Xi visits Xinjiang for 1st time since crackdown

BEIJING : China’s leader, Xi Jinping, made his first visit to the western region of Xinjiang since he unleashed a campaign of mass detentions of Uighurs there. His trip amounted to a proclamation of success in his yearslong effort to quell ethnic resistance, despite international condemnation. Xi’s four-day visit that ended Friday 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 labor transfers — to press the region’s Uighurs 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 neighborhood of Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, Xinhua News Agency reported. His published remarks did not mention eradicating “extremism” and “separatism,” which officials have long cited as the rationale for the party’s severe policies.
Chinese state media also showed Xi waving at cheering crowds of Uighur 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 quasimilitary conglomerate whose products have been banned by the US as tainted by coercion and forced labour. The visit comes just two weeks after Xi made a rare trip to Hong Kong, another territory where Beijing has dramatically tightened its control.