I’m often afraid to express my skepticism that most of what we know about Xinjiang comes from Adrian Zenz, because doing so makes people think I actually support those policies.
Is that not totalitarian enough?
They seem totalitarian enough to suck up all that telemetry, what makes us think they wouldn't be totalitarian enough to sanction its use against us?
So you know the BBC has spent the last two months race baiting. They were once a most treasured institution of my nation now they've lost respect and their future is in jeopardy - you only have to view the hash #DefundTheBBC to see how they're actions have sullied them.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-china-muslim-crack...
Now Zenz is an evangelical fundamentalist who once wrote he's on a crusade against the CPC. His studies often times don't really follow scientific standards.
For example, for his claim that 2 million Uighurs are held in concentration camps, he interviewed 8 Uighur refugees, and extrapolated from the numbers they believe to be detained from their villages to the whole region.
Both ASPI and Zenz when accusing the chinese government of genocide via forced sterilization completely glared over the fact that it is the enforcement of the two-child-policy. And they do so knowingly, because if you read between the lines of their reports, it is quite obvious that all the women interviewed already had 2 or more children.
It is extremely difficult to get an accurate picture of what is going on there. - Security is definetely extremely tight in the whole region, and "brainwashing camps" are admitted to exist by the government. Many international Xinjiang without an obvious agenda think something very fishy is going on, but the exact scale, method and goal are completely obfuscated by lies and propaganda from both sides.
[1] https://medium.com/@jerry_grey2002/abc-four-corners-tell-the...
Actual journalistic sources, based on interviews with former detainees, etc, validate the claim that China is undertaking a campaign of demographic genocide against predominantly Muslim minorities: https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
And BTW, your sources include a Medium post, a YouTube video, and Chinese govt controlled media. These are hardly reputable journalistic sources.
- Multiple citations from Zenz (+Pompeo for bonus points)
- Entire article revolves around testimony of those with 2+ children being subjected to family planning policies (IUD / sterilizations etc).
- Mentions "now-abandoned ‘one child’ policy" without providing context of that new "Two-Child" policy is in affect for everyone, with no minority exemptions.
- Claims 30 interviews reveals how wide spread the practice is. Hint: you can interview 1.3 billion Han Chinese to see how wide spread family planning program was for the last 40 years.
We already know from leaked internal papers the purpose of these camps, the reality is, the camps themselves are boring techno authoritarian reeducation camps (like in France), but the threshold for manufacturing consent requires something meatier like literal genocide. There's sufficient state-level intelligence capability to actually verify the scope of the camps, but western media insists on quoting the same few unsubstantiated sources + Pompeo musings while conveniently omitting facts that goes against the narrative. I.e. recently ASPI "slave labour" study, casually glosses over that the minimum hourly wage from contracts was equivalent to basic salary at Foxconn and 2x annual GDP of prefecture the workers are from. Because the mental image for a prisoner stamping license plates for 50c an hour is different than $20 an hour.
The greater context is, Islamic attacks in multicultural European societies in the past 10 years (particularly in England + France) informed internal decision making in China regarding XJ. I remember French banlieue / ethnic enclaves where radicalization was happening were part of conversation on policy debates to revise minority policy in China a few years ago. The position being multicultural "salad bowl", classic soviet oblast model where minorities had relative cultural autonomy had failed to reign in extremism (and separatism in China's case), so now everyone gets sinicized and the Han treatment, aka blending into the US melting pot model.
[0] https://www.france24.com/en/20180223-france-deradicalisation...