Hypocritical silence on Xinjiang

After China Global Television Network, the national broadcaster, aired multiple documentaries providing graphic accounts of terrorist attacks in and related to the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, including never-before-available details, it is disheartening that the Western media should greet them by uncharacteristically falling into collective silence.

There had been the general feeling that no critic of the Chinese government's Xinjiang policies could continue to malign them in the face of the bloody truth.

But it seems that underestimates the willingness of the Western media to weave a false narrative around Xinjiang.

Nonetheless, the State Council Information Office remains undaunted in its efforts to show the true picture of the harm terrorism and extremism were doing in the region prior to the implementation of the government's de-extremism measures.

It convened a news conference on Monday, in which three local officials defended the de-extremist education program by detailing the impressive local development achievements that have been made over the past three years since the policy was introduced.

As the officials, two of them Uygurs, confirmed, from 1990 to the end of 2016, thousands of terrorist attacks occurred in Xinjiang, resulting in the deaths of many innocent civilians as well as hundreds of police officers.

The acts of terror in Xinjiang culminated in the massacre in Urumqi on July 5, 2009, while an October 2013 attack in Beijing and another in March 2014 in Kunming, Yunnan province, spread fear outside the autonomous region. People across China wondered what had gone wrong, and what could be done.

The Chinese government's answer was decisive. Alongside resolute anti-terror responses, a large-scale de-extremism campaign was launched.

As the officials highlighted, such endeavors have paid off. There has been no report of a terrorist incident over the past three years; extremist infiltration has been effectively curtailed and security conditions in the region have improved conspicuously.

Extremist thinking is widely identified as a close relative of terrorism, being the trigger for terrorist attacks. Yet the changes the Chinese government has brought about in Xinjiang in a bid to eliminate extremism are lambasted in the West as human rights violations.

Such allegations, once again highlight the double standard of the West.

As the officials said, practice has proven that the establishment of vocational education and training centers is a useful move to explore measures for counter-terrorism and deradicalization, there is no reason for the Western media to blur the lines of what is right and wrong because of their ideological biases.