Photo: Pixabay
By Yaruq
China’s 20th National People’s Congress took place in Beijing on October 16-22. Uyghurs in the diaspora and those interested in the Uyghur issue carefully followed whether the congress would mention the Uyghurs. During the entire period, no one uttered ‘Uyghur’ in any context. Even while Xi was giving his two-hour closing speech, there was no mention of Uyghurs.
Why? We must remember that whatever the speech omitted was pre-planned.
By not talking about the Uyghurs, Xi tried to avoid the Uyghur issue coming to the fore again – positively or negatively. He could not bear the international press to report on the Uyghurs once again.
Keeping the ‘important’ stuff in the foreground and marginalizing and ignoring the ‘unimportant’ by pushing them into the background is one of the tactics for pulling the public in the direction the government wants. Xi and his communication consultants must have thought that the Uyghur issue, which has become one of the most important negotiation topics on international platforms, would cause reactions. Instead, they avoided talking about Uyghurs or even mentioning the word Uyghur.
Xi ignored the Uyghurs with the communication strategy he followed in the congress, the logic being: “If the CCP does not care about the Uyghurs, you should not care either!” He was giving the message to the international community.
Was he perhaps implying that there is no such thing as the Uyghur ‘issue’ and that Uyghurs live very comfortably in China?
Communication can have such a broad meaning that people, especially politicians, send messages not only with what they speak but also with what they do not speak, with body language and eye signs. The fact that Xi did not mention the Uyghurs proves that a dictator is afraid of the truth and justified criticism.