China Wants to Sell The World on Xinjiang Farmed-Fish

When Chinese state television hailed inland salmon as a miracle in 2018, many viewers saw something more familiar: not a wonder, but a sales pitch.The segment, aired by China Central Television that May, celebrated salmon farming in western China. Over images of sleek fish cutting through clear water, the narrator marveled that “a precious fish like salmon, which typically lives in the open ocean,” could now be raised inland, in the country’s barren western hinterland. The message was unmistakable. Technology had made the improbable possible. “The land is the same land, and the people are the same people,” the program declared, “but when technology is brought in, miracles are born.”Online, viewers began poking at the claim almost immediately.Was that salmon at all, many asked, or just rainbow trout dressed up as something fancier? On Chinese social media, the mood turned from curiosity to irritation. “People expect Atlantic salmon, but we’re getting freshwater rainbow trout that costs half as much,” one Beijing-based WeChat account complained. “How could you not be angry?” Science writer Fang Shimin dispensed with niceties: “This is cheap rainbow trout being passed off as expensive...