{"id":49945,"date":"2015-10-10T23:08:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-10T23:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=49945 "},"modified":"2015-10-10T23:08:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-10T23:08:00","slug":"49945-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=49945","title":{"rendered":"\\’A brighter future beckons\\’: China tries to get Xinjiang to join the party"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Propaganda in overdrive as Beijing celebrates the 60th anniversary of a region that has been the setting for frictions and deadly explosions of violence<\/div>
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Friday 9 October 2015 06.15 EDT Last modified on Friday 9 October 2015 06.18 EDT<\/div>
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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”.<\/div>
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“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.<\/div>
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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. <\/div>
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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.<\/div>
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“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.”<\/div>
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The energetic government celebrations are part of a concerted push to depict the troubled region as a place of economic opportunity not ethnic riots.<\/div>
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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.<\/div>
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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.<\/div>
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“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.”<\/div>
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In fact, there is little normal about the backdrop to Xinjiang’s 60thanniversary, which comes amid growing ethnic tension and, many also suspect, bloodletting. <\/div>
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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.<\/div>
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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.<\/div>
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Uighur neighbourhoods are patrolled by teams of black-clad police carrying riot shields and wooden clubs.<\/div>
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“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.<\/div>
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For detail please visit here<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<div>As Beijing celebrates the 60th birthday of China&#8217;s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region this month, Communist party officials have decked out the region&#8217;s cities and towns in a garish blaze of multi-coloured propaganda.&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}