As visitors to China's Xinjiang enjoyed new theme park-style tourist centers 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 so-called re-education centers from 2016, according to U.N. experts and researchers — part of what Beijing has described as an effort to eradicate extremism.