China tries to counter Xinjiang backlash with … a musical?

In one scene, Uighur women are seen dancing in a rousing Bollywood style face-off with a group of Uighur men. In another, a Kazakh man serenades a group of friends with a traditional two-stringed lute while sitting in a yurt.

Welcome to “The Wings of Songs,” a state-backed musical that is the latest addition to China’s propaganda campaign to defend its policies in Xinjiang. The campaign has intensified in recent weeks as Western politicians and rights groups have accused Beijing of subjecting Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang to forced labor and genocide.

The film, which debuted in Chinese cinemas last week, offers a glimpse of the alternate vision of Xinjiang that China’s ruling Communist Party is pushing to audiences at home and abroad. Far from being oppressed, the musical seems to say, the Uighurs and other minorities are singing and dancing happily in colorful dress, a flashy take on a tired Chinese stereotype about the region’s minorities that Uighur rights activists quickly denounced.

“The notion that Uighurs can sing and dance so therefore there is no genocide — that’s just not going to work,” said Nury Turkel, a Uighur American lawyer and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington. “Genocide can take place in any beautiful place.”

In the wake of Western sanctions, the Chinese government has responded with a fresh wave of Xinjiang propaganda across a wide spectrum. The approach ranges from portraying a sanitized, feel-good version of life in Xinjiang — as in the example of the musical — to deploying Chinese officials on social media sites to attack Beijing’s critics. To reinforce its message, the party is emphasizing that its efforts have rooted out the perceived threat of violent terrorism.

In the government’s telling, Xinjiang is now a peaceful place where Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group, live in harmony alongside the region’s Muslim ethnic minorities, just like the “seeds of a pomegranate.” It’s a place where the government has successfully emancipated women from the shackles of extremist thinking. And the region’s ethnic minorities are portrayed as grateful for the government’s efforts.

The musical takes the narrative to a new cringe-inducing level. It tells the story of three young men, a Uighur, a Kazakh and a Han Chinese, who come together to pursue their musical dreams.

The movie depicts Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region in China’s far west, as scrubbed free of Islamic influence. Young Uighur men are clean-shaven and seen chugging beers, free of the beards and abstinence from alcohol that authorities see as signs of religious extremism. Uighur women are seen without traditional headscarves.

The Uighurs and other Central Asian ethnic minorities, seen through this lens, are also portrayed as fully assimilated into the mainstream. They are fluent in Chinese, with few, if any, hints of their native languages. They get along well with the Han Chinese ethnic majority, with no sense of the long-simmering resentment among Uighurs and other minorities over systematic discrimination.

The narrative presents a picture starkly different from the reality on the ground, in which authorities maintain tight control using a dense network of surveillance cameras and police posts, and have detained many Uighurs and other Muslims in mass internment camps and prisons. As of Monday, the film had brought in a dismal $109,000 at the box office, according to Maoyan, a company that tracks ticket sales.

Chinese officials had initially denied the existence of the region’s internment camps. Then they described the facilities as “boarding schools” in which attendance was completely voluntary.

Now, the government is increasingly adopting a more combative approach, seeking to justify its policies as necessary to combat terrorism and separatism in the region.

Chinese officials and state media have pushed the government’s narrative about its policies in Xinjiang in part by spreading alternative narratives — including disinformation — on American social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This approach reached an all-time high last year, according to a report published last week by researchers at the International Cyber Policy Center of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI.

The social media campaign is centered on Chinese diplomats on Twitter, state-owned media accounts, pro-Communist Party influencers and bots, the institute’s researchers found. The accounts send messages often aimed at spreading disinformation about Uighurs who have spoken out, and to smear researchers, journalists and organizations working on Xinjiang issues.

Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who was not involved in the ASPI report, called China’s Xinjiang offensive the biggest international propaganda campaign on a single topic that she had seen in her 25 years of researching the Chinese propaganda system.

“It’s shrill and dogmatic it’s increasingly aggressive,” she said in emailed comments. “And it will keep on going, whether it is effective or not.”

In a statement, Twitter said it had suspended a number of the accounts cited by the ASPI researchers. Facebook said in a statement that it had recently removed a malicious hacker group that had been targeting the Uighur diaspora. Both companies began labeling the accounts of state-affiliated media outlets last year.

The party has also asserted that it needed to take firm action after a spate of deadly attacks rocked the region some years ago. Critics say that the extent of the violence remains unclear, but that such unrest did not justify the sweeping, indiscriminate scope of the detentions.

Last week, the government played up a claim that it had uncovered a plot by Uighur intellectuals to sow ethnic hatred. CGTN, an international arm of China’s state broadcaster, released a documentary Friday that accused the scholars of writing textbooks that were full of “blood, violence, terrorism and separatism.”

The books had been approved for use in elementary and middle schools in Xinjiang for more than a decade. Then in 2016, shortly before the crackdown started, they were suddenly deemed subversive.

The documentary accuses the intellectuals of having distorted historical facts, citing, for example, the inclusion of a historical photo of Ehmetjan Qasim, a leader of a short-lived independent state in Xinjiang in the late 1940s.

“It’s just absurd,” said Kamalturk Yalqun, whose father, Yalqun Rozi, a prominent Uighur scholar, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2018 for attempted subversion for his involvement with the textbooks. He said that a photo of Rozi shown in the film was the first time he had seen his father in five years.

“China is just trying to come up with any way they can think of to dehumanize Uighurs and make these textbooks look like dangerous materials,” he said by phone from Boston. “My father was not an extremist, but just a scholar trying to do his job well.”