UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Michelle Bachelet actually visited Xinjiang and made no such assertions. Whoever did release the report you're referencing, they waited until immediately after her term ended to release it (within hours). Pretty conspicuous.
No it was actually released hours before her term ended not after. And the reason she held off releasing until the last minute is because of pressure from China to refrain from releasing it.
In addition to releasing the report she released a 131 page Chinese rebuttal simultaneously. Not the actions one would expect of a shadowy group at the UN out to get China.
“Bachelet’s damning report was published with only 11 minutes to go before her term came to an end at midnight Geneva time. Publication was delayed by the eleventh-hour delivery of an official Chinese response that contained names and pictures of individuals that had to be blacked out by the UN commissioner’s office for privacy and safety reasons.”
The organization’s human rights office delivered its much-delayed report minutes before Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, was to leave office.
I agree it was reported this way, but do we have evidence it was actually prepared and published by her at that time? The report conspicuously does not mention the viewpoint and concerns of the High Commissioner as other OHCHR reports do nor does it reference Bachelet's findings from her May 2021 visit to Xinjiang.
So you don't have any evidence it was published the next day? You just made that up out of whole cloth?
The internet archive lists the first time they archived the document as August 31 22:23 GMT, which was August 31 23:23 in Geneva. That matches the reporting from NYT and Guardian from the next morning. Both of those reports are also available on the internet archive.
Yep missed that. The internet archive did indeed fist scrape that document 23 minutes after midnight Geneva time.
However it is unlikely that the internet archive web scraper would have picked up a relatively obscure document within 23 minutes of its release.
The NYT and Gaurdian articles published that morning (verified by the internet archive) said that the article was published 11 minutes before midnight Geneva time. That lines up with the internet archive scraping it about 30 minutes later.
So unless they were both wrong or in on it, it was released before midnight Geneva time.
What evidence do you have to support that the UN was lying, and that the NYT and the Guardian were wrong about the time?
The Internet Archive recorded an error page for that URL just four minutes prior. So we know that the document was not available before September 1, after Bachelet's term had ended.
So your evidence is that the internet archive didn’t scrape the document until 23 minutes after midnight? And the most likely explanation isn’t that it took the IA scraper a few minutes to pick it up? The most likely explanation is that the NYT and the Guardian were wrong or lying and that the UN was lying?
Did you even know about the time on the internet archive before I brought it up? You said “within hours” so I assume you didn’t? Where did you hear that it as published on September 1st?
You chose the Internet Archive as authoritative evidence, not me. Your back-pedaling "most likely explanation" is again disproven by your own source as the Internet Archive recorded an error page for that URL just four minutes prior. So we know that the document was not available before September 1, after Bachelet's term had ended.
Where has the UN asserted that Bachelet prepared this report? Please share if you are aware of any such assertion.
Again, the report does not make any reference to the High Commissioner's inquiries as other reports do. Your "most likely explanation" fails to account for this.
Yes, media outlets lie and make errors all the time. Sorry to be the one to break this to you.
Numerous newspapers and NGOs who received the press release have stated that it was released on her last day in office. Many of them complained that by doing this she was attempting to avoid the fallout.
Bachelet made no statements even hinting that it wasn’t the report she prepared.
If she was worried that someone would release a report once she left, she could have released her version before she left to prevent that.
Reuters quotes the Chinese Ambassador thusly “If I read her mind correctly, I don't think she's on board with the report and that's why it was released in the last minute,"
Notice he made no mention of “the report was backdated”. He says “last minute”.
I can find no evidence of any official Chinese position that the report was backdated. Surely the Chinese government would have complained if this had taken place.
This whole thing is just some nonsense internet speculation with zero evidence that proposes a version of the facts that not even the Chinese government agrees with.
The Xinjiang Police Files: A 2022 leak of over 5,000 police photos, internal documents, and spreadsheets revealing the scale of detention, with images showing prisoners shackled, hooded, and under guard in 2018.
The China Cables (2019): Leaked, classified instructions on how to run the camps, including directives to ensure "no escapes" promote "repentance" and use full video surveillance.
Satellite Imagery Analysis: Researchers from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) identified over 380 suspected detention sites, including new construction and expansion, often featuring guard towers and razor wire.
Testimonies and Research: Former detainees have reported torture, rape, forced sterilization, and intense indoctrination to abandon their religious and cultural practices.
Government Documentation: The Karakax list, a leaked document, provided detailed, case-by-case justifications for detention, such as having too many children or wearing a veil.
Are you this incredulous when someone reports that the US locks up more Black people capita than White?
Someone defending the US could make the same claims you are that everyone is out to make the US look bad. That multiple independent groups are fabricating evidence etc…
1. give links or one link to the collection of above "evidence" to let others to get conclusion by their own. BTW, I've seen some ("Leaked, classified instructions...) but easily get different interpretation.
2. Also using "I" is better than "We". That means you get your conclusion, not representing others.
1. I've provided a half dozen links in this thread. Feel free to google for more if you want them. Most of the people I'm replying to will respond with some variation of "funded by nefarious group x" regardless of what links are posted.
2. Lecturing random people you meet like they're a freshman English student is patronizing.
Can you imagine hundreds of journalists who would lie to promote a false story that hasn't really been all that effective and harming China (the only possible motivation for such a campaign). And not a single one of the journalists approached by the creators of this campaign leaked anything. If this really was a massive conspiracy theory, that itself is a much much bigger story than the Chinese rounding up people that most of the world don't seem to care about. One of those hundreds of journalists wouldn't have been able to resist such a scoop.
