China's Xi makes rare visit to once-restive Xinjiang

BEIJING: Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Xinjiang this week, making his first trip in eight years to the once-restive northwestern frontier region where the United States has accused China of genocide against the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority.

State media, which tends to release news of Xi's movements after the fact and with few initial details, reported on Friday that Xi had visited sites from Tuesday through Thursday including a university and a trade zone in the regional capital of Urumqi.

A photo by the official Xinhua news agency showed a maskless Xi surrounded by smiling and clapping residents, many of them appearing to be Uyghurs wearing ethnic costumes and Muslim prayer caps.

Xinjiang had been the scene of sporadic anti-government and anti-Han Chinese violence before a crackdown that the United Nations said in 2018 had put one million Uyghurs into "massive internment camps" set up for political indoctrination.

China has repeatedly denied any mistreatment of Uyghurs. It initially denied the existence of any camps, then said it had set up "vocational training centres" with dormitories where people can "voluntarily" check themselves in to learn about law, Chinese language and vocational skills. It said that in 2019 all trainees had "graduated".

Xinjiang has not reported any violent attacks since the establishment of the centres.

"The point of Xi's Xinjiang trip is to see the results of the policies he has put in place in recent years to stabilise Xinjiang and to conclude that his approach and strategy for Xinjiang had been successful," said Li Mingjiang, associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

The trip marks Xi's first public appearance since he visited Hong Kong for the July 1 anniversary marking 25 years of Chinese rule over the former British colony, another territory where Beijing has dramatically tightened its control following sometimes-violent pro-democracy and anti-China protests in 2019.

Xi's last reported visit to Xinjiang was in 2014, when he called for an all-out "struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism", according to leaked papers reported by the New York Times. Local authorities later stepped up efforts to track, control and re-educate Uyghurs.

Xi, who has also clamped down on the once-restive Tibet Autonomous Region, last year made the first visit to the region by a Chinese leader in three decades.

Xi is poised to secure a precedent-breaking third leadership term later this year.