashgar village was probably endorsed by the local government in Hangzhou, where Yang had become well known for showing “real, exotic and diverse” lives of locals in the region. Besides that, since she has a degree in environmental studies, she had put effort into advertising the importance of environmental protection. She had also taken part in a mass swim in Wuhan in December 2020 at a time when there was widespread discrimination and blame in China towards Wuhan and its people, because the first COVID case had been found there. China’s main official television channel, CCTV, had described Wuhan as the “hero city” (英雄城市) to try to stop such criticism of Wuhan and its people. Yang took part in that campaign, known as the “Tell China’s Anti-Pandemic Story Well”, in which she had described Wuhan people as kind and had criticized negative stereotyping of them during the pandemic. She had thus become what in China is sometimes termed “a cultural promotion ambassador” (文化宣传大使), or a “contributor to the propaganda work of the local government”.

Now, it seems, her marriage and her wish to show “happy Uyghur lives” presented her with an opportunity to contribute to another of China’s propaganda drives – “Tell Xinjiang’s Story Well.” This drive, part of Xi’s overall call to his people to “Tell China’s Story Well”, is intended to refute western critics of China’s policies in Xinjiang, who have documented mass detentions, imprisonments, involuntary re-education, heavy surveillance and rampant religious repression against Uyghur and other Turkic peoples in the region. Her role in helping gain foreign attention to positive aspects of China’s policies in Xinjiang would have added to her political currency in China as an influencer and state propaganda ambassador.

For Eysajan, a man from a poor Uyghur village, marrying an American woman with such strong influence is, as the American phrase goes, “a big deal”. For what are in fact unclear reasons, such a move is seen in the Uyghur community as representing success. This is probably because it increases his access to the US and means that he could one day move there. But there is a more subtle discourse behind this notion of success: in the eyes of Chinese officials and like-minded “modernizers” in Xinjiang, Eysajan’s marriage is probably viewed as a radical and courageous act because it rejects the “traditional and backward” restrictions of the community in which he grew up. Both by the Uyghur community and by the Chinese government, he would also be seen as someone who can now cross cultural, religious, and ethnic boundaries within China, an option widely assumed to be unavailable to normal Uyghurs and minorities. Seen from this perspective, he is a hero helping the Uyghur community to become modern, open, diverse, and “integrated”. This may not have been the case if he had married just any foreigner or American. Her special status plays a big role. It could otherwise have been seen as suspicious by the government.

This perspective involves another kind of silencing. Like other interethnic couples supported by the government and showcased on social media or on television, Eysajan does not talk about religion or about the traditional barriers to marriage between a Muslim man and a non-Muslim woman. He only hints at such concerns by describing his parents as “open-minded” – but his allusion in that context is only to the fact that they accepted their son living with an American woman before marriage, an action that would normally be strongly criticized within the Uyghur community. He does not explain how his parents accepted a non-Muslim woman to be a member of their Muslim family; nor does he discuss whether they would prefer their new daughter-in-law to convert to Islam, as would normally be the case. This silence is not incidental: government policy in Xinjiang is to declare as a fiat that religion is not a problem in interethnic or interreligious marriage, or indeed in their shared community life or ethnic harmony more generally. This is underlined in the strongest possible way by treating any suggestion of a religious objection to such a marriage as a sign of religious extremism. Raising such an objection can lead to detention or imprisonment. Even emphasizing the religious or cultural differences in such marriage can be a reason for people to be sent to re-education. Whatever his personal convictions, Eysajan had little choice but to present his marriage on social media within the discourse of progress and modernity.

This development in Eysajan’s life will have presented him with opportunities. His videos have gained many Uyghur followers, and he has started an e-commerce business to sell domestic goods online. He may in time be able to follow in the footsteps of earlier presenters of “personalized propaganda” in Xinjiang, such as Ayituna, the “thick eyebrow brother from Kashgar”, and “Fate from Chöchek”, who became famous figures in Chinese social media and now have their own business as restaurant or company owners. But more valuable will be the “political currency” he has earned both for himself and his family by demonstrating the good lives of Uyghurs in southern Xinjiang and thus contributing to the effort to “Tell Xinjiang’s Story Well”. Already, there is one indication of such a development: Two days after the marriage registration, Eysajan received a passport. In present-day Xinjiang, for minorities, this is a privilege, especially for Uyghurs in southern Xinjiang. Only certain elite families with extensive economic capital and political connections are able to get new passports and to travel outside China now. Those who had passports in the past have had to hand them into a local police station and are rarely able to recover them; thousands of Uyghurs were detained in the 2010s simply for applying for one, and many of those applicants are still in detention, leaving relatives often stranded in the diaspora while they are unable to leave Xinjiang. Eysajan’s acquisition of a passport is part of the story he has told on social media, further contributing, with its necessary silences, to the narrative of “Xinjiang’s normalcy”.

From an anthropological perspective, Yang’s objectification of her new relatives and their culture places her in a long tradition of cultural exotification and orientalism. But this “true love story” between an American woman in China and a Uyghur man from a rural Kashgar village can also be seen as a three-way collaboration in which the two main actors and the Chinese state gain benefits for themselves. Those benefits are sometimes political, at other times economic. But they are part of a highly complex and precarious environment. The passport and the “political currency” that Eysajan has gained for himself, and his family are a temporary achievement. They depend on the whims of officials and on variations in state policy; they can be withdrawn at any time. For the young couple, the benefits that come from their videos will last only as long as their stories continue to contribute to official narratives about China’s project in Xinjiang.

[1] This is a real, direct quote but we are keeping the source confidential for security and ethical reasons.

[2] There are many stories among rural Uyghurs about people being detained because of their comments on other people’s online posts. A comment which criticizes an instance of Han-Uyghur intermarriage can easily be used by officials as evidence of “destroying the unity of the Chinese nationalities” or “opposing state policy” and can then lead to the commentator being sent to detention.

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