Der Spiegel in Xinjiang: The Misrepresentation of the Mundane
A Critical Examination of Der Spiegel's Coverage of Xinjiang: Media Bias and the Resurgence of Anti-Communist Sentiment
In the world of journalism, credibility is paramount, and the German news magazine Der Spiegel has long enjoyed a reputation for in-depth reporting and a commitment to the truth, but only when it doesn’t relate to communism or Germany’s geopolitical enemies. Its coverage of China, Xinjiang and the Uyghur population has raised significant questions about its journalistic integrity and objectivity. Der Spiegel's reporters, who visited the region, appear to have mischaracterized ordinary occurrences as evidence of human rights violations against the Uyghur population. Such misrepresentations not only distort our understanding of the situation in Xinjiang but also contribute to the ongoing vilification of China in the Western media. Ironically, this is happening in a country that has been diligently working to distance itself from its Nazi past, a past that was vehemently anti-communist, an ideology that modern-day China follows. This situation presents a peculiar paradox: as Germany seeks to discard its historical baggage, it simultaneously propagates the same anti-communist narratives that were once a cornerstone of Nazi ideology.
I’m often told to verify sources through Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC). It’s a website that ranks different media sources based on their potential bias and credibility. Der Spiegel/Spiegel Online is considered to be the most popular mainstream media organization in Germany, and MBFC claims that they have High Credibility and “slightly favor the left”. But alas, this is an inherent problem with Western media. You can source the literal CIA in matters pertaining to America’s geopolitical enemies and still be considered to have a ‘high credibility’.
I’m certain that if a media organization sourced CGTN (Chinese state media) in matters pertaining to the US, they would be labeled with ‘low credibility’. CGTN itself has a ‘low credibility’ rating on MBFC, while Voice of America and Radio Free Asia are both rated as highly credible. I find that very interesting, since every single Radio Free Asia article about China I’ve ever read uses anonymous, totally-real-I-promise sources. So yea, I don’t trust MBFC if they label CIA funded media as credible. But, I digress.
A Journey Through China's Uyghur Region
The Three Worlds of Xinjiang
Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been sent to re-education camps in China since 2017. Today, the repression continues, but less conspicuously. The Xinjiang region appears to be in a significant stage of transition.
Here’s the latest anti-China propaganda piece from the ‘highly credible’ source Der Spiegel. Spoiler alert: there is nothing credible about this report. The description makes the bold claim of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs being sent to ‘re-education camps’, we’ll get to where they sourced that number from in a bit. At least they didn’t go with the magic ‘millions’ number that so many western publications spew. Not that it makes much of a difference, however.
Spiegel sent a team of journalists to tour southern Xinjiang for a week and a half. Their goal? To further a common western narrative. I wonder if the ‘highly credible’ Der Spiegel is familiar with the concept of confirmation bias? Funnily enough, this is why China limits certain western journalists from accessing Xinjiang or the so-called ‘re-education camps’. When you’re already set in your beliefs, any mundane thing you see can be spun as suspicious. Spiegel exhibited this propagandistic behaviour in spades in this article.
You know, BBC also sent a team to Xinjiang, to tour a ‘re-education camp’. They saw some graffiti in a bathroom which sounded like a song lyric and attributed it to CPC malice. The words “Oh my heart, don’t break” on a stall door is definitely proof that China is genociding the Uyghurs or whatever. Ok, BBC. The most interesting part of that video is when they return to the ‘camp’ unannounced and see a group of students—ahem prisoners, according to BBC—leaving for the night. They still tried to spin this as a negative somehow.
But back to Spiegel:
The Chinese, who are once again traveling extensively following the lifting of the country's zero-COVID policy, increasingly view the Xinjiang region as an attractive tourist destination. In just the five days of holidays in early May, the region recorded 8 million visitors, an increase of 140 percent over the same period last year. The increase was twice as high as the national average.
See what I mean? At face value, applied to any other country, you would think that an area like Xinjiang, so rich with culture, being a tourist destination would be good. More people to experience and enjoy Uyghur culture. But nope, this is most definitely proof of China replacing Uyghurs with Han Chinese!
