A young Uyghur woman smiles as she threads a needle to the backdrop of tinkling piano music.

Key points: China says diplomats have been shown "a real Xinjiang"

China says diplomats have been shown "a real Xinjiang" Sanitised tours mask the reality of the camps, experts say

Sanitised tours mask the reality of the camps, experts say The tours echo controlled viewings of North Korea, Cambodia and Nazi Germany

"I have rid myself of extremist thought," another says, playing ping-pong.

Slick Chinese videos seek to counter the United Nations' finding that at least 1 million Uyghurs — a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority — are detained in internment camps in China's western region of Xinjiang.

But the centrepiece in China's propaganda apparatus is the orchestrated tour of Xinjiang — bringing journalists and diplomats inside their "vocational centres" to showcase young Uyghur men and women dressed in bright clothing as they sing and dance for the cameras.

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Last month, two dozen countries — including Australia — called on China to halt the "arbitrary detention" and "widespread surveillance and restriction" of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.

But last week China hit back, saying ambassadors from 50 countries backed their stance on Xinjiang after taking state-sanctioned tours of what it calls "boarding schools".

"They saw a real Xinjiang with their own eyes," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told reporters

In rhetoric echoing science-fiction notions of "pre-crime", China says the facilities are necessary to prevent terrorist acts before extremist thoughts can take root.

Uyghurs say pictures taken during Beijing's tours cannot be trusted. ( Reuters: Ben Blanchard, file )

The idea of the manufactured perspective has long been echoed throughout history from the propaganda playbooks of Nazi Germany to Russia's fabled "Potemkin villages", the fake structures designed to deceive the viewer into believing a situation is better than it really is.

Such tours have been a staple for communist authoritarian regimes in North Korea and Cambodia, in a bid to mask atrocities and dupe foreign observers.

But new technology offered another glimpse behind Xinjiang's facade, as a recent BBC report from inside China's rosy Xinjiang tours showed.

Satellite images taken before and after the Government-arranged tour showed security structures like watch towers had been removed, and sporting fields installed.

Those images from space, paired with a scrawl of Uyghur graffiti that appeared to betray a sense of hopelessness, revealed cracks in the carefully crafted facade.

'Plausible deniability' and political illusion in Xinjiang

A photo posted to Xinjiang Judicial Administration's WeChat account in 2017 shows Uyghur detainees listening to a "de-radicalisation" speech. ( Supplied: RFA )

Beijing's tactics of using meticulously arranged scenarios and "scripted" interviews with guards standing within earshot echo Nazi Germany's window-dressing of its concentration camps for foreign observers, according to Magnus Fiskesjo, associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University.

Critics say staged scenarios in Xinjiang are an attempt to mask what's really happening to the Uyghurs. ( Reuters: Ben Blanchard )

He added that there had been a marked shift in the Chinese Government's tone, from denying the camps' existence to showcasing them as places of learning.

For example, an image of rows of men sitting behind barbed wire once circulated as domestic propaganda to whip up fear among Chinese citizens has since been scrubbed and replaced with people sitting at desks in a classroom, Mr Fiskesjo said.

"Looking closer at the images, you will notice that the detainees selected to appear in them, are almost all young and beautiful, including attractive young women — it's intentional," he told the ABC.

"In reality there are many, many old people in the real camps, as numerous refugees and other witnesses have told us."

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Researcher Adrian Zenz has written that the projection of Xinjiang contradicts China's own internal documents, which state the purpose of re-education centres is to "wash clean the brains" of those interned.

The orchestrated tours of Xinjiang are fraught as they allow Beijing to shape the way the Uyghur situation is portrayed in the media and "reduce the sense of urgency", Chinese Islam historian Rian Thum told the ABC.

"If the visual impression of what's happening there is the one created by the state in these camps — which are absolutely, demonstrably altered from what the normal camp experience is — it gives a false sense of what it's like there," he said.

He added China's tours weren't necessarily designed to win over critics — instead, they are effective and useful for people who have a view of China as a favoured alternative to American hegemony or for diplomats who needed to side with China for geopolitical reasons.

"It gives plausible deniability to people who have to say that these camps are good," he said.

'Revolutionary romantics': The Khmer Rouge's Cambodia

Swede Gunnar Bergstrom was a rare visitor to Cambodia in 1978 during the Khmer Rouge regime. ( Supplied: DC Cam )

Gunnar Bergstrom knows first-hand what it's like to see and believe in a Potemkin village for the sake of ideology.

As an idealistic Maoist 27-year-old, the Swede was one of few Western tourists allowed to enter Cambodia in 1978 under the Khmer Rouge.

The regime killed an estimated 2 million people through a campaign of executions, forced labour and mass starvation, but Mr Bergstrom came back from his trip writing glowing articles about the communist utopia he witnessed.

He's since renounced that stance.

