A journalist based in Poland recently described a surprising find: a Nazi tourist guidebook from 1943 for tourists going to the so-called General Government, Nazi Germany’s most infamous dumping zone for deported undesirables on the ashes of occupied Poland. The region’s many sightseeing spots were recast as German heritage, which proud German tourists visited with the guidebook’s help.
This is exactly what we see today in China’s own genocide zone in Xinjiang (called East Turkestan by the native Uyghur population).
Having suppressed all possible resistance – through a formidable surveillance apparatus, mass detention of anyone remotely suspect of pro-native sentiment, and mass forced labor for camp survivors – the Chinese government is now promoting both domestic and foreign tourism to the Uyghur region.
The campaign is accompanied by a propaganda blitz, hoping to thwart foreign criticism of the genocide launched in 2017. A major goal is also to recruit both domestic and foreign tourists into supporters who “see for themselves” that Xinjiang is safe and good.
Domestic tourists are lured to Xinjiang with new infrastructure, remodeled cities and new attractions, from fake dinosaur parks to wholly new faux-historical “mystery” sites that re-appropriate Uyghur culture while exoticizing and primitivizing it.
It’s not going badly. Numbers are uncertain, but it’s clear that large numbers of domestic Chinese are visiting. Xinhua claimed 265 million tourist visits for 2023.
This includes foreign visitors, and they are not just the usual crop of pro-China influencers for hire. Foreign tourists are visiting, taking in the message, and relaying it abroad – to the delight of China’s propaganda officers. Foreign tourism seems to have taken off from about 2023, when the top leader, confident in his victory, publicly sanctioned it. International tour companies began to offer Xinjiang tours, and private individuals can come, too.
It is true that the genocide project is succeeding, overall. In the current secondary stage, over a million Uyghur children (and increasing), have been taken from their families and sequestered in Chinese boarding schools, where their language and culture is forbidden; ethnic women are systematically sterilized (while demographic and educational statistics have been made state secrets). The able-bodied are put in forced labor; hundreds of thousands of others have been sent to prison with decades-long virtual death sentences.
Uyghur culture has been decapitated, by way of the disappearance and silencing of an entire class of cultural leaders, artists, scholars, and the like. Historic monuments and holy places are bulldozed, so that they cannot form a foundation of any resurgent future Uyghur identity. All this points to the intended outcome of the entire genocide project: The breaking and eradication of Uyghur identity – while fashioning Chinese-speaking factory workers out of the survivors.
Meanwhile, news reporting is strictly controlled – and this too is working. When there are no TV pictures of the suffering, world media go silent. There is in fact a constant stream of news, but it often concerns events that happened months before. Leaked footage is rare. At best, what emerges is fleeting social-media clips and recordings with glimpses of the abuse – clips that typically can’t be verified by the usual journalistic standards.
The classic Communist Party strategy is to hide reality, and instead concoct and push sanitized alternative facts, a palatable alternative “truth” foisted on the public. This, too, often works – on both foreign and domestic tourists.
“Seeing is believing” is the core slogan of China’s tourism promotional propaganda in English. What they want tourists to see in Xinjiang are bustling shopping streets with food stalls, fake dance performances, and so on, a “normality” of sorts that presents itself to tourists as believable. They may not understand that this is selective. Tourists don’t see the hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in prisons, the forced labor industries, the locked boarding school system, or the razed heritage – because it isn’t in their line of sight.
Instead, they see Chinese commerce, alongside select tokens of a Disney-fied Uyghur heritage designed to suggest that Uyghurs once lived there. This same message is implied by the use of mosques as restaurants or tourist hotels (if they aren’t razed): There are no worshippers, religion is out, so new (Chinese) entrepreneurs have taken over. Meanwhile, Uyghur-owned restaurants, like the Miraj chain in the provincial capital of Urumchi, have been closed and the owner detained.
This bolsters the Chinese tourists’ sense of being modern, and therefore superior to the local surviving Uyghurs they now treat as servants. It is all eerily reminiscent of the heyday of European colonialism, which produced similar sentiments in members of the “master race” visiting the subdued colonies.
As Melissa Shani Brown and David O’Brien have observed, it is also a “testimonial gaze” that internalizes the official re-scripted memory about the meaning of the Xinjiang colony, and the gazer then regurgitates it when called upon.
Domestic Chinese visitors are also encouraged to stay – going beyond the peculiar Chinese system of mass home-stay monitoring (by which Han Chinese settlers move in with not-yet incarcerated Uyghurs). In another eerie parallel to the Germanification through resettlement in Nazi-occupied Europe, the Chinese in Xinjiang also take over houses emptied when their Uyghur owners and their entire families were detained and disappeared. The houses are offered for cheap to incoming new Han Chinese settlers – along with job offers and Uyghur women for marriage.
China’s 21st century settler-colonialist project is increasingly being addressed by new scholarship that is breaking a longstanding taboo on recognizing China’s colonialism as directly comparable to similar examples in history.
What is not often recognized, however, is the direct parallels between China’s weaponizing of tourism and the very similar efforts undertaken by other authoritarian regimes.
I myself have experienced this as a tourist both in China and in the former Soviet Union, where the policing of tourists and the constraints on their movements was everywhere. In Russia, it was obviously designed to ensure that we would only see the approved sights.
This Soviet obsession with bringing foreigners in while attempting to shape their experience as testimony for the sake of propaganda – as with the domestic population, but seizing upon the perceived higher value of outsiders’ testimony – originated with the Soviet “Cultural Diplomacy of a New Type” from the 1920s onward, perfected in the curating of Stalin’s “fellow travelers.”
The above-mentioned example of Nazi Germans induced to travel to occupied Poland also parallels the Chinese case. Readers of the General Government tourist guidebook were taking in a place redefined by the regime, to be experience as per Nazi-style nationalism.
In fact, the Nazi regime made huge coordinated efforts on this sort of “genocide tourism,” including through government promotional initiatives like “Strength Through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude). It was wildly successful, up to the launch of World War II – and not just commercially. As Kristin Semmens explained in her book “Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich,” it also recruited many tourists into believers in the “normality” of Nazi Germany and even defenders of its superiority of its system.
Julia Boyd’s “Travellers in the Third Reich” describes what it was like to travel in Nazi Germany “without the benefit of post-war hindsight” – when the images of Nazi atrocities had not yet etched themselves into our minds.
Like China today, to foreign tourists Nazi Germany often seemed like a fun, affluent, and friendly place, with lots of great sightseeing for the tourist to do. American and British tourists were greatly encouraged by the regime, and came to vastly outnumber those from other countries (half a million Americans visited in 1937). Americans and British even sent large numbers of their children to study in Hitler’s Germany!
Julia Boyd relays the favorable impressions of the Third Reich from the many British and American visitors who relished holidaying there, year after year, “even as the more horrific aspects of the [Nazi] regime came under increasing scrutiny in their home countries.”
Meanwhile, the Nazi regime pressed on, welcoming tourism, confident that “seeing is believing.”
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