- The commenter is skeptical of the quality of Western media
- Commenter provides an anecdotal data point, which is by definition not reliable but provides some grounds for skepticism
- Human rights abuses have been and still are an issue in the United States. I would argue here that the comparison to China is facile at best but I understand the point being made.
You may have some strong counter arguments but starting off by accusing the commenter of being a "PLA" or "CCP" agent is undermining them.
The rule is that you can't make insinuations about astroturfing or shillage without some sort of evidence. Another user having different views than yours—even when you find them wrong, or even perversely wrong—does not count as evidence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
I get accused of all sorts of things because we enforce this policy straight down the middle. Guess what: I'm not a secret communist agent. I just don't like mobs.
The issue is that HN has guidelines that people need to adhere to. It's not ok to break those, no matter how right your side is or you feel it is. Moreover, there's no need to, because you can make a much better case for your side by following them.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data."
You can believe what you want, obviously. But understand without evidence, your claims are baseless.
Considering that an anti-China stance is part of Trump's strategy, and intelligence agencies have been caught lying countless times (e.g. Iraq's WMD) to further their agenda, there's no good reason to believe these accusations.
The Chinese are certainly a totalitarian regime, and it is certain that the people of Xinjiang are not in a good state, and there are certainly political prisoners there. But, as you mentioned, the numbers I've heard of 1-2 million prisoners (there are 10 million Uyghurs in total) in concentration camps and slave labor etc seem extremely exaggerated. Pretty much everyone in china has a phone with a camera, including Uyghurs. You'd think at least a few videos of indisputable evidence would be leaked. If you want to accuse a nation of a holocaust, you must have strong evidence.
And on a tangential note, the US has the world's largest prison population, at 22% of the world's prisoners, and a disproportionate number are black. The Chinese could also spin the situation and say that the Americans are running concentration camps for blacks and be on similar footing.
People mistake the frequency and breadth of repetition of a narrative as a measure of truth value, and the three letter agencies take advantage of this human bias, hence the downvotes for your salient comment. It's not easy to take a contrarian stance in these times.
https://www.nchrd.org/2018/08/china-massive-numbers-of-uyghu...
There are leaked Chinese government documents:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/ch...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50511063
Satellite photos:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/09/ch...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alison_killing/satellit...
Open source Chinese government documents, such as budgets and construction bids:
https://jamestown.org/program/evidence-for-chinas-political-...
But if that's not good enough, please organize an independent investigation team to go to Xinjiang and find out, and tell me how that goes.
I don't see anything in your links that shows much evidence of slave labor or millions in concentration camps.
Is that supposed to be response to this?
>> But if that's not good enough, please organize an independent investigation team to go to Xinjiang and find out, and tell me how that goes.
If it was, then I'll spell out what was meant by my sarcasm: the Chinese government won't allow anyone to conduct a systematic independent investigation, and are quite capable of fatally interfering with such a project. If you set your standard so high as to either require such an investigation or a confession, you've conveniently put yourself in a position to unreasonably deny almost crime or violation anyone's made an attempt to hide.
> I don't see anything in your links that shows much evidence of slave labor or millions in concentration camps.
Estimates vary on the exact total population of the camps, but the lowest credible ones I've seen have been in several hundreds of thousands.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/world/asia/xinjiang-china...:
> Accounts from the region, satellite images and previously unreported official documents indicate that growing numbers of detainees are being sent to new factories, built inside or near the camps, where inmates have little choice but to accept jobs and follow orders....
> Independent accounts from inmates who have worked in the factories are rare. The police block attempts to get near the camps and closely monitor foreign journalists who travel to Xinjiang, making it all but impossible to conduct interviews in the region. And most Uighurs who have fled Xinjiang did so before the factory program grew in recent months.
> But Serikzhan Bilash, a founder of Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, an organization in Kazakhstan that helps ethnic Kazakhs who have left neighboring Xinjiang, said he had interviewed relatives of 10 inmates who had told their families that they were made to work in factories after undergoing indoctrination in the camps....
> “It’s not as though they have a choice of whether they get to work in a factory, or what factory they are assigned to,” said Darren Byler, a lecturer at the University of Washington who studies Xinjiang and visited the region in April.
> He said it was safe to conclude that hundreds of thousands of detainees could be compelled to work in factories if the program were put in place at all of the region’s internment camps....
> The documents detail plans for inmates, even those formally released from the camps, to take jobs at factories that work closely with the camps to continue to monitor and control them. The socks, suits, skirts and other goods made by these laborers would be sold in Chinese stores and could trickle into overseas markets.
> Kashgar [a city with a population of over 500,000], an ancient, predominantly Uighur area of southern Xinjiang that is a focus of the program, reported that in 2018 alone it aimed to send 100,000 inmates who had been through the “vocational training centers” to work in factories, according to a plan issued in August.
At this point there is enough disinformation coming from both sides that makes it hard for me to understand the true scope.
how about so many interned that they have to build new camps. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-inter...
The video has a few problems: there's no indication of where in china this is; there's no indication that these are uighurs; there's no indication that these are any particular kind of prisoner (i.e. political vs criminal); and last this doesn't provide any evidence of more than a few dozen or hundred prisoners.
The BuzzFeed article has problems as well. They extrapolate too much from scant or vague evidence. The satellite photos and maps don't provide any solid evidence for their claims. Just pictures of buildings.
