Nearly 200 international hotels, including prominent chains, are either already operating in Xinjiang or planning to open in the region, despite reports of widespread human rights abuses by China, according to a new report.
The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) has identified at least 115 operational hotels that “benefit from a presence in the Uyghur region”, including major international hotel chains — Accor, Hilton, IHG, Marriott, and Wyndham. Additionally, at least 74 other hotels are in various stages of construction or planning in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang).
These hotels are “operating and dramatically expanding their presence in East Turkistan despite ongoing crimes against humanity and genocide”, the UHRP said in a report published on Thursday.
The report also mentions that some of the hotels have connections to forced labour and labour transfer programmes.
“By offering high-end accommodations and leisure spaces, international hotel chains contribute to a sanitised image of the region, one that directly serves Beijing’s propaganda objectives,” it said.
Xinjiang, one of the most ethnically diverse regions in China, has been witnessing systematic abuses against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic groups under the guise of “terrorism” and “religious extremism” by the government in Beijing, activists say.
According to Amnesty International, it is estimated that over a million people have been arbitrarily detained in internment camps throughout Xinjiang since 2017.
The international human rights group has stated that China is carrying out mass internment, torture, re-education, forced labour, the criminalisation of acts of religious expression, and the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region.
Legal experts and world governments have called China’s indoctrination and human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities a genocide, a claim yet to be taken to the international court.
China has denied reports of its mistreatment of minorities in the Xinjiang region.
Experts working on the report have called on the hotels working in the region not to normalise China’s human rights abuses.
“It’s unconscionable that these hotel chains continue to operate and expand in the Uyghur Region at a time when the Chinese government is carrying out systematic atrocities,” said Peter Irwin, co-author of the report and the associate director for research and advocacy at the UHRP.
“There is absolutely no way these multibillion-dollar corporations can operate responsibly in this environment – their presence alone normalises and legitimises these abuses,” he said.
The rise in the number of hotels operating in China’s far west comes at a time when Beijing is promoting Xinjiang as a tourist destination, with state media claiming around 300 million visitors to the region in 2024 alone.
According to the UHRP report, hotel chains operating in the Uyghur region “risk enabling and legitimising the political and economic system that perpetuates forced labour, cultural erasure and other human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs”.
The leading hotels “support the very apparatus of state control that enforces these atrocities” by maintaining a presence in the region, it said.
Seeking action, the UHRP has called on the international hotel chains to freeze their further expansion in the region, halt all operations and sever any business ties, and third-party booking platforms to delist all hotel booking services in the region.
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