too many people remain ignorant of the level of terrorism there was in Xinjiang, and how the Chinese state dealt with it beyond the vocational training centers:
Starting around 2007, however, it became increasingly dangerous to visit Xinjiang. The region was rocked by a spate of horrific terrorist attacks, resulting in over 1,000 deaths and countless injuries.
For example, on July 5, 2009, there was a riot in the capital city of Urumqi; 197 people were hacked, beaten or burned to death and 1,721 were injured. On May 22, 2014, two car bombings in the same city killed 43 people and wounded 94. There were dozens of other attacks.
The extreme violence was not just confined to Xinjiang. In 2013, five people died and 38 were injured in a suicide attack by three Uygurs in Beijing. In 2014, a killing spree by eight knife-wielding Uygurs left 31 people dead and 141 wounded at a Kunming railway station.
A 2016 study commissioned by the US government noted that, from 2012 to 2014, domestic attacks in China "apparently became more frequent, more geographically dispersed, and more indiscriminately targeted". The perpetrators, in many cases, were radicalised members of the Uygur ethnic group.
The organisation that often claimed responsibility for the attacks, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) [later known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP)], was described in a Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder as "a Muslim separatist group founded by militant Uygurs".
Xinjiang: what the West doesn't tell you about China's war on terror
it's not the Chinese state that tried to erase Uyghur culture, that was an armed Salafist group, which received training and funding from Al-Qaeda, and wanted to impose a new way of life on the whole province, through terroristic violence and intimidation
China responded to the problem of radicalisation by trying to address its underlying socio-economic causes, as well as targeting the radicalisation networks themselves. the vocational training centers were one small part of trying to improve the economic and social well-being of people in Xinjiang. other efforts included:
• implementing the...transfer [of] employment for 100,000 laborers in southern Xinjiang in three years (2018-2020) and having realized the transfer employment of 75,000 people from families suffering extreme poverty;
• adding a total of 1.4008 million new urban jobs and transferring 8.305 million surplus rural laborers for employment in Xinjiang from 2016 to 2018 through developing labor-intensive industries...and creating jobs through business startups;
• popularizing nine-year compulsory education and providing free three-year preschool education in urban and rural areas in southern Xinjiang;
• offering free universal health check-up; ensuring full coverage of serious illness insurance, and ensuring full coverage of centralized treatment of 15 serious illnesses and contracted services for chronic illnesses for the poverty-stricken rural population;
• improving the social security system, and ensuring that the standard of subsistence allowance for impoverished urban and rural residents is raised continuously.
[white paper] The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in Xinjiang, Section V
And their approach worked:
No violent or terrorist activities have occurred in Xinjiang for more than two years; the number of criminal cases and public security cases has fallen significantly; the infiltration of extremism has been curbed, and peace and harmony has returned to society. In 2018, tourism in Xinjiang grew rapidly: Tourists from inside and outside China numbered over 150 million, a year-on-year increase of 40 percent; foreign tourists totaled 2.4032 million
[white paper] The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in Xinjiang, Section VI (2021)
So how did China's counter terrorism programs get turned into a supposed genocide by the West?
On November 5, 2020, two days after the US presidential election, the Trump administration delisted ETIM as a terrorist group.
(...)At the stroke of a pen, ETIM-sponsored terrorism was no longer an issue to the US, and out went the international legitimacy of China's counter terrorism campaign.
That paved the way for Pompeo to declare genocide, on the day he was packing up to leave office...If there were no terrorists to fight, China's policies could then, by default, be labelled as ethnic repression.
By striking out the premise of counter terrorism, Western politicians could then frame China's anti-terror measures simply as religious and ethnic persecution.
Xinjiang: what the West doesn't tell you about China's war on terror
if you want to learn more, the two sources linked here should give you a much clearer picture of the problem Xinjiang and China more broadly was facing from the separatist terrorism, and how they went about tackling it
For more on how and why the US conducted this propaganda war, check out this post from my lovely partner @jingerpi
