The WEST's war of words against CHINA. Starting with the Uyghurs.

[JW Insider]

14 hours ago, Arauna said:

Well there are just too many reports coming out of those who have suffered.  And new camps keep going up ...... one can look at them (and the activities) on google earth.

Not if the original report was made up as an assumed extrapolation from interviews with 8 or fewer interviewees living 1,000 miles from China (and from someone who claims he is doing this for God and for apocalypse), and subsequent reports keep playing off reports from the same original madman, imo, Adrian Zenz. Sure, when the idea caught on as a thing to be against, then lots of people are going to pick up on it and try to make it provable through some kind of evidence. But you'll notice that it requires a lot of loaded words to make sure that this gets picked up by other groups to make sure they are incensed enough to jump on the bandwagon. Even using the term "camps" is intentionally meant to conjure up the the phrase "concentration camps." Obviously, they are not camps, nor are they anything like camps. The article here, in the NYT, which is guilty of several mistranslations, also uses this phrase:

Tactics from Turpan City for answering questions asked by the children of concentrated education and training school students

Does anyone think the term "concentrated education" is in the original? In this sense it's about how these schools are centralized not about concentrated education.

However, what China is doing really is is in response to the stabbings and bombings and violent riots by radicalized religious extremists. It's for those people who try to rally others to join in running off to Syria, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East to join "Al-Qaeda" and "ISIS," or who distribute pro-Jihadist materials, or who give or attend rallies and speeches that incite radicalization.

People think that these facilities were hidden, and denied, then only admitted after pressure. That's completely false. There really are prisons for radicalized Muslims and China is very proud of these. They aren't hidden, but are talked about openly in the media daily.

Many Muslim countries have visited and ALL of these countries have praised China for this particular method of handling Muslim extremism. Rather than locking up everyone in a standard prison (unless they have actually killed someone) this method makes use of these less prison-like educational facilities which double as vocational schools and people can even go to them voluntarily. I don't doubt that such schools might include a fair bit of pro-government ideology, since we know that this is true of Chinese elementary schools.  

The narrative created out of Google Earth images is worthless. They find a new facility, maybe even a new prison built somewhere and immediately claim it must be proof of Uyghur "concentration camp" facilities. And of course you cannot see the claimed activities from Google Earth.

Also, so many of the supposed closer images have been debunked. Regular prisons have been shown from other places in China and called Uyghur. A barbed wire fence near Shanghai is shown and it is called Uyghur. A Nike factory in Indonesia is shown and it is called Uyghur. 

There is a very interesting review of the BBC's report on the Uyghur situation here:

https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/breaking-down-the-bbcs-visit-to-hotan-xinjiang-e284934a7aab

The BBC apparently relies on the idea that few people with the will to debunk the BBC speak Chinese. They also evidently hope that people will just believe BBC propaganda and not think clearly about what they just saw. I'll make some points about it or quote it at more length in another post.

[JW Insider]

As mentioned above, there is a very interesting review of the BBC's report on the Uyghur situation here:

a recent video report on Xinjiang by John Sudworth of the BBC .

The link to the original report is here:  “Inside China’s ‘thought transformation’ camps — BBC News”

The fascinating expose of the BBC propaganda in the report is here:

https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/breaking-down-the-bbcs-visit-to-hotan-xinjiang-e284934a7aab

I'd love to quote the whole thing, and include all the pictures, but I'll quote enough so that some might have enough interest to look. The numbers are the time locations in the video. My own comments will be inside brackets [like this]:

----------------

[Commenter points out that as they get closer to the facility, the blue sky just shown from outside the facility is made darker and darker and the music turns ominous]

1:04–1:42 Sudworth can barely contain his condescension here, letting you the viewer know that the Chinese government would have you believe that these dancers shown are just students and came here willingly!

...

The camera then pans away from the ongoing dance practice to focus on a surveillance camera visible through the window. The implication is clear, though a bit rich coming from the British, who boast the world’s highest ratio of surveillance cameras to people.

...

1:42–2:42 Now here we start to get to even more egregious BBC editing — when a dancer is asked if he came to the school willingly, he replies yes, he previously had extremist views, and says that a village policeman said to him, 这么好的学校，你可以去参加，转化自己的思想 — which translates to “what a great school (that is), you can enroll there, and change your worldview/ideas”. This is glossed as “a policeman told me to get enrolled”, turning a suggestion into a directive.

[Although BBC didn't clearly point it out, the "Chinese officials" running the school are also Uyghurs.]

