this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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PLEASE LEARN WHO ADRIAN ZENZ IS AND STOP CITING HIM
Your sources are 1) the State Department saying “our biggest lie is no longer tenable but we’re not backing down that easy” while giving no evidence for anything, 2) a paywalled decision from an unofficial tribunal that appears to just be some random fucking people in the UK, and 3) Adrian fucking Zenz, an infamous propagandist who has been caught lying and misrepresenting data numerous times, including in that report
Please find better sources.
Zenz is cited everywhere, and you should always check for his name. Ask me tomorrow if you want more examples of him lying. Form your own conclusions, but don’t look to that guy.
You’re right, a “scholar” who refuses to admit he made a mistake and instead tries to brush it away as not paying close attention to his work (??? that’s worse, not better) should never be considered a legitimate source, so let’s toss him out all together. You should consider being equally critical of your own sources. They are 1) a twitter-like thread which is sourcing 2) Chinese state media, who of course will deny the allegations. The entire rebuttal by the CCP and this person is written in English, everything except the source document itself. This makes it impossible for people who don’t speak Chinese to fact check these numbers themselves, and makes it very easy for the CCP to manipulate data, which it has a history of doing (like with Tiananmen Square).
I have spent my morning reading the UN Human Rights report “OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China”. I strongly recommend you read it in it’s entirety, though the most relevant section on reproductive rights starts on page 32 (page 34 of the PDF). It concludes that there is credible evidence of forced birth control and forced sterilization, disproportionately impacting Uyghur populations.
This document does not attempt to define the extensive human rights violations as genocide. However, drawing my own conclusion based on the different types of genocide as defined by the Genocide Convention, it’s genocide.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22273613/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf
The twitter thread (nitter is a twitter mirror) uses the same data Zenz uses. But also, you should consider reading the rest of it. Zenz was not saying he made a mistake or that he should have paid more attention, he was saying that about his critics. He then answered the criticisms with more statistical sleight of hand that he doubled down on.
SUMMARY OF THE STATISTICAL SLEIGHT OF HAND OUTLINED IN THE LINK.
The statistic Zenz gives — that “80% of net IUD insertions in China were in XJ” — is extremely misleading because the percent is not out of 100. Using his math, many provinces have percentages below 0, because we are comparing net values. When you add up net values for all of China, negatives and positives cancel, giving a small denominator.
(Xinjiang insertions - removals) / (China insertions - removals) = a nonsense percentage, potentially negative, potentially dividing by zeroIf you add up Xinjiang, Henan and Hebei you get 210%
So it's not just a simple mistaken wording, the statistic itself was fundamentally nonsense from the start.
To drive the point home: In 2014, per the twitter thread, Xinjiang net insertions were roughly the same as in 2018, but China net insertions were much higher, so Xinjiang’s percent was only 2.5% rather than 80%, even though there was no significant change in Xinjiang.
Which brings me to the next point: There is a time element to the story. Less-developed provinces, where access to reproductive health services is still expanding, will have more net insertions, because there are fewer older people removing old IUDs. But over the years, insertions and removals will balance out, and can even dip negative in aging populations that have had IUD access for a long enough time. An underdeveloped province that is still expanding reproductive health access will have more net insertions than other provinces. It is expected that provinces will have high net insertions early in that timeline.
What's missing is the actual number of IUDs in Xinjiang, which would be illuminating.
I did read the full thread, I must have misread his comment about a “mistake” though. But once I realized he was a dishonest, untrustworthy “scholar” I completely stopped arguing his point. I even struck my sources from my first comment, as at least the first is based on his “research” and there is no point in arguing about false/nonsensical data.
You may note that the UN Human Rights report never cites Zenz or any IUD data at all. It comes to the forced birth control and forced sterilization conclusion through other data and interviews. Did you get a chance to read through the UN report?
I've read through the reproductive rights section of the report but only some of the citations, and I'm still looking for the interviews.
The OHCHR report does cite Zenz in citation #140 a few times, on page 19 and continuing into the footnote on page 20 of the pdf.
Citation #140 is for a statistic that in certain counties 10–20% of the adult "ethnic population" (the report's words) were detained.
The footnote mentions Zenz's name twice, but also mentions Xinjiang Police Files, which is Zenz again.
I'm still looking for the 40 interviews. It would be really interesting to hear what they have to say. Speaking before seeing them, I'm not sure I can have full confidence in them when I'm aware of so many instances where western governments and their allies have produced false witness testimony to justify foreign policy, e.g., the Nayirah testimony before the Gulf War, witness accounts of Iraqi WMDs before the Iraq War, fictitious witness accounts of a genocide in Libya before the NATO bombing campaign that obliterated the country, and a large number of North Korean defector testimonies that have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian. This is how consent is manufactured. America is engaged in a trade war with China and hostilities are escalating in the South China Sea, and these activities require consent from legislators and the public. But I'm not going to discount the interviews either — it's evidence that has to be stacked up with other evidence and then appraised as a whole.
This smells like racism against Chinese. At this point you want it to be true so you can justify your hate towards the people.
I’m trying to have a good faith conversation and you come at me with an ad hominem attack. I would love for it to not be true, I don’t want genocide anywhere, but I believe the evidence of my eyes. I’ve read the entire UN report. Have you?
heads up, that's a different person, not me