Chinese President Xi Jinping’s claim to have provided “new accommodation” for more than 10 million Xinjiang residents may include people being evicted from their communities, a scholar of China’s Uighur policies says.

Xi made the claim last week, when he said China had achieved major progress in the autonomous region from 2014 to 2019, averaging annual growth of 9.1% in residential per capita disposable income.

In that same period, the government built 1.69 million rural apartments and 1.56 million urban apartments, and over 10 million people were able to “move into new homes,” he told a two-day work conference on Xinjiang.

The statistics might include residents who were forced to leave their traditional communities and ancestral homes, said Rian Thum, a University of Nottingham researcher of Uighur policies in Xinjiang.

“If this [figure] is correct, it is a massive disruption,” Thum told Radio Free Asia, adding that it could include people who moved to a different city or relocated to apartments after authorities demolished traditional communities.

In his speech, Xi said that China’s policy in the region — which has a population of more than 20 million — was correct and “must be adhered to in the long term.”

His speech indicated that the Beijing policy in Xinjiang would likely continue on its current course despite international pressure, Thum said. Xi made no mention of China’s pacification policies in the region, which might mean that authorities had largely achieved their goal and were transitioning into a more stable model, he added.

In a report last week, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said that at least 61 detention sites in Xinjiang had seen construction and expansion between July 2019 and July 2020. Chinese authorities had also destroyed or damaged around 16,000 mosques, the institute reported based on satellite imagery and statistical modeling.

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