The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, made his first visit to the western region of Xinjiang since unleashing a campaign of mass detention of Uyghurs there. His journey amounted to a proclamation of success in his years-long effort to quell ethnic resistance, despite international condemnation.
Mr Xi’s four-day visit that ended Friday focused on projecting that Xinjiang had become unified and stable under his leadership. After his last visit in 2014Mr Xi launched a drastic policy – widespread arrests, surveillance, indoctrination and labor transfers – to incite the region’s Uyghurs and other largely Muslim ethnic groups to identify as members of a Chinese nation loyal to the Communist Side.
“Every ethnic group in Xinjiang is an inseparable member of the great family of the Chinese nation,” Mr Xi said during a visit to a heavily Uyghur neighborhood of Urumqi, Xinjiang’s regional capital. Xinhua news agency reported:. His published comments made no mention of stamping out “extremism” and “separatism,” which officials have long cited as the reason for the party’s strict policies.
“We should especially cherish the excellent conditions of stability and unity,” said Mr Xi.
Chinese state media also showed Mr. Xi waving to cheering crowds of Uyghur and Han inhabitants; speak with students standing at attention in the region’s main university; and admire cotton grown by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a quasi-military conglomerate whose products have been banned by the United States for being contaminated by forced and forced labor. He wore a cowboy hat and dark sunglasses as he toured ancient ruins on the outskirts of Turpan, a city in northern Xinjiang surrounded by desert.
“It suggests that the party is clearly very confident in what it has achieved in Xinjiang,” he said Michael Clarke, a senior fellow at the Australian Defense College’s Center for Defense Research who conducts research on Xinjiang. “They have provided security and ‘stability’ and are well on their way to achieving their long-term goal of cultural assimilation.”
The visit comes just two weeks after Mr. Xi rare trip to Hong Kong, his first since the massive and sometimes violent protests there in 2019. During his visit, on the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, Mr Xi demanded justification for the harsh measures he had taken to crush the pro-democracy opposition and strengthen Chinese control over the once freewheeling city.
Mr Xi’s successive visits are part of an increasingly intense effort to praise his policies before a Communist Party congress this fall, where he appears to be serving a third five-year term as the party’s general secretary.
Ahead of the political congress, the party wants to maintain national stability. But it is struggling with a sharp slowdown in the economy, caused in part by Mr Xi’s tight controls against Covid outbreaks. The party’s media apparatus has used the visits to Hong Kong and now Xinjiang to present Mr Xi as a confident, paternal authority, dominating even in once-turbulent regions on the periphery of China.
Rayhan Asat, a lawyer in the United States whose younger brother is imprisoned in Xinjiang, said Mr Xi’s comments were unrelated to the harsh reality on the ground.
“Photo ops with smiling Uyghurs hardly change the evidence that innocent Uyghurs are still imprisoned,” Ms Asat said. “The ‘China Dream’ cannot be realized as long as an ethnic group is subject to an apartheid regime and imprisoned for its race,” she said, referring to Mr Xi’s vision for a rejuvenated, powerful nation.
Relations between many Uyghurs and the Chinese Han majority have often been tense since Communist Party-led forces took over the region in 1949. Uyghurs make up 45 percent of Xinjiang’s 26 million residents, while Han accounts for 42 percent, Census figures 2020. Uyghurs are a Turkic group whose language, culture and Muslim heritage share many affinities with Central Asian nationalities. They have long complained of discrimination at work, as well as strict restrictions on religion and the use of Uyghur language.
Mr Xi made his previous visit to Xinjiang eight years ago, while he was still developing tough policies to quell Uyghur discontent and outbreaks of violence that had worsened since the deadly 2009 riots in Urumqi, the regional capital. Nearly 200 residents were killed by Uyghur attackers in those riots, Chinese news reports said at the time. Uyghur groups abroad said many Uyghurs killed by security forces or vigilantes are not included in China’s census.
Weeks before Mr Xi’s 2014 visit, Uyghur militants had stabbed more than 150 people at a train station in southwestern China, killing 31. On the last day of Mr Xi’s 2014 visit to the regional capital, militants detonated a bomb in Urumqi, killing a bystander and injuring dozens of others. that reinforced the demands of Mr. Xi to double control over Xinjiang.
A survey 2019 by The New York Times, based on hundreds of pages of leaked internal documents, showed that it was during and after that 2014 visit that Mr Xi laid the groundwork for the crackdown, calling for a series of secretive speeches for a total “fight against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of the dictatorship” and showing “absolutely no mercy”.
Mr Xi’s demands have sparked a wave of repressive measures in Xinjiang. Experts estimate that as of 2017, as many as 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other members of Central Asian ethnic groups were incarcerated in prisons and internment camps. There they underwent indoctrination to make them secular, patriotic supporters of the party.
The authorities also place the region under strict supervision, destroyed mosques and shrinessent residents to working in factoriesstepped up contraceptive measures for Muslim women and posted children in boarding schools.
In May, the BBC and a researcher, Adrian Zenzpublished leaked photos and documents from Xinjiang showing Uyghurs being held and imprisoned for acts such as refusing alcohol or growing beards under the influence of religious extremism.
As evidence of Beijing’s draconian actions in Xinjiang has grown, the Chinese government has been condemned by human rights groups, Western governments and Uyghur activists abroad.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has accused China of commit genocide against Uyghurs and other mainly Muslim groups, and have imposed sanctions on Chinese officials, companies and government agencies involved in Xinjiang. In June, a new law came into effect in the United States to ban Chinese forced labor by banning products from Xinjiang unless companies can prove that forced labor was not involved.
“Every time you use a trade measure like this, you don’t expect it to completely change government actions in the very short term,” Thea Lee, the US Department of Labor’s deputy undersecretary for International Labor Affairs said in a telephone interview this month about the law. But, she added, “it sends a very strong message to the Chinese government that this kind of activity is completely unacceptable.”
China rejected the criticism, arguing that its policies have helped to reduce poverty and extremism in one of the country’s least developed economically regions. Xinjiang, Mr Xi said during his visit, “should accelerate high-quality economic development” and improve job creation.
He was joined in Xinjiang by Ma Xingrui, the Communist Party secretary of the region who: was installed late last year, replacing Chen Quanguo, who carried out the most draconian phase of the government’s mass detentions. Since taking office, Mr. Ma promoted industrial development in Xinjiang, while maintaining a focus on security. During his visit, Mr. Xi Xinjiang as a “hub” in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an incentive to expand global commercial and geopolitical ties through infrastructure and port projects.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say it draws a line among the harsh, repressive elements in Xinjiang,” said Mr. Clarke, the Australian Defense College investigator. “But the renewed emphasis over the past year and a half on economics suggests an implicit admission that the repressive apparatus in Xinjiang, including the re-education camps, has had a negative impact on the region’s economy.”