China's Harmonious Relations With Its Citizens

"This is textbook United Front Work."

"Using these root-seeking camps to cultivate the next generation of pro-CCP [Chinese Communist Party] supporters and conditioning them to the CCP's political agenda." 

James Leibold, professor/expert on Xinjiang, La Trobe University, Australia

"[The trip represents a] long-term investment [by China, using young people to cultivate a positive image of the CCP and one of its most controversial files]."

"Showing a friendly and smiling face in China has been the primary job of the United Front and its affiliated organizations."

This sort of trip is a trap, in fact, to give an organized tour with organized destinations and limited engagement."

Mehmet Tohti, head, Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project

"[The XPCC Public Security Bureau acts as a government, bureau of prisons, media empire and sprawling corporate holding company in Xinjiang. It is] involved in a pervasive program of egregious rights violations [against the Uyghurs, from extrajudicial imprisonment to social engineering and forced labour]."

"From cradle to grave Uyghur people are subjected to centrally directed indoctrination delivered by the XPCC."

Sheffield Hallam University, U.K. report

Visitors pass a booth for the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps at the China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing, Sept. 1, 2022. Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP

 

The government of Canada imposed sanctions on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) in March of 2021 after accusing it of "gross and systematic human rights violations". The Corps, in its combined role as paramilitary force, local government and business conglomerate is seen as complicit in arbitrary detention of over a million Uyghur people, involved in forced labour and forced sterilization.

That failed to stop a group of young Canadians for whom the XPCC recently acted as guide through he very region where such abuses are commonplace enough to be government policy. Twenty young Chinese Canadians went off on a "roots-seeking" trip this past summer on a ten-day trip organized by the Corps and a branch of China's influence-peddling United Front Work Department. 

 

At the conclusion of their sojourn, an official with the United Front urged the children to "tell the true, beautiful and colourful stories of Xinjiang and the Xinjiang Corps", another United Front division reported online. The trip exemplified the lengths to which Beijing will go to spread its influence globally to alter the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region narrative, in the face of documentation of harsh repression in the region.

 

A demonstrator wearing a mask painted with the colours of the flag of East Turkestan and a hand bearing the colours of the Chinese flag attends a protest of supporters of the mostly Muslim Uighur minority and Turkish nationalists to denounce China's treatment of ethnic Uighur Muslims during a deadly riot in July 2009 in Urumqi, in front of the Chinese consulate in Istanbul Photo by OZAN KOSE /AFP/Getty Images

The All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese featured the story with accompanying photographs of the trip participants who appear in their early teens, posing in bucolic rural settings, at a dairy plant and in front of the "reclamation museum" of the XPCC. According to the article, "The campers were eager and enthusiastic, pushing the atmosphere of the closing ceremony to a climax".

The tour, according to the association's website, left the children with "a deeper understanding of China"; that as a result "their horizons have been broadened". No one can conceivably argue with that; ethnic Chinese young people having the opportunity to return to the country of their parents' and grandparents' birth, able to view a world quite different from their own in Canada. Whether as a result of that trip they will cant their impressions in favour of the CCP's repressive policies is another story.

Beijing has flooded Xinjiang, a mostly Muslim area, with Han Chinese with a view to tilting the majority status in China's favour, much as they did with Tibet, forcing their sovereignty over that once-Buddhist nation. Beijing seeks 'harmony' among its various inhabitants and total acceptance of the dominant Han Chinese rule. While in Xinjiang, the young visitors to China were introduced to Kazakh herdsmen, resettled in a "beautiful ethnic new village", according to the published article, and "felt the brilliant achievements of the cause of ethnic unity".

The usual Chinese hyperbole. The new show village reminiscent of what dictatorial regimes do, to demonstrate to critics that matters are not really as fraught as their detractors claim. Nazi Germany had invited the Red Cross to a camp where Jews were shown to be living peacefully, before the full force of its savage move to destroy Europe's Jews became full-blown in news outside of the Axis and occupied Nazi countries.

A Chinese knock-off version of Russia's USSR with totalitarian Moscow sending its octopus arms to embrace and strangle its neighbours, ransacking their autonomy as satellites orbiting Russia in a dominating constellation of captured and emasculated quasi nation-states content to be ruled by Stalin's iron hand.

Staff members stand at a booth for the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a state-run authority that handles administrative, economic, and paramilitary functions in parts of western China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, at the China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing. Photo by Mark Schiefelbein/AP