a completely unsourced rant, from the same people that peddled the 'Iraq has WMD's' bullshit.

Some names have been changed.

Was Adrien Zenz one of them?

  • Punk [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Trying to parse what parts of this are true and which aren't.

    I believe that she was actually in a camp as that would be a pretty easy thing to disprove if she was lying but the whole part about how she went back to China seems absolutely bizarre. So she's been was granted asylum in France, started working at a bakery and cafeteria, and lived there for 10 years but was still employed by her Chinese company somehow?

    Then they need her to fly all the way there just to sign some paperwork in person? I'm sorry but it's 2020, there are hundreds of ways to get an issue like that sorted that don't require wasting loads of money flying someone to China and if she claims they were just insisting that to get her over there then you'd have to be an absolute moron not to see that giant red flag.

    It sounds like her husband and kids were involved with separatist groups in Paris so I wouldn't be surprised if she went back to Xinjiang to meet people or contacts with ETIM and that's why she was taken to a camp.

    The camp stuff is all probably true or slightly exaggerated; obviously the sterilisation stuff is ridiculous cuz there's no injection that can permanently sterilise you and I have no idea how she'd know she'd been sterilised.

    I think the stuff China is doing is racist and really fucked up but the lies and sketchiness of all the stories that come out makes it so hard to know the extent to which we should criticise them.

    • OllieMendes [he/him,any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      So you don't think there's anyway of knowing what's really going on but are also so sure that its racist and really fucked up.

      • Punk [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I've never said I don't think there's anyway of knowing what's going on. I think it's hard to know the full extent. Even without getting into the camps, China's own De-extremification Regulations outline clear racial profiling which is, yes, racist and fucked up.

        • T_Doug [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          4 years ago

          Agreed. It's clear that western media lies a great deal about Xinjiang; and the reeducation centers are obviously not analogous to the Holocaust as is so frequently suggested. But the official motivations and policies for them resemble those of North American Indigenous Residential schools far too much for me to feel comfortable defending. And past readings through article on The Gray Zone, or that big Google Doc posted here months backhas done nothing to dissuade me from that view.

          This is particularly true because both China's line, and many of it's defenders, have adopted a very unmaterialist view of why tensions exist in Xinjiang in the first place. As though "radical Islamic Terrorism" just appeared there one day; and is not the result of decades of rising discontent among Uighur's in the face of deprivation and state policy percieved as actively hostile. As well as clearly inflammatory Chinese actions like setting up training camps for Uighur mujahideen in Xinjiang during the Soviet Afghan war .

          Though admittedly; certain policies now pursued by the Xinjiang government do recognize that this is a conflict rooted in past and present deprivations of an ethnic group; and providing better access to decent jobs better living standards, and more equal representation in government will do more to end this tragic conflict than any civics lesson possibly could.

          • RedFoundry [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            This is an absurd take. No one says it comes from nowhere, which is why China is doing everything it can to integrate Uighurs into greater Chinese society.

            There have been no terrorist attacks in Xinjiang since 2017.

            • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              Damn, China invaded Iraq and murdered 2 million Iraqis as well? That country just can't catch break.

    • T_Doug [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      It sounds like her husband and kids were involved with separatist groups in Paris so I wouldn’t be surprised if she went back to Xinjiang to meet people or contacts with ETIM and that’s why she was taken to a camp.

      A Chinese court found her innocent and released her. Beyond the absurdity of imagining that a middle aged relatively well off Christian women was collaborating with an Islamic terrorist organization in Xinjiang from France, why would the PRC release her if there wasn't clear evidence of her innocence?

  • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    My husband, Kerim, had left Xinjiang in 2002 to look for work. He tried first in Kazakhstan, but came back disillusioned after a year. Then in Norway. Then France, where he had applied for asylum. Once he was settled there, our two girls and I would join him.

    ...

    “You must come back to Karamay to sign documents concerning your forthcoming retirement, Madame Haitiwaji,”

    So she fled to France as wife of an asylum seeker but then returned to China to sign some paperwork?

    How many people suffering actual life-threatening persecution return to the persecuting country to fill in a form?

    Sounds like she's either making things up or is just not very bright.

    • space_comrade [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I think there's way more to the story than she's letting on. I wouldn't be surprised if she's involved with some intelligence agency.

      • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I wonder if she'll hide it better than the Uighur woman who did an AMA on reddit who got dunked on because her LinkedIn said she worked for the CIA.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Sounds like she’s either making things up or is just not very bright.

      A thin premise followed by ten thousand words documenting the atrocities. It's a shell game.

      We've already seen stories about Chinese bureaucrats trying to trick or pressure Liu Changming into returning to stand trial by denying his family exit-visas after he fled the country in a $1.4B fraud scandal.

      We've got a story about a NYPD officer spying for the Chinese on Tibetan monks.

      All this plays into a general narrative about the Chinese stalking people and kidnapping them in order to do evil Chinese Totalitarianism at them.

  • BeamBrain [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Pretty impressive that she was able to write this after having all of her organs harvested

  • penguin_von_doom [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    The story sounds pretty legit, and reeducation camps are a pretty bad look, of course libs and warhawk will circulate them. The best propaganda is when its true and stories like this dont come out often. This of course doesnt mean that the western media narrative on what is going on is true or correct, but a harrowing individual experience of what is actually there is more effective than a made up story about millions upon millions of detained people.

    The one thing that bugs me about the story is the premise to it. So you sought asylim in a foreign country, and have been away for 10 years, yet still somehow remain an employee of a company there. And despite having no intentions going back you still care about your retirement there. And instead of having them send you the documents by mail, you decide to take a several weeks long trip, into a country you ran away from, that you know is repressing your people,'. Just to sign some documents? I mean people do dumb things all the time, but this does sound very sus.

    So, while the account of the camp sounds legit enough, the resons she gives for getting there not so much.

    • dukeofprunes [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Re education camps are a better way to deal with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism than you know, going to war and killing millions of people.

          • spectre [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Yeah I mostly agree, but I don't think that leaves any of them above criticism. A "necessary evil" is still evil.

            Of course we need to contextualize our criticisms properly, and also be conscious of the company in which we level such criticisms lest we serve as aids to imperial interest.

            • dukeofprunes [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              I genuinely can't think of a better way than 're-education', as long as the conditions are good and it's done respectfully. Which from what I have seen and heard is how China is going about it, the things described in this article are obviously bad but then there's no proof that they actually happened and it's not beyond the realms of possibility or precedent that they would be invented to further western anti-china narratives.

              • abdul [none/use name]
                ·
                edit-2
                4 years ago

                To be clear, you can’t think of a better solution to the prospect of extremism than to inter every single person with a beard or a Muslim family member into forced labor camps? Because that’s what they are doing and the official criteria China claims to use is purposefully vague to the point of being useless.

                • dukeofprunes [he/him]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  4 years ago

                  source for the beard thing?

                  also pretty sure the forced labour thing is a zenz creation

                  this is worth a read, a breakdown of when BBC visited these centres (but from an opposing point of view to BBCs bias) - https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/breaking-down-the-bbcs-visit-to-hotan-xinjiang-e284934a7aab

                  also this is a pretty good watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oKvulTU8oU&feature=youtu.be - a socially awkard man on holiday in xinjiang, observe the uighurs in their natural habitat, dancing in nightclubs and going out for ice cream and shit, better standard of life than i've got here in the uk that's for sure.

        • RedFoundry [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Please tell us what solution to Islamic terrorism and separatism you've found that is effective and not distasteful.

    • funkfresh [they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      These aren't "camps" they're entire neighborhoods with better amenities then places I've paid to rent in America

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      The story sounds pretty legit

      Yeah, but almost everyone here could write a "pretty legit" sounding account of, say, a DPRK prison camp by reading a few articles that have already been published and embellishing the details. All this without even having set foot in Korea.

      • dukeofprunes [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        it happened to me, kim made me eat dog poo and said my hairstyle was bad

      • penguin_von_doom [she/her]
        ·
        4 years ago

        In the case you can also find the daughters profile, and she talks about her mom, so when I mean pretty legit, I mean, this woman has most likely been in a reeducation camp and most likely experienced these things

        • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          That just means she was detained in some way. Doesn't prove that anything in the article actually happened, including the throw away line on sterilization.

          • funkfresh [they/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            4 years ago

            Providing birth control and education to minorities is a crime against humanity, what they should doing is encouraging them to have children in poverty so they can grow up damaged by their material conditions and locked away in private prisons to be used as a cheap source of labor

            • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              It's not even that about birth control.

              The author of the article claims she got an injection while in prison. For all we know, it could have just been a flu jab.

