Why I don't think there are "Xinjiang atrocities"？

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I managed to gain the trust of a Uighur from the countryside of Kashgar/Hotan in southern Xinjiang.
These two regions are the regions with the largest fertility decline when the government still calculates the fertility rate by region before 2019. The proportion of Uighurs in these two regions exceeds 90%.
He came from a poor rural area near the border here, and the local special situation was in 2014, where there was a serious conflict which the China government and the World Uighur Congress had completely different statement(He didn't tell me his version), so the situation he knew could represent the region with the most stringent policies.
He still lives in Xinjiang. My interview is conducted via internet phone, which is safer than typing through social software. He is very alert and evades some of my questions.

"In our village (400 families), most of the heads of households(Basically, means man of the house) have ever been there. The head of the household is the backbone of a family, and children and women listen to him. So they only need to pay attention to the head of household.

There is skill training, but the middle-aged and old people will not learn much.

It teaches law, because terrorist activities are conducted by outsiders(People from outside the border) who recruit local people. People from outside will escape first, while locals would be blamed.

After entering, honest people will come back in a year or two. Those who disobey may be sentenced.

They will analyze and inquire from the surroundings to understand what you have done before and what you have done recently. If you are not honest when you are asked, they will know.

The villagers did nothing wrong. My father is not interested in terrorist activities. (His father was forced to "study" for two years.)
(Describe the experience of a man in this village) His family had no idea what had happened to him in the first few years. It was a long time before they learned that he had been sentenced to 16 years.

Many people here are uneducated and easily cheated by outsiders to "do things". This is to brainwash them not to be cheated.

There is no compulsion to eat pork face to face. But some people will secretly add pork to your food when they know you don't eat pork. This will definitely cause conflict, and the other party will use this as an excuse to claim that "your mind is wrong".

There is no forced marriage, but cross ethnic marriage is advocated."

"(The families where the men were sentenced)Only one woman and a few children, a few acres of land. They even have a hard time surviving.
Women are weak and easy to be bullied by children.
Without father's discipline, children are becoming more and more disobedient. They steal things from their parents, buy mobile phones to play video games, and do not help their mothers work."

He refused to talk about anything related to religion because quote "I am a college student".
Chinese law forbids college students to have religious activities in schools, and may strictly enforce them in Xinjiang (because the Uighur imam I know in the mainland is also a college student without this problem).
He refused to talk about the destruction of books. I am not sure if this is because I asked if any of the Qur'an had been destroyed.

"- Do you hate those people(Terrorism/violence planners)?

- Of course. It's impossible not to hate.
Those people take advantage of ordinary Uighurs.
They started the trouble. Many families are broken. It has left us Xinjiang people with a bad reputation."

"The government has set up modern new countryside. We can move in just by paying a little fee. Most of the expenditure is subsidized by the government.

The environment is much better than before. There are many new infrastructure projects completed by the government.

In the past five years (2017-2021, when Chen Quanguo was in office), there was no economic development and the income of local people did not increase.

15 years of compulsory education, right. The government will also provide additional subsidies.

The government won't let one die of hunger."

Before about 2010, Xinjiang's policy was that urban Uighurs could have two children, rural Uighurs could have three children, and Han people could have one child. (It is said that family planning was not actually implemented in the rural areas of Xinjiang at that time, and some people fled from the mainland to the rural areas of Xinjiang.)
After the fight against terrorism, Xinjiang started family planning with ethnic equality. All urban people can have two children and rural people can have three. Strictly implement.
As other parts of the country began to allow three children, so did Xinjiang.

Talk about family planning:
"(Give birth to more children than allowed)Fines exist. A few years ago, they used this as an excuse to say that you had "problems in your mind", so there were many cases of sending you in.

The amount of the fine depends on the age of the child who exceeds the limit. The younger they are, the more they will be fined.

If people dare to have more children than the quota in recent years, it will be cancelled directly. (He means forced abortion, which is very common in the implementation of family planning in China.)

There is no forced use of IUDs. But women must be checked several times a year to see if they are pregnant or suffer from gynecological diseases.

In fact, these things are not important. The important thing is to use this as an excuse to claim that "your mind has problems and needs to be educated"."
There are retroactive penalty.

Describe compulsory primary schools:
"Grade 1-3 goes home every day, and grade 4-6 boarding.

You can't speak your mother tongue in school. (This is inconsistent with the statement of a Uighur and a Kazak in the above, possibly because this area has a much higher proportion of ethnic minorities than other regions.)
The university is free. You can speak any language outside the classroom.

