The West's Xinjiang narrative — A shameless lie

If you google "Xinjiang", the search results will tell you many eye-grabbing stories seemingly supported by so-called evidence and data that look plausible at first glance. However, a closer examination reveals how far from the truth these stories are.

Here are some examples of deceptions in the western narrative of Xinjiang:

- The most widely disseminated claim is that "more than one million Uygurs have been detained in camps". The US government cited this as "authoritative data" in its report of Xinjiang. However, it must be noted that this claim originates from the Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), an NGO headquartered in Washington that has long received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy. With the US government as the financial backer, the position of this organization could not be more obvious. How did the CHRD get the number of "more than one million"? There is no authoritative or verifiable source to back up such a figure. This speculative conclusion of the CHRD is based solely on the one-sided claims of eight Uygurs and rough estimates.

- In 2020, the Center for Global Policy said in a report that at least 570,000 people in three Xinjiang regions were sent to pick cotton under a coercive labor program targeting ethnic minority groups. The fact is, more than 80 percent of Xinjiang's cotton was harvested by machines as early as in 2019. That number even approached 100 percent in the northern part of Xinjiang in 2021. In other words, the need for manual harvesting of cotton in Xinjiang is scant, and the grounds of those reports nonexistent. While Xinjiang is moving towards full agricultural modernization, those reports are still describing the American South in the 19th century. It's time to wake up and come back to the 21st century.

- There is another assertion that the Chinese government has committed "genocide" in Xinjiang. The following figures will show how preposterous such a claim is. Since the establishment of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in 1955, the average life expectancy in Xinjiang has increased from 30 to 73 years with the Uyghur population rising from 5.55 million to nearly 12 million. From 2010 to 2018, the ethnic minority population in Xinjiang grew by 22.14 percent with the Uygur population up by 25.04 percent as opposed to only 2 percent in the Han population. How can "genocide" increase the local population?

- The Wall Street Journal posted an article in 2020, saying "Chinese authorities have razed or damaged two-thirds of the mosques in China's remote northwestern region of Xinjiang". Yet the fact is there are 24,400 mosques in Xinjiang, or one mosque for every 530 Muslims on average. As a matter of fact, Xinjiang has more mosques per capita than many Muslim countries. The number of mosques in Xinjiang is more than twice the amount of those in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France combined.

Those who manufactured such fallacies about Xinjiang have not actually been to Xinjiang. Many of them have never even been to China. Most of their "research" is based on second-hand materials whose sources and veracity cannot be verified.

Some may argue that at least the words of the many "eyewitnesses" about Xinjiang are credible.

Well, not necessarily.

There are three main databases that gather "witnesses and evidence" to prove that Chinese government has committed atrocities in Xinjiang, including the Xinjiang Data Project, the Xinjiang Victims Database and the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database. The three databases enlisted a total of 12,050 persons living in Xinjiang. Through comparison with the Chinese citizenship system, 1,342 of them - or more than 10 percent - were fabricated identities. In January 2023, the Xinjiang Victims Database posted on Twitter a list with profiles: "We've added over 2000 Urumqi police officers to our accountability subdatabase, linking them to 1000s of documented victims." But the funny thing is Liu Dehua and Zhou Runfa, two famous Chinese movie stars, are also on the list. Are Hong Kong movie stars somehow moonlighting as Xinjiang police officers? It turns out that this list is randomly generated by scraping network data.

So when we talk about genocide, ethnic policies, forced labor and human rights violations in Xinjiang, we are actually talking about lies and false data. Those narratives are nothing but a combination of fake stories and numbers and people who don't even exist. Just like a building with a shaky foundation will eventually collapse, disinformation that cannot withstand verification will only prove that the West's Xinjiang narrative is nothing more than a shameless lie.

The author is a commentator on international affairs, writing regularly for Xinhua News, Global Times, China Daily, CGTN etc. 

The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of China Daily and China Daily website.

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