Xi Jinping made his first visit in eight years on Thursday to Xinjiang, a province in the far west of China that represents one of the most sensitive points of his administration and where Beijing is internationally accused of repressing the Uighur Muslim minority.
Reports from the official Xinhua news agency indicate that Xi visited universities, a port area, a museum and residential complexes in the capital Urumqi. He also met with members of the Xinjiang Construction and Production Corps, a business and paramilitary entity created in the 1950s that controls much of the local production.
Citing Xi’s speech, Xinhua said the regime leader said he was pleased with the “great progress made by them in reform and development” and urged officials to feel proud, “continue to work hard and intensify efforts to make the group even stronger.”
The leader’s visit, despite the smiling photos, comes at a time when Xinjiang has returned heavily to the international debate after UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, who is soon to leave office, visited the region and urged Beijing revises its anti-terrorism policies to avoid arbitrary measures.
Bachelet’s speech, it is true, was criticized by human rights organizations, and her stance was also being rejected by countries like the USA. The expectation was that the Chilean would be more emphatic in her criticism of the way the Chinese regime treats the Uighurs, but she stressed that her departure did not represent a formal investigation.
It also weighed in the fact that, days earlier, leaks of thousands of documents and images from police districts in Xinjiang, dubbed the Xinjiang Police Archives, had been released.
There are more than 2,800 photos of detained Uighurs, dozens of documents, including some of high-ranking Chinese regime figures, and 23,000 files of people arrested and placed in re-education camps. All date from 2017 and 2018, early years of Beijing’s breakthrough.
The province of 1.6 million km² has significant economic weight. It corresponds, for example, to 19% of the global production of cotton and 25% of the production of tomato derivatives, according to data from the local government and the organization C4ADS. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia are, in that order, the three main importers from Xinjiang.
“The purpose of Xi’s trip is to see the results of the policies he has implemented in recent years to stabilize Xinjiang and to conclude that his approach has been successful,” Li Mingjiang, from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told Reuters. Singapore.
Xi’s last public visit to Xinjiang was in 2014, when he called for a “total fight against terrorism and separatism” to be implemented. Since then, authorities have expanded the repression and imprisonment of Uighurs.
The province of 25 million people, official data show, has 10.9 million people of the Han ethnic group — the predominant one in China — and 11.6 million Uighurs, people with strong ties to Central Asia. Researchers and human rights organizations project that, since 2017, 1 million to 3 million Uighurs have been detained in Xinjiang, both in prisons and in re-education camps.
This is also Xi’s first public appearance since he visited Honk Kong on the 1st, which marked 25 years since the island, a former British colony, returned to China and took part in the inauguration of John Lee, the newest. chief of the local Executive allied with Beijing.
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