An atrocity tour in the sense used in the above title is not a tour of atrocities. It is a tour of anything but atrocities. It is a very guided tour of Xinjiang designed to help perpetuate atrocities by “proving” that there is nothing to see here except happy people living happily in a happy place.
The Chinese government conducts the tours to cultivate ignorance of what it has been doing to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and also hostility to any exposure to the truth. Though it looks benign, the tour itself is an atrocity.
National Post reports (“Canadian children get tour though Xinjiang, China, where Uyghurs live,” December 4, 2023):
The 20 Canadians were sent on a “roots-seeking” trip to Xinjiang this past summer, their 10-day sojourn organized by the sanctioned Corps and a branch of China’s influence-peddling United Front Work Department….
An official with the United Front’s Federation of Overseas Chinese asked the children to “tell the true, beautiful and colorful stories of Xinjiang and the Xinjiang Corps,” according to an online account by another United Front division.
With young foreigners as the target group, the trip represented a striking example of Beijing’s drive to spread its influence worldwide and change the narrative around the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region—despite extensive documentation of harsh repression there….
Mehmet Tohti, head of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, called the trip 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,” he said. “This sort of trip is a trap, in fact, to give an organized tour with organized destinations and limited engagement.”
People who take this kind of tour are supposed to say, later, if anyone tries to tell them of atrocities in Xinjiang, “Atrocities in Xinjiang? What atrocities? I have been there. I have firsthand experience. I didn’t see any atrocities.” If the guided tourists like these unfortunate children also imbibe any Chinese propaganda, they may even angrily decry “rumors” and “lies” about what the Chinese government has been doing to Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang.
“Rumors” is a propaganda word for the testimony of victims, who would be in a position to know what has been done to them. They would know how they or loved ones have been incarcerated, brainwashed, sterilized, raped, murdered for being Muslim.
“Lies” is a propaganda word for the leaked government records abundantly documenting Chinese policy toward the Uyghurs, including memos on what to tell children when they come home to discover that parents and neighbors have been spirited away by the government.
China wants what it calls “win-win cooperation” with the goals of these tours. But nobody who has been on one of China’s guided tours of Xinjiang has to accept the government’s story. Any alumnus of the tour is free (once outside China and the Great Firewall, anyway) to supplement the tour with a little research.
Also see:
New York Times: “ ‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims”
“The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.
“The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?”
Uyghur Tribunal: “Witness After Witness, Hundreds Reveal the Atrocities of China’s Concentration Camps”
“Is this a case of a political campaign being waged against China through a cynical use of the suspicions often harbored about Beijing? Or are we witnessing a crime of historic dimensions to which the international community is responding with incomprehensible indifference? The organizers of the Uyghur Tribunal, an extraordinary civilian procedure, are out to discover the truth once and for all. The tribunal is intended to address the following questions: Is China perpetrating a crime against humanity, and have the Uyghur people become the victim of genocide?”
Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice: “ ‘Until nothing is left’: China’s Settler Corporation and its Human Rights Violations in the Uyghur Region”
“The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (also known as the XPCC or Bingtuan or corps) is a state-run paramilitary corporate conglomerate that operates in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Uyghur Region or XUAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The XPCC functions as a regional government, a paramilitary organization, a bureau of prisons, a media empire, an educational system, and one of the world’s largest state-run corporate enterprises.”
