ICC Note: The Uighur minority of western China continues to live in persecution and discrimination even though Chinese state controlled media would have one believe otherwise. In a public relations campaign, President Xi Jinping was seen locking hands with smiling Uighur sisters who presented him with an embroidery stating “striving for the Chinese dream with one heart.” However, reality is not as simple as a hand shake and smile. In 2014 the Xinjiang province which is predominately Muslim Uighur minority, saw at 500 deaths related to an escalation in violence. The Chinese government released a white paper expressing the “improvements” within the region since the communist regime annexed the province 60 years ago. Over the years, Han Chinese have settled in the area, pushing out the native Uighurs as current figures place the capitol city Urumqi at less than 13 percent. The Chinese government continues to root our ethnic and religious minorities through forced displacement, imprisonment, and murder.
10/01/2015 Xinjiang (UCA News) – Tune in to any news channel in China on the evening of Sept. 30 and you’d be forgiven for thinking China’s minorities were living in utopia. There was President Xi Jinping locking hands with smiling ethnic representatives as two Muslim Uighur sisters gifted an embroidery set with the words: “striving for the Chinese dream with one heart.”
‘Uncle Xi’ (Xi Dada), so it goes, dreamt up the Communist Party slogan — now ubiquitous in China — and minority Uighur hands dutifully sewed it. For the hundreds of millions watching at the start of China’s National Day, the imagery would not have been lost. But the reality is different — violently so.
Sixty years since the Communist Party annexed the vast northwestern province of Xinjiang in central Asia, many of China’s 12 million Uighurs, natives of the region, could not be less happy.
