Xi Jinping visits Xinjiang for the first time since imposing crackdown
By Chris Buckley and Amy Qin
URUMQI – China’s leader, Xi Jinping, made his first visit to the western region of Xinjiang since he unleashed a campaign of mass detentions of Uyghurs there. His trip amounted to a proclamation of success in his years-long effort to quell ethnic resistance, despite international condemnation.
Xi’s four-day visit that ended Friday (15) focused on projecting that Xinjiang had become united and stable under his leadership. After his last visit in 2014, Xi set in motion drastic policies — widespread arrests, surveillance, indoctrination and labour transfers — to press the region’s Uyghurs and other largely Muslim ethnic groups to identify as members of one Chinese nation loyal to the Communist Party.
“Every ethnic group in Xinjiang is an inseparable member of the great family of Chinese nationhood,” Xi said while visiting a heavily Uyghur neighbourhood of Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, Xinhua News Agency reported.
“We must particularly treasure the excellent conditions of stability and unity,” Xi said.
Chinese state media also showed Xi waving at cheering crowds of Uyghur and Han residents; speaking to students standing at attention in the region’s main university; and admiring cotton grown by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a quasi-military conglomerate whose products have been banned by the United States as tainted by coercion and forced labour.
The visit comes just two weeks after Xi made a rare trip to Hong Kong, his first since the huge, and at times violent, protests there in 2019. During his visit, Xi claimed vindication for the hard-line measures he had taken to subdue the pro-democracy opposition and cement Chinese control over the once-freewheeling city.
Xi’s back-to-back visits are part of an increasingly intense effort to extol his policies before a Communist Party congress this fall, where he appears set to take a third five-year term as the party general secretary.
Rayhan Asat, a lawyer in the United States whose younger brother is imprisoned in Xinjiang, said Xi’s comments were disconnected from the harsh reality on the ground.
“Photo ops with smiling Uyghurs hardly change the evidence that innocent Uyghurs continue to be imprisoned,” Asat said. “The ‘China Dream’ cannot be achieved while an ethnic group is subject to an apartheid regime and locked up for its race,” she said, referring to Xi’s vision for a rejuvenated, powerful nation.
-New York Times