Human rights in China: activists say sensationalist reports on Xinjiang do more harm than good

International pressure against China over its Xinjiang policies has gained traction in recent months, with China criticised over the treatment of Uygur Muslims in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. China has denied allegations of forced labour and detention. We look at the issues in this series. Since starting the Xinjiang Victims Database in 2018, Gene Bunin has seen the world’s media turn its attention to allegations that China is violating the rights of ethnic groups in the Xinjiang region. But while Bunin, a Russian-US human rights activist, says the attention is welcome, he says it is not helpful when information shared by the media is inaccurate. The Xinjiang Victims Database has as many as 14,500 cases showing examples of Uygurs who have been detained and whose whereabouts are still unknown. Many of these cases have been cross-checked and verified with witness testimony and online evidence. The United Nations has estimated that up to 1 million Uygurs and other members of Muslim ethnic minority groups have been detained in re-education camps. Since January, Washington has labelled China’s repression of the Uygurs and other Muslim ethnic minority groups as “genocide”. Bunin spent several years in Xinjiang, studying and learning the Uygur language. He left the region in 2018 after his Uygur contacts began disappearing. He declined to comment directly for this article but on his Facebook page he criticised a BBC report from February alleging “systematic rape” in the re-education camps built by the Chinese government. Bunin said there were indeed cases of rapes in the estimated hundreds of detention camps peppered around the region, but the evidence for systemic rape had not been established. “You cannot write a news story claiming systematic rape based on three eyewitness accounts, not all of whom are reliable … You just can’t and the BBC should know better,” Bunin said in the Facebook post. “Take that from someone who’s been dealing with testimonies 24/7 for the past two years now.” What is going on in Xinjiang and who are the Uygur people? Bunin argues that his work shows the human rights abuses in Xinjiang exist but that the cause of correctly documenting abuses is harmed if the media runs with sensationalised headlines rather than corroborating accounts given to them – even if corroboration is made difficult by China’s government. “Eyewitness testimonies are an incredibly valuable source of evidence, and them losing their credibility and being disregarded as cheap propaganda would be disastrous and harmful to all of us,” he wrote a week later on Facebook. When asked about Bunin’s posts, the BBC said: “We stand by our journalism and totally reject accusations of inaccuracy or ideological bias. Our journalists have reported these stories truthfully and fairly, as they do everywhere around the world.” Despite Bunin’s pivotal role in sharing hard evidence about China’s crackdown on the Uygurs since 2018 – allowing journalists to cite individual cases and for testimony to be put before parliamentary hearings in the West – no international news outlets cited the activist’s long critique. This includes the international arms of Chinese state media, such as the nationalistic tabloid Global Times, which accused Bunin in an April 9 article of running his database with funds from anti-China think tanks in the United States and Australia. The Xinjiang Victims Database is fully crowdfunded, according to the website’s FAQ. All donations are publicly logged and funding from government organisations – especially those with ties to the US – are not accepted. Angst, agreement over anonymous report questioning Xinjiang ‘genocide’ “This rule applies double to the US government as we do not want the association – the crisis in Xinjiang is not a US-China issue and should not be seen as such,” the website said. Bunin is not the only critic of China’s policies in Xinjiang with concerns about how the crisis is being covered by foreign media. Ma Haiyun, an associate professor of history at Frostburg State University in Maryland, has every reason to oppose the Chinese Communist Party. Ma is a member of the Hui, one of China’s largest Muslim ethnic minorities. Like the Uygurs in the far-west region in Xinjiang, the Hui have also faced crackdowns on religion in recent years. Ma, who researches China’s relations with the Islamic world, said several of his Hui friends had been arrested on spurious charges. He avoids contacting Hui scholars in mainland China for fear it might lead to their detention. His grandfather died fighting the communists for a Hui Muslim warlord clique back in the 1950s, when the People’s Republic of China had just been established. But as accusations that Beijing is committing genocide in Xinjiang gain traction, Ma is concerned that discussions on the widespread human rights abuses in the region are taking a wrong turn. “In the current political climate, if you publicly state that there is no genocide in Xinjiang, it will affect your reputation to the point where if I said this, half of my friends would cut me off,” he said. Why getting to the heart of Xinjiang forced labour claims is so hard Ma said that this was in part created by Uygur activist organisations that often used sensationalist language bordering on fabrication. But Ma added that influential outlets in the US were also responsible for politicising Xinjiang’s human rights crisis. Ma said he believed the prospect of the US rallying Muslim-majority countries in Central Asia and the Middle East on the issue of Xinjiang would be one of the few ways to compel China to improve its treatment of Uygurs because it would threaten the country’s Belt and Road Initiative. However, such a tactic would require the US to radically change its stance on Israel-Palestine relations, which Ma sees as unlikely, not least because influential US outlets such as The New York Times did not give the same weighting to Israeli oppression of Palestinians, as they did to China’s oppression of the Uygurs. “This labelling of the situation in Xinjiang as a genocide, it’s all tied to geopolitics, it’s all because of US-China tensions,” he said. The real problem Less than two weeks after Bunin criticised the BBC article in February, he defended the influential British current affairs magazine The Economist. The outlet was being criticised online after publishing an editorial that argued “genocide was the wrong label” for what was happening in Xinjiang. The piece called China’s humans rights abuses in the region “horrors” but called for more evidence before allegations of genocide were thrown at China. The argument was made that countries should only accuse China of genocide if they were prepared to break off economic ties with it as a result of the designation. Bunin wrote on Facebook that while he thought there was a “slow motion” genocide going on in Xinjiang, throwing around the label was of no use to the millions of Uygurs in China. The article was a welcome call for “balance and precision”, an approach he said he deployed when addressing the human rights crisis in Xinjiang. “But today’s 0-1 information-saturated society does not care about these things. Either you say that X is evil and then we like you, or you don’t say that X is evil and you are thus our enemy. Critical thinking is somehow optional,” he wrote. A month and a half later, Bunin appealed for coverage of older people detained in Xinjiang. “OK, media – I get it. Prisons are boring and no one wants to write about it even though it’s by far the worst issue in Xinjiang today, both in scale and in terms of danger,” he wrote. “But still the headlines are dominated by more peripheral topics, such as labour, surveillance, parent-child separation, birth control, etc, as well as what-to-call-it and geopolitical spats.” Bunin gave a link to more than 250 recorded cases of Uygurs – all over the age of 55 – transferred from detention camps into long-term prison sentences. “Could some decent journalist try to at least write about the elderly people who’ve been given long sentences? Because, you know, they might just die in there?” he said. “This is kind of an emergency.”