They then take us through a variety of classes — ending with a peek over a guy’s shoulder as he types. “I love the Communist Party of China”, Sudworth intones solemnly. There’s a lot more visible on that page, including “I love Hotan”, and the classic Chinese children’s song “I love Beijing Tiananmen”. None of these would be out of place in any school outside of Xinjiang, but Sudworth is counting on you not knowing that.

In any case, Mandarin is an important skill to have in China, but it also should not come at the expense of Uyghur and other languages, which is why it’s good to see that both are being utilized here, with instruction in other classes still done in Uyghur.

[The commenter also points out how both Mandarin and Uyghur script are written on the wall of the school room.]

2:43–3:56 Sudworth begins this section with a monologue of how terrible the place is, with the following observations:

1. they have to wear uniforms ([as if] adults never wear uniforms willingly)

2. they don’t go home at night (remember this one, we’re coming back to it)

3. they sleep in dorms and have communal toilets (with a nice shot of a squat toilet to remind everyone how uncivilized Easterners are)

Now that the BBC has you properly outraged, we have a short interview with Mahemuti, an Uyghur instructor working at the facility.

Mahemuti reiterates that people are there willingly, but Sudsworth is undeterred: “Doesn’t a place where people have to come, obey the rules, stay until you allow them to leave, sound more like a prison?” he continues.

Putting aside the fact that you have to “obey the rules” even if you’re in a McDonalds, no proof is offered that people are not there willingly — the dancer they interviewed previously said as much as well, but both are ignored because the BBC is sure they’re lying.

[Earlier when a person was asked if could come and go willingly, he apparently said "Yes. Exactly." But the segment was boggled so that they conflated it with a policeman supposedly directing him to go to this school.]

...

3:56–5:25 Here we get a series of Google Earth images purporting to show new facilities built in Xinjiang (much like the one they visited). I’ve captured one at 4:05 that has a noticeable sports field.

At 4:40 in the video, they then claim that for the place they visited, the sports facilities were “hastily added” before their tour. But why do other places they showed earlier have sports fields too? Did BBC journalists visit all of them and that’s why they had to hastily build them?

Sudsworth also notes that barbed wire and fences make these places feel unlike schools. But high fences are normal for schools all across China, and security is tight at each of them. Maybe barbed wire isn’t very classy, but plenty of school facilities in the West have them as well. You wouldn’t be shocked to see armed police officers (we call them “student resource officers” here though) in a US school either.

[The commenter adds a picture of a barbed wire fence around a US school, and I should add that it's also found right here along the fences of the high school in New York.]

...

BBC aren’t the first people to suddenly become Google Earth experts. UBC student Shawn Zhang tried to use Google Earth to claim a historical mosque had been demolished (Keriya Aitika Mosque) using satellite images, but later had to retract his claim because he was literally staring at the wrong building on his screen.

5:25–7:50 The crux of the BBC’s argument is here, the interview with Kazakhstan resident Rakhima Senbay. She claims to have been in the camps before and it was far more brutal than what we’ve seen, beatings, etc.

...

Rakhima Senbay isn’t a famous dissident like Enver Tohti (a Google search for her turns up the same “ Rakhima Senbay, who now lives in Kazakhstan but says she spent a year in the camp — simply because she had WhatsApp on her phone” line multiple times), but she’s also the only real evidence the BBC has to support their claims.

7:52–8:39 We have some more interesting interviews here with some higher-ups, discussing the philosophy behind the facilities.

The first guy talks about the preventative nature of vocational training and education — giving people the skills to succeed instead of waiting for a crime to be committed and then applying punishment. His example of hyperbolic, but the second person makes it clear we’re talking about minor offenses.

Sudsworth claims in the monologue prior to the interviews that some people “have not been charged with a crime”, but Xu, the second interviewee, mentions that many people have committed criminal offenses, albeit minor ones — hence the focus on training and rehabilitation instead of punishment. NPR’s previous article on Xinjiang gave examples of these, such as a man who forced his wife to stay home and quit her job. It’s these types of social pressures that these programs are trying to eliminate.

This segment is spun as China doing a Minority Report-esque PRE-CRIME program — and the model here is certainly open to discussion and criticism, but on the face it seems far more reasonable than something like California’s Three Strikes law. Instead of punishment or prison, minor offenders are offered training, making reintegration easier. It’s unclear what proportion of people there as an alternative to prison or simply there just to capitalize on vocational training. This is information that I’d be very interested in, but the BBC didn’t think to ask. All in all, if this model of rehabilitation through vocational training centers was applied in the US, it’d be called left-wing extremism and being “soft” on crime.

