Part of it may also be that people don't want to know. Take the ongoing Uyghur genocide right now, but most are ignoring it. Why isn't it an emergency and headline news every day?
not saying "there is nothing going on there" and "those incarcerations are complete lies" but the whole thing is fishy, especially considering that there are political motives behind screaming bloody murder – for comparison, there is literally zero western pressure on israel on the occupation issue, and the EU is blatantly ignoring the insane conditions migrants are subjected to on the other side of the EU barriers.
China has done a great job of making people frame it as the US/EU lying and the "whataboutism" in your last paragraph. This is also a tactic that Putin loves to use. Using Western shortcomings to justify their own tyranny.
Those may well be actual death camps. The stated amount of people disappeared (2m+) far exceeds just how much people you can physically fit into those camps. They may fit few hundred thousands, but not millions.
on the data: if by "we" you mean adrian zenz then you're out of luck when it comes to quality. i'd like to see better sources than someone who thinks he's in a mission from god like he's the blues brothers. china hasn't done "a great job" at framing the west for lying otherwise there wouldn't be a wikipedia page and we wouldn't be discussing this on hacker news. the sad reality is that china doesn't give a shit about its reputation abroad, which is why many of the rebuttals to those claims are in chinese. one is here: https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/13029926735409111... – it's by the chinese state media so one can still claim they're lying.
on the "cities that were once heavy uyghur communities ..." as i mentioned above: kashgar still has a lot of uyghurs. they go to their mosques and so on.
what is true, however, is that china is encouraging resettlement of han chinese (they've been doing it for decades), for the sole purpose of making the uyghurs a minority in their own land. this is something that personally i don't like, but (here comes the whataboutism) i have not seen a single piece of criticism when this happened literally everywhere else, minus of course when it was accompanied by planned extermination, which only applies to anatolia's christian minorities, as the jews were already a small minority in the locations that were affected by the deportations.
What would you propose to do?
on the EU issue: there isn't one single solution since all the cases are different. a few come to mind. i would not pay blood money to morocco and libya to "keep them at bay" because the EU can't just champion human rights at home and then fund concentration camp-like establishments outside of its borders – we are not funding the ones in xinjiang, we are funding the ones in the libyan litoral. a way more efficient refugee processing scheme with the participation of everyone else would be ethically better. much as i disliked him, matteo renzi put it very well for the eastern european extremists: no refugees, no money. on an EU level i'd also crack down on pushbacks (such as the ones happening in spain and in greece), where the carrot should be a better refugee distribution.
let's not forget that europe's exploitation caused this problem, it's also on us to help people and figure out a solution.
as i have said a thousand times though, i don't think they're approaching this "problem" the right way.
I expect evidence. I do not get upset because it is the fashion to do so. If someone calls me a liar and demands proof I didn't mislead them, I do my best to display evidence in my defense. All that the CCP offers is threats to other sovereign nations.
There is a pattern of behavior from the CCP which indicates duplicity and untruthfulness from the destruction of viral lab samples in Wuhan, to entire fishing fleets going dark off sovereign waters. Every day we receive more of these reports of bad behavior. If China wants us to believe them, they need to start producing evidence. Let observers in. Show the world.
on the other hand: am i denying the existence of fishy "re-education camps" targeting one ethnic group and one only, where they are brought in under very opaque circumstances? no, i am not denying that.
if you want a very long read with some context behind some of those claims, here's one: https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/education/xinjiang
there are a bunch of things there, a full timeline of the "conflict", a couple of articles debunking both poor google maps journalism and a few poorly-made BBC & vice docs on the matter.
there's also the fact that some of the "punishments" against the uyghurs are forcing children to go to school, to mandarin-speaking public ones even, which is the same policy most countries in the world adopt (a recent request in france to partially allow schooling in catalan in the region of perpignan has been rejected). there are some claims that state-funded xinjiang schools are even bilingual but i haven't dug enough on it.
i won't comment on the wuhan issue because i don't really know enough about it, but as someone who is born in an island with plenty of US bases i laugh at everyone claiming china is "flexing their muscles" with their navy.
to be clear: nobody approaching any of those bases gets allowed in, just like in the "xinjiang camps". does this excuse china? no, it doesn't, but we should probably be fair in our judgment.
Can you prove that this refutation of those satellite images is false? Let's remember that there were satellite photos of WMDs before the Iraq War also. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1208288.shtml
> Let observers in. Show the world.
According to China many observers have come, and there is an open invitation for more to come as well: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1180917.shtml
Do you have evidence that this is false?
The Palestinian, Pakistani, and Syrian ambassadors to China have commented on camera about what they observed in Xinjiang: https://youtu.be/ebeGipO6-gU?t=490
Do you have evidence that they are lying? Which Muslim-majority countries or non-Western-aligned Muslim interest groups have condemned China for human rights abuses in Xinjiang?
> The Palestinian, Pakistani, and Syrian ambassadors to China have commented on camera about what they observed in Xinjiang: https://youtu.be/ebeGipO6-gU?t=490
There is every indication that these are sanitized media tours. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Times
[2] https://wokeglobaltimes.com/aac16063149c4e37a8e3ee58066c4837...
Right, and the Western claims all stem from people or organizations connected to the US state department or intelligence apparatus. These claims are propagated by the same bastions of journalistic truth which stoked popular fervor in the run-up to the Iraq War and every other unjustified US foreign coup or war (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony).
Global Times is an organ under the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP. There is no controversy of its origins or whose authority it acts. Given that no newspaper can be wholly privately-owned in China, conflicts of interest are unavoidable.
I don’t think Wikipedia is objective in any way on geopolitics. I don’t think that’s possible. My point was simply that some geopolitical facts are so indisputable that even Wikipedia admits them (of course this only tends to happen once the US has gotten what it wants). You have to decide whether you’re going to reckon with those facts or just talk more about sources. At the end of the day that’s a cover for not having any hard evidence.
It sounds like a major conspiracy.
Which Muslim?