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.