I'm guessing the next part of your conspiracy theory is that the conspiracy group is so powerful that everyone is scared to come forward. But if they are that powerful, why construct such an ineffective anti-china story? Surely such a powerful group could construct something more damaging.
That's a very outdated model for how conspiracies work. Why would it be necessary to bribe and threaten journalists working at these organizations? They genuinely believe in the project of the US financial, military, and cultural empire. They went to the same schools and were socialized with the same core beliefs as the people in US government and high finance or those running the intelligence agencies and military-industrial complex. They wouldn't have the opportunity to work at these 'news' organizations if they had worldviews that were radically incompatible.
Likewise, I don't believe anyone is coercing you to push these ideas online. I believe I could drill down on every single source and claim, and your fundamental beliefs about this question would remain the same.
Proximity to and dependence upon established institutions exerts an inexorable gravity on worldview. It determines one's social circle and path to advancement in every area of life. Those inside the bubble feel themselves to be 'free thinkers', but one who strays outside the acceptable range of beliefs and ideas will immediately experience a sharp discontinuity in this 'freedom'.
You have a group of Swiss journalists who regularly publish critical stories about war crimes in Gaza, the US detaining immigrants, the Trump administration, and waning influence.
And your first thought is that these people have such a hard on for the American Cultural Empire that they are willing to fabricate massive amounts of evidence of Chinese wrongdoing with no coercion required?
They’re just all sitting around writing stories about how fucked up the Trump administration is and how America is over and how the next century belongs to China, and then they think “hey we should probably all work together to make China look bad because America Fuck Yeah! Am I right!?!?”
Please calm down. They might not like Trump — that would be a given for many in these elite circles — but are they really opposed to the prevailing world order? In what material way?
How does being Swiss contradict anything I said? Switzerland is deeply integrated into this prevailing order. It is home to the Bank of International Settlements, the supra-national central bank of central banks whose charter grants it immunity from any national subpoena or inquest.
Sure. I can also much more easily imagine pseudnonymous accounts making material misrepresentations for politically motivated reasons, spreading FUD about journalists making things up.
Ironic phrasing used here. China is the only country that actually has the capacity to deeply integrate AI into industrial manufacturing in a way that will reduce costs of goods. They already have lights-off autonomous factories without AI.
It’s rational if you cognize that being the beneficiary of a long shot scheme or gamble is the only viable path to economic security for most, given the overall trajectory of the economy. Simply plot the median wage in terms of gold or any other hard commodity (as opposed to the gamed CPI metric).
Nextcloud is not great, it's just the only available package that approximates an all-in-one GSuite experience. In practice, the UI is really janky and unpolished.
The US has pointed and fired guns at other countries for moving away from US treasuries, but alternative justifications are produced to reassure our domestic population that it’s really because the foreign leader is a very bad guy.
All the wars which are said to be for resources like oil are actually over the US financial system’s monopoly over access to such commodities as it tends not to be practical to execute complex resource extraction in countries devastated by war.
> I am an open minded, well traveled man. I disagree with the powerful.
This kind of narrative is actually one of the more popular forms of propaganda.
"We are the side of the revolutionaries. The status quo is wrong but only about the things we want to change and not the things we want to stay the same. Powerful people are our opponents."
All politics is about opposing powerful people, because if they weren't powerful then it would be easy to defeat them. But there are different groups of powerful people, with different interests, and then it rather matters which ones you align yourself with on a given issue. And if it's always the same ones then you're doing partisanship rather than reasoning.
To be fair, my father in law who is Chinese and had to exile himself during the cultural revolution would pretty much say the same thing about the Cultural Revolution. Educated people in China who lived through it will certainly criticise the Cultural Revolution (or The Great Leap Forward for that matter) if they are in a situation when they can be honest about it.
So I'm not sure that specific comment would be considered to be a "dominant western narrative" unless you're going to tell me that older (and so who have lived through it) educated people in China who don't speak a word of English have a western mindset because they're educated.
Oh the fact that there has been some positives from the cultural revolution (by having educated people sent to the farm and rural area) doesn't stop the fact that the cultural revolution was a net negative for the country. How many works of arts have been destroyed due to it? How many people suffered?
Nothing is ever white or black but it doesn't mean that we can take a small positive outcome and use that to justify atrocities.
The fact that you immediately think you know what the author I referenced has written and continue to plow forward with your pre-established conclusions is evidence of the “dominant western narrative” effect.
Accounts from well-off diaspora of any country will always be negative. It’s a self-selecting group with specific interests.
I mean I skimmed it earlier but I do plan to read it. That said my pre-established conclusions are based on first hand negative accounts of people who currently still live in China some of which do not speak English so weren't influenced by any "western narrative" (where I also lived for a number of years before moving to HK). Those are not accounts from a well-off diaspora.
EDIT: By the way, it's not that hard either to find books written by Chinese writers not part of the diaspora that are critical of the cultural revolution (Serve the people by Yan Lianke, 3 body problem by Liu Cixin) or the great leap forward (4 books by Yan Lianke). Obviously, writers living in China that have to deal with censorship tend to be less directly critical of it compared to writers from the diaspora but that doesn't stop some criticism to shine through.a
Even the official CPC line is critical of Mao. The assertion is not that all Chinese people believe the same thing or all necessarily belief different things from dominant western narratives on every issue. The assertion is simply that: some narratives are dominant in the West and treated as closed issues without any room for critical discussion or nuance. Deviating from those narratives is punished in a variety of ways through social and institutional enforcement.
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