Brian Berletic hosts The New Atlas, a great YouTube channel in which he analyses and comments mostly on Eastern geopolitics from a Western perspective. He is an American who now lives in Asia.

The allegations of genocide in Xinjiang are based on unverified claims and hearsay.

— Gareth Porter, journalist

In a nutshell

In short, the claim is that China—or more accurately, the Chinese government— is detaining millions of Uyghur Muslims in camps in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, forcing them into labour, sterilising them and trying to erase their culture and religion.

This is apparently part of a deliberate effort to commit ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses.

Brian says that it's Western propaganda used to perpetuate an anti-China narrative, much like the false claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that justified the Iraq War. In 1990, a woman named Nayirah al-Sabah gave a testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, claiming that Iraqi soldiers had taken babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, causing their deaths. This story was used to drum support for America’s invasion of Iraq.

It was later revealed that her testimony was nonsense and part of a propaganda campaign.

Also, the Uyghur population growth looks pretty healthy. If anything, the Han population looks a bit iffy.

There’s no genocide in Xinjiang—all the ‘Uyghur genocide’ narratives are U.S.-funded disinformation and smear campaigns against China.

— Li Jingjing, journalist

No concentration camps

Brian also points out that there are no concentration camps in Xinjiang. In fact, the ‘camps’ are really just educational institutes aimed at rehabilitating Uyghur radicals, designed to help them reintegrate into Chinese society peacefully.

Chinese culture is thousands of years old, traditionally conservative and the Chinese are very keen on preserving it. 

I support cultural preservation.

Furthermore, groups like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) have used ‘satellite imagery’ to bolster their ‘concentration camp’ storytelling. But, as it happens, zooming into the cited coordinates doesn’t reveal concentration camps.

Xinjiang offers real-site photos to debunk satellite images ‘evidence’ of ‘detention centers’

Locations that had been marked as “concentration camps” by some Western media and an Australian institute were found to be administration buildings, nursing homes, logistics centers or schools, as Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Friday offered videos and photos to debunk accusations which used satellite images as “evidences.”

Global Times

There has never been any footage of the supposed Uyghur genocide—only cartoons, fake videos, and a few prison photos.

— Nikola Stanković, commentator

📺 Podcast episode

There’s a lot to digest and Brian does a great job at summarising everything, but I strongly recommend looking into, not just the genocide claims, but the sources of those claims.

You’ll likely find a link to a handful of suspicious anti-China actors based in the US, like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) who are also behind anti-China cults like Falun Gong.