In the West, by contrast, Xinjiang is primarily associated with the oppression of the Uyghurs. After Beijing unleashed its "Strike Hard" campaign in 2014, hundreds of thousands of women and men were shipped to camps, with some estimates putting the figure at more than 1 million.
This is a bit of a self report, and it’s wildly ironic. Yes, most of the West delusionally believes the CIA propaganda about Xinjiang. Most westerners are incapable of using even the tiniest bit of critical thinking and swallow red scare propaganda like they’re starving (well, 1 in 4 American adults are food insecure, so they may actually be starving).
I guess I spoke too soon about the famed ‘1 million’ number, because Spiegel does mention it here. Curious how they don’t give a source though, they just say ‘some estimates’. Those estimates come from CIA-funded christo-fascist Adrian Zenz, who we’ll see more of later in this article. Sorry, that’s another spoiler.
The Xinjiang Police Files, leaked police documents from the internment camps that DER SPIEGEL and other media published in 2022, were just further evidence of events that the UN human rights chief at the time determined could constitute "crimes against humanity."
I guess it comes sooner than we thought. They don’t mention him by name here, but the Xinjiang Police Files were released by Adrian Zenz. The other Spiegel article they link to under the word ‘published’ there says this:
The data was initially sent to the German anthropologist Adrian Zenz, who has published secret information about the camps in the past. According to Zenz, the information comes from an anonymous source, apparently a hacker who managed to penetrate the computer systems of Chinese security agencies. According to the anthropologist, the source placed no conditions on the use of the data and no payment was made.
Another CIA sponsored asset using anonymous sources to ‘prove’ that China is keeping Uyghurs in internment camps. Typical. It is quite interesting that Adrian Zenz just happened to be sent these documents after telling the BBC that it was impossible to ‘prove’ what the West claimed China was doing. I guess he found that proof, huh? It just… fell into his hands?
Further down in the main Spiegel article:
A team of journalists with DER SPIEGEL spent a week and a half traveling through southern Xinjiang at the end of April. Our journey took us along the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, from Korla through Hotan to Kashgar, including stops in the desert town of Qakilik and rural Karakax. In southern Xinjiang, the Uyghur share of the population is higher than in the north, and their culture is traditionally strong. When the campaign of repression was at its most rabid, this part of the country appeared to be under siege.
Xinjiang “appeared to be under siege”? According to who? Zenz? Radio Free Asia? They don’t even say. But, it’s not under ‘siege’ now, right? When did the ‘siege’ stop, and why?
Now, it seems that three worlds exist simultaneously in Xinjiang: A wonderland full of orientalist kitsch that has been concocted for tourists. A shadowy world of continuing repression, although it is harder to see than it was a few years ago. And an in-between world in which most Uyghurs probably live: no longer in an absolute state of emergency and yet far from normality.
“Orientalist kitsch”? Does Spiegel know what orientalism is? This is China. Literally the Orient. Orientalism is when, for instance, a British museum puts up a China exhibit full of stolen artifacts from when they colonized China. When an East Asian country celebrates East Asian culture, that is not orientalism. When your publication from a Western country makes wild claims about Xinjiang that aren’t backed by any tangible evidence while claiming that you care about the well being of East Asians, that is orientalism. Stop projecting, Spiegel.
It’s harder to see the ‘continuing repression’? Because… it doesn’t exist? Are we forgetting about Occam’s Razor? The simplest explanation is almost always the correct one. You don’t see any repression. It’s not being masterfully hidden, it’s just not happening.
There aren’t ‘three worlds’ in Xinjiang. There’s one. It’s a world where the CPC is helping to modernize a small portion of Uyghurs that previously lived in primitive villages with no running water or electricity, where infant mortality was the highest in all of China at almost 46%. It’s a world where an even smaller portion of Uyghurs that were radicalized by the violent East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) to commit hundreds of terror attacks on China are deradicalized in the most fair way possible. Which is infinitely better than how the US or other capitalist countries deradicalize Islamic extremists. The US even imprisoned 22 Uyghurs in Guantanamo Bay after 9/11. I wonder what they did to them?
Efforts are obviously being made in Kashgar to implement the instructions issued by China's state and party leader. "We should fully showcase the Chinese culture by displaying what can be touched and seen to strike a common chord," Chinese President Xi Jinping said during a visit to Xinjiang in July 2022.
