Is this “taking Chinese propaganda at face value”?
Well… no, not exactly.
Your approach to helping to see truth through the miasma of the narrative is, as you present it, reasonable if unavoidably inherently biased - independent journalists are largely going to be presenting the western Ukranian perspective, just by dint of volume (nobody puts them in prison just for being critical of the Ukrainan commanders (the nuances of that are a different discussion that is also important).
Side note about russian independent journalists
I can name many independent russian journalists, but that’s because their names stand out; there just aren’t that many allowed to exist, and their jobs are incredibly dangerous and memorable. Many of them are unironic proletariarian heroes. (Favorskaya and Kreiger, both of Sotavision, are the two that spring most readily to mind, both having been recently sentenced). They stick in the memory because of their rarity and how messy their fates tend to be.
(I am also (and I want to be clear not in a dismissive way I am just genuinely unclear what you are referring to) very curious as to what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?)
I have done a similar thing, where I have based my opinion on careful research of my own interactions with Ukranians and the work of academics familiar with the situation as well as:
the documentation from both state and independent news reporting groups inside Ukraine (and to the extent we have them Russia
the patterns of behavior Russia has historically used to justify their imperialism that are reflected in their current actions
the truly overwhelming number of reports and analyses from long-established dedicated & well respected international groups who report on this
And that’s I suspect what you have done too.
But… when I do the same thing for the claims of genocide in China, I arrive at the conclusion it’s very much occurring. There’s overwhelming documentation from many many sources on the topic, and much as with the Ukranian conflict, the majority are going to be western aligned simply because (despite the fascist push for control of western media) independent and critical media is not suppressed in the west, but it very much is in china (to any comparable degree) (the list of independent Chinese journalists is longer than in Russia, which tracks it’s a much larger country, but their lives are often no less fraught). In different ways than in Russia, but nontheless the narrative is extremely strictly controlled.
Why then do you treat the mountain of inherently biased evidence for Russia being wrong as acceptable and reasonable, but when many of the same organizations you will have used to dismiss Russia’s claims say there is a genocide in china, they are dismissable?
Setting aside that a genocide does not have to look like whats happening in palestine (ask me about native american genocides I can go on for a while), it’s internally inconsistent reasoning.
My dismissal of the supposed “genocide of Russians in eastern Ukraine” doesn’t come from sources denying it, it comes from the sources claiming it not providing compelling enough evidence that it’s happening. To me, individual testimonies aren’t enough to determine there’s a genocide, and that’s really all the evidence available in the case of Xinjiang pointing towards genocide.
The Uyghur minority was, firstly, excluded from the single child policy precisely because they were a minority, and in this period acquired the majority status in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. A wave of ISIS related terrorist attacks stroke China in the 2000s and early 2010s, and the government reacted to it by doing a big reeducation campaign in the Xinjiang province which, with its significant Muslim population, was the region where most attackers came from.
This reeducation, mostly consisting of vocational training (also linked to the Belt and Road initiative going through Xinjiang, and the development of the region), was compulsory for many. In the west this looks morally abhorrent, but to Chinese people, it’s not so strange a concept. Many Chinese people spend their teenage years in boarding schools in which they study from 9 to 9 and in which they sleep, so living in an education center isn’t that big of a deal in many Chinese people’s opinion.
As of 2022, the reeducation campaign finished, the camps were closed, and life returned to normal in Xinjiang. Even western state sources like BBC confirmed the closure of the camps, of course with their rhetorical “but at what cost / what’s next”.
The “evidence” of genocide, as per the International Amnesty inform (the most trustworthy source in my opinion), again consists of “anonymous interviews”. I don’t doubt there have been cases of police abuse (ACAB after all), but extending that to the definition of genocide is hurtful to people suffering actual, demonstrable genocide such as Palestinians.
Lastly, I’ll respond to this:
what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?
Essentially information that can be falsified in nature. Pictures can be proven to have been taken at a location and time and to be unedited. Data (such as that of the Ministry of Health of Gaza) including names and identification of actually demonstrably existing people. What I don’t consider material evidence are things that aren’t falsifiable, such as testimonies (especially anonymous ones), reports of the type “it seems/it has been seen”…
Amnesty International has never provided evidence that there’s a genocide in Xinjiang, because they have never claimed there is a genocide in Xinjiang.
In fact the only times the word “genocide” even appears in their report is in one footnote, #688, where the word appears twice in the citations themselves and once in a clarifying citation about why the word ‘genocide’ may be inappropriate, included as a reference to the titles of the two cited works.
What they do provide exhaustive evidence for (including as you describe it material evidence - photographs, data and internal reporting) is that china has engaged in a program of human rights violations that they believe may qualify as crimes against humanity. This is extremely evident in any reporting done on this topic by AI - this isn’t a gotcha, it’s the subject of the most prominent western criticism of amnesty international and has been a central point of debate within the UN and most AI-aligned groups (including HRW, another extremely reputable organization that agrees with AI on this topic). Even the most prominent source of the pro-genocide arguments, The Uyghur Tribunal, agrees and provided independent verification justifying AI’s reservations with calling it a genocide - their claims of genocide are based on reports of forced sterilization and organ harvesting, topics AI has not engaged with.
You used the lack of evidence provided for claims made by an organization you regard as the most reputable source for this topic as supporting your position, but you used that to dismiss claims which that organization has never even made. An organization which actually agrees with you that (on the basis of their own investigation) there is no genocide of Muslims in Xinjiang.
