On the streets of historic Kashgar, a desert oasis in Western China known as the cradle of Uyghur culture, a brand new "Ancient City" is in the midst of a tourist boom.

In recent years, most of the old town's distinctive mudbrick dwellings, which survived 2,000 years of shifting empires, have been demolished, with the government citing concerns over earthquakes and sanitation.

Uyghur activist groups say the destruction of the old town amounts to "cultural genocide".

Now, souvenir stalls selling fridge magnets, cheap jewellery and traditional instruments line the streets, where visitors can take a ride in an electric buggy through the crowds or get dressed in a traditional Uyghur costume for a photo shoot on the steps of a mosque.

China says more than 180 million tourists have flowed into the Xinjiang province so far this year, enticed by government-funded coupons for discounted travel.

 

The police checkpoints have been rolled back, replaced by a vast network of sophisticated facial-recognition security cameras.

They are one of the few visible signs of the decade long, intense crackdown that may constitute "crimes against humanity", according to a United Nations report released last year.

Xinjiang's 'great rebranding'

For several years, the region of Xinjiang has been shut off from most of the world's media, amid a highly secretive government campaign to stamp out extremism amongst the Uyghur population and other Muslim minorities.

The crackdown came after decades of unrest, including riots in the capital Urumqi where hundreds were killed in 2009 and a car attack on pedestrians in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 2013, that killed five.

 

When a knife and explosive attack on Urumqi train station overshadowed President Xi Jinping's trip to the province in 2014, he ordered officials to "strike hard" against terrorism.

Since then, a chorus of academics, researchers, journalists and legal scholars have meticulously documented widespread abuses at the hands of the government, including mass internment camps, forced labour and birth prevention policies.

The United States has labelled the crackdown "genocide", but Australia hasn't used that word.

For its part, China first denied the existence of the camps, before later insisting all of its "vocational centres" were closed in 2019.

Now the province is moving to a state of "normalisation". The great rebranding of Xinjiang is in full swing.

A carefully orchestrated tour of Xinjiang

The ABC was invited on a media tour of the region, organised and carefully curated by the Chinese government to show off the best the province has to offer.

But none of the officials wanted to go on the record. 

We were shown a Uyghur kindergarten, where students recite verses in Mandarin in the classroom, then dance happily in the playground to traditional music.

 

A thriving factory belonging to a local business, where one in five workers are said to be from a Muslim minority background.

A milk packaging facility where we can film workers through a glass wall as they monitor production.

And rural towns with painted-on fishponds and colourful murals depicting harmonious scenes of village life, but very few actual villagers.

"The changes in Xinjiang are great," Nie Zhaoyu, a village cadre from Ximen told the ABC. 

"Traffic, roads, life, employment and improvement of people's welfare … We can see the happy smiles on people's faces."

The tour, which lasted a week and included about 20 journalists from around the world, was tightly controlled and left little time in the busy program for us to speak to locals ourselves.

 

In Urumqi, a flashpoint of unrest in the past, we were allowed to walk around and film unrestricted, past midnight and without a minder.

Uyghur families appeared relaxed as they enjoyed kebabs and sheep brains at the bustling night markets.

Those we spoke to said the city was safe and their lives were good.

But our requests to see one of the former internment camps where more than 1 million people are believed to have been locked up for months or years, were denied by our Chinese hosts.

The man and the camera 

During the tour, the ABC and a US outlet approached a souvenir vendor who claimed to have spent time in such a facility. 

He wasn't provided by the tour guides. 

When we started interviewing him, another man we'd never met appeared with a camera, stood next to us and filmed his every answer.

Imamu Maimaiti Sidike, a father of three, showed no outward sign of intimidation as he impassively described the "extremely radical religious ideologies" that saw him locked up for seven months.

"I didn't allow my wife to work," he said. 

"I believed that if we spent her income, we would go to hell and forced her to stay home. I also promoted these values to the people around me."

