I genuinely went to read this in good faith since it's The Intercept (I know it's not great, but it's not CNN) but decided to do a quick text search for Zenz just to make sure. And of course, the whole fucking thing is full of Zenz.
This is just ridiculous at this point. I really don't want to be a genocide-denier if there is actually one happening, but for fuck's sake this is just ridiculous, LET ME SEE ONE REPORT ON THIS WITHOUT ZENZ ALL OVER IT.
TBH, I'm fucking tired of the Zenz posting. He'll get quoted regardless in any document leak because he did (however mistranslated in some cases and colored by his weird ideology) get some analysis of government documents. The police database document leak (which is the point of the story) is much more interesting than anything he was quoted as saying in the article. Just go read the documents and they speak for themselves how bad the situation is. The article also quotes Darren Byler 25 times, who is a pretty anti-capitalist ethnographer/anthropologist (who I found out about via an old TMBS interview and some grad student friends before I got more into political economy twitter) who spent years in Xinjiang and whose opinion I respect.
Oh, if anyone wants a big list of other people to read on Xinjiang and the development of western China, check out the resources in this post. Lots of good authors. Also just fyi for everyone, I am not a specialist. If anything the only history I formally studied was the history of European socialism and cold war technocultures, and that was minor as I'm a Computer Science Theory person. I just know East Asian Studies and Central Asian Studies grad students and trust their recommendations.
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Not sure they know Zenzposting is a thing.
Being "anti-capitalist" doesn't make someone trustworthy. There's a long history of capitalist powers using splits among communists in the imperial core to discredit communist movements outside the imperial core. If you want to make the Xinjiang story believable, it should come from the nominal left.
I only specified that in comparison to Zenz since Zenz is so ideologically anti-communist, and Byler's main work is on the development of capitalism in Xinjiang and its effects on Uighurs.
Awkwardly hides copy of Animal Farm
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I've always felt that Byler was a little sus. Darren Byler is a fellow at Center for Asian Studies and China Made and writes for China Channel which are all financially supported by the Henry Luce Foundation which funds anticommunist organizations like the Atlantic Council (a NATO cutout), the Asia Foundation (was heavily funded and originally established by the CIA), and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Henry Luce Foundation was established by the vehemently anticommunist media tycoon Henry R. Luce.
Rushan Abbas also boasted of her “extensive experience working with US government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of State, and various US intelligence agencies.” Abbas was a National Endowment for Democracy (a CIA cutout) grantee and worked for Radio Free Asia.
I hate to nitpick, but I don't see anything wrong with what Byler did in that tweet. The original tweet accused her of helping run Guantanamo, which is blatantly not true.
I cannot imagine what anyone would do working at Guantanamo that did not involve torture or collaborating with torturers to extract confessions under duress while the torture was happening and translate it.
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Yeah he knee jerks like that too often then has to clarify (I mean in that Zha thread he effectively says he doesn't believe her on on the treatment of the detainees in GITMO). Guy is extremely emotionally involved in the whole thing because he lived there for years. I'm most familiar just with his PhD thesis which is very good.
Yeah, but why always him tho? Why smear your reporting with shit by including him? He doesn't even speak/read their language -- how is he the ONLY one that keeps getting these scoops and reports?
I'm sorry, but as I said to another comment. If somebody in the US based most of their article on shit Alex Jones uncovered, nobody would take it seriously -- no matter how true it actually was. You would ignore the whole article -- which is what I choose to do with every article that has anything to do with Zenz (which is like 99% of the most serious allegations).
I think it is a combination of media clout, the fact that some of his stuff has come out to be broadly correct, and since he's anti china he got propped up be large media outlets so now the whole thing has snowballed and he gets cited because he's somehow become "the guy" to cite even though there are much better people like Byler to go to. Left media has been sounding the alarm bells for years about conditions in Xinjiang, including left media inside of China before security was tightened.
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IDK, here's a dive someone did into one of the first pieces Zenz did 2018 and basically chocks the paper up to broadly correct but his Chinese isn't very good and his citations aren't either (in that they had to go contact Zenz to send the documents because they couldn't find them, but he did send them and the person was later able to find them). I also from knowing who interacts with the person who does this blog that they do speak Mandarin pretty well.
Funny enough, there's a whole episode on Sinica about Chinese pro-democracy figures that were siding with Trump right after the election based on twitter posts and the like. So liberal idiocy definitely runa in both directions.
By the way, the hosts of Sinica are pro-democracy, anti-authoritarians liberal types (one more optimistic and one more pessimistic), so their takes tend to go in the direction of a "both sides" approach to US-China politics, which make them a bit more nuanced and worth critically engaging and debating than the usual shameless western propaganda. For example, they had a great episode recently with Indian reporters who cover China talking about the dearth of Indian knowledge about China and the hosts kept chiming in with variations of "sounds about as ignorant as the US then."
They covered Xinjiang a while back but I never listened to it so I don't know how credulous they are about the reporting. I'm sure it's not great.
who translated those documents?
You'd have to ask the author or Ryan Tate. The author is active on Twitter so they'd probably answer.
I don't have a Tweeter so w/e, I only bring it up because Zenz has a habit of feeding documents through Google translate and having his conclusions dunked on by people who are actually fluent in Chinese
Thank you for this. Very interesting stuff and he pretty much owned me so I guess I should hear him out