All of us here are ethnic minorities. Teachers are also ethnic minorities, and they can't speak Mandarin well themselves. There is no Mandarin environment here. This kind of regulation helps us practice Mandarin, which is a good thing.

In life, everyone uses their mother tongue. No chance to contact Mandarin."
He is a Uighur who completely uses Uighur to receive education from primary school to high school (this school system has been canceled). He went through a lot of struggles in college to speak Mandarin well.
He is still looking for opportunities to speak with people on the Internet to practice Mandarin. He dreams of going to the mainland for a job, because he has never left Xinjiang.

"-After September 2019, few of these things happened.

-What about after 2022?

-Of course not now. Extremism has been completely eliminated. Now we have entered the era of economic development."
Note: This sentence is quite official.

"If you ask ten people about this kind of thing, you will get ten different statements.

Different things have happened in different regions. Some people have not experienced it themselves, but only get it from others' opinions; Some people exaggerate and sensationalize; Some people will say good things to avoid trouble.

I won't tell you more. That is OK thet you can understand the general situation. Don't believe my statement completely."

"Why do you guys ask these? These are things of the past. You can do nothing.

Our family is safe, the current life is good, and the future life will be better. Talking about the past will only bring trouble, not any benefits. We should look ahead."


He thinks A Xinjiang Han Talk about Camp speaks well and is very balanced.
I shared all the describe(excluding opinions) I quoted from Reddit's Chinese community, and he confirms that these are all reasonable.

In addition, he also recognized the authenticity of this discussion.

His opinion:
"What they said are right. In the past, border control was relatively loose.
Why did the United States discredit the Xinjiang issue - what they said is not entirely right - because it cannot continue to create trouble."

He recently met a Kirgiz woman, who was studying abroad, on the Internet. (Kirgiz is a Turkic-speak ethnic group, which accounts for a very low proportion in Xinjiang and there is a nation state, Kirgizstan. In Xinjiang, they mainly live in southern Xinjiang together with Uighurs.)
He relayed what she had told him. He described it as
"She hated what had happened.
She told me the history of our ethnic group, what our ethnic was in the 1950s, and what has happened now.
She is not partial to either side.
She made suggestions on what the government should do and what ethnic groups should do.
Her evaluation of western media: part is true, part is smear. After all, they are foreigners who just want to provoke ethnic conflicts and use this to attack China."

This Hui woman revealed more information in our small private community.

She called the East Turkistan Movement Organization "blue flager", and called CCP "red-flager".
She boasted that when she was a child, blue-flager rushed into her house and hack her.

"- Have you really been hacked by blue-flager?

- lol. The scar was as wide as my arm. Now that I'm older, the scar is only half the width of my arm.

- OK. What happened to the blue-flager who hacked you?

- In our place, after catching them, they will be shot directly. They have no value for interrogating. No results will be obtained.

- Is there also blue-flager in northern Xinjiang?

- The county where I live has harbored many. In villages and towns, their scale is relatively large.

- How to know the color of his flag before he starts to hack people?

- Only Allah and himself know."

She is in her twenties. So this should have happened about 10 years ago.

Not trying to pick a fight. Just sayin' that you're up against an army of Western experts like this.


https://youtu.be/A3hjxSDzEX8

Frankly I don't understand why you guys here on WP are all being so polite to a genocide denier who is attempting to spread CCP propaganda while you guys are trashing America in almost every post on here?

And it's not just Wrong Planet, I'm seeing this kind of phenomenon happen everywhere I look on the internet like Quora and Youtube.

I just don't get it.

Just speaking for myself... I like the OP. He is the only mainland China person on the site whom I ever seen. One quarter of the human race lives on mainland China- and he is the only one I have ever seen on WP. And he has an interesting POV.

AND a few years ago (when Islamophobia was all chic and acceptable) folks from Muslim, and Arab countries, would get brutally bullied, and driven off the site. So personally...I want folks from far flung corners of the earth to feel welcome here...even if they occasionally espouse far flung opinions characteristic of those far flung places. You dont have to agree with them, but we should go easy on them.

So why can't the world go easy on Americans?

What does THAT have to do with anything?

You yourself are talking about us here on WP. Not about 'the world'.

And what you are accusing WP folks of doing is NOT hypocrisy, but 'reverse hypocrisy'. you're supposed to set at least as high a standard for yourself as you are for others. If we were to (a) attack China, but (b) NOT attack ourselves for some equivalent crime then THAT would be hypocrisy. you're complaining about us NOT having a double standard.

Further...what the hell do YOU know about Xinjiang? Do you travel there? Do you have relatives there? Are you some kind of expert?

Even if you, or I, wanted make Xinjiang our cause celeb, or an axe to grind, how would you or I do it?

