Chinese dictator Xi Jinping defended the alleged successes of his ongoing genocide of Uyghur and other Turkic people during a visit to occupied East Turkistan this weekend, urging Communist Party leaders there to continue efforts to eliminate the Uyghur language, transport slaves nationwide, and make the region more “culturally advanced.”
Xi appeared in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkistan, on Saturday, for his first visit since July 2022. Footage published by Chinese state media indicates that Xi spent most of his time there with high-ranking local communists indoors, not interacting with the public.
Xi launched a genocide campaign against the indigenous populations of East Turkistan – the majority Uyghurs, but Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic, majority-Muslim peoples as well – in 2014, branding it an “anti-terrorism” initiative and claiming that the eradication of Islam and Uyghur culture was necessary to prevent jihadist violence. Since then, the Chinese government has forced over three million people into concentration camps, where they endure a host of human rights atrocities including torture, sexual assault, slavery, communist indoctrination, and medical testing consistent with live organ harvesting.
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Outside of the camps, the Chinese Communist Party has separated children from their families; bulldozed critical cultural sites, including cemeteries; and forcibly sterilized potentially hundreds of thousands of women to prevent the non-Han population from growing.
Extensive evidence procured by human rights activists, Uyghur survivors, and journalists indicates that Xi personally ordered the genocide. Chinese government documents obtained by researcher Adrian Zenz and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in 2022, and published under the name “Xinjiang Police Files,” repeatedly gave Xi credit for ordering the genocidal policies, demanding Communists “break the lineages, break the roots, break the connections, break the origins” of indigenous East Turkistanis.
Xi defended the genocide in remarks “affirming the achievements made” in the region by the Communist Party.
“We must enhance our awareness of adversities … and consolidate our hard-won social stability,” Xi asserted, according to state media. “In the process of Chinese-style modernisation, we will better build a beautiful Xinjiang that is united and harmonious, wealthy and prosperous.”
The dictator delivered an extended speech to senior Party leaders, the Chinese government’s Xinhua News Agency reported, after they updated him on the latest operations in the occupied region of both the Party and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a regime-controlled company with close ties to slavery in the region. In 2020, America’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency announced it would not allow any shipments into the country of cotton products originating with the XPCC, citing “information that reasonably indicates the use of forced labor, including convict labor.”
“Recognizing Xinjiang’s achievements in various aspects, Xi said the work related to Xinjiang is of special importance in the work of the Party and the country,” Xinhua reported, “and concerns the overall task of building China into a strong modern socialist country in all respects and promoting the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
Xi demanded that his Party underlings “develop a beautiful Xinjiang that is united, harmonious, prosperous, and culturally advanced” citing two specific policies: the elimination of languages indigenous to East Turkistan and forcibly displacing local workers.
“He [Xi] said the education on standard spoken and written Chinese must be resolutely carried out to enhance people’s consciousness and capability to use it,” Xinhua relayed. “He called for more industrial cooperation and personnel exchange between Xinjiang and the rest of the country, and encouraged people from Xinjiang to work outside the region and people in other parts of the country to start business and live in Xinjiang.”
Forcing the people of East Turkistan to labor, often for little to no money, in other Chinese provinces is a key policy of Xi’s genocide. In a 2020 report titled Uyghurs for Sale, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) detailed how the Chinese government sold Uyghur people, most likely imprisoned in concentration camps, online to factories across China. The ASPI report found that supplier factories from as many as 82 international companies – including household names such as BMW, Nintendo, and Apple – used Uyghur slaves to manufacture goods.
File/A protester from the Uyghur community living in Turkey, holds an anti-China placard during a protest in Istanbul, Thursday, March 25, against against the visit of China’s FM Wang Yi to Turkey. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)
A year later, a report by the British network Sky News found that Chinese websites were still selling Uyghur slaves, this time in “batches” of 50 to 100 people, to factories across the country.
In his remarks this weekend, Xi continued to use the excuse of fighting terrorism to justify the Uyghur genocide.
“The mechanism for forestalling and defusing major risks and potential dangers should be improved, Xi said,” according to Xinhua, “adding that the fight against terrorism and separatism should be integrated with law-based and constant work of maintaining stability.”
Xi referred to “maintaining stability,” often a euphemism for eradicating local religion and culture to replace it with atheist communism, as a “top priority.”
While state outlets did not show Xi taking in any sights in Urumqi or interacting with locals, the state-run CGTN network produced a propaganda piece claiming to show thriving markets in Kashgar, East Turkistan, benefitting from Xi’s “stability.”
Xi’s presence in the occupied region, and celebration of a genocide he orchestrated, elicited outrage from the Uyghur diaspora.
“What we are facing in Occupied East Turkistan is a humanitarian crisis of unparalleled magnitude in the 21st century. The systematic destruction of a nation is not something the world can afford to ignore,” Salih Hudayar, the prime minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, said in a statement this weekend. The Government in Exile, which seeks to restore to the region its pre-Mao Zedong sovereignty, demanded the world “confront the undeniable, horrifying reality of a full-scale genocide” and “take swift, irrevocable action to hold China accountable.”
“Despite waves of global outrage, President Xi Jinping remains steadfast in his chilling commitment to execute China’s genocidal master plan in East Turkistan,” the group said in a statement.