![Female tourists in Xinjiang in a photo from China's state news agency Xinhua.](https://www.merkur.de/bilder/2023/10/06/92563871/32849719-touristinnen-in-xinjiang-auf-einem-foto-von-chinas-staatlicher-nachrichtenagentur-xinhua-2kuEKE1MYlfe.jpg)
Luxury hotels for tourists instead of re-education camps for Uyghurs: China is trying to polish up the image of the Xinjiang province. But the situation is still dramatic.
The Chinese province Xinjiang should be a “beautiful” place, demanded Xi Jinping End of August. On the way back from the Brics summit in South Africa, China’s head of state and party leader traveled to the Uighur region in the northwest of the country to hear from the local leadership about the progress in the province. Nice – that means for Xi: Xinjiang should become like the rest of the huge empire. So, above all, it is politically stable – and as “Chinese” as possible. The Turkic peoples living in Xinjiang must speak standard Chinese and “illegal religious activities” must be “effectively controlled.” And, according to state media, Xi Jinping also said this in August: The “successes of the work in Xinjiang” are already clearly visible.
Several Western journalists have recently reported that it is no longer quite as visible in Xinjiang Surveillance and control of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. Most of the police stations that were on every street corner in Xinjiang some time ago have been dismantled, reported David Lipson from the Australian television station ABC. Only the many surveillance cameras are “one of the few visible signs of decades of intensive oppression” of the Uyghurs, writes Lipson, who was recently able to visit Xinjiang.
UN experts criticize human rights violations in Xinjiang
It has also been known for some time that most of the re-education camps, in which up to a million people are said to have been interned by 2019, have largely been closed. Nevertheless, “the worst is not over at all,” said the journalist and sinologist Mathias Bölinger in an interview with the in the spring Frankfurter Rundschau. The camps have been converted into official prisons, and “relaxations are only on the surface.”
Last year, then-UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet accused China’s government of committing “serious human rights violations” in Xinjiang. Her successor, the Austrian Volker Türk, also expressed “concern” about the situation in Xinjiang a few months ago. UN human rights activists threw China recently proposed sending Uighur children whose parents were in exile or in internment camps to state boarding schools. There they would be culturally assimilated.
Terror attacks and violent riots with hundreds of deaths triggered the massive crackdown against the Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities, as China blamed militant separatists for them.
China wants to promote tourism in Xinjiang
Despite or precisely because of the massive accusations from Western observers, China now apparently wants to give the Xinjiang region a new image. The provincial government must “strengthen positive public relations and show the new atmosphere of openness and self-confidence in Xinjiang,” Xi said in August.
This also includes promoting tourism in the region through which the historic Silk Road once ran. The Xinjiang tourism authority plans to invest more than 700 million yuan (92 million euros) this year in the construction of luxury hotels, theme parks and campsites, among other things, the AFP news agency recently wrote. According to ABC report by David Lipson, 180 million tourists have already visited Xinjiang this year alone. However, there is no longer much to see in Xinjiang of the old culture that once made the region so fascinating. For example, the historical center of the oasis city of Kashgar, which lies in the very west of Xinjiang, has been largely destroyed in recent years.
But it’s not just luxury hotels and wealthy tourists that are supposed to help polish Xinjiang’s image. China is also investing a lot of money in disinformation campaigns, as a report published at the end of September on behalf of the US State Department shows. It is also about painting a positive picture of Xinjiang.
China wants a positive image of Xinjiang
One strategy of the Chinese government is to invite foreign reporters to travel to the region. The ABC journalist, for example, was on such a tour. According to his own statements, despite almost complete surveillance, he was also able to speak undisturbed with locals, who gave him a differentiated picture of the situation. A reporter recently traveled to China at the invitation of the Chinese government Berlin newspaper the Uyghur province. However, there is nothing to be read about human rights violations in his “Travel Report from Xinjiang”. Instead, we learn about “tremendous economic changes” that clearly made a huge impression on the author. While visiting a “modern agricultural company” he learned that “almost 90 percent of the workforce” were Uyghurs. He lets a farming couple rave about the benefits of the Chinese state.
On the social network X (formerly Twitter), political scientist Andreas Fulda from the University of Nottingham calls the text a “palpable scandal”; Thorsten Brenner from the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin speaks of a “low point in German journalism”. And sinologist and Xinjiang expert Björn Alpermann from the University of Würzburg writes that the article “represents 1:1 the standard narratives of Chinese party propaganda.”
As early as 2013, President Xi issued the slogan that journalists must “tell China’s story well.” All the better if these “good stories” are about Xinjiang.
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