The Chinese regime still controls information going in and out of the mainstream part of China (the 36 provinces of China proper inhabited by the Han Chinese). Xinjiang is a remote desert backwater barely accessible even without an authoritarian regime controlling people and info coming and going to it.

So you and I have to rely on the authority of either Uighur refugees, or of western experts like the guy in my vid to get any information at all. So how would either you or I debate anyone about the issue?

The OP lives in the middle of "China Proper", and obviously gets fed only whatever news the Chinese regime feeds its people. And the Chinese regime does seem to be very two faced about ethnic minorities. They have a benign side, and have programs much like our "affirmative action" programs in his part of the country. But they have another side. And dont show him atrocities they have, and continue to commit, in minority regions. But most folks on WP lack the specific expertise to have any kind of conversation with the op about it.

Thats why most of us just side step this thread he started- were not expert on the subject. I am probably the first other person besides him to post anything on it in the last ten pages.

But if you wanna throw down the gauntlet to Skinned Fish and take him on, and call him out on his apologetics for Beijing then go for it. No one here is stopping you. Feel to free to research and read up about Xinjiang, and the Uighers,

Like most Americans you probably cant even find Xinjiang on a map.

You probably cant name which former Soviet republic (now separate nation) borders Xinjiang.


Or name any country that borders it.


Or name the main desert in the region.


I can do all of that without even going on the Net. But I dont count myself expert enough to debate anyone about the subject.

But if you wanna do your homework on the topic, and debate him, more power to you.

I basically don't believe the report of the Chinese state... I may get it indirectly, because my information source - some of those who live near/in that area will get information from the state.
Just because I have different views on this issue from the West does not mean that I will agree with CPC.

Continue this one.

"- Is it true that "school" does not exist no longer at all?

- It can be said that. There is still a little bit, which is different. You can go home and meet your family.
Those who have not returned, usually, are officially convicted."

"Most of what you see on the Internet is untrustworthy. Whether it is an internal network or an external network. Some are false, some are exaggerated. The people who have experienced the events here are uneducated. They have not learned to write and are not allowed to tell."


Describe past Uyghur language textbooks and the current education system.：
"- There is no patriotism, but it is mixed with religion. Do you think it is OK that there is no any patriotism in the textbook?
In the early version, it did not emphasize that we are Chinese, but only our ethnic/nation.
A few are translated versions of Mandarin texts, while the vast majority are heroes and religions of our ethnic/nation.

I - But the general historical textbooks are based on the Han land centralism.

- No, not the Han nationality, it's the Chinese nation.

You can choose one from English or Uyghur as a second language course. The main courses use Mandarin.
Kindergartens use Mandarin. But kindergartens are not boarding schools."

Conversations in our small private community:
"- Religion is good, but some people use it for personal gain. The religious personages of high status, who were trusted by everyone, took advantage of people's ignorance. They colluded with outsiders to plot violent independence. When things broke out, they had arrived abroad, and the rest were victims.

A Hui Muslim form Xinjiang (His relatives were also forced to re educate.) - They are the lackeys of the United States and Türkiye. In recent years, there has been much peace, simply because it is not easy for them to come in. And ISIS is dead.
The East Turkestan Movement is a group of lunatics supported by the United States. Later, the government's de extremism was also too extreme.

I - Is it possible that some terrorist attacks are just local grievances rather than the behavior of a specific organization?

the Hui - Maybe. But most of them are just crazy. They killed even Uighurs who did not agree with them. Crazy people will not ask your ethnicity politely before killing."


Describe 10-15 years ago:
"The villagers were conservative and ignorant.
I was a child at that time. Now I recall, these things are very distorted.
It can't be said that this is extremism, but...

My mother gave birth to eight children and five died.

Polygamy exists. If someone has prestige and religious status here, people may give their daughter (around 16 years old) to him as a concubine. Without wedding nor bride price. (which are usually required)
He would have seven or eight wives, who are not allowed to leave home.
Others would consider it an honor to give their daughter to him.

It is true that religious groups force minors to engage in prostitution.

Stores selling cigarettes or alcohol may be destroyed.

The burqa really existed. Women either wear it or are not allowed to leave home."

"Some Uighurs in northern Xinjiang support the education of Uighurs in southern Xinjiang? It's true. Northern Xinjiang is much better than here."

"The countryside is very patriarchal. My father would beat my mother. He believed that everyone in the family must obey him.

He will beat my mother after "coming back". (Note: His father was in the camp/school during 2017-2019)
The last time was in 2020. He hit her in front of me. I didn't stop him, I didn't say anything. I was thinking: How many times would you beat her if I wasn't there?
Now he dare not do so. We have grown up.

