Xi Jinping Visits Occupied Uyghur Region for Genocide Denial Spectacle

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Centr
Xie Huanchi/Xinhua via Getty Images)Xie Huanchi/Xinhua via Getty Images
Frances Martel

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping toured the far west city of Urumqi, East Turkistan, this week to inspect the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people and other non-Han groups in the region, state-run Chinese media outlets revealed on Friday.

China began engaging in genocidal practices – including imprisoning civilians in concentration camps, forcibly sterilizing entire villages of women, separating children from parents and forcing them to learn the foreign Mandarin language, and harvesting organs from prisoners – in East Turkistan since at least 2017. An investigation published in 2018 by the Reuters news agency revealed the existence of more than 1,000 concentration camps in East Turkistan.

None of these realities appeared Friday in Chinese state media coverage of Xi’s visit to East Turkistan, which the Communist Party refers to as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Xi, instead, appeared in front of choreographed crowds of colorfully dressed ethnic minority people and was depicted only as receiving raucous applause by the staged audience. According to the Communist Party’s Xinhua News Agency, Xi spent his time in Urumqi, the regional capital, visiting Xinjiang University, a local museum, and various residences. Xi also reportedly enjoyed a dance performance.

“Xi learned about the work in nurturing talent, coordinating [Chinese coronavirus] response with economic and social development, promoting ethnic unity and progress and consolidating the sense of community for the Chinese nation, among others,” Xinhua claimed:

Another government media outlet, the English-language propaganda outlet Global Times, quoted Xi as promoting alleged “ethnic unity” in East Turkistan.

“We must be down-to-earth, understand what the people are thinking and hoping for, and do our work according to their needs,” Xi reportedly said. “We need to build community-level Party organizations well, truly playing their role as fortresses, so that people of all ethnic groups lead happier lives.”

Xi also took the opportunity to promote China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure plan allegedly meant to reconstruct the Ancient Silk Road trade route between China and western Europe. In reality, the BRI has spread rapidly to the poorest countries of the world in places nowhere near the Ancient Silk Road, such as Africa and Latin America. The predatory loans these countries take out to participate in the BRI have resulted in significant economic devastation in vulnerable countries, most prominently Sri Lanka. East Turkistan lies squarely in the heart of the proposed route of the initiative.

“The Belt and Road Initiative has yielded fruitful results since it was initiated. As the joint building of BRI continues to advance, Xinjiang is no longer a remote region but a core area and a hub. What you have done is of historic significance,” the Global Times summarized Xi as saying.

In reality, Xi Jinping’s “ethnic unity” program has largely meant the erasure of the native populations of East Turkistan. According to the Communist Party’s official statistics, the region’s natural population growth rate dropped 67 percent between 2017, when the genocide began, and 2019. In 1949, only about seven percent of the population belonged to the foreign Han ethnic group; today, the group represents nearly half the population of the region.

As of 2021, the Han population in East Turkistan is growing significantly faster than the native Uyghur population.

Leaked documents and other research strongly suggest that Xi has personally orchestrated the genocide – not that it is the result of rogue Communist Party underlings in the country’s westernmost region acting out of lockstep with Beijing. Among the most damning evidence of this is the trove of classified government documents published in May by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, known as the “Xinjiang Police Files,” documents reportedly leaked to researcher Adrian Zenz, who has been at the forefront of documenting the Uyghur genocide. The texts of speeches by Communist Party leaders published in these documents repeatedly credit Xi Jinping as the mastermind of the genocide, using terms for the extermination such as “the Party Central Committee’s strategy for governing Xinjiang with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core.”

The Party’s top official in the region, Chen Quanguo, describes the genocide objectives in one document as “breaking lineages, breaking roots, breaking connections, breaking origins” – crediting Xi with the plan.

Xi’s visit to East Turkistan follows growing pressure on the Communist Party to cease its genocide, culminating in the United States with the implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) in June. The law bans imports of any products from East Turkistan, assuming they were made by Uyghur slaves, unless the importer can prove that slaves were not used to produce or manufacture the imports. The Chinese government has admitted through its state propaganda arms that the law has significantly impacted the region’s economy – particularly its cotton industry, which is largely fueled by the use of Uyghur slaves to pick cotton and manufacture clothing and other fabric products.

A report published by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post this week revealed that the Chinese government is planning major purchases of East Turkistan cotton to offset the collapse in demand from the rest of the world.

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