Propaganda in overdrive as Beijing celebrates the 60th anniversary of a region that has been the setting for frictions and deadly explosions of violence
Friday 9 October 2015 06.15 EDT Last modified on Friday 9 October 2015 06.18 EDT
Yellow signs swing from lampposts urging citizens to “hold high the great banner of national unity”. Red banners hang from bridges imploring drivers to “unswervingly promote long-term stability”.
“The Party’s great policy is the root of our great life!” shouts another one of hundreds of posters lining the motorway into the heart of the mountain-flanked northwestern city of Urumqi.
As Beijing celebrates the 60th birthday of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region this month, Communist party officials have decked out the region’s cities and towns in a garish blaze of multi-coloured propaganda.
Taxi drivers have been ordered to place Chinese flags on their vehicles while roundabouts and street corners have been decorated with animal-shaped flower arrangements.
“Tremendous changes have taken place in Xinjiang over the past 60 years,” boasted a government white paper marking the anniversary. “Today, Xinjiang is standing at a new starting point for development … A brighter future beckons.”
The energetic government celebrations are part of a concerted push to depict the troubled region as a place of economic opportunity not ethnic riots.
For decades Xinjiang, a vast region of snow-capped mountains and deserts, has been the setting for frictions and deadly explosions of violence between the native Muslim Uighur minority and a rising influx of Han Chinese migrants.
Now, Beijing – which recently lured British chancellor George Osborne to the resource-rich region – is fighting to promote a more dynamic image of Xinjiang, which president Xi Jinping has placed at the heart of an economic “pivot west” towards Central Asia.
“This is a big deal with a lot of time and effort being put into it,” James Leibold, a Xinjiang expert from La Trobe University in Melbourne, said of the festivities. “They need to demonstrate to a whole range of constituencies that Xinjiang is open for business and that Xinjiang is calm and normal.”
In fact, there is little normal about the backdrop to Xinjiang’s 60thanniversary, which comes amid growing ethnic tension and, many also suspect, bloodletting.
In the capital, Urumqi, primary schools are fenced off by yellow and black barricades – installed after a May 2014 bomb attack that was blamed on Uighur extremists and led Beijing to launch a crackdown dubbed the “people’s war” on terror.
Armoured vehicles, flanked by soldiers with automatic weapons, sit outside mosques, public squares and amusement parks, partly the consequence of deadly ethnic riots in 2009 that claimed about 200 lives.
Uighur neighbourhoods are patrolled by teams of black-clad police carrying riot shields and wooden clubs.
“If anything happens you just yell and people will come. We’ve had a lot of rehearsals,” said Li Juntao, a security officer at a children’s amusement park where Tweety Bird rides and a mushroom-shaped merry-go-round are guarded by an APC manned with rifle-toting soldiers.