It is true that the government will stop domestic violence now.
They will dissuade you several times before and send you to education after too many times.
But he is our father. He has suffered. We will not report him again.

This is all due to problematic thinking. You can report now. How about before? You can only bear it."

I told my brother, (his brother went to college in the mainland), leave as far away as possible from here and never come back.
I swear I won't ask my father for a penny. I never contact him, just my mother."


"- I didn't want to talk about it. I have my own life.
But I am dissatisfied and grateful.
He is my father. He suffered. There was corporal punishment, and his leg would ache in rainy days.
But he did change.

- Do you think this change is a good thing?

- yes. Two years changed him, changed here, completely.

- He had domestic violence since he came back, no?

- That's different. In the past, he would force you, this is not allowed, that is not allowed, and so on. You must obey him. But the last time cause he quarreled with my mother for my tuition."

"In the past, if a woman had premarital sex, she would not survive. She will be forced to death or commit suicide.
Now those who are in love, cuddle and kiss can be published on the Internet. This was unimaginable before.
I won't do this, but those who do should not be interfered with."


About Shache/Yarkand in 2014. The Chinese government described this as a planned terrorist attack. The overseas Uighurs described the riots caused by the interruption of peaceful gatherings, and the radicals described the massacre of Uighurs.
This Uighur lived in the place where the incident occurred.
"- Is it a counterattack triggered by the provocation of a normal assembly or a premeditated attack?

- Premeditated, of course.
They planned this on July 27, and on July 28, they began to block the road.
When the fleet of trucks came from the mainland, they stopped them and blocked the roads in front and behind. Those cars can't escape. They started to set fire and kill.

- Are there no Uighurs in these trucks?

- They spared the Uighurs and killed the Han people inside.
The local police couldn't handle it. In the evening, the army came.
Those people are brainwashed. Those leaders and false imams lied to them, saying that if they killed the infidels, they would go to heaven. These uneducated people will believe and be used.
Why can't these things happen in Beijing and Shanghai? Because they are open-minded and educated.

These people know they will die. But they believe they will go to heaven.
But in fact, their families will have more financial difficulties and may go to re education in the past few years.

Religion is good, but some people distort it.
The extreme of religion is just an excuse for them to brainwash the people. Their real aim is separatism, for which ordinary people and children suffer."



Recently, a Uighur girl from southern Xinjiang asked him for help. Because her ex boyfriend committed suicide because she broke up with her, people in the village thought she was guilty and she wanted to commit suicide.
In addition, she has just been admitted to a university, but her parents refused to pay the tuition (this is not expensive, it depends more on test results than money), and prohibited her from going to the university, claiming that education is useless.
We are trying to help her. If her parents have prohibited her from leaving, we plan to report her father, even if this may lead to her father's arrest by the government.


Another of his plans is to raise money to help the children in the village. He has been volunteering to educate these children for several years.
"I want to help the children in the village, to learn Mandarin well, to let their ideas change from an early age, become attach importance to education, to educate them in patriotism.
Education will broaden our horizons and change our destiny."

This is a picture of the village where he used to live. Now they have moved to a more modern village built by the government. I also have many pictures of those children, their numbers are about 50. But I will not release them here to avoid this Uyghur being Identified.
He wanted to give the children some clothes to spend the winter and some stationery.
It will cost about 1000 US dollars altogether. If any reader is willing to provide a small part - this is a crowdfunding - please PM me.

Last edited by SkinnedWolf on 17 Oct 2022, 11:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

Actually, three. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan.
The other two Central Asian countries, members of the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan (although Uzbeks and Uighurs are highly similar) and Turkmenistan (sometimes described as North Korea in Central Asia), have no common border with Xinjiang/China.

Xinjiang and Afghanistan share a common border through the Wahan Corridor.
One of my sources of information in the previous is a young Uighur imam who lost his father.

His father had travelled from Xinjiang to Afghanistan on foot when he was young.

I believe Skinned Wolf is actually a "she," or maybe a "they." She/they has stated that she/they is biologically female, and "looks female." She/they doesn't seem to want to be defined in terms of gender.

She/they does have interesting substance, I believe.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 17 Oct 2022, 10:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

Not that everything Zenz said was wrong. But he is not reliable source.
I quoted an article about refuting his earliest paper in the early post.

Recently, I also calculated the fluctuation of abnormal fertility rate in Xinjiang by myself and published it on the website for Chinese people - And found that the same project of Zenz had tampered with key data to meet his desired conclusions.

