China’s President Xi Jinping has paid his first visit to the western region of Xinjiang where he initiated a policy of mass detention of Uighurs some eight years ago. While the West continues to accuse Beijing of “genocide” against the region’s mostly Muslim Uighur population, the notso-veiled triumphalism of President’s Xi’s four-day visit which culminated on Friday is being seen by most observers as his very own ‘mission accomplished’ moment. It amounts to a very public message being conveyed by Mr Xi ~ that he has succeeded, pretty comprehensively, in eradicating ethnic resistance from the province. But what will be the price for the years-long campaign to make, as the Chinese supreme leader himself put it, “every ethnic group in Xinjiang an inseparable member of the great family of Chinese nationhood”? Ethnic unity between Uighur and Han, while it may well have been rammed down the throats of the province’s population as critics allege, was very much in evidence in state media’s coverage of the visit.
But then a united and more importantly stable Xinjiang has to be the focus of the Communist state’s narrative given the costs imposed on it at least in terms of perception by Western powers reading from the human rights hymn book, Islamic countries privately aghast at the ruthless suppression of their co-religionists, and the discomfort of its increasingly nervous neighbouring nations. The only silver lining, if one must look for one, is that the campaign to mainstream the Uighurs kicked off by Mr Xi on his previous visit in 2014 which has included widespread arrests, intrusive surveillance, setting up of indoctrination camps, forced labour, and population transfers, may be winding down. After all, now that the Uighurs and other mainly Muslim ethnic groups in the region have been pummelled into becoming model Chinese citizens and card-carrying members of the Chinese Communist Party subscribing to the notion of one Chinese nation, the need for coercive policies ought to diminish. Hints that this indeed may be the case came from President Xi’s officially published remarks on his visit.
He made no mention, as a New York Times report pointed out, of “extremism” or “separatism” which the state has long asserted was the rationale for its drastic policies in Xinjiang. That Mr Xi visited the province just a fortnight after another rare trip to another restive region albeit for very different reasons, Hong Kong, is also significant. Experts say that these outings, as it were, show that President Xi is growing in confidence that he has effectively subdued troublesome parts of the country ~ Tibet was sorted a long time ago ~ and can focus Beijing’s attentions on reclaiming the last-remaining “renegade province” of Taiwan for the Chinese mainland. He may do well to remember, though, the rather dim view history has taken of the US President who announced the original ‘mission accomplished’ in 2003 after the Iraq War and the damage it did to America’s global standing.