China defends hard line

CHINA’S campaign of pressure against the country’s Uighur Muslim minority has prevented the far-northwestern region of Xinjiang from “becoming ‘China’s Syria’ or ‘China’s Libya’,” an official Communist Party newspaper said yesterday.

The Global Times editorial came after a UN anti-discrimination committee raised concerns on Friday over China’s treatment of Uighurs, citing reports of mass detentions that it said “resembles a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”.

Following attacks by radical Muslim separatists, hundreds of thousands of members of the Uighur and Kazakh Muslim minorities in Xinjiang have been arbitrarily detained in indoctrination camps where they are forced to denounce Islam and profess loyalty to the party.

Global Times said the intense regulations in the region were merely “a phase that Xinjiang has to go through in rebuilding peace and prosperity”.

The editorial did not directly mention the existence of the internment camps.

Denouncing what it called “destructive Western public opinions”, the paper said, “peace and stability must come above all else”.

“It has avoided the fate of becoming ‘China’s Syria’ or ‘China’s Libya’,” the paper said.

The 10 million Uighurs make up a tiny proportion of China’s almost 1.4 billion people.