The whole conspiracy theory started with a claim of millions of Uyghurs being supposedly imprisoned story is based on two highly dubious “studies.”.

However, this claim is completely absurd when you stop and think about it even for a minute. That figure 1 million is repeated again and again. Let’s just look at how much space would you actually need to intern one million people.

This is a photo of Rikers Island, New York City’s biggest prison. The actual size of a facility interning ten thousand people.

According to Wikipedia, “The average daily inmate population on the island is about 10,000, although it can hold a maximum of 15,000.” Let’s assume this is a Xinjiang detention camp, holding ten to fifteen thousand people. How many of these would it take to hold one million people?

Let’s do some math:

Rikers Size	Rikers Prisoners	One Million Uyghurs Size
413.2 acres (0.645 square miles)	10,000 to 15,000	43 to 64 square miles

In reality, one million people would probably take more space; all the supposed detention camps we see are much less dense than Rikers.

For comparison, San Francisco is 47 square miles. Amsterdam is 64 square miles. You’d literally need detention camps that total the size of San Francisco or Amsterdam to intern one million Uyghurs. It’d be like looking at a map of California. There’s Los Angeles. There’s San Diego. And look, there’s San Francisco Concentration City with its one million Uyghurs.

Literally visible to the naked eye from space.

CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, but their enormous estimate was ultimately based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals. Based on this absurdly small sample of research subjects in an area whose total population is 20 million, CHRD “extrapolated estimates” that “at least 10% of villagers […] are being detained in re-education detention camps, and 20% are being forced to attend day/evening re-education camps in the villages or townships, totaling 30% in both types of camps.” Furthermore, it doesn’t even make sense from logistics perspective.

Practically all the stories we see about China trace back to Adrian Zenz is a far right fundamentalist nutcase and not a reliable source for any sort of information. The fact that he’s the primary source for practically every article in western media demonstrates precisely what I’m talking about when I say that coverage is divorced from reality.

Zenz is a born-again Christian who lectures at the European School of Culture and Theology. This anodyne-sounding campus is actually the German base of Columbia International University, a US-based evangelical Christian seminary which considers the “Bible to be the ultimate foundation and the final truth in every aspect of our lives,” and whose mission is to “educate people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ.”

Zenz’s work on China is inspired by this biblical worldview, as he recently explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “I feel very clearly led by God to do this,” he said. “I can put it that way. I’m not afraid to say that. With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.”.

Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.

Zenz outlined these views in a book he co-authored in 2012, titled Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation. In the tome, Zenz discussed the return of Jesus Christ, the coming wrath of God, and the rise of the Antichrist.

The fact that this nutcase is being paraded as a credible researcher on the subject is absolutely surreal, and it’s clear that the methodology of his “research” doesn’t pass any kind of muster when examined closely.

It’s also worth noting that there is a political angle around the narrative around Xinjiang. For example, here’s George Bush’s chief of staff openly saying that US wants to destabilize the region, and NED admitting to funding Uyghur separatism for the past 16 years on their own official Twitter page. An ex-CIA operative details US operations radicalizing and training terrorists in the region in this book. Here’s an excerpt:

US has been stoking terrorism in the region while they’ve been running a propaganda campaign against China in the west. In fact, US even classified Uyghur separatists as a terrorist group at one point https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-was-at-war-uyghur-terrorists-now-claims-etim-doesnt-exist/276916/

Here’s an interview with a son of imam killed in Xinjiang https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-06-19/Son-of-imam-assassinated-in-Kashgar-s-2014-mosque-attack-speaks-out-RqNiyrcRuo/index.html

Here’s an account from a Pakistani journalist who has been all over Xinjiang (which borders Pakistan) claims that western media reports on “atrocities” are lies. https://dailytimes.com.pk/723317/exposing-the-occidents-baseless-lies-about-xinjiang/

It’s also worth noting that the accusations originate entirely from the west while Muslim majority countries support China, and their leaders have visited Xinjiang many times.

• https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/on-eid-xinjiang-imams-defend-china-against-u-s-criticism-1.5425967
• https://www.bolnews.com/latest/2023/07/pak-religious-leaders-nurture-bonds-of-cooperation-with-xinjiang/
• https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/islamic-envoys-say-china-is-protecting-minorities-in-xinjiang-after-five-day-visit

Also notable that whenever western media actually deigns to visit Xinjiang, which is not often, they’re unable to produce support for any of their claims of mass imprisonment and oppression, so they opt for insinuations instead https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china-health-travel-7a6967f335f97ca868cc618ea84b98b9

There’s a further list of debunking here https://redsails.org/the-xinjiang-atrocity-propaganda-blitz/

The whole thing is very clearly a propaganda blitz that US is cynically using to manipulate impressionable people in the west.

