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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Pretty impressive that she was able to write this after having all of her organs harvested
Stupid fucking Americans believe you can be sterilized with one injection. Like, I wish it was that easy, that would make life so much easier for surgeons and doctors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re education camps are a better way to deal with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism than you know, going to war and killing millions of people.
Please tell us what solution to Islamic terrorism and separatism you’ve found that is effective and not distasteful.
These aren’t “camps” they’re entire neighborhoods with better amenities then places I’ve paid to rent in America
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.
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
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.
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.
“ 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?
“ 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
