Judging from what I've seen on r/worldnews where it looks like many people have caught on to Adrian Zenz and ASPI, I think tackling these kinds of conversations from a media literacy angle seems to be the way to go.
I'd start off by bringing up the current geopolitical context (e.g. between US and China, I'd mention the Trump administration's trade war and his trying to shift blame of covid mishandling onto China) and tie that in with:
the US's track record of using human rights concerns as means of manufacturing consent against its enemies with a main focus on the Iraq War (WMDs, Nayirah testimony)
how the main stream media just followed along with the bs from 1.
From there, I'd just start going through commonly cited sources and debunking them with effort varying depending on how receptive they appear to be. So if they seem to be onboard the "most of this is highly sensationalized bs" idea, then I'd point them to some good sources that do the debunking, and otherwise I'd walk through the debunking process with them myself step by step.
Oh yeah for sources I'd provide, I don't know much about DPRK besides that fantastic haircut video, but for Xinjiang what I'd go with depending on topic would be:
Debunking stuff:
one million uyghur claims/Zenz/US-backed NGOs - https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-uyghurs-problems-claims-us-ngo-researcher/
forced labor camps/ASPI/Zenz/Falun Gong/US War Machine - https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/forced-labor-china-us-nato-arms-industry-cold-war/
unreliable witness testimony - narrative changes from "did not personally see violence" and "there was no meat" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/world/article-everyone-was-silent-endlessly-mute-former-chinese-re-education/ to "there were all kinds of tortures there" and "meat was served on Fridays, but it was pork" https://www.haaretz.com/amp/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-a-million-people-are-jailed-at-china-s-gulags-i-escaped-here-s-what-goes-on-inside-1.7994216
photos/videos that are straight up mislabeled - https://factcheck.afp.com/these-photos-show-protests-istanbul-and-xinjiang-and-migrant-shelter-thailand https://factcheck.afp.com/no-not-video-chinese-soldier-beating-uighur-muslim-having-copy-koran https://factcheck.afp.com/video-shows-police-officer-pinning-down-drunk-chinese-woman-his-knee-hotel-shenzhen https://twitter.com/j_bigboote/status/1182726991675625472
shitty guesswork based off of satellite images/mosques being "destroyed" - https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/the-case-of-the-keriya-aitika-mosque-efa29e456339
more shitty guesswork based off of satellite images - https://twitter.com/ChengxinPan/status/1310051540397297665
blatant propaganda witness testimony/Campaign for Uyghurs - "my friends and family are in concentration camps" from a Uyghur activist who worked at a CIA propaganda outlet and fucking Guantanamo Bay during the Bush administration https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/e9ad4n/
What is (most likely) actually going on:
Not genocide - world bank investigation/statement: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/statement/2019/11/11/world-bank-statement-on-review-of-project-in-xinjiang-china
BBC visitation with heavy editing and mistranslations - https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/breaking-down-the-bbcs-visit-to-hotan-xinjiang-e284934a7aab
Unedited visitation to a camp and interviews with Uyghur students there - https://youtu.be/Jp5y9LCZqTA I made a post about it including parts that the translator had left out here https://hexbear.net/post/33959
All the Muslim countries side with China and even US-aligned Saudi Arabia sided with China since they had sent diplomats to visit Xinjiang and its re-education camps - https://www.economist.com/china/2019/07/27/chinese-actions-in-xinjiang-become-a-matter-of-international-dispute
Judging from what I've seen on r/worldnews where it looks like many people have caught on to Adrian Zenz and ASPI, I think tackling these kinds of conversations from a media literacy angle seems to be the way to go.
I'd start off by bringing up the current geopolitical context (e.g. between US and China, I'd mention the Trump administration's trade war and his trying to shift blame of covid mishandling onto China) and tie that in with:
From there, I'd just start going through commonly cited sources and debunking them with effort varying depending on how receptive they appear to be. So if they seem to be onboard the "most of this is highly sensationalized bs" idea, then I'd point them to some good sources that do the debunking, and otherwise I'd walk through the debunking process with them myself step by step.
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Oh yeah for sources I'd provide, I don't know much about DPRK besides that fantastic haircut video, but for Xinjiang what I'd go with depending on topic would be:
Debunking stuff:
What is (most likely) actually going on:
deleted by creator