Chengxin Pan Profile picture
Sep 27, 2020 23 tweets 8 min read Read on X
ASPI's report's Turpan Detention Center Facility #7 & Facility #1 turn out to be Gaochang District Bureau for Veterans Affairs and Gaochang District Bureau for Business & Industry Informationisation respectively. The smoking gun is that they both have external walls!
I swear most Chinese work units & government compounds have external walls, so do most Chinese schools, universities & gated communities. And don't forget the Great Wall, which means that the entire country inside the wall has been a giant concentration camp.
Satellite images of my primary & senior high schools - both with external walls!! But who knows, they may have been recently converted into detention center facilities! I boarded at the high school for 3 years & was only able to go home once a month. Sounds eerily familiar right?
Now back to Xinjiang. According to APSI Xinjiang Data Project, this is Kashgar Facility #4 (tier-2 re-education facility). Via Google and Baidu Maps, this is marked as Shen-Ka No. 5 High School, next door is Kashar Tequ Senior High School. Apparently these schools are supported
... by Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (Shenzhen Tequ), hence both school names include 'Shen' and 'Tequ'. Here is a link to the Tequ High School Sports Carnival opening ceremony - the sporting ground seems to match the satellite images. bilibili.com/video/BV1UE411…
The ASPI report noted that the usage of the land prior to 2017 was farmland. This immediately raises suspicion - newly built detention centers! Well, the whole eastern part of Kashgar was newly built. Below, the red rcircle is Kashgar Teque High School and the title says:
"Another Kashgar city was created in a short 5 year time span, thanks to rapid development of Dongcheng Xinqu (City East New District)!" A key development project is dubbed "Shenzhen City", part of the sister city program between Kashgar and Shenzhen. 3g.163.com/dy/article/FFG…
Below you can have a look at how Shenzhen is providing aid to Kashgar in the development push. not sure how effective such 1-on-1 aid programs are. Definitely there should be honest & fact-based study and critical analysis of them if anyone is interested. xjks.gov.cn/2020/07/01/bmx…
But when it comes to Xinjiang, resorting to slogans has proven hard to resist - people can read the one-on-one aid programs as cultural genocide by stealth. The following picture from the linked article is also likely to raise outrage and horror: forced Uyghur labour!
Or if you can read Chinese, it simply says: "In March 2020, the HQ of Shenzhen Aid to Xinjiang provided PPEs to enterprises in Kashgar Shenzhen Industrial Park to help enterprises resume work and production." But with such exotic scenes, who'd blame them for fearing the worst?
I know anything lining up in a row (plus external walls) in China is suspect. So it's fair game to speculate, but speculation has to have some factual foundations and be aware that anyone with relevant language skill, curiosity & time can fact-check, eg:
Honestly I have many other things to do but this time couldn't resist curiosity, & the above is what I found. Maybe all the other facilities in the report are real. Possibly, but the easily identified misinformation from the small samples doesn't inspire confidence in the rigor
... of the APSI report. Yet, it has and will get widely covered, cited as credible sources and blended into scholarly texts. New theses, papers & books on the topic will be written, a process of knowledge production, dare I say, not dissimilar to money-laundering:
disinformation, via the power of mass media, turns into information & via scholarly interest & publications, becomes scientific knowledge & objective truth. By this stage, anyone who dare depart slightly from such 'truth' becomes deniers, apologists, shills, wumaos, etc.
I'm here not to deny anything or apologise for anyone. My main point is: in order to advance your cause, however laudable and virtuous it is, you need to be rigorous and follow basic journalist norms and scholarly practices. China's lack of openness hasn't helped either.
Lack of information and openness invites wild speculation and sensational journalism. This unfortunately feeds a vicious cycle: lack of mutual trust makes even openness look like propaganda, and even genuine efforts at scholarly research and journalism look like hatchet job.
I am sure such a vicious cycle still has a long course to run, much to the delight of those whose whole career is now built on it.
*ASPI*
This screenshot comes from ASPI Xinjiang Data Project website, implying the shown facilities as detention centres. The expanded view of the map for Kashgar Facility #3 includes two schools, Kashgar Tequ High School and Shen-Ka No. 5 High School. However @Nrg8000 responded he
didn't identify the first one as a camp. Yet the expanded map clearly includes both school and provides misinformation, and is currently still on the website. So my tweet linking to a video of the first school serves to warn of such misinformation. It's also incredible to
... speculate that the other school is a detention centre, given the proximity to a real school. Indeed, I've pointed out the 2nd school (No. 5 High School) seems to be also a real school, not a detention facility. Why build a full-sized sporting field for such a facility?
The questions shown on this website about the school indicate that this is a genuine school. People asked whether this school offers Olympiad competition training classes, whether the school imposes strict discipline on unruly students, whether kids can
... carry mobile phones, whether intermitted students need an intermission certificate to re-enrol, and whether the dormitory has storage space for students' luggages. sxkid.com/question/schoo…