It was the first time Xi had traveled to the region since the wave of repression began in 2014. It could be interpreted as a victory tour, a signal that he believes the population is now sufficiently integrated.
More scare tactics here. Now it’s a “wave of repression”. Of course Spiegel doesn’t mention anything about the hundreds of terror attacks that China was addressing, starting in 2014. Xi Jinping didn’t go to Xinjiang in 2022 as a victory over the newly ‘integrated’ Uyghurs. He went to celebrate the success of their deradicalization program and the uplifting of those Uyghurs who used to let their children use a piece of bread as a soother. Wouldn’t you celebrate the end of ETIM’s reign of terror?
Many of the police stations, lined up like shoe boxes every few hundred yards along the roadsides, are indeed abandoned, their metal doors barricaded. At market gates and the entrances to the Old Town of Kashgar, there are still security checkpoints, but the metal detectors are turned off and don’t beep. Guards fiddle with their mobile phones in boredom.
Spiegel is providing more proof of the success of the deradicalization program while still neglecting to mention ETIM at all. Why did they have metal detectors? What purpose do metal detectors serve? It’s to find weapons. What are weapons used for?
It appears that mass tourism and mass incarceration are not mutually exclusive. The high-security facility is located among sand dunes in the desert northwest of Hotan. "Loyalty to the Party, strict discipline," a quote from a Chinese police oath, is written in red characters on the flat roof. Several rows of buildings are located behind a high wall, in front of it a fence, barbed wire, electric wire and a watchtower.
It could be a regular prison. But might it also be one of the infamous internment camps? Either way, there is a high probability that a disproportionate number of Uyghurs will be imprisoned there who were not convicted according to the rule of law.
Hint: it’s a regular prison. Because there was never any internment camps. Adrian Zenz was paid by US Congress to tell you there was, and you believed it for some reason. He’s also the reason why you would ignorantly believe there is a ‘high probability’ that more Uyghurs will be imprisoned there.
But the places where they are imprisoned may no longer be the same. In 2020, research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) caused a global sensation. The researchers examined thousands of satellite images of Xinjiang at night, zooming in on places where lights could be seen in remote areas. By doing so, they identified 380 facilities in Xinjiang, some of them high security, that they believed to be camps.
Why am I not at all surprised that Spiegel would source the ASPI here? If you didn’t know, the ASPI is funded by the Australian Department of Defence, the US Government, several American mega-corporations like Google and Meta (Facebook), and a smattering of defence contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. They exist to spread propaganda against China to bolster defence spending. They want to manufacture consent for the current cold war or even for a future hot war, who knows. Read more about the ASPI here:
The ASPI ‘research’ that Spiegel mentions didn’t cause a “global sensation”. A few western countries circle-jerked over it, like they do with anything that implies ‘China bad’. ASPI used satellite data to try to prove that there are hundreds of ‘internment camps’ in Xinjiang. Satellite data is commonly used in anti-DPRK propaganda as well, and just like with the DPRK, satellites cannot and never will be able to prove torture. You cannot tell what is and isn’t a ‘torture camp’ through a top-down view from space.
Foreign journalists accredited in China went to the camps and verified the existence of some. By now, many of the suspected camps are apparently no longer used for that purpose.
Spiegel of course neglects to mention who these foreign journalists are, and since they are being purposely vague, I’m going to assume they mean this random Chinese dude who (CIA-operated) Radio Free Asia platformed. I’m not sure if he was paid by RFA to do this, but they seem to be the first organization to give his video any attention so I wouldn’t be surprised.
Random nobody ‘Guanguan’ traveled to a few abandoned prisons in China and got video of the outside of them. They were clearly out of commission, as the guard towers were empty. The west of course takes this as concrete evidence of the existence of these torture camps. You know who has a lot of high security prisons that aren’t empty at all? The US, who funds and operates Radio Free Asia. They have almost 25% of the world’s prison population despite having only 4% of the world’s total population. But no, China bad. US good. Excellent reporting, Spiegel.
On this reporting trip, the team from DER SPIEGEL attempted to visit around a half dozen of these locations. Two of them are definitely in operation, heavily secured and well shielded. Another now houses a technical college.
