This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.
China’s promotion of tourism in the far-western region of Xinjiang, where Beijing has sought to hide its persecution of the 11 million Uyghurs who live there, has parallels to the Nazis’ practice of “genocide tourism,” a Swedish anthropologist and former diplomat writes in the online current affairs magazine The Diplomat.
Magnus Fiskesjö, who teaches anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University in New York state, notes a popular German travel guide in 1943 — recently discovered by a Polish journalist — for tourists going to occupied Poland.
“The region’s many sightseeing spots were recast as German heritage, which proud German tourists visited with the guidebook’s help,” Fiskesjö writes in the article.
“This is exactly what we see today in China’s own genocide zone in Xinjiang.”
“Having suppressed all possible resistance — through a formidable surveillance apparatus, mass detention of anyone remotely suspect of pro-native sentiment, and mass forced labor for camp survivors — the Chinese government is now promoting both domestic and foreign tourism to the Uyghur region,” he wrote.
In China’s efforts to promote Xinjiang as a tourist destination, it has sought to cover up its human rights abuses against the Uyghurs by sprucing up buildings, installing new infrastructure and constructing fake historical sites, Fiskesjö writes.
It’s all meant to promote China’s narrative that Uyghurs are living happy, prosperous lives and benefiting from China’s development, when in fact about 1.8 million of them have been detained in concentration camps and thousands have been sent to prison, often on flimsy charges — behavior that United States and some Western parliaments have labeled a genocide.
China denies those accusations and claims the camps were training facilities and are now mostly closed.
Tourists are flocking to Xinjiang — mostly from within China — and tend to see a sanitized version of life there. Last year, 265 million tourists visited the region, the state-run Xinhua news agency said.
Beijing has arranged for dozens of diplomats and journalists, mainly from Muslim countries, to visit Xinjiang to take orchestrated tours of the region — without letting them freely roam around or talk with local residents.
Chinese officials have adopted similar practices embraced by the Nazis, who allowed tourists to go to an “occupied zone … under the military and police control so they can channel tourists to safe places where they only see what the government wants them to see,” Fiskesjö told Radio Free Asia.
“It was their attempt to present the situation as normal,” he said. “The Nazi government would say, ‘We have everything under control. There is nothing to worry about, and you can be a tourist.’”
Resettlement strategies
There are other similarities, Fiskesjö says.
Beijing’s strategy of settling Han Chinese in Xinjiang and the forced assimilation of Uyghur children into Chinese culture also mirrors the Nazis’ relocation of people from Germany to occupied territories and their forcible assimilation policies for children taken from their parents to be raised as German, he said.
“Both of these aspects are equally happening in Xinjiang today,” he said.
Fiskesjö and Rukiye Turdush, an independent Uyghur researcher from Canada, published a report in July titled “Mass Detention and Forced Assimilation of Uyghur Children in China,” which provides evidence of Beijing separating children from their families, preventing them from being reunited with their parents, and restricting their use of the Uyghur language.
Fiskesjö also pointed to the ongoing arrests and detentions of Uyghurs, and Chinese settlers taking over farms and homes of those held in camps or prisons.
Most tourists on government-sponsored or designed trips to Xinjiang will stick to designated areas and stay in the same hotels, he said.
“It’s about inviting people and tricking and fooling them into [seeing] this as a normal area, controlled and safe,” Fiskesjö said.
Tourists who go to Xinjiang are convinced that the criticism of China’s mistreatment of the Uyghurs isn’t true, he added.
“This is what is encapsulated in the slogan ‘seeing is believing,’ which the Chinese government has been recycling again and again” with regard to Xinjiang, Fiskesjö said.
‘False narrative’
Experts on Xinjiang concurred with Fiskesjö’s assessment.
“By shaping the tourist experience either through what people see, what people read [and] who they can speak to, China believes that it can use individuals who come to the region to amplify its own narratives,” said Henryk Szadziewski, director of research at the Uyghur Human Rights Project.
When visitors go to Xinjiang, they feel safe and see Uyghurs dancing or participating in other performances; then, after they leave, they will tell others about their experiences, which are meant to counter the arguments of genocide, he said.
The Uyghur Human Rights Project, based in Washington, issued reports in August 2023 and a January 2024 about Western travel companies offering tours to sites in Xinjiang connected to the repression of religious beliefs, the destruction of Uyghur cultural heritage, surveillance, imprisonment, torture, sexual assault and deaths in custody.
U.S. columnist, author and lawyer Gordon Chang said some visitors are willing to whitewash the persecution of the Uyghurs and spread the Chinese government’s narrative that there is no genocide.
“They see what the Communist Party wants them to see, and they know what is occurring,” he told RFA. “Some foreign tourists are just naïve, but many are propagating a narrative that is false. We know that because there is evidence that shows that China is engaging in these crimes against humanity.”
Anders Corr, principal of the New York-based political risk firm Corr Analytics, compared the Xinjiang visits to Soviet propaganda “Potemkin villages” — selected sites designed to demonstrate a façade of success of the Soviet system to outsiders.
Beijing wants to promote ideological beliefs that there is no genocide, that everything is fine, and that the locals are happy and allowed to practice their religion and cultural traditions, he said.
“They’ll try out some Uyghur actors to act happy, and they will try out Uyghur dancers to look happy and tell them to smile, but if [they] don’t smile wide enough, [they] are sent to concentration camps.”