He denied any mistreatment at the facility, claiming he ate well, played chess and read books and was even allowed to go home on weekends.

"Through my studies, I realised that radical religious views harm people. I no longer have this mindset. I can get along with people of any ethnicity and faith."

Those comments fit the government's prescribed narrative, according to Peter Irwin, Associate Director for research and advocacy at the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP).

"They follow this narrative because of this fear and this ever-present threat of punishment for stepping out of line… People are deathly afraid of saying the wrong thing, meeting the wrong person, or communicating abroad," said Mr Irwin.

"They've detained people for the most basic expressions of religious expression … Having a Koran at home can get you detained for 10 years. Is that a normal society?"

Religious freedom 'doesn't exist at all'

In Kashgar today, the Chinese flag flaps in the breeze over the top of crumbling mosque domes.

The call to prayer has fallen silent.

Long beards and veils are hard to spot.

We couldn't find anyone who knew where to buy a Koran.

The 600-year-old Id Kah Mosque, which has capacity for 5,000 Muslim worshippers, is now primarily a tourist attraction.

Our guides initially didn't want us to go inside during prayers, but they eventually allowed it. 

On the day we visit, a few dozen people show up to pray. Most are elderly and none of them are under the age of 50.

 

The mosque's Imam, Maimaiti Jumai told us he was "very satisfied" with the government's work to stamp out extremism.

"The efforts our country made on cracking down on extremism, I think set an example for the world," he said.

A similar line was offered at Xinjiang's Islamic institute in Urumqi, where the next generation of Imams are given Chinese language lessons, under the tutelage of director Abdureqip Tumulniyaz.

"Our China, our Xinjiang will not allow [extremism] to take root," he told ABC.

When asked why there was little sign of a living form of Islam in Xinjiang, he suggested religious devotion had gone too far before the government stepped in.

 

"People were praying in the street, blocking cars; praying in hospitals, so doctors couldn't help their patients; on planes, so the planes couldn't take off."

Describing such claims as "absurd", Peter Irwin said the UHRP has documented the destruction of thousands of mosques and upwards of 1,500 cases of Uyghur Imams and other religious figures who have been detained or disappeared.

"The Imams have been either removed or detained or imprisoned and the Imams that remain are only allowed to have a sermon that's directly in line with what the Chinese government is saying," he said. 

"So religious freedom doesn't exist at all and it's been very much replaced by this tourist consumption attitude."

Uyghur exiles cut off from their families 

The Chinese Communist Party's big tourism push for Xinjiang is another blow to members of the Uyghur community around the world who have been unable to speak to their families back home, let alone visit them.

Yusuf Hussein left Xinjiang in 1999 and now lives in Adelaide.

He maintained regular contact with his family in Xinjiang, phoning to chat almost every week.

But in 2017, the year the internment camps started operating, he was cut off.

 

"After that, I didn't get any response. They just didn't pick up," he said. 

Last year, some devastating news reached him: His father had died three months earlier.

"That was the only message. And [the messenger] didn't give any details whether [my father] was sick or in concentration camp or anywhere," he said. 

The grisly museum in Xinjiang 

Like the ravages of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, China now appears to be embarking on a campaign of coerced, collective amnesia about the crackdown in Xinjiang.

A museum in the capital Urumqi, dedicated to "The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism in Xinjiang", outlines in glossy, gory detail the period of bloody unrest in the province.

It even features grisly, slow-motion videos of hostages being killed by Islamic State terrorists in Syria, as a demonstration of the "foreign influences" infecting Xinjiang.

 

There are dozens of guns, knives and bombs on display behind glass.

Then, a jarring shift in tone, with panel after panel depicting the harmony and prosperity of current day Xinjiang, under the stewardship of President Xi Jinping.

The decade-long crackdown on the Uyghur population, which activists claim is really an attempt to wipe out an entire culture, receives just a passing mention about "powerful legal instruments".

"Worthwhile results have been achieved," it reads.