Experts denounce trips to East Turkistan as ‘genocide tourism’

Nearly 400 delegations and groups consisting of more than 4,300 people from various countries and international organizations visited the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 2023, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a press conference on Jan. 5.

Visitors included government officials, diplomats, religious figures, experts, scholars, and journalists as well as ordinary travelers, he said. Unlike travel in the rest of China, however, visits remain by invitation only and visitors are led on government-sponsored tours.

These include trips to mosques and heritage sites “to see how Xinjiang’s traditional culture is protected,” Wang said. “They went to local factories, businesses and farms to learn about Xinjiang’s production and development, and visited ordinary households where they saw the happy life of people of various ethnic groups.”

“Seeing is believing,” he said. “People are not blind to the truth. For certain countries, they are comfortable telling lies about genocide and forced labor in Xinjiang…. Xinjiang will keep its door open to the world.”

The move comes as China gets ready for its fourth Universal Periodic Review, or UPR — a Human Rights Council mechanism that calls for each U.N. member state to undergo a peer review of its human rights records every 4.5 years. The review is scheduled to be held in Geneva, Switzerland, on Jan. 23.

Authorities have tightly controlled who enters East Turkistan, where harsh repression of Uyghurs and other Muslims in recent years has amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity, according to the United States, the United Nations, the parliaments of other Western countries and human rights groups.

Authorities in East Turkistan have detained an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, destroyed thousands of mosques and banned the Uyghur language in schools and government offices. China has said that the “re-education camps” have been closed and has denied any policy to erase Uyghur culture.

A recent CBS documentary on China’s “rebranding” effort shows surveillance cameras and facial recognition devices monitoring Uyghurs. The name of the ancient town of Kashgar appears in Chinese as “Kashi” on signs and billboards, while the 15th-century Id Kah Mosque — closed to local Muslims since 2016 — has been transformed into a tourist attraction.

Through the scripted travel junkets, the Chinese government is spreading a narrative that Uyghurs live happy lives to cover up Beijing's severe human rights violations in East Turkistan, experts on the region said. Foreign visitors, in turn, have perpetuated the narrative through photos and posts on their social media accounts.

The U.S.-based Uyghur Human Rights Foundation, or UHRP, called the visits “genocide tourism” in a report issued last Aug. 30, saying that they help China conceal genocide and crimes against humanity occurring in East Turkistan.

“They are showing Uyghurs and Uyghur culture, but not real and free people or culture, but a hollowed out version, a mummified version, like a CCP museum,” said Adrian Zenz, director of China studies at the U.S.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.