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Adrien Zenz is not a reliable source of information

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-uyghurs-problems-claims-us-ngo-researcher/

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And neither is the Grayzone lol. If you're gonna deny genocide please come back with sources that aren't Ben Norton or Max Blumenthal, Chinese State Media or Qiao Collective. Those aren't primary sources.

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Do you folks have sources on the bit with 10%+ of the population, coerced work, forced sterilization, false terrorism charges, etc?

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from darren:

Sure. The best accounting of incidents ranging from protests to petty theft to actual attacks being labeled terrorism is Gardner Bovingdon's book, especially the appendix 174-190: https://elkitab.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Gardner-Bovingdon-The-Uyghurs_-Strangers-in-Theiz-lib.org_.pdf

For an accounting to the present Sean Robert's 2020 book form Princeton does this or this article:

https://t.co/D0ZawBmPVK?amp=1

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more from darren:

on sterilization it is just Adrian's gov. sources:

https://jamestown.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Zenz-Internment-Sterilizations-and-IUDs.pdf?x60014

About the 10 percent number. It is squishy, totally an estimate. It could be off by as much as couple hundred thousand. We know over 340,000 people were put in prison in 2017-2018, many in the 2018 number were transferred from camps as they started to shut some of them down.

https://npr.org/2019/10/08/764153179/china-has-begun-moving-xinjiang-muslim-detainees-to-formal-prisons-relatives-say

Here XJ government officials put the number of Uyghurs "infected" with extremism at around 20-30 percent.

https://t.co/2GqiGvkb0U?amp=1

Zenz's study (unfortunately in the right wing journal political risk--though was peer reviewed by me and a bunch of other left-leaning academics) looks at thousands of government documents of detainee numbers from a number of prefectures, camp food budgets, satellite imagery of estimated capacity, detainee accounts of crowding in camps and food rations, to estimate a range of 900,000-1.8 million. https://jpolrisk.com/wash-brains-cleanse-hearts/

Here are the people that were detained based on many of the lists from Adrian. https://shahit.biz/export.php?list=22

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more from darren:

On coerced work, see this for my take: https://supchina.com/2019/09/04/how-companies-profit-from-forced-labor-in-xinjiang/

On sterolization: the AP report is the best

https://t.co/rncjlSGUBn?amp=1

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These are a lot of links to reports that all rely on the same source - Zenz. The "infected" with extremism source comes from a outlet called China Leadership Monitor which is funded by an organization that funds the AEI, Brookings, RAND, etc. Andy, are you actually reviewing these sources or just cutting and pasting whatever Darren passes along to you? Would solely relying on right wing / neocon sources be acceptable on any other topic but China?

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Thank you very much.

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Thanks for this great discussion. Regarding the people sent to work in factories outside of Xinjiang, Darren made a couple interesting statements I haven’t seen elsewhere: he estimated the total number may be around 250,000, and he suggested that the people sent to inner China were “surplus labor” (rather than former inmates of the camps). I’d really appreciate sources or further reading for this, or just understanding how he arrived at those tentative conclusions.

Also: do we know anything about the number of people coerced into labor within the XUAR itself—either the total number or the breakdown between former detainees and “surplus labor”? There is this government target of 1.3 million (new?) textiles jobs that people sometimes cite and that I think is mentioned in the podcast, but it’s a pretty crude guide. Even if those 1.3 million jobs materialize, do we currently have a basis to guess how many might represent coerced labor? What about coerced labor within the XUAR in other sectors? We’ve got at least rough figures for people detained and for some of the family planning stuff (mostly from Zenz), but it seems like there’s less on the figures for forced labor, which seems like the thing that the outside world might actually have a bit more leverage over.

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