Where I live, a man was given a 10 year prison sentence for stealing $33 worth of underwear. Imagine if instead of prison, he was given training for a few months and then reintegrated into society, instead of locked away for an entire decade.

...

When Buayxiam (another Uyghur instructor) tells him about how their goal is also to get rid of religious extremism, she’s met with a very solemn WE CALL THAT BRAINWASHING from Sudsworth.

[Commenter points out how the BBC editors cleverly manage an awkwardly angled picture of a person under a hairdryer at this point when brainwashing is mentioned, as if under a real brainwashing machine.]

What should be done then? If there are Chinese citizens who subscribe to jihadist ideologies, shouldn’t an attempt be made to change their minds? Is that brainwashing?

9:34–End

Sudworth is told by the principal that students go home once a week (hey kinda like the weekend happens “once a week”), and shows us an empty courtyard when students should be leaving.

...

Regardless, we soon get to see people leave in the video. Sudsworth tells us that they come back to the facility uninvited the next day only to be surprised that there are students lining up waiting for the bus home.

The bus soon arrives, and instead of acknowledging that they were wrong about students going home, Sudworth instead tries to call it a “testament to the scale of the operation”.

Do you ever see a school bus or a shuttle taking people to a hotel and marvel at the “scale of the operation”?

Finally, Sudsworth claims the bus “disappears into a government compound”, but it appears to just be a central location for the bus to drop people off, as everyone soon emerges. The narrator tells us that they “finally are given freedom of the night for a few hours”.

This section is what really calls into question the credibility of the entire video. Early on, they claimed *without any evidence* that no one was allowed to leave, taking great pains to highlight the cameras, the “watch towers”, the fences, etc., but when they make a surprise visit (which they couldn’t have anticipated and put on some sort of facade) they see the whole normal process unfold before their eyes — a bus comes and picks people up, drops them off at their home, and everyone gets off and goes home, presumably for the weekend.

Xinjiang is a large place and villages are very spread out. Boarding schools are simply an easier way to manage training when everyone is spread out — transportation back and forth is provided, but having people come to Hotan from remote areas is simply efficiency. Go to Sichuan, Jiangxi, anywhere else in China, and you’ll find boarding schools. The images of the dormitories we’re shown, the toilets and beds, they’re not that different from the facilities at Chinese colleges either.

Final Thoughts

While I clearly have my contentions with the narrator of this video, I’m glad that the BBC was able to visit. We saw a good faith effort to provide a variety of tangible, useful vocational skills training (Mandarin, hospitality service, art, performance, and barber training), decent facilities (pickup basketball by students), Uyghur-led instruction, and efficient transportation to get students there and back. The more I see of these facilities, the better they look. It’s easy to make assumptions about a top down Google Earth image, less so when the scariest thing the BBC could show me was a bathroom with the lights off.

[JW Insider]

I think it's also fair to point out that most of the persons at these educational facilities appear to be male between the ages of about 18 to about 35. Just today I saw someone claim (on Instagram) that the number of Uyghurs being tortured and "slaughtered" in concentration camps is about "three million." 

Three million is higher than the entire population of Uyghur males in that age range in the entire province. Therefore these very few Google Earth facilities would actually be expected to take up about half the entire populated areas of real estate of the entire province to handle even a million. Yet this Google Earth "proof" shows very few of these relatively small facilities amidst large populated areas, and no one seems to notice the discrepancy. If the Western rumors were true, we'd see 100 times the number of these facilities, and they'd be taking up nearly entire cities.

It should also be pointed out that there are at least a million Chinese Muslims of other ethnic backgrounds in other parts of China, many of whom also travel inside and outside China.

[Anna]

I have just seen this recently published BBC news article and I thought it was interesting. I generally trust the BBC to be unbiased and factual.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/nz0g306v8c/china-tainted-cotton

 

[Arauna]

4 hours ago, Anna said:

published BBC news

Thank you Anna. I have seen so many articles with similar content from reputable news sources. The UN recently also condemned this. ..... which was surprising because they use China as a model. I have also seen more stories about the organ harvesting despite the fact that journalists cannot enter China without being followed around by secret services. Only "responsible"  journalists allowed which means: pro-CCP journalists

[JW Insider]

5 hours ago, Anna said:

I have just seen this recently published BBC news article and I thought it was interesting. I generally trust the BBC to be unbiased and factual.

