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.