Cutting through an overload of information to get to the heart of the story, this is the point.
Delegates from across China gearing up to attend the annual meetings of China's top legislature,
the National People's Congress,
or MPC, and the top political advisory body,
the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
Ethnic unity is always high on the agenda during the two sessions.
To understand how ethnic unity is promoted on the ground,
I went to Northwest China's Xinjiang Weigou Autonomous Region to a city called Shihezi,
whose administration has been put under U.S. sanctions for the past four and a half years.
How are U.S. sanctions affecting the lives of people in Xinjiang?
I'm here in Shihezi, a young city in northern Xinjiang,
whose authority has been put under sanction by the U.S. government since 2020.
The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which built the city from scratch seven decades ago,
now stands accused of asserting a brutal rule over ethnic minorities here.
Is that really the case?
Before cultivation began in 1950, the environment in Shihezi was harsh and rocky,
which gave it the name, meaning, Stone River.
Today, the city is known as the pro of the Gobi Desert, lush with parks, green fields, and vegetation.
The XPCC administers 12 cities across Xinjiang, with Shihezi being the largest.
With a population of 760,000, it continues to attract people from different ethnic cities.