Thread by @benmauk

The most risible thing about Blumenthal's denial of an internment drive in Xinjiang is that they absolutely *didn't* examine the source data, which is readily available from public Chinese government sources!

These are the foundations of Adrian Zenz's scholarly claims.

https://twitter.com/themattdimitri/status/1287355528205615106

The only work Blumenthal has published on the subject is this article. 95% of it is devoted to attacking Adrian Zenz's evangelical background and character. There's almost no discussion of the research itself.

What discussion there is, is wrong.

thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/chi…

There's lots about Zenz himself in this weird GZ article. Some of his beliefs and writings are indeed strange. But there are also lame Daily Mail-style gotchas, like this line about Zenz, a China scholar who uses Twitter largely to disseminate his work. This is journalism?

This paragraph is the only direct attack on the contents of his research in the *entire article*. It's also wrong. It simply doesn't fully describe how Zenz arrived at his estimate or his follow-up revisions.

Certainly, it omits most of the article's work examining the scale of internment. It also uses quotation marks around a phrase, "over 1 million," that does not appear in the paper itself except as part of a broad range. It's so deceptive I would call it a lie.

Zenz is quite forthcoming about how he comes to his conclusions. His writing is standard for peer-reviewed academic work, which it doesn't seem like either Grayzone author has read much of.

Most of his (dozens or hundreds of) references are gov. reports and state journalism.

In particular, Zenz used work bids, public construction plans, quoted eyewitnesses, and security sector job postings to work out his understanding of the scale of the drive. You can't read a fraction of these without coming to the conclusion that a huge effort is underway.

Here is a link to this article, the only peer-reviewed work of Zenz's they cover in the Grayzone piece. Read it yourself! Most of Zenz's work is available online. Most of it overwhelmingly concerns the interpretation of Chinese government documents.

tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

The paper even ends with a dense eight-page list of public bids in China related to re-education facilities. The URLs are right there. Nothing is hidden or underhanded here. Have a look!

It is true that the section of the paper specifically devoted to estimating total number of detainees (p.27-30) uses the sources GZ mentions: RFA and a leaked report by what may be a partisan group. Maybe you think those sources are CIA inventions. Fine! But:

1. Zenz is forthcoming that there are no official figures, and he notes that his estimate assumes the sources are broadly accurate. For this reason the numbers themselves are downplayed in the article. (Not Zenz's fault that journalists like big numbers.)

2. Zenz uses the Chinese government's own figures on the former re-education through labor program to show that the size of the new drive isn't out of line with what is already publicly admitted about mass detention in China.

As the anthropologist @dtbyler has said, if you have a problem with Zenz's peer-reviewed work, you really have a problem with the Chinese government's own claims. That's the wealth of his source material.

player.fm/series/time-to…

What's so impressive is the size and boldness of the Grayzone lie. *Anyone* can read these papers! I've read most of them. In many cases you can track down the original documents he cites! You don't have to trust or even like Zenz to do the routine shoe-leather journalism here.

And while not everyone is qualified to, say, read Chinese government work orders (I'm not), it's not hard for a journalist to follow up on claims by picking up the damn telephone and calling some non-partisan experts.

If you actually read the papers and check the claims, you'll find much that is irrefutable. You'll also see that scholarship changes with new evidence. In this 2019 paper, Zenz adjusts his estimate to "a speculative upper limit estimate of 1.5 million"

jpolrisk.com/brainwashing-p…

He cites food subsidies specifically earmarked for vocational schools. You can agree or disagree with the math, but there's no deception and no partisan source--just cited government reports, part of a peer-reviewed paper with dozens of references.

I think it's good to be skeptical of partisan reports, one-off stories, and individual eyewitness accounts. In the past, they have certainly misled journalists and useful idiots into stumping for imperialist wars.

But knee-jerk opposition to human rights claims, even when they are strategically adopted by US interests, requires blinkered credulity and faith in bad actors.

Credulity on the left led to the widespread denial of genocide in Cambodia. Did we learn anything?

In conclusion, Blumenthal's lazy, uncritical, evangelically anti-US, water-muddying "journalism" disgusts me.

It isn't as bad as Trumpism, it IS Trumpism. It is conclusion before evidence, and ad hominem über alles.