"We were wrong. We made the same mistakes as the people [who] visited Stalin and Hitler," he said.

He told the ABC that while the eerily empty cities gave him some misgivings at the time, he had "indoctrinated" himself and let himself be fooled by the smiling faces that greeted him on the tightly-controlled tour.

"We were revolutionary romantics, and when the Khmer Rouge talked about no money, no cities, no leadership with privileges, we wanted to believe that," he said.

"We had these distorted glasses to try to interpret what we saw."

Elizabeth Becker at Angkor Wat in 1978 with journalist Richard Dudman (front right) and Malcolm Caldwell (back, second from left) who was murdered during the trip. ( Supplied: Elizabeth Becker )

Elizabeth Becker, one of just two journalists to enter Cambodia at the time, felt the weight of finding the truth in a country that was completely cut off from the rest of the world.

"It was like walking into a nightmare. Nothing was as it was before. It was totally orchestrated," she said.

There were flowers everywhere, the streets were clean, and her group would "accidentally on purpose" happen upon peasants singing as they toiled in a field.

When she snuck out to see things for herself and spotted malnourished children dressed in rags, officials were furious, she said.

A fellow traveller on the tour, British professor Malcolm Caldwell, was murdered the night before they were due to fly home.

Becker ended up reporting on what she didn't see — there were no monks in saffron robes at temples, no children playing in the streets, no people gossiping at markets.

"I was plagued by nightmares. I knew something horrible was going on. And all of this told me that they were hiding," she said.

"When you add up all that's missing, you are describing a totalitarian regime.

"They can hide their prisons and the concentration camps … [but] look for the silences, the emptiness, because that's what they can't cover up."

'Western media portrays us as mindless robots': North Korea

Pyongyang's manicured streets mask the poverty of many of the country's people. ( Flickr: Hélène Veilleux )

North Korea is renowned for its sanitised tours for Westerners and its kitschy exports of song-and-dance restaurants.

But such tours can be risky, as demonstrated in the cases of American tourist Otto Warmbier — who was jailed for stealing a propaganda banner and died days after being transported home in a coma — and Australian student Alek Sigley, who ran North Korean tours but was detained and deported after being accused of spying, which he denied.

In her book Nothing to Envy, former Los Angeles Times reporter Barbara Demick describes being chaperoned at all times and "led along a well-worn path of monuments to the glorious leadership" of North Korean leaders during a 2005 tour of Pyongyang.

"North Korea takes the precaution of assigning two 'minders' to foreign visitors, one to watch the other so that they can't be bribed," she wrote.

"The minders spoke the same stilted rhetoric of the official news service … If I wanted answers to my questions, it was clear I wasn't going to get them inside North Korea. I had to talk to people who had left — defectors."

The stories she heard from the far northern city of Chongjin revealed widespread control and famine, with meagre meals being lengthened out with sawdust.

North Korea conducts controlled tours and exports song and dance routines. ( Supplied: Uri Tours )

But Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, who took a tour of North Korea as a Chinese tourist and later wrote about it for the ABC, said there was something to be gained from seeing the country first-hand and more nuance was needed unpacking the isolated nation's intricacies.

"These guides were saying: 'We don't understand why the Western media portrays us as mindless robots like we don't have our own minds … we believe in this, we want our own path'," she said.

"Authoritarian governments think they're all-controlling, but they're not.

"There are so many things you can see if you want to during the controlled tour."

She said she was impressed by Pyongyang's beautiful streets and doubted it was possible to stage every detail, but notes she was quickly apprehended when she wandered away from her group.

"They didn't want us straying and seeing bad things, especially poverty," she said.

"I remember seeing a child walking in the snow barefoot, and that really left an impression."

'It's not true these things': Xinjiang scenes are 'like a movie'

Dilnur Abdurehim described a different reality to what China claims. ( Supplied )

Meanwhile, the Uyghur Association of Victoria told the ABC the growing body of witness accounts "flatly contradicts" China's narrative.

"The weight of evidence indicates that these are prison-like facilities in which millions of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples are held involuntarily and without due process," UAV said, adding detainees were subjected to "brainwashing and coercion" in a bid to erase their culture and "reprogram" them.

China's depiction of Xinjiang couldn't detract further from what Melbourne-based Uyghur Gulnur Idreis knows from her sister Dilnur's experience.

Before Dilnur made contact with her in a brief and fearful exchange, Gulnur said she too might have believed the Chinese Government's claims that media reports were false.

Speaking to ABC's Four Corners program last month, she revealed her sister alleged hundreds were brought into a camp, shackled and handcuffed, and put to work in a textile factory.

This week, she told the ABC her sister had been told by officials that when foreign journalists visit, they were told to look happy, dance, and describe their detention as "a heaven".

"This is a fake drama, like a movie. It's not true, these things," she said.

"I want to tell the Australian Government: please, please don't trust the Chinese [Government]."