Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited Xinjiang, the home of the Muslim Uyghur minority, on July 12 – 15, to purportedly promote national unity and reinforce the regime’s ambition to influence the world.
According to State-run Xinhua and CCTV, Xi went to a Uyghur neighborhood in the capital city Urumqi. He also visited a unit of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a quasi-military organization that the regime has used to control and develop the region since the 1950s, in Shihezi city, about 85 miles west of Urumqi.
This was Xi’s first Xinjiang visit in over eight years. His last trip concluded on April 30, 2014, the day of a bomb and knife attack in the capital’s train station that killed three and injured 79. Beijing described the incident and similar ones as “violent terrorist attacks” by Muslims and hence speeded up its “Sinicization of Islam” campaign, that is, policies designed to eradicate Muslim practices and force the religious believers to believe in the Communist Party….