              Even if there is a shot you can give a woman to render them permanently infertile (in which case why do women still have to get surgery to get their tubes tied?), and even if the author is now medically infertile as a result, it should be extremely trivial for her to produce a medical certificate or find a physician who can go on record to prove it.

              But that would go against the propaganda tactic of simply begging the question.

              • funkfresh [they/them]
                ·
                4 years ago

                Oh yeah I forgot about her. I thought they were talking about that new headline about Uighur women not being "baby making machines" anymore

    • Punk [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      lol I just commented saying pretty much the same thing. The weird exaggerations and inconsistencies are so annoying cuz I honestly think if they just reported everything straight it'd be fucked up enough on it's own, but the crazy provably false shit and exaggerations in some of the reports just make it so hard to know what's going on that everyone ends up with a different view of what's happening and it's impossible to discuss on the same level.

  • BillyMays [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    “ President Xi Jinping’s great plan – that is, a peaceful Xinjiang, open for business, cleansed of its separatist tendencies and its ethnic tensions. In short, Xinjiang without Uighurs.

    That whole thing reads like the biggest bullshit story I’ve ever heard. And of course they’re an oil engineer and so is their husband. And the Chinese government somehow had a photo of her daughter at a French protest. Like they’re stalking every Uighur all around the world. Who would ever publish this?

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      “ President Xi Jinping’s great plan – that is, a peaceful Xinjiang, open for business, cleansed of its separatist tendencies and its ethnic tensions. In short, Xinjiang without Uighurs.”

      Implying that the existence of Uighurs is inherently contradictory to a peaceful and prosperous Xinjiang to own the CCP.

    • This [it/its]
      ·
      4 years ago

      It sounds like you already came into the article with a conclusion drawn. Maybe consider another non-Zenz report, like this one presented by the Communist Party of India. They're staunch Marxist-Leninists, and seem to be very even-handed in their criticisms of China and the Uyghur camps.

      • BillyMays [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I think criticism is fair and I would be willing to criticize them, but this story is so obviously made up. Go read it. You’ll see

        • This [it/its]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Her description matches even what the internal Chinese documents reveal. Do you think she faked her disappearance for two years and made this story up out of whole cloth?

          • BillyMays [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Don’t really feel like parsing the story and finding the nuggets of truth when it all seems like a ridiculous story written by western propaganda

            • Cayman [none/use name]
              ·
              4 years ago

              the real answer is to not read anything in case it might be western propaganda

              • abdul [none/use name]
                ·
                4 years ago

                Especially if there’s a chance you find out the government you support is engaging in ethnic cleansing and religious persecution.

                • PowerUser [they/them]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  Does critical support not exist? The only effect of me, a person in a western country, criticising China is to support what military action that will be used ostensibly to address these, while the country I live in that actually does clearly documented war crimes gets to continue on the same path.

      • snackage [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        why isn't there a single link to primary sources in that article?

        Edit: There is a link to the white paper at the end of the 5th paragraph. It's only 26 pages so since we have to be serious it's better to read that before reading the CPI-ML Liberation's summary. The CPI-ML Liberation should really reconsider their CSS.

        • T_Doug [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          4 years ago

          Blatant lie. Within a few paragraphs the article links directly to an official translation of China’s 2019 White Paper On Uyghurs, and references leaked documents throughout.

          It is the White Paper which is most cited throughout the article since it aims to conclude using the PRC's own documents that

          We do not have to look further than China’s own documents and its own propaganda organs to recognize that the Chinese State is holding vast numbers of Uyghurs in concentration camps, subjecting the entire Uyghur community both inside and outside the camps to forced indoctrination, surveillance and censorship, and attempting to erase the identity and culture of the Uyghur people. China has been touting its Xinjiang model as a successful model of “counterterrorism” which the world should adopt. Certainly, Narendra Modi and his fascist regime in India, would be happy to adopt China’s Xinjiang model for Kashmir, and for minorities and dissenters in the whole of India, lock, stock, and barrel.

          • snackage [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            4 years ago

            Dude that link is so hard to parse from just normal text. I knew it was cited throughout hence my wish for the original primary source. I just expect that if you're mentioning a white paper that it would be readable somewhere. I really didn't see the link.

    • ElGosso [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      If they really wanted to kill all of the Uyghurs... why haven't they? Hasn't this been going on for, like, ten years? How long does it take to kill someone?!

