This is some shady stuff, but corporate media is much more interested in getting their sources from right wing actors that will exaggerate than actually do investigative journalism. There’s a small number of left wing sources that do confirm mass repression and arbitrary imprisonment. The sensational claims of the world uyghur congress, and some of Zenz’s interpretations of public data are not supportable.
A good report is from an anthropologist who was doing ethnography in Xinjiang for years named Darren Byler who’s written a lot about it including his PhD thesis. There’s also a book on the Han perspective that was published a few years ago called Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang.
Alright so to my knowledge with the fall of Isis many Muslims who used to fight for them are now returning to Uyghurland, and have commited several terrorist attacks there (this might not actually be quite accurate - it seems there have been muslim terrorist attacks for quite some time), now China uses it´s materialist powers (powered by the immortal science of marxism-leninism) to see why this happens. Their conclusion: they are uneducated, often don´t speak the main chinese language and generally have a bad lot to participate in the chinese economy and culture. So they build re-education camps to teach the main language, etc. As far as I know it´s actually working out pretty well and there haven´t been any terrorist attacks for quite some time now
Further reading: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d0lynghlCnR6Hs57pypEEhlhHczFVgaYX-TIZD61s_w/edit
I’m far from an expert, but my understanding is that Western mainstream coverage on this stuff can’t be taken at face value (to put it lightly) because the most commonly cited source is Adrian Zenz - a hardcore Evangelical working for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (US backed group who take the Black Book of Communism’s death toll as their official line, and who are responsible for trying to add global COVID deaths to the death toll of Communism). Supposedly he believes he’s on a mission from god to expose the evils of the Chinese Communist party.
So are there abuses happening toward ethnic and religious minorities within China? Possibly, though it’s incredibly difficult to get objective sources on this. Should you view the official Western line with extreme suspicion? Definitely.
Here’s the wiki article on the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Communism_Memorial_Foundation
I’m sure someone more informed than I am will chime in on this with more detail.