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More from @ChengxinPan

Aug 19, 2022
If my English comprehension is correct, here actually the UNCLOS literally defines 'high seas' as 'all parts of the sea that are NOT included in the exclusive economic zone' (EEZ), while the entire Taiwan Strait is clearly in an EEZ (200 nautical miles from the baseline).
Therefore, there is no such thing as 'considerable high seas corridor' in the Taiwan Strait. In the past, part of the EEZ might have been considered 'high seas', but not any more under the UNCLOS (perhaps one of the reasons why the US refuses to ratify it).
The US uses the vague term "international waters" (IW) to muddy the high seas water, but IW is not a defined term in international law. The lawfulness of military activities in other countries' EEZ is not clearly defined by UNCLOS, which leaves much room for contestation.
Read 5 tweets
May 25, 2022
This 'leaked' document features prominently in BBC reporting of the alleged 'shoot to kill' policy in Xinjiang. It has no doubt shocked millions of people already given the coordinated coverage in Western MSM.
As many have already pointed out, however, the font of some words used in the document is not consistent with simplified Chinese.
Moreover, when I downloaded the 'leaked file' from xinjiangpolicefiles.org/key-documents/
the version has been changed: instead of having 11 main points, it now has 9 main points.
Read 9 tweets
May 24, 2022
In this article published 6 years ago, @OliverDTurner and I argue that the American discourses of 'virtue' and 'power', shared by most Americans, are productive of the subjectivity of neoconservatism, which, despite its widely abhorred manifestation in the Bush Doctrine, is thus
more normatively appealing and more enduring than commonly understood. In fact, it could be argued that there has been a quiet neocon-ization of the West over the past two decades, with many Western countries appropriating American 'virtue' and identifying with US power.
The fact that no one talks about neoconservatism anymore today is not because it's gone, but because it's gone capillary. The deep faith in US-led virtue and power is such that the neoconservative motto of 'moral clarity' and 'military strength' has replaced good old-fashioned
Read 5 tweets
Apr 30, 2022
The Ukraine war signals that after 20+ years of failed intervention wars in Afghanistan & Iraq, the US and its allies have now rediscovered the 'winning formula' of proxy wars after the 2018 US national defense strategy identified China+Russia, not terrorism, as main threats.
To fight such wars against their designated geopolitical threats, they deploy identity narratives such as 'values', 'freedom' vs 'repression', 'democracy' vs 'autocracy' to sow & exploit divisions between rivals and their neighbors which are primed to distrust & hate each other.
Distrust opens up room for building and/or expanding alliances & strategic groupings (Quad, AUKUS and NATO) among 'like-minded democracies' right to the borders of their geopolitical rivals. Such buildup and expansion in turn exacerbate distrust & increase the chance for war.
Read 8 tweets
Jun 23, 2021
One of the US's earliest concerns about China's human rights violations dates back to the Opium War; one of the earliest UK overseas humanitarian missions also had something to do with its opium trade monopoly. Like-minded democracies have come a long way. books.google.com.au/books?id=OzsxE…
In the lead up to the Opium War, one side was appealing to 'universal values', and the other was determined not to let such 'fine things' get in the way of a big bucket of money, legal or not, and was prepared to use fake news to justify a war for it. Guess which is which?
Speaking of power transition in international relations, this was part of the original process of power transition from China to the US, 19th-century style.
Read 5 tweets
Jun 23, 2021
Australia 'blindsided' & 'ambushed' by a 'China-led' UN committee where China has a 'stranglehold'... nice media word play sufficient to turn a case of climate emergency facing Australia into the latest episode of China threat emergency for the public. theaustralian.com.au/nation/chinale…
So it comes as no surprise when the latest Lowy poll shows 63% in Australia believe China is more of a security threat to Australia than of an economic partner, a 22-point increase since last year’s poll. You wonder why public opinion has changed so much. theguardian.com/australia-news…
Most would say this reflects changing reality in China itself. Perhaps, but has that reality indeed changed so dramatically? Maybe so, but then how do we know? How many people can directly see the reality as it actually is, without relying on the interpreting filter of the media?
Read 8 tweets

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