1. Always assume the US is lying or it’s the opposite of what they’re claiming
2. We are seeing what a genocide looks like in real time, there’s no way that China could cover all of that up.

Tell your partner straight-up that they have it backwards. Practically the entire Muslim world supports China’s policies in Xinjiang. The only people who seriously espouse the “genocide” lie are Westerners and fringe East Turkestani separatists. Parroting this is on the same level of insanity as whining about white genocide in South Africa.

To the Islamaphobia accusations, basically every global Islam organisation has been to investigate, and found no genocide. The issue is purely one of Western projection.

I had anarchist comrades who had this weird chip on their shoulder about Xinjiang and would bristle when I pointed out that this whole story sounds suspiciously like a way to make the US seem good and a rising rival seem bad, and that maybe they were inclined to believe the story because China is at least nominally Communist and “authoritarian” so they want to believe that China is doing something horrible. But the story didn’t add up so I went looking for sources to back up their beliefs, and all I found was clear American propaganda. Your partner is carrying water for a Washington DC based think tank. Washington DC, famous friend of Muslims. All English language citations for the “Uighur genocide” I’ve been able to find eventually trace their citations back to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. I could not find one that did not, though that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there because I eventually gave up in despair.

I cannot believe for a moment that the US cares about Muslims, so based on that alone I simply did not trust the narrative. If America is pushing it, it’s more likely than not bullshit. But just in case, I asked my mother, who is a Muslim immigrant and politically pretty well informed but not on the radical left by any means and is pretty unsympathetic toward China, her take on the situation and got a 2 hour lecture. Given that she’s the one who taught me about how the US fucked around in Afghanistan and 9/11 was just blowback for fomenting radical Islamic extremism in a country that didn’t natively even have that problem in order to fight the Soviets, and how Saddam was America’s favorite pawn before they did what they always do to “allies”, I’m inclined to take her assessment seriously. In summary: There’ve been terrorist attacks from the East Turkistan separatist movement, even going so far as to team up with Balochistani separatists and assassinate Chinese engineers who were working in Pakistan. Xinjiang neighbors Afghanistan through a narrow passage and it’s likely that “radical islamic” ideas spread across that porous border. China eventually responded to it with a heavy-handed crackdown and deradicalization programs, to which the claim of “cultural genocide” might carry some weight, but it’s a far cry from mass murder. Furthermore, she laughed at claims that China was using fashion to erase Uighur identity and pointed out that if you compare historic traditional Uighur fashion and modern fashion, the latest fads (very conservative, burqas) are clearly influenced by the dress codes the Taliban had imposed. Because they come from the same ideological root. So are these new radical islamic movements the ones who are actually doing cultural genocide against the Uighurs?

So, she said it’s complicated and a bit muddy, because who is to say that the separatists don’t have the right to secede? Meanwhile, no nation state ever wants to cede territory or deal with terrorist attacks from armed separatists. But this narrative has existed for a long time and at no point have we ever seen a shred of convincing proof of the mass-murder phase of genocide, while we see it in Palestine, and it’s just ridiculous to call whatever is going on there “genocide.” At this point, the burden of proof is on the people who say there is a genocide to prove it, and they have not. They just call you a genocide-denier if you say “alright, show me the corpses” and that’s pretty telling.

I don’t know what race you are but if you’re white I would approach this cautiously because poc typically don’t like being whitesplained to. At the same time, it may be helpful to gently point these things out to your partner, point out the ways that , and point out how strange it is that the US government would pretend to give a single shit about Muslims. Does she really think that being on the same side of an issue as the US State Department, famous for murdering millions of Muslims and Middle Easterners, actually cares about an ethnic minority of Muslims in China? If so, give me her number, I’ve got a bridge to sell her.

how come there is not a single shred of evidence of a genocide in a region of >25million population and of enormous area. stuff like this just cannot be hidden or swept away.

The Western narrative on Xinjiang is a lie. Pure and simple. There really isn’t any more to it than that. ML’s don’t need to take a position on a non-existent issue other than to point out that it is complete and utter bullshit. Go watch some videos from Xinjiang and tell me where the genocide is.

