The “Uyghur genocide narrative” is falling apart and Jaq James, an Australian socio-legal research consultant is one of the main architects of the collapse.
Ms. James has demonstrated a remarkable degree of integrity and consistency in seeking, at her own cost in terms of both time and money, to help people who have been wronged by a narrative which gained incredible momentum. Due to some amazing research and tenacity and thanks to her CO-WEST-PRO Papers, the narrative is running out of steam.
There was never a genocide, that much is known. So, the word was incorporated into another PR blitz to become “cultural genocide”. Now, unfortunately, because of its misuse, the word genocide has lost all meaning, it’s thrown around willingly by the same people who would have us believe that an invasion is an intervention, an assassination is a strike and torture is enhanced interrogation.
It was alleged, that up to a million Uyghurs were incarcerated in camps but this proved to be no more than an extrapolation of numbers by a researcher and amplified in a UN meeting; never by the UN. In order to justify this outrageous claim, it was necessary to find prisons to incarcerate a million people, which, over time, grew into many more.
An Australian think tank (ASPI) entered the fray and identified “camps” across the region. Except that they didn’t. A region so large needs boarding schools and residential factories. The same region, because of a destabilised and radicalised minority, some with terrorist tendencies, also needs security. So, everything with a gate, fence, security presence and dormitories when viewed from satellites, was identified and analysed, by a young man at ASPI, who has never set foot in China, as being “a camp”; 380 of them! In the list, to give him credit, there are some prisons. But in a region with 25 million people and a terrorist problem, that’s hardly a surprise.
It became clear that most “camps” were no more than factories, schools, colleges and vocational training centres, designed to achieve two goals, to educate and de-radicalise an impoverished and under-educated population in the remote region, and a poverty alleviation program that has, according to the World Bank, impressed the world.
The narrative needed to be shifted, so, the Uyghurs we were told were being forced to pick cotton in slave labour conditions. Except, again, they weren’t. China, in 2019, produced over 6 million metric tonnes of cotton. Studies suggest that a slave could, if “incentivised” pick as much as 300lb of cotton in a day, it doesn’t take a mathematician to understand that we’d be witnessing slave numbers far bigger than the pre-Civil War US, there was simply no evidence for that.
Furthermore, Xinjiang has become the home to several US Cotton Harvesting equipment suppliers, John Deere alone sold over half a billion dollars of cotton harvesting equipment to Xinjiang in one year. So, the “slave labour” stories needed to be changed. And they were, by the same Australian think tank ASPI, when they published a report called: “Uyghurs for Sale”. International NGOs, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) jumped on this bandwagon and wrote their own reports on China’s alleged human rights abuses.
Now it seemed that Uyghurs who weren’t being “genocided” before, weren’t being forced to pick cotton anymore, they were apparently being forced out of Xinjiang and sent to work in different provinces and regions of China.
This is where CO-WEST-PRO really came to front and centre. CO_WEST_PRO’s analysis of this reports completely eliminated any credibility ASPI had in regards to Xinjiang and the analyses of two NGO reports has been summarised as failing to provide any recognised methodology with nothing in the form of admissible evidence, in fact, after careful assessment, there appears to be very little that can be described as anything other than headline seeking junk research.
CO-WEST-PRO did not state outright that there was no slave labour or human rights abuses, instead the reports were carefully and methodically stripped back, layer by layer and legally examined. Through this method, it was proven that the entire narrative has been based on opinions, misstated facts, mistranslations, misinterpretations and misunderstandings. Any reader can now clearly see that the allegations were not just unsupported, they were unsupportable with the evidence and information cited.
Readers can find the OHCR’s report here; and more on this topic here: Massive secret network was pushing the western narrative, and here: Australia excoriated over refusal to allow UN torture committee to visit places of detention.
Jerry Grey is a former British Police officer who was a general manager in a multi-national security company based in Australia for 17 years. He has lived, worked, travelled extensively and studied in China for almost two decades. He holds a Master Degree in cross cultural change management. Jerry Grey is a freelance writer living in Southern China's Guangdong province.
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