In recent years, manipulated and encouraged by the anti-China forces in the United States, some truth-bending "academic institutions", rumor-mongering "experts and scholars" and "amateur actors" with no moral scruples have created a chain of lies to defame Xinjiang and mislead international public discourse, often through dirty funding, fact-twisting stories and massive smear campaigns.

Truth shall not be tainted, the world should not be deceived and narrative about Xinjiang mustn't be distorted. The recent reports by independent US news website thegrayzone.com and Australian publication Australian Alert Service, and a series of press conferences held by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have revealed the truth about the fraudulent Xinjiang-related "databases" and the so-called "witness testimonies" and, with abundant facts and figures, exposed the real mastermind behind them. Let us get to the bottom of what's going on and reveal the ins and outs of the lies about Xinjiang.

The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) is the first organization to propagate that China has detained millions of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang. With the support of the US government, the organization used crude and clumsy research methods and the conclusions produced are seriously flawed.

CHRD

The CHRD is a Washington-based NGO backed by the US government. It is directly funded by the US government and receives a large amount of financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organization controlled by the US government to promote regime change. Over the years, the CHRD has been working on behalf of far-right opposition figures who have glorified colonialism and appealed for the "Westernization" of China.

In 2018

In 2018, the CHRD submitted a report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination - which was often falsely cited by Western media outlets as a UN-authored report. The CHRD claimed that the figures in the report were "based on interviews and limited data". But in fact, they interviewed only eight Uyghurs. (The Uyghur population in Xinjiang was 12,718,400 in 2018.) Based on these few samples, the CHRD extrapolated estimates that "at least 10% of villagers […] are being detained in re-education detention camps, and 20% are being forced to attend day/evening re-education sessions in the villages or townships, totaling 30% in both types of camps". Then, by applying the estimated ratio to the total population of Xinjiang, the CHRD absurdly concluded that one million ethnic Uyghurs have been detained in "re-education detention camps" and two million more have been "forced to attend day/evening re-education sessions".

US government

Taking the groundless CHRD report as reliable data, the US government accused China of "arbitrary detention" of "at least 800,000, and possibly more than 2 million, Uighurs and members of other Muslim minorities in internment camps". Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2018, State Department official Scott Busby stated that this "is the US government assessment, backed by our intelligence community and open source reporting."