Aziz Isa Elkun couldn't bear to watch footage of Chinese leader Xi Jinping celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region this week.

Livestreams from Chinese state media showed Xi receiving a red-carpet welcome as locals sang and danced in traditional Uyghur dress.

Elkun fled Xinjiang nearly three decades ago after being persecuted by the Chinese government.

"I couldn't dare to watch. It was just a second or two… and I stopped," said 56-year-old Uyghur poet, now based in London.

The festivities in Xinjiang, he told DW, stood in stark contrast to "what [Xi] did just a couple of years ago to the [Uyghur] community."

"Now you have people singing for you. It's ridiculous," Elkun added.

Xi calls for 'social stability'

Under Xi's rule over the past decade, mass detention and heavy surveillance of ethnic Uyghur groups have intensified in Xinjiang.

When faced with criticism from abroad, Beijing framed the clampdown in the region as counterterrorism.

During his three-day visit to Xinjiang this week, Xi called for "every possible effort to uphold social stability."

The Chinese president also met with representatives of all the ethnic groups, expressing hopes "that everyone would join forces and move forward together to build a beautiful Xinjiang," according to report by the Xinhua news agency.

At the same time, he also hailed the Communist Party's ethnic autonomy system as "entirely correct" and "effective."

Under the Chinese constitution, ethnic minorities have the right to "practice regional autonomy, establish autonomous organs and exercise the power to self-govern" under Beijing's guidance.

Why did Beijing clamp down on Xinjang?

October 1 will mark the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party's designation of Xinjiang as an autonomous region.

The region, originally known as East Turkistan, is home to native Turkic-speaking Uyghurs but has seen large inflows from China's ethnic Han majority under Beijing's rule.

The authorities granted only limited autonomy to local ethnic groups, including the Muslim-majority Uyghurs. The region saw social unrest and multiple violent incidents breaking out in the 2000s.

In 2014, China was shocked by a terror attack when two cars ploughed through shoppers while setting off explosives at a busy street market in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi.

Nearly 40 bystanders were killed and four attackers also lost their lives.

The Chinese government under Xi blamed Uyghur extremists and started to double down on religious and cultural repression in the region.

"It was framed as sort of 'China's 9/11.' And that was the impetus for building out the high-tech surveillance," said Darren Byler, an associate professor who studies the effects of surveillance on stateless populations in Asia at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada.

Half a million Uyghurs detained

In the following years, Beijing announced that tens of thousands of "terrorists" had been arrested.

The authorities also started the construction of the so-called "vocational training centers" to "educate" the ethnic minorities.

Byler told DW that the primary goal for Chinese authorities is to "make Xinjiang a space that's fully integrated with the rest of the country… a space that's sort of open for business."

"To get there," he added, "they want to turn Uyghurs into a productive workforce."

In an Atlantic Council report published last year, at least half a million Uyghurs had been imprisoned as of 2022, though precise figures remain difficult to verify because of China's tight restrictions on official data.

Recent reports also accuse Beijing of running forced labor programs that move hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs from detention centers into textile, manufacturing, and agricultural work.

Tourism masks pervasive surveillance

At the anniversary celebrations in Xinjiang, Xi also urged the region to "deepen the integration of culture and tourism" by fully implementing central government guidelines.

According to the state-run China Daily, Xinjiang received 302 million tourist visits last year, generating about $50.4 billion (€43.1 billion) in tourism revenue — despite ongoing international concerns over human rights abuses.

But analysts say the festive atmosphere masks a harsher reality.

"People aren't seeing what's happening at the village level, where many of these policies of cultural erasure are being implemented," said Timothy Grose, a professor of China Studies at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

Byler, the scholar at SFU, also noted that Beijing has made Xinjiang's vast surveillance network less visible to outsiders.

"There is less intrusive checkpoint surveillance," Byler told DW, "but license-plate and facial-recognition systems are still in operation. And [authorities] are tracking people's digital behavior as well."

"It's quite a seamless system. If you're a Xinjiang resident, the government kind of knows where you are all the time." he added.

Researchers kept out of Xinjiang

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have long urged the international community and the United Nations to increase pressure on Beijing over its repression of Uyghurs.

In 2022, the UN released a report accusing China of "serious human rights violations" in Xinjiang that may amount to crimes against humanity.

On-the-ground scrutiny, however, has become increasingly difficult in recent years, with outsiders reaching the region only on tightly managed tours.

"Access has been virtually cut off for researchers," said Grose, the professor of China Studies. "Many of these tours and tourists don't have the linguistic, historical, or cultural knowledge to make meaningful comparisons with what was occurring before."

Uyghurs still speak up from abroad

Still, Grose remains hopeful, pointing to "a very, very active diaspora" preserving Uyghur culture abroad.

"They have been proactive in establishing cultural centers, publishing books, teaching children the language, and retaining religious elements of their identity,"Grose added.

Elkun, now a researcher at SOAS University of London, is one of them. He has published poems about his homeland and continues to speak out despite Chinese police continually harassing his mother in Xinjiang.

"I'm hopeful. I do believe, as I said earlier, justice will prevail," he said.

DW reporter Jun Yan contributed to this report

Edited by: Darko Janjevic