I used to think so too. I have been completely amazed at what I have learned about the BBC and the manner in which it constantly produces a few layers of propaganda to mingle in with very good journalism. The more I study this issue of the Uyghurs, the more problems I see with it. Evidence should be more than just warring with words. And I'm sure there are big problems, but a lot of the evidence is manufactured, and I have to ask myself why. Some of the mistakes in evidence that the BBC has presented have been outrageous, almost laughable in the ease in which they have been debunked. But it's like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. After repeating something thousands of times, most tend to believe it. And then even when the same people who pushed the misinformation apologize for having created false propaganda based on no physical evidence, the same people who believed them when they were lying, will now find reasons to ignore them, or disbelieve them when the same lying liars are finally forced to admit they were lying before.

Bad things happen everywhere, and I often believe that a lot of it is true just based on the claims. And then we might find that we WANT to believe something just because it fits an ideology. And we might not realize that this was a vicious cycle that created the ideology in the first place. So the problem is not whether some or a lot of the claims are true, it's how anxious we are to believe and claim it MUST be a fact, when no real evidence has shown up yet. And then sometimes when you follow the money, the propaganda makes more sense.

I'd love to discuss the tactics of the BBC at length. I've heard dozens of interesting and amazing news stories about various countries in Africa, for example. But if you listen closely there is another story or agenda going on in almost all these stories. It feeds a subtle need in the BBC audience to think of African countries as still struggling, which they are, but with the idea that the struggling is due to their independence from imperialism. The audience is almost made nostalgic for the "peaceful" times under colonial powers. But it's an Orwellian revision of "peaceful." Most of these same struggles can be seen in a truer light as due to the after-effects, and current effects of the same imperialist but post-colonial powers. China is woven into these stories, too, but as a kind of distraction to hide the fact that what is being blamed on China is still 100 times worse under the post-colonial imperialist powers, such as the USA and UK.

I'll get back to this topic soon enough. The latest discoveries have been very enlightening.

[Arauna]

On 9/2/2020 at 7:00 PM, JW Insider said:

Are you saying this is a bad thing? Perhaps it

China only does predatory loans. Unfortunately you think so much of your own opinions that you believe only that which confirms your own opinions. You are tremendously contentious because of this. 

I have LIVED 45 years in Africa and still have many friends and relatives there. So why would I argue with a smartypants? 

You also cloud your own judgement by saying Amerika is promoting bad stories about China and Africa to draw attention away from it's own deeds.  The truth is: in Africa itself - it's people do not care about America - they are trying to survive all the time while their corrupt leaders are selling them out to China. Rare minerals and other natural resources are already in the hands of China.  They do not care what USA thinks. In actual fact the problems in Africa have always been UNDER REPORTED.......... the suffering, wars, genocides, predatory loans by China and UN...... 

USA only happened to focus on it now because it suits them........ it does not mean it has not been ONGOING.  Today 300 boys abducted in Nigeria..... why this got publicity heaven knows because the abduction of girls has been an ongoing problem as well as the destruction and murder of entire christian villages. 

China has also been a problem for quite some time....... and they have said nothing.  I feel sorry for the Chinese citizens.... who have to deal with the CCP and its military who have infiltrated every sector of life in China and doing the same in other countries. It is its military wing which has been donating money to US universities and lending money to other countries.....  

 

[TrueTomHarley]

7 hours ago, Anna said:

I generally trust the BBC to be unbiased and factual.

Ever since they reported Fred Flintstone’s lower facial discoloration as evidence of masking during a prehistoric pandemic my faith in them has been shaken.

 

 

 

[JW Insider]

38 minutes ago, Arauna said:

In actual fact the problems in Africa have always been UNDER REPORTED.......... the suffering, wars, genocides, predatory loans by China and UN...... 

I agree with the under-reporting. And the only thing I disagree with in that whole sentence is "China." (My blind spot.)

39 minutes ago, Arauna said:

I have LIVED 45 years in Africa and still have many friends and relatives there. So why would I argue with a smartypants? 

And I have several acquaintances in and from China. We studied China for quite a while at work to evaluate opening a branch of a multibillion-dollar French company there. My son has about a dozen current friends in China, and has mostly learned the language for networking purposes to discuss ongoing physics research. (He started but abandoned [Covid] a small solar energy company, with a patent pending.)

But I've always appreciated our arguments together, Arauna. You can always be counted on for the counter-arguments. I recognized the strongly held disagreements, but didn't think our arguments were all that contentious. I'll definitely try to do much better in this regard.

[Anna]

3 hours ago, JW Insider said:

And then we might find that we WANT to believe something just because it fits an ideology. And we might not realize that this was a vicious cycle that created the ideology in the first place. So the problem is not whether some or a lot of the claims are true, it's how anxious we are to believe and claim it MUST be a fact, when no real evidence has shown up yet.

Yes, I understand this is your main point.