I readily believed in the Uyghur Genocide narrative until relatively recently. What ultimately changed my mind is actually hearing what Uyghurs living in Xinjiang have to say, which is a far cry from what we’ve been told is happening. The only response to their words is patronizing bullshit like “oh they’re afraid of the government” or “they’ve been brainwashed” and other things that remove their agency as human beings entirely. Because when the only Uyghurs claiming they’re facing persecution conveniently exist entirely outside the country the alleged genocide is occurring in while all the ones inside it say everything is fine at that point you simply have to stop and ask yourself if maybe the people actually living there have a better idea of what’s going on because even while being bombed, starved, and shot at in the ruins of their homes Palestinians have still been able to tell the world about the destruction they’re facing and unlike Uyghurs they’re facing a real genocide.

You can find no shortage of images & videos showing a Xinjiang that is flourishing with Uyghur culture but what you’ll never find is a single image of torture, detention centers, mass graves, or anything else that would indicate an actual genocide is going on despite it allegedly happening in a country where there are more smart phones than people and which receives hundreds of millions of tourists every year.

The fact that anyone believes this myth at all when it’s so easy to disprove just demonstrates how insulated Westerners are from the rest of the world. This isn’t like the Holodomor where there’s been several decades of pre-internet misinformation campaigns to build up a grand conspiracy theory that can actually convince people that some nefarious scheme was behind an ordinary tragedy; you can pull up Google Images and try to find any visual proof of the Uyghur Genocide only to get images of nothing but protests in foreign countries, with one sole image of men in jumpsuits surrounded by a fence by used as the consistent “smoking gun” that genocide is going on even though there is no immediate context to that image and it’s impossible to tell what is actually going on in it. The best part is that there is a second image taken from behind where it shows they’re in a drug rehabilitation center and watching a play that you’ll simply never see because it’s impossible to spin it as ‘proof’ of concentration camps.

We really have just been lied to about Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, etc.

The biggest critique of the Western left that arises from the Uyghur issue is how willing the majority were to believe the genocide narrative. There’s a real genocide being streamed to all their phones, their nations sit on textbook examples of ethnic cleansing from their colonizer days and beyond, and yet their governments, who commit war crimes on the daily and are the most blatantly pro-capitalist, anti-worker governments on the planet sling a litany of bullshit accusations at China and the Western leftists go ‘yeah, that tracks’.

Support for China amongst the Western left is relatively new as it’s getting harder for Western media to credibly deny the good that the Chinese nation is doing for its people, for foreign allies that the West continues to abuse, and for the environment. And yet when the Uyghur thing is denied as more of the same Sinophobic red scare bullshit, it still sticks. And there’s no way to make that make sense without Westerners coming off as latently racist with lingering white man’s burden/manifest destiny brainrot.

Xinjiang is an open area. Anyone can go there and verify if there is a genocide going on. So far, no real evidence has been provided.

The “free turkstan” movent is Wahhabist. Most of the active members left Xinjiang to go to Syria to behead “infidels” with Jolani and kidnap women as sex slaves.

There is no genocide. There was an extensive poverty alleviation program that included vocational schools and some re-education of radicalized extremists.

@[email protected]

My partner is Lebanese and one issue that has consistently come up with any discussion of Marxism (and honestly the online left as a whole) is Uyghur genocide denial.

Unfortunately a lot of sectarian BS amplifying western propaganda. The west cares neither about muslims nor the chinese but somehow cares about chinese muslims. It is very difficult to convince someone who has bought into the sectarianism to step out of the bubble because you are essentially asking them not to believe salafist/wahabbist perspectives which has now become unfortunately institutionalised into various sunni institutions the world over; the most overt example is the overwhelming lack of response to the genocide in Palestine by the Sunni world in sharp contrast to the Shi’ite (namely Hezbollah, Ansarallah and Iran).

I mean the whole thing was “initially” based on Adrian Zenz’ paper (German far right Christian fundementalist nutjob with Langley/CIA links) using I think a sample of 8 people who can’t be traced/sourced properly and extrapolated to the whole region.

There are a ton of videos online about Xinxiang where ordinary folks go there and see how Uighurs live with their language on the national currency, high HDI, advsnced infrastructure and technology, empowerment of local farmers and fisherman with agricultural tech, in charge of local governments and often beating the west on standard of living, more mosques per capita in china than the west etc. And obviously no apartheid. And all the other muslim domimant chinese ethnicities that the West and their satellites in west asia conveniently ignore.

The region also benefits significantly from both domestic and foreign tourism to experience Uyghur culture because it is actively promoted; could you say the same about for example Israel - are people visiting Israel to experience palestinian culture? Or how about the west with similar proportions of muslims as china; is anyone visiting the West specifically to experience various forms of Islamic dominant cultures (eg France for Algerian culture? Is Algerian arabic even on the euro?)? Is it part of their tourism strategy? If not, then why not?

