User:Red-tailed hawk/Uyghur genocide denial

Xinjiang denialism  is denialism relating to the ongoing series of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government against the Uyghur people and other ethnic and religious minorities in and around the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of the People's Republic of China.

Uyghur genocide
Since 2014, the Chinese government, under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the administration of CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, has pursued policies leading to more than one million Muslims   (the majority of them Uyghurs) being held in secretive internment camps without any legal process  in what has become the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since the Holocaust. Critics of these policies have described it as the Sinicization of Xinjiang and have called it an ethnocide or cultural genocide, while some governments, activists, independent NGOs, human rights experts, academics, government officials, and the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile have called it a genocide.

Critics have highlighted the concentration of Uyghurs in state-sponsored internment camps, suppression of Uyghur religious practices, political indoctrination, severe ill-treatment, and testimonials of alleged human rights abuses including forced sterilization, contraception, and abortion. Chinese government statistics show that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60%. In the same period, the birth rate of the whole country decreased by 9.69%, from 12.07 to 10.9 per 1,000 people. Chinese authorities acknowledged that birth rates dropped by almost a third in 2018 in Xinjiang, but denied reports of forced sterilization and genocide. Birth rates have continued to plummet in Xinjiang, falling nearly 24% in 2019 alone when compared to just 4.2% nationwide.

Xinjiang internment camps
The Xinjiang internment camps, officially called Vocational Education and Training Centers by the Government of China,   are internment camps operated by the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region government and its Chinese Communist Party (CCP) provincial committee. Human Rights Watch says that they have been used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Muslims since 2017 as part of a "people's war on terror," a policy announced in 2014. Within the the heavily-policed Xinjiang region, thousands of check points assisted and accelerated the detention of locals in the camps; in 2017 the region constituted 21% of all arrests in China despite comprising less than 2% of the national population, eight times more than previous year. The judicial and other government bureaus of many cities and counties started to release a series of procurement and construction bids for those planned camps and facilities. Increasingly, massive detention centers were built up throughout the region and are being used to hold hundreds of thousands of people targeted for their religious practices and ethnicity. The Xinjiang internment camps are a part of the Chinese government's strategy to govern Xinjiang through the detention of ethnic minorities en masse.

Human rights abuses within the camps have been widely reported. China has subjected Uyghurs who live in Xinjiang to torture. Beginning in 2019, reports of forced sterilization in Xinjiang began to surface, with an Associated Press investigation in 2020 concluding that there is a "widespread and systematic" practice of forcing Uyghur and other ethnic minority women to take birth control in the Xinjiang region. In December 2020, an investigative report by BuzzFeed News revealed that "[f]orced labor on a vast scale is almost certainly taking place" inside the Xinjiang internment camps, with 135 factory facilities identified within the camps covering over 21 e6sqft of land. The report noted that "[f]ourteen million square feet of new factories were built in 2018 alone" within the camps and that "former detainees said they were never given a choice about working, and that they earned a pittance or no pay at all". In January 2021, BBC News reported accounts of organized mass rape and sexual torture carried out by Chinese authorities in the internment camps. There have been multiple reports that mass deaths have occurred inside the camps.

Fabrication narrative
The Chinese government has claimed that critics of its policies within Xinjiang have made up information or engaged in fabrication, attempting to instead portray that Uyghurs live happily within Xinjiang.

Denial of the existence of the Xinjiang internment camps
In early 2018, Chinese Communist Party officials repeatedly denied the existence of the Xinjiang internment camps.

Chinese government accusations against scholars
In 2021, Chinese Communist Party deputy head of propaganda Xu Guixiang claimed that German anthropologist Adrian Zenz had fabricating information relating to human rights abuses in Xinjiang after the United States, United Kingdom, European Union members, and other countries issuing sanctions against China for its human rights abuses.

Counterterrorism narrative
China has used the global "war on terror" of the 2000s to frame "separatist" and ethnic unrest as acts of Islamist terrorism to legitimize its counter-insurgency policies in Xinjiang.

In December 2015, the Associated Press reported that China had effectively expelled Ursula Gauthier, a French journalist, "for questioning the official line equating ethnic violence in the western Muslim region with global terrorism." Gauthier, who was the first foreign journalist forced to leave China since 2012, was subject to what the AP described as an "abusive and intimidating campaign" by Chinese state media that accused her of "having hurt the feelings of the Chinese people" and that a Chinese Foriegn Ministry spokesman accused her of emboldening terrorism. In August 2018, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination decried the "broad definition of terrorism and vague references to extremism" used by Chinese legislation, noting that there were numerous reports of detention of large numbers of ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities on the "pretext of countering terrorism". In 2019, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, Sam Brownback, and Nathan Sales have each said that the Chinese government consistently misuses "counterterrorism" as a pretext for cultural suppression and human rights abuses.

While the Chinese government initially outright denied the existence of the Xinjiang internment camps, the government later attempted to portray the camps as a response to national security threats posed by the Uyghur people and as "vocational training centers."reasonable response to a national security threat, and claiming the camps are vocational training centers.