Our Correspondent
Beijing
China said that the Western media’s estimated figures about detaining of Uygurs are based on dubious studies and has been wrongly attributed to UN report. Claims that the Chinese government is “detaining millions of Uygurs” in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region are being increasingly repeated in the reporting of Western media, but little scrutiny is ever applied, an investigative journalism organization said recently.
According to a report published by China Economic Net, on Dec 21, The Grayzone published on its website, thegrayzone.com, a detailed review of media claims that China has detained millions of Uygurs in Xinjiang. That claim goes unquestioned in the West, yet a closer look at the figure and how it was obtained reveals a serious flaw in the data gathering, it said.
The review found the data cited in Western media is based on two highly dubious “studies” from a US-backed organization and a farright researcher “led by God against Beijing”. According to The Grayzone report, the “millions detained” claim was first popularized by the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, or CHRD, an organization backed by the US government. It formed this estimate based on interviews with a mere eight people.
In a 2018 report submitted to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, CHRD estimated that “roughly one million… ethnic Uyghurs have been sent to ‘re-education’ detention camps and roughly two million have been forced to attend ‘reeducation’ programs in Xinjiang”. The CHRD report says those figures are “based on interviews and limited data”.