There have been so many visits from Islamic countries dignitaries and heads of state, various corporations around the world who have to make the case to their own anti-chinese western/western-aligned governments that Xinjiang is safe and very specifically there is no Uyghur oppression (VW report being the most famous example).

If one cannot differentiate between salafist extremism funded by the West and how to fight that versus attempts to keep local islamic culture against forced SA/UAE/qatari imports then trying to convince someone otherwise is an uphill battle.

If you got the money, go visit there. There’s nothing that will beat western propaganda than seeing with your own eyes.

The real Xinjiang story is not so difficult to understand:

The rise of Xi Jinping and the Belt & Road Initiative posed a serious challenge to American supremacy much earlier than they were expecting, so …

the U.S. amped up their funding of terrorism in the region, as per the “Afghan Trap” doctrine outlined by Brzezinski, but …

instead of sending in the PLA, repeating the error of the Soviets, China reacted by building schools and vocational programs instead.

As a result, the U.S. and its allies desperately pivoted to accusing them of “genocide,” despite lack of evidence.

https://redsails.org/the-xinjiang-atrocity-propaganda-blitz/

Edited to add: when you hear/see ETIM involved in this just want to remind one that this is a pattern of abuse that the West/US has a long history of engaging in whether it is funding/training narcotic cartels in central america, or fascists in Americas/Eastern Europe/Asia, or salafists in West Asia/Africa/heartlands; it’s all the same game of imperialism to them and justify their involvement and presence in those areas formenting instability, developing the power of the local comprador bourgoisie class and defacto western rule. Liberals often try to rationalise events as isolated from the whole but when you see the above geopolitical trend it becomes harder to justify it.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Vocational_Education_and_Training_Centers

The genocide narrative has thoroughly been debunked. I get where your partner is coming from and I assume they’re not an ML from how you speak about it. In regards to white western leftists I mean all people I know are with Palestine (even the apolitical libs) and what took place in Xinjiang looks nothing like it. Most of the narrative around the genocide was crafted by white people in fact - they’re named in the link. It’s a clear example of manufacturing consent for later use. If I’m not mistaken Lebanon was part of signatories that defended china’s policy in Xinjiang because like I said, the (western) alternative is to bomb them all. That’s how we’ve been “fighting” terrorism.

There are other Muslim minorities in China and somehow these were never mentioned, because they weren’t going through repression, but why would China only focus on uyghurs if the problem is religion? Why did the Hui not protest with their Uyghur ummah? If they did, we would have heard about it.

China is clear that the Chinese nation encompasses all of the ethnic minorities (37 or 57 are recognized because I think at some point they had to group some together. There’s literally hundreds in China) and even historically China just was not racist. Buddhism spread in China through India and quickly took over the country, with emperors not trying to put a stop to it. When Christians came they were allowed in some port towns to proselytize, but that was more of a trade protectionism thing and every European had to stay in those ports - and they were right, for only a few years later the tea bush was stolen from China, then silk was stolen too, then opium was introduced because the UK was literally bankrupting itself buying from China.

There are so called Han people (I’m still not convinced it’s an actual thing lol) right now that speak Tibetan better than Tibetans.

Were there excesses? I mean, possibly. I don’t think they were widespread enough that Uyghurs would want to topple the regime over it. They are also not the masters or Xinjiang and the only ethnic minority that comes from Xinjiang. Carl Zha is documenting his trip through Xinjiang right now on twitter and nobody is being oppressed. Xinjiang is now safer - ETIM terrorists don’t discriminate.

So the story is that the US and our allies, who have spent decades villifying imprisoning and killing muslims, and who have repeatedly verifiably lied about similar human rights abuses to justify our foreign policy before, are the only ones who can be trusted to tell the truth about the conditions for muslims who just happen to be living in the country which is our single greatest global rival politically and economically, about whom we have an extremely obvious foreign policy motive for lying, but we’re definitely telling the truth this time and everyone else is lying? Every muslim majority nation on earth is apparently only supporting China because they’re either corrupt or too terrified to oppose them, despite the fact that the US has been completely unable to get similar results for Israel with our best efforts? And despite having the most advanced surveillance technology on earth, despite having satellites that can take high resolution pictures of any patch of dirt on earth and an unmatched intelligence network, the US has somehow been unable to obtain any incontrovertible physical evidence of this supposed genocide for years? And you believe that?