for anyone who wasn't around for the dustup when r/ContraPoints declared war on the old subreddit, here's a sample of the moderation team's style:
I've asked you
TWO
Extremely clear questions.
ONE:
CAN YOU ABIDE BY OUR COMMUNITY'S RULES?
and
TWO:
WERE YOU TRYING TO CALL ME A LIAR?
These are questions I asked YOU.
You can answer them -- or not.
And you can participate here.
Or not.
The moderation team of /r/ContraPoints is the moderation team of /r/ContraPoints.
YOU are NOT on it.
Before 35 minutes ago, you'd never participated in our community.
How we run our community is our business, and the business of the people who participate here in good faith.
We don't allow disrespect; We don't allow verbal or emotional abuse; We don't allow people to brigade our subreddit and post off-topic posts and metadrama.
What YOU think you know about our moderation team is informed solely by third-hand hearsay and screenshots released by someone abusing their position, edited and therefore cherry picked to support a narrative.
That narrative is abusive.
It will not be allowed.
No one will be allowed to come here and back-seat run our subreddit, or light torches and brandish pitchforks.
So now,
THREE Questions:
The first two still must be answered,
and
AM I PERFECTLY CLEAR THAT YOU ARE NOT A MODERATOR OF THIS SUBREDDIT?
Here’s a decent primer on Zenz.
deleted by creator
here’s a more recent addressing of his allegations.
The TL;DR is that the dude’s an evangelical Christian tied to Neo-Nazi and reactionary entities like the Victims of Communism Foundation, who can’t speak Chinese, and can’t even do basic maths.
If you want more on XJ generally, Qiao Collective has a decent writeup.
If you want to see the best arguments of the anti-China side, I’d suggest the Made In China journal, or Chuang.
Chaung had imo a good history of the period here: http://chuangcn.org/journal/two/spirit-breaking/
Out of 47 footnotes, 2 are translated documents from Zenz (unfortunate, but they only cite what the documents said), and 1 source is from a radio free asia interview from an anonymous official. Whether or not that is true well, stuff they've reported has been true and false before, usually interviews where they've labeled the town it came from have been true with respect to other things like labor strikes. However there's just no way to know. Qiao (a much more pro CPC site) itself on those RFA interviews are like IDK, they're definitely sourced in a biased way, but it's unverifiable whether they true or not. Similar thing happens in the US constantly with anonymous Trump officials doing interviews but not giving documents. Some of it's false, some of it's turned out to be true.
I've talked with people from Chuang before, and they are very sincere, but do not have the money or power to go pay for independent research outside of Hong Kong and certain coastal cities for labor reporting from people that they have that are already there/have connections. Their Xjinjiang articles are all from people who at different times have spent significant time in the region doing different academic work though.
Made In China journal is also great, I have a copy of their Afterlives of Chinese Communism collection. They had a recent article with examples of how state desecration of shrines actually works, lots of photos: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2020/08/24/the-spatial-cleansing-of-xinjiang-mazar-desecration-in-context/
here's a pretty good twitter thread from Roderic Day
https://twitter.com/RodericDay/status/1287411708374454273