I’m sorry, I just dont think I can believe you when you say you’ve personally engaged with this topic to the extent you claim. If that were true, you should have known this. It is at the very heart of this discussion.
Well… no, not exactly.
Your approach to helping to see truth through the miasma of the narrative is, as you present it, reasonable if unavoidably inherently biased - independent journalists are largely going to be presenting the western Ukranian perspective, just by dint of volume (nobody puts them in prison just for being critical of the Ukrainan commanders (the nuances of that are a different discussion that is also important).
Side note about russian independent journalists
I can name many independent russian journalists, but that’s because their names stand out; there just aren’t that many allowed to exist, and their jobs are incredibly dangerous and memorable. Many of them are unironic proletariarian heroes. (Favorskaya and Kreiger, both of Sotavision, are the two that spring most readily to mind, both having been recently sentenced). They stick in the memory because of their rarity and how messy their fates tend to be.
(I am also (and I want to be clear not in a dismissive way I am just genuinely unclear what you are referring to) very curious as to what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?)
I have done a similar thing, where I have based my opinion on careful research of my own interactions with Ukranians and the work of academics familiar with the situation as well as:
And that’s I suspect what you have done too.
But… when I do the same thing for the claims of genocide in China, I arrive at the conclusion it’s very much occurring. There’s overwhelming documentation from many many sources on the topic, and much as with the Ukranian conflict, the majority are going to be western aligned simply because (despite the fascist push for control of western media) independent and critical media is not suppressed in the west, but it very much is in china (to any comparable degree) (the list of independent Chinese journalists is longer than in Russia, which tracks it’s a much larger country, but their lives are often no less fraught). In different ways than in Russia, but nontheless the narrative is extremely strictly controlled.
Why then do you treat the mountain of inherently biased evidence for Russia being wrong as acceptable and reasonable, but when many of the same organizations you will have used to dismiss Russia’s claims say there is a genocide in china, they are dismissable?
Setting aside that a genocide does not have to look like whats happening in palestine (ask me about native american genocides I can go on for a while), it’s internally inconsistent reasoning.
My dismissal of the supposed “genocide of Russians in eastern Ukraine” doesn’t come from sources denying it, it comes from the sources claiming it not providing compelling enough evidence that it’s happening. To me, individual testimonies aren’t enough to determine there’s a genocide, and that’s really all the evidence available in the case of Xinjiang pointing towards genocide.
The Uyghur minority was, firstly, excluded from the single child policy precisely because they were a minority, and in this period acquired the majority status in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. A wave of ISIS related terrorist attacks stroke China in the 2000s and early 2010s, and the government reacted to it by doing a big reeducation campaign in the Xinjiang province which, with its significant Muslim population, was the region where most attackers came from.
This reeducation, mostly consisting of vocational training (also linked to the Belt and Road initiative going through Xinjiang, and the development of the region), was compulsory for many. In the west this looks morally abhorrent, but to Chinese people, it’s not so strange a concept. Many Chinese people spend their teenage years in boarding schools in which they study from 9 to 9 and in which they sleep, so living in an education center isn’t that big of a deal in many Chinese people’s opinion.
As of 2022, the reeducation campaign finished, the camps were closed, and life returned to normal in Xinjiang. Even western state sources like BBC confirmed the closure of the camps, of course with their rhetorical “but at what cost / what’s next”.
The “evidence” of genocide, as per the International Amnesty inform (the most trustworthy source in my opinion), again consists of “anonymous interviews”. I don’t doubt there have been cases of police abuse (ACAB after all), but extending that to the definition of genocide is hurtful to people suffering actual, demonstrable genocide such as Palestinians.
Lastly, I’ll respond to this:
Essentially information that can be falsified in nature. Pictures can be proven to have been taken at a location and time and to be unedited. Data (such as that of the Ministry of Health of Gaza) including names and identification of actually demonstrably existing people. What I don’t consider material evidence are things that aren’t falsifiable, such as testimonies (especially anonymous ones), reports of the type “it seems/it has been seen”…
Amnesty International has never provided evidence that there’s a genocide in Xinjiang, because they have never claimed there is a genocide in Xinjiang.
In fact the only times the word “genocide” even appears in their report is in one footnote, #688, where the word appears twice in the citations themselves and once in a clarifying citation about why the word ‘genocide’ may be inappropriate, included as a reference to the titles of the two cited works.
What they do provide exhaustive evidence for (including as you describe it material evidence - photographs, data and internal reporting) is that china has engaged in a program of human rights violations that they believe may qualify as crimes against humanity. This is extremely evident in any reporting done on this topic by AI - this isn’t a gotcha, it’s the subject of the most prominent western criticism of amnesty international and has been a central point of debate within the UN and most AI-aligned groups (including HRW, another extremely reputable organization that agrees with AI on this topic). Even the most prominent source of the pro-genocide arguments, The Uyghur Tribunal, agrees and provided independent verification justifying AI’s reservations with calling it a genocide - their claims of genocide are based on reports of forced sterilization and organ harvesting, topics AI has not engaged with.
You used the lack of evidence provided for claims made by an organization you regard as the most reputable source for this topic as supporting your position, but you used that to dismiss claims which that organization has never even made. An organization which actually agrees with you that (on the basis of their own investigation) there is no genocide of Muslims in Xinjiang.
I’m sorry, I just dont think I can believe you when you say you’ve personally engaged with this topic to the extent you claim. If that were true, you should have known this. It is at the very heart of this discussion.