My Take | Is China committing ‘genocide’ by promoting tourism and development?
Much of UK media and academia have helped manufacture spurious claims about Xinjiang while denying real monstrous crimes elsewhere that many of them sponsor or otherwise justify
So this is how the Chinese commit genocide and crimes against humanity, according to much of the Anglo-American media and academia, which have valiantly resisted Beijing’s attempt to censor them in their home countries.
According to a new BBC report, tourism is booming in Xinjiang. The ground zero of alleged Chinese genocide last year welcomed 300 million visitors, more than double the number in 2018.
“Beijing has pumped in billions of dollars to develop infrastructure, help produce TV dramas set in its unusual landscapes, and has occasionally welcomed foreign media on carefully orchestrated tours,” the BBC reported.
“It has been repackaging the controversial region into a tourist haven, touting not just its beauty but also the very local ‘ethnic’ experiences that rights groups say it is trying to erase.”
Come again, erasing by promoting?
But, the report goes on: “[Xinjiang] became infamous for some of the worst allegations of Chinese authoritarianism, from the detention of more than a million Uygur Muslims in so-called “re-education camps”, to claims of crimes against humanity.”
The authorities have repaired and upgraded the old town of Kashgar, a historic centre of Uygur culture. With about 24,400 mosques in Xinjiang, it has more of them than any non-Muslim country, and five times the combined numbers of the United States and Britain where Islamophobia is endemic.