The HN crowd is skeptical of heavily documented scientific studies from renowned scientists and picks them with a fine toothed comb, yet accepts political narratives with patchy evidence put forth by parties with conflicts of interest with little skepticism. It's kind of absurd.
Someone actually figured out the exact train station and approximate date of when the video was shot. He even showed his work, if you want to check it:
https://observers.france24.com/en/20190925-drone-video-shows...
> there's no indication that these are uighurs; there's no indication that these are any particular kind of prisoner (i.e. political vs criminal); and last this doesn't provide any evidence of more than a few dozen or hundred prisoners.
> The BuzzFeed article has problems as well. They extrapolate too much from scant or vague evidence. The satellite photos and maps don't provide any solid evidence for their claims. Just pictures of buildings.
This isn't skepticism, it's denialism. There are hundreds of original reports circulated in reputable journals and news outlets that assemble testimony, documents, and circumstantial evidence that paint a pretty indisputable picture there is some kind of ethnicity-based mass imprisonment program going on in Xinjiang. The attempts of the Chinese government to suppress fact-gathering in the region add even more credibility to picture. Sure, you're not going to find some single piece of evidence that proves it all (e.g. a single satellite image of a vast field of prisons capable of holding one million inmates with a sign legible from space that says "Uyghur forced re-education through labor prison complex, population 1,000,000. Don't tell the foreigners!" and has all the inmates standing outside being counted), but to expect something like that is unreasonable. Each article usually presents just one new piece of the larger puzzle, which has been assembled well enough that it's pretty clear what it's of.
https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/china-uyghur-mi...
The buzzfeed study is one of the first decently comprehensive analysis. It doesn't go the actual step to break down each site in detail (i.e. calculate capacity by square footage) which would be actually useful. It does however identify ~300 camps total in the region. The 1-2 million estimate by Zenz that western media regularly repeats is based off his unsubstantiated estimate of 1,200 camps (ASPI). Yet, we're not seeing the corresponding downward revision in numbers.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/mapping-xinjiangs-re-educatio...
So far, the entire situation can be summed up as willful ignorance to facts because propaganda > truth for geopolitics. State level institutions in the west have the resources to extrapolate the scale of the XJ programs accurately, but the reality is an underwhelmingly boring dystopia (and it is extremely dystopian) as revealed by leaked CCP documents itself. So the narrative is built on a mix of cherry picked facts and fake news. For instance the codastory on XJ work programs cited the minimum compensation for those in the program is 13RMB per hour as a negative, but that's basic entry level manufacturing wage in China and 2x higher than average income of Hotan where that batch of workers were from. Yet no one is going around reporting XJ vocational training detainees from poor agriculture towns are being paid double their usual income for manufacturing jobs. Incidentally maybe also why the Buzzfeed study, partially funded by RFA / Open Technology Fund goes so far as to identify the number of camps but don't go the extra step of estimating internment capacity, preferring to again, repeat Zenz estimates based off poor methodology that concluded 4x camps existed, something the buzzfeed study itself invalidates.
Also, wire feeds and media publications like AP, Guardian etc have their independent reporting on it as well like.[1]
Facts might be getting exaggerated but it is not helped by reluctance of CCP to come clean on issues like Covid-19 origins, beligerence towards anyone who says/does something they dislike and comical claims like nine dash line which they are forcing on others like a bully. These at least are open for everyone to see.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/04/muslim-minorit...
"Her story, first told to the Dutch Uyghur Human Rights Foundation, is difficult to verify. It is hard to take photos inside detention facilities and there is little documentation. But details match accounts by other camp detainees and research into coercive birth control practices."
This person's story is heartbreaking, but it is merely a thread in an investigation if hard evidence isn't there. The DURF, when you go to their website (https://www.duhrf.org/who-are-the-uyghurs/), is run by five apparently anonymous individuals. They have links to other organizations, one of which I know has at least some leadership linked to American regime change projects.
I'm Jewish. I can't stand authoritarian regimes or concentration camps (hence my objections to the current US regime). However, I don't want to be lead by the nose into another war or brutal sanctions regime that kills hundreds of thousands or millions (as has happened many times in the past) because I didn't ask for evidence when it mattered. If China is really doing this stuff, show me hard evidence.
What exactly is "hard evidence" to you?
The point of evidence is to get at the truth, and standards that are either too low or too high both fail to achieve that. The former admits lies; the latter denies truth, which can be thought of another kind of lie.
Though five decades back but US administration ignored the blood telegram[1] when a genocide of millions happened and they supported the regime who did it, so they definitely are not some white knights as well.
It would be hard to get hard evidence I think, there have been videos of prisoner transfers between these camps, satellite footage of these structures but CCP can always spin a different story about them.
Anyway war is something no one should indulge in unless it threatens their own sovereignty, it is not worth it.
I would say sanctions are reasonable though with the evidence we have seen, considering the other things as well which I had mentioned in my original comment.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_Telegram:_Nixon,_K...
There's no presumption of innocence here, it is not a criminal court.
For example, the US news reported that the UN had condemned the practices in XJ, but in fact it was one US person on one commission that didn't represent the UN as a whole. The US media has to do more than mere assertion. In any case, the current fascist US regime has little credibility on human rights issues given their open support for police murders and various policies of ripping children away from travelers and imprisoning them.
I'd like to say show me the evidence, but unfortunately when I try to read chinese government documents or political discourse I am befuddled by my inability to read chinese. :-/ Note how many US reporters on these stories cannot either.