As visitors to China's Xinjiang enjoyed new theme park-style tourist centres showcasing the region's Muslim Uyghur culture on a recent national holiday, signs of heavy security and state surveillance were never far away.

Tourists smiled and posed in traditional dress on camels for photographs amid billboards extolling the ruling Communist Party.

China is trying to move on from a security crackdown in Xinjiang in which more than a million ethnic Uyghurs were detained in re-education centres since 2016, according to UN experts and researchers – part of what Beijing has described as an effort to eradicate extremism.

It wants to build a patriotic, multi-ethnic region that is secular, mandarin-speaking and attractive to domestic tourists who spend trillions of yuan a year on group tours and curated experiences.

Although Beijing says reporters are able to...