Airbnb has about 700 offers of residences or rooms on its portal located in Tibet and Xinjiang, the regions where China is accused of widespread violation of human rights as well as of forced cultural assimilation. The complaint comes from the Free Tibet organization that told it to the French news agency AFP during the Beijing Winter Olympics, of which the online holiday giant is a sponsor, as of all the Games that will take place until 2028 for a total amount of the order of 400 million euros.
According to the non-profit that defends the rights of the populations of the Far West of China, the persistent growth of Airbnb in China is partly driven by the locations it offers in the two regions, 300 of which are located in Tibet, and about 380 in Xinjiang where Beijing is accused of real ethnic cleansing against ethnic and cultural minorities, in particular against Muslim Uyghurs.
The San Francisco company, which as known connects a “host” who owns a home to rent to potential users, and therefore perceives “service costs”, is a giant listed on Nasdaq which, in the recent past, has shown itself to be sensitive to human rights awareness movements, starting with “Black Lives Matters”. In a note on the Chinese question, he explained that he operates “where the US government allows us to do so” and that he has a “rigorous process” aimed at ensuring “that we are following the correct legislation”. He then explained to AFP that he has a “long-term partnership” covering several editions of the Games and that he had spoken to the International Olympic Committee on the “importance of human rights”. He then explained that it is true that China “is an important part of our goal of connecting people from all over the globe”, but that this commitment is worth only one percent of the company’s profits in recent years. .
China, for its part, has promoted Xinjiang as a vibrant tourist destination, with a focus on winter sports tourism in recent times. But the region is at the same time in the grip of that “counter-terrorism” campaign which has literally deported a large number of Uighurs and Muslims in general to so-called “re-education” camps. Beijing is also accused of perpetrating the forced sterilization of Uyghur women, imposing forced labor and destroying cultural sites, in what in many Western countries is classified as genocide.
For its part, China, after denying the existence of the camps, has partially backtracked, arguing however that they are camps born with the intent of eradicating local extremism, where the population enters on a voluntary basis. Chinese Airbnb site, Xinjiang hosts flaunt “ethnic style” rooms for “mysterious and romantic” settings. “An increasing number of tourists” are reaching the “beautiful” region, one of the hosts, based in Kashgar, a historic stop on the Silk Road, told AFP. Yu – this is the nickname of Ms – lei said she is a Han Chinese – the majority ethnic group in the whole country, adding that “there is no safety hazard”.
Another host based in Kashgar dismissed the issue of ethnic discrimination as a mystification of Chinese issues, typical of the West. However, former residents of the area speak of long-standing cultural restrictions, culminating in the destruction of many historic buildings, which in many cases have become the basis of tourism-oriented structures. A native of the area who now lives in the States told AFP that tourists arrived en masse in Kashgar only after the waves of arrests which, since 2017, have “cleaned up” the city of its Uyghur inhabitants. He, his brother, according to what he said, is one of the inmates in the re-education camps, and hasn’t heard of it for years.
Global politics pundits are of no different opinion. According to Darren Byler, who teaches international studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby (Vancouver area), Canada reports that Uyghurs remaining in the area are forced to offer “theatrical” performances of themselves in central government approved dance-related performances. music or gastronomy. All in a strictly controlled context where tourists may not even notice that they are “in a sort of ghost town, where the people who really lived and circulated on those streets have in fact vanished”.
Also thanks to the advantage of being able to offer conditions of privacy and distancing from others, Airbnb was one of the first companies to benefit from the first rebounds of the world tourism market, after the negative peak from Covid in 2020. In 2021 it was able to invoice 25 per one hundred more than in 2019. It currently operates in 220 countries and autonomous regions. Her popularity in China – where her name is translated into something that sounds like “welcome each other with love” is growing. The activity in the country of Confucius and Mao has already attracted criticism on a couple of occasions: on one it emerged that the list of offers discriminated against Uighurs and Tibetans; in another it was discovered that the house or the rented room was on land owned by a paramilitary group “banned” by the US government.
Western companies active in Xinjiang have suffered boycotts by their own consumers: a striking case has been the victim of the fashion giant H&M. According to David Tobin, who specializes in East Asian studies at the English University of Sheffield, companies that profit from tourism in the area where Uighurs have been deported are “complicit in genocide trials”.
Abduweli Ayup, a Uighur activist living in Norway, argues that a company like Airbnb could include homes that once belonged to minority ethnic groups on its list. “They have among their responsibilities to check where the owners are, and to ask themselves why so many houses are empty.”