After the 20th Communist Party of China (CPC) Congress, which ended on Saturday, Chen Quanguo, the former party secretary of Tibet and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, was fired by Xi Jinping. The freshly elected Central Committee, widely considered as China’s highest leadership body, reportedly does not include Chen’s name.
Chen, who is just 66, is much younger than the unofficial retirement age of 68 that Xi has used as a benchmark for the majority of his career. The retention of Wang Yi, the foreign minister, who is 69 years old, and Zhang Youxia, the vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, both of whom are 72 years old, is evidence that Chen’s dismissal was planned.
Many people believe the CPC leader to be the mastermind behind the ‘Uyghur genocide,’ which is still happening in the Xinjiang province. But from 2011 until 2016, Chen administered Tibet as the CPC Committee Secretary, before taking over the area and governing it with an iron grip. In the CPC, he is the only individual to have held the position of party secretary in both autonomous areas.
According to WION, the Xinjiang Police Files, a document taken from detention facilities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, exposed the full scope of Chen’s campaign. More than 20,000 Uyghurs who are detained are profiled in the files. A speech made by Chen in May 2017 while she was the region’s party secretary from August 2016 to December 2021 is one of the papers.
He asserted that the Chinese government’s campaign of repression in Xinjiang was a ‘extinction war’ against the Uyghur people rather than an effort to rid the region of criminals. The Uyghurs were described by him as a ‘enemy class’ According to the former official, individuals who received sentences of less than five years should be mobilised for ‘learning law’ and ‘bilingual learning,’ and they should only be freed once they had reached a satisfactory study level, regardless of how long that took.
According to WION, Xi Jinping has stated repeatedly that Islam can only exist in China if it is transformed to reflect Chinese perspective. And based on the materials, Chen was simply according to the guidelines established by people like Xi in the higher hierarchy. Therefore, it’s still unclear why he was fired at this point. With the exception of a third term as the top leader of the party, Chen may have served his function and was no longer useful to Xi, who would try to adopt a much harsher position against the minority.
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