Shopkeepers line up with wooden clubs to perform their daily anti-terror drill outside the bazaar in Kashgar, Xinjiang late last month. Photo: Reuters In a commentary published by the official Xinjiang Daily on Monday, Yasin Sidik, a senior official from Kashgar in Xinjiang, urged fellow ethnic Uygur cadres to “bravely stand at the forefront against separatism”.

“We must ... remember to be grateful to the party,” Yasin said. “To forget history is tantamount to betrayal. “We must stand out and reveal ‘two-faced’ people, thoroughly seize bad elements out from the masses, clean them out,” he said.

Men install a CCTV camera in a shopping street in the old town of Kashgar in Xinjiang late last month . Photo: Reuters Sidik’s was at least the fourth such warning from Uygur officials in the past two weeks. Another top Kashgar official warned last week that Uygur party cadres were not pulling their weight in the region’s fight against extremism.

A historic Silk Road trading post, Kashgar is central to Beijing’s belt and road initiative, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign and economic policy that aims to bolster trade and infrastructure links with Central Asia, the Middle East and beyond.


However, the city and nearby towns in southern Xinjiang are also among the most unstable in the region, creating a threat to plans that the party is combating with paramilitary and police “anti-terror” rallies and a raft of new security measures.

Hundreds have been killed in Xinjiang in the past few years, mostly in unrest between the Uygurs, who call the region home, and Han Chinese. The government has blamed much of the unrest on Islamist militants.

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The party encourages ethnic minorities to become cadres, but Uygurs still number far fewer than Han officials in the region. All party employees are expected to be atheist, so those Uygurs who do become party officials are seen by fellow Uygurs as having abandoned their culture.