The FIFA World Cup 2026 in the United States, Mexico, and Canada has captured the global imagination through open play, star players, fan diversity, and state-of-the-art stadiums. Few events attract attention quite like a World Cup, drawing worldwide television audiences at all hours of the day and night. Yet football’s showcase tournament is rarely free from controversy. This World Cup has generated criticism over travel restrictions, eye-watering ticket prices, and commercial pressures that have reshaped the game. Less visible are protests directed at corporate actors, such as Aramco and Mytel, linking FIFA to states with dismal human rights records.
The World Cup has long been used by malign governments seeking legitimacy and international prestige. Benito Mussolini recognized the propaganda value of the tournament when Italy hosted the 1934 World Cup, presenting fascist Italy as modern, disciplined, and successful. During Argentina’s 1978 World Cup, General Jorge Rafael Videla’s military dictatorship projected an image of national unity while political prisoners were tortured and disappeared only miles from tournament venues. More recently, Russia’s hosting of the 2018 World Cup and Qatar’s of the 2022 tournament demonstrated how major football events can help soften international criticism and cultivate favorable narratives.
Much of the discussion surrounding “sportswashing” focuses on international competition. Yet domestic tournaments can serve a similar function. The Chinese government’s promotion of football in the Uyghur Region provides an example of how local sporting events can be mobilized to distract from ongoing human rights violations while advancing the state’s political objectives.
Since 2017, the Chinese state has been implicated in a range of human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples, including mass internment, state-sponsored forced labor, widespread surveillance, cultural destruction, and forced sterilization. The Uyghur Tribunal concluded that these policies amounted to genocide, while the United Nations found that they may constitute crimes against humanity.
As international scrutiny intensified, Beijing gradually shifted its messaging. Rather than defending its crackdown, officials began presenting those same policies as responsible for creating a stable region now open to visitors and investors. Uyghurs increasingly appeared in state narratives as grateful beneficiaries of development and modernization. International hotel chains and travel companies participated in building a regional tourism industry, while social media influencers amplified images of hospitality and prosperity, ignoring the context of repression. Sporting events became an important part of this effort. Winter sports, rally races, and other competitions helped normalize conditions and redirect attention away from allegations of atrocity crimes.
The Assimilation Cup
Football has now become one of the most visible components of China’s shift in messaging.
Chinese state media is promoting the 2026 Tongxin Cup Xinjiang Super League as the first region-wide amateur football competition. Fourteen prefecture-level teams are competing in a tournament running from May through August. The extensive state media coverage emphasized large crowds, inexpensive tickets, and grassroots participation. The league is also marketed as an economic driver, with prefecture governments promoting football tourism, cultural performances, merchandise, and local branding campaigns.
These initiatives fit the sportswashing aim to distract from human rights abuses and cultivate favorable narratives. Yet the political messaging surrounding the Tongxin Cup reveals something else. The competition’s name, “Tongxin” (同心) – translated as “one heart” or “united as one” – carries strong associations with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) discourse on “ethnic unity.” State media consistently frame the Tongxin Cup as bringing players and spectators from “all ethnic groups” together, while the tournament’s pomegranate-themed mascots, Tongtong and Xinxin, draw directly on CCP narratives of ethnic unity. The pomegranate branding is a direct reference to Xi Jinping’s comment that China’s ethnic groups should be “closely united like the seeds of a pomegranate.”
As such, the political messaging of the Tongxin Cup is closely aligned with state policies to reshape ethnic identity in the region. Adopted in March this year, the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress requires state institutions, schools, media organizations, and businesses to promote a shared national identity over distinct ethnic identities. The law expands Mandarin-language education, encourages greater “interethnic integration,” and institutionalizes campaigns promoting national unity.
Consequently, national identity is understood as Han culture, and the decades-long process of Uyghur cultural loss is codified under law. Within this framework, football becomes a vehicle for reinforcing assimilation and erasing diversity. It is no coincidence that the law comes into effect on July 1, 2026, in the midst of Tongxin Cup games.
Football as a Tool of Control
The use of domestic football competitions for political purposes is hardly unique to China. Across different political systems and eras, authoritarian governments have used domestic football to manufacture consent, project legitimacy, and divert attention from repression. Francisco Franco renamed Spain’s historic Copa del Rey as the Copa del Generalísimo between 1939 and 1976, turning football into an affirmation of his regime.
China’s use of football in the Uyghur Region fits within this tradition. The strategy is particularly effective because football is as popular in Uyghur society as it is in countries such as Spain. However, for many years, football provided a means of expressing dissatisfaction with Chinese rule among Uyghurs. Support for whichever national team happened to be playing against China became a common form of resistance among some Uyghur fans.
Furthermore, football became a means of independent organization. In the mid-1990s, Uyghurs in Ghulja responded to unemployment and substance abuse among young people by reviving the meshrep, a traditional community gathering, to offer mutual support and moral guidance. Meshrep leaders organized a 16-team football league to provide healthy activities for marginalized Uyghur youth. Chinese authorities shut down the tournament, deployed tanks onto football pitches, and removed goalposts to prevent matches from taking place. The suppression of meshrep activities became one of the grievances that contributed to the February 1997 Ghulja protests and subsequent massacre of Uyghur demonstrators by Chinese security forces.
The lesson learned by the Chinese state was not that football could strengthen communities. It was that football could become a focus of resistance and generate social networks beyond state control. Today, football is encouraged, but only under official supervision. The state promotes participation and funds facilities, provided that football serves state objectives rather than community autonomy.
Football thrives in the Uyghur diaspora, with initiatives like the establishment of the East Turkistan national team, which competes in non-FIFA international tournaments, as well as the playing of the “Uyghur World Cup” and amateur competitions organized by diaspora communities in countries such as the United States, Australia and Turkiye. However, these initiatives operate on shoestring budgets. Their significance lies in the ability of communities in exile to organize themselves and maintain language, culture, and communal ties despite formidable odds.
In the context of such constrained resources in the diaspora, the Tongxin Cup represents more than a football tournament. It demonstrates how a well-resourced authoritarian state can appropriate a popular sport and transform it into an instrument of political messaging and distraction from human rights violations. By promoting narratives of unity, prosperity, and participation, the competition helps normalize a broader project aimed at assimilating Uyghurs into a state-defined national identity.
Football can bring people together. It can also be used to legitimize policies that erode the very diversity the sport is often celebrated for reflecting. As self-declared “custodians” of the global game, FIFA could express concern, but with a coterie of autocratic regimes pulling the strings within global football, that seems more than a long shot.