The data sources I and he claimed to use were the official Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook of China.
The sub regions do show that the four regions with the highest proportion of Uighurs have the fastest fertility rate decline, but in addition to Hotan, the fertility rate was far lower than that in other Uighur regions before 2014, the fertility rate in other regions is higher than that in regions where the Han majority area in Xinjiang even after the decline. (This is also the area where the age structure is closest to the explosive population growth, that is, the area that will be most affected by the strict implementation of family planning.)
Zenz has tampered with Kashgar's data to make it the same as Hotan's results in 2019, and claimed that Kashgar and Hotan represent the fertility rate of the Uyghur region, thus claiming that the fertility rate of the Uyghur people has changed from far higher than Han in Xinjiang to far lower. This is a strong academic misconduct.


Suspicion of him seem to be widespread in many online communities discussing this issue, at least in the communities I have checked. I don't understand why anyone would insist on using Zenz as the main speaker if they want to occupy the authority on this issue. It is not that there are no more credible western experts.

That's why calling the president an idiot is a punishable offense, as is insulting catholic religious feelings, pride parades are followed by waves of homophobic attacks and looking weird on the streets gets you the stares

dunno who are the "we" you talk about here. you are projecting, in truth, you can't know what other polish people think or feel...neither can I.....but statistically, that statement is very far from reality.
It's more like your projection, you're repeating a sentence that instills a sense of nationalistic pride in you, and boosts your own sense of self-worth that way.



Probably because they are Americans. In America, it's popular to trash their own country, and both right and left wing do it. This is probably born out of a desire to change their own country for the better....according to one's individual vision of what is better, of course.

Knowledge of other countries is rather limited, and so is the interest.

If a person with a political agenda can prove their "how to change America for the better" point by trashing china, they will do it. If they can, however, prove it better by sympathizing with china, they will do it instead.

No one really cares or knows what's going on in china, they only care as much as they can relate it to American politics.

I don't know if Poles have a distinctive identity within the West. But it makes sense to claim that Poles are less receptive to formalism at a statistical level than the Chinese (or other East Asians).
Magz has second-hand experience of observing East Asian societies, so this claim has its proper context.


"Any PRC Chinese who expresses a political opinion different from mine is an aide to the CCP" is a view I see both the English and Chinese speaking world.

The same goes for this statement. Only would-be immigrants really care about the reality of the United States or random Western countries, other Chinese only use highly abstract characteristics of the United States (or other countries or even a certain dynasty in Chinese history) as metaphors to attack or defend the Chinese establishment.
When I wrote an article in the Chinese world to refute such statements as "The Anglo Saxons are more brutal than other Europeans, so the North American aborigines survived less than the South American aborigines", "The North American aborigines have completely disappeared", many people also accused me of being a spiritual American or serving the United States, although this reflects ignorance of the actual American propaganda.
I suppose this is true of citizens of any country large enough to complete the internal cycle that the vast majority of people do not need to leave the country or communicate with any actual foreign community to complete their lives.


However, from the growth record of the number of clicks on this thread, even though there are not many posts to respond to, there are actually users who are interested in things.



A short update about the Uighur girl from South Xinjiang mentioned above:
She cried and dared not go out, because local people would blame her for the death of her ex boyfriend.
We taught her how to apply for grants and student loans. The Uighur suggested that she leave the village, do not go back, go to learn Mandarin well, and start a new life farther away where no one knows her.
she was beaten by her father because she wanted to go to school. Her parents think she should farm with them and get married in a few years.
She doesn't have her own mobile phone or computer, but borrows it from her neighbor every few days. We temporarily lost contact with her.

Very few Americans are likely to ever live in another country and most don't even travel internationally, even to neighboring countries. I think most of those people will tell you they don't see much relevance to their own situation in what happens in those other countries. They may be aware of some differences in approach but not convinced the foreign examples would succeed in the US. So I don't think Americans are willfully ignorant. It does bother me that Americans typically know so little about day-to-day life or institutions in Mexico given the proximity, but OTOH Mexico has never been promoted as an example to emulate (although I believe there is more to admire about Mexican society than most of us know).

But I wouldn't conclude that Americans are willfully ignorant of other countries. They just focus on their own because that is where they see their future.

I think Chinese are similar in this regard. Despite the large Overseas Chinese population, the vast majority of Chinese don't anticipate ever going elsewhere.

Let me help you out by translating what you're saying into plain English.

What you're saying is "HELLO...everyone! Obviously, Americans are just like all other humans in every other country on Earth, by being more obsessed with local issues than with issues far away, because it's the local that effects them directly, and it's the local that they can better influence to reform than they can influence the faraway."

Exactly.

you're just stating the obvious. But sometimes the obvious needs to be stated.