      • PowerUser [they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I mean we have a clear historical example, where 6 million Jewish people were exterminated from 1941 to 1945.

        The first thing that really convinced me that the broader genocide claims were very suspect was an NPR article that cited a 5x increase in the rate of sterilisations (and the usual Zenz quotes). Except the nominal figures were referred as well, and it was an increase from 50 people per year to 250 per year in a region with millions of people.

        • MerryChristmas [any]
          ·
          edit-2
          4 years ago

          While I agree with you, it's important to remember that most of the death camps were outside of Germany. Hitler set up the most extreme camps in states that the Nazis had already toppled because open genocide tends to lead to civil unrest.

          Basically, I'm saying that without the chaos of an all-out world war, I don't think the holocaust can be used as a standard measurement of how long that process might take.

      • sailorfish [she/her]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I don't think this is a great argument either way. It's the exact same one people use to defend Israel. "If Israel is so cruel to Palestinians, how come the population has grown, huh? How long does it take to kill someone?!"

    • penguin_von_doom [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      You can actually find her daughters profile fairly easy, so I dont see a big problem with the chinese government having such a photo. The story from the camp seems legit enough from what Ive heard of reeducation camps (that radio warnerd episode and a few stories here and there), but the way she got into it sounds a bit weird.

  • This [it/its]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Wow, that's a harrowing story. I hope the sino crowd gives this a good read and doesn't treat her story like the DNC did Tara Reade.

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I find it interesting that when Western propaganda puts out lies against Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, etc Western leftists are prepared to dismiss it out of hand. But the moment those same propaganda rags put out something about China, suddenly some Western leftists are ready to "give it a good read".

      :thinkin-lenin:

        • Quaxamilliom [comrade/them]
          hexagon
          ·
          edit-2
          4 years ago

          I now consider all white people sus until proven otherwise. I've met too many white 'leftists' who couldn't give a shit about imperialism, prattling on about countries considered 'enemies' of the west, while only wanting free shit for themselves. If these people weren't poor, they'd be republicans.

      • This [it/its]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Consume it all, think for yourself.

        • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          For myself, I think that these articles are as real as the Iraqi uranium Powel waved in the Security Council's faces.

          • This [it/its]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Where would you put The Guardian on the spectrum in terms of journalistic accuracy and integrity?

            • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              They're the newspaper equivalent of the SocDems. Seemingly sympathetic to the left from the outside, but will almost certainly do everything possible to strangle the revolution in its crib.

              • This [it/its]
                ·
                4 years ago

                How about the journalistic integrity and accuracy of Chinese state media?

                • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  All state media everywhere serves the interests of that state, even when it purports not to.

            • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              4 years ago

              When it comes to national security and foreign policy they're expressly a propaganda outlet of the intelligence services and British (ie US directed) state these days.

              They were far from perfect before but in the wake of the Snowdon leaks and the intelligence services making a show of not only smashing up their hardrives in the Guardian offices but threatening their journalists, the paper pivoted hard toward doing exactly as it was told. It's no longer a public trust, instead having being ran by a private board, none of whom are journalists anymore and several of which have intelligence ties. They were 'invited' to sit on the advisory panel that the intelligence services use to issue the new version of censorship D-notices, now called the Defense & Security Media Advisory Committee where the intelligence services commented about how much more 'cooperative' they'd become even compared to other leading newspapers like The Times.

              • space_comrade [he/him]
                ·
                4 years ago

                but in the wake of the Snowdon leaks and the intelligence services making a show of not only smashing up their hardrives in the Guardian offices but threatening their journalists

                Damn, any sources on that?

            • snackage [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              One need only look at their treatment of Corbyn to come to the conclusion that they are feckless cowards.

    • dukeofprunes [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      There's literally no proof or evidence for any of it, it could be 100% fiction and no one would be able to tell. What's the point in giving it a 'good read'. Yes its a harrowing story but so is Carrie and I don't see guardian articles talking about that.

  • funkfresh [they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Duhmanized and brainwashed is when your housing, Healthcare, and vocational training are paid for and national celebrations of your culture are held

    • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
      ·
      4 years ago

      But you might as well republish Qanon stories of adrenochrome harvesting and just call it "Telling a story", theres gotta be sources or objective evidence for these claims to just be published in this manner, like even just a fucking bruise or whatever for the physical abuse described.