First, "人次" does not have an English equivalent but it means person-instance, e.g. a factory with 100 workers will count 500人次 for labor in a 5-day working week, confusing this term with population immediately strikes me as alarming because the article editors clearly had no Chinese speaker on staff.

Second, they are conflating communist buzzword talk, which are effectively a type diplomatic language within the CCP structure, with purposive language. You cannot take these things literally. For example, "mobilize" and "organize" are typical communist buzzwords for "the party officials ask people to do something", so are "ideological education" or "patriotism" which means nothing in the context. The same applies for the scary looking phrase "labor is glorious"; it may look like arbeit macht frei but this is one of the most common Mao-era propaganda that became engrained in the Chinese vernacular. These communist-speak do not mean their literal meaning like "drain the swamp" wasn't actually about building physical pumps for an actual swamp.

Are there legit irregularities in the article? Yes, singling out "religion" is uncommon for normal rural mobilizations here; (for those who don't know, it is typical for rural governments to be engaged with private factories in the cities to promote seasonal employment, a practice that still happens to this day; however these are not coercive but mutually beneficial; the article noted coercive tones when applied to Uyghurs which is a red flag that warrants investigation). also the report did say "neither want to work, nor want to study" for young men and "traditional values... only wants to stay at home and raise children" for women, both are stereotypes of Muslims by Han Chinese. But the article used the eye-catching term "deep-rooted lazy thinking" as a header, which is unfounded; they also severely cherry picked these two stereotypical statements by leaving out the term "only" so it somehow spinned the narrative into "having kids is not okay", which is a totally different meaning.

I am not trying to deny systematic persecution of the Uyghurs by the CCP, because it is happening as the persecution of religion and ethnic minorities is widespread knowledge among us Chinese people, but you cannot make the leap into forced labor or even genocide territory without substantiated evidence. BBC is seriously undermining its own journalistic integrity here. First, Sudsworth is their long term China correspondent, and he has done great work here, but he doesn't speak Chinese well, and not asking a Chinese speaking person (not hard to find in the UK) to proofread is borderline unethical. Second, circular citations that always end up on Adrian Zenz as a source. Combine them together and BBC - one of world's premier news agencies - is essentially validating a bogus activist's word at face value. Millions of people will see it and take it as true because of BBC's reputation, and since they don't speak Chinese the vast majority of readers cannot fact check them, and this is a huge problem.

Explained by u/glymao