LAST Monday, four journalists – including me from Sunday Star – were invited to the Chinese Embassy in Kuala Lumpur for a briefing on the latest developments in Xinjiang, which to many Malaysians is a romantically colourful place but unsafe.
But before 2017, this region was inundated with news of riots until the Chinese central government cracked down in 2016 to force an end to terrorism and Uighur separatism. Bai Tian explained that to bring an end to chaos, the Chinese government also set up numerous vocational training centres to de-radicalise and re-educate the young and misguided Uighurs – who account for 40% of Xinjiang’s 22 million multi-ethnic people.
According to Beijing, in 2019, Xinjiang attracted 250 million local and foreign tourists. - Photo courtersy of Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Malaysia “If you have not seen Xinjiang, you do not know how big and how beautiful China is, ” said Bai Tian, adding that the area of the province is equivalent to one-sixth of China.
Locally, Bai Tian has become proactive. He wrote two articles on Xinjiang last year and is inviting journalists to visit it.Seeing is believing: Beijing says that Xinjiang is now safe, peaceful and prosperous. In Beijing, the local government even bought a piece of land worth 1.5 billion yuan in 2018 to reserve it as burial ground for Muslims, he added.
According to the envoy, the central government is developing and modernising Xinjiang. Last year, the allocation for the province was 40bil yuan . From 2014 to 2017, China has uplifted 1.85 million Uighur Muslims out of poverty, according to a CGTN documentary.