Hey Spiegel, it was always a technical college. You need to prove that it once wasn’t, which you haven’t. This is why satellite images prove nothing. You find a huge complex, and since you are trying to prove a narrative you claim it is a torture camp. From above, colleges can look like prisons or ‘camps’. You just disproved ASPI’s research completely and you’re too ideologically motivated to admit that.
Another site in Karakax near Hotan, described by the German Xinjiang researcher Adrian Zenz in 2020, appears to be abandoned. The facility looks forbidding, cameras are mounted on the corners of the walls, and the masts of floodlights can be seen behind them.
There we go, they finally mention Zenz by name. It should be noted that Zenz is German, so of course Spiegel will platform him, no matter how much of an anti-Semitic piece of shit he is. Since losing WWII Germany has desperately tried to distance itself from it’s Nazi, anti-communist past. They sort of handled the Nazi part, but they’re just as anti-com as ever. They’ll do anything to try to prove to you that communism doesn’t work. Communists saved us from your terror once, Germany. They’ll do it again if you keep this capitalist, red scare, yellow peril bullshit up. Germany is militant about suppressing any kind of Nazi imagery or praise, yet the most popular German publication will platform a dude who said that Jews will perish in a coming rapture. Not very kosher, Spiegel.
Adrian Zenz is a ‘Senior China Fellow’ at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC). They were started by a US Act of Congress and base their platform off of the widely debunked (even by three of its contributors) Black Book of Communism. The Black Book greatly exaggerates the death toll of China-under-Mao’s Great Leap Forward, among many other ‘victims of communism’. Should we trust what a VOC Fellow says about China? Spiegel thinks so. I sure don’t.
But the police station on the access road has apparently been out of service for quite some time. There's no delivery traffic and only one car parked nearby at all. A Uyghur man of about 50 years gets out of the car and introduces himself as the person responsible for security at the facility.
He says that no journalists are allowed to approach the site without permission from the local propaganda authority. Company policy. No, he says, by no means was anybody locked up here. The conversation ends there. That happened often during the trip, leaving our impressions fragmented and contradictory.
The conversation ends abruptly? Could it maybe be because of a language barrier issue or some other mundane reason? No, that Uyghur man is clearly hiding the repression of his fellow Uyghurs, as Spiegel seems to imply. Maybe he knows that you’re there to lie or exaggerate about him and his ilk? Because that’s what you did here, many times.
At the beginning of May, analysts at IPVM in the United States published a new report in which they reveal that a Shanghai police department is having a digital warning system built that will alert them as soon as any Uyghur person arrives in the city. It’s obvious that the persecution and monitoring of Uyghurs in China persists.
Now this is a really interesting bit of propaganda. Here’s the IPVM report. These camera systems have the capability to track Uyghurs, yes, but what IPVM and Spiegel neglect to mention is that they can track any ethnicity. They simply highlight the Uyghur tracking capabilities because just merely mentioning the words ‘Uyghur’ or ‘Xinjiang’ gets your report clicks and attention.
Look at the wiki page for IPVM. The majority of it talks about their reporting on the Uyghurs. I had never heard of IPVM before this. Now, they’ve hit the mainstream in the West because anyone who says ‘China bad’ is platformed everywhere. From the wiki:
The company's investigations on surveillance equipment used in China have been widely cited by major newspapers in the United States, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Isn’t that any investigative journalism corporation's wet dream? Being platformed by mainstream media? Every country that does mass surveillance has systems that can identify different ethnicities. The same company accused of marketing ‘Uyghur detection’ for China is also advertising it in Britain, which is famous for being the most egregious surveillance state in the world. Even shopping malls in Western capitalist countries are tracking ethnicity, so they can try to more efficiently sell you useless crap.
The FBI was just revealed to have “misused controversial surveillance powers more than 278,000 times between 2020 and early 2021 to conduct warrantless searches on George Floyd protesters, January 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol, and donors to a Congressional campaign”. This is what the PATRIOT Act was designed to do. The US admits to it. No one cares.
If China is tracking Uyghurs, so what? ETIM still exists. They still think Xinjiang is actually East Turkestan and they want to use any means necessary, including violence, to separate from China. If they start up another terror campaign, should China be prepared or should they let more citizens be slaughtered?
According to Spiegel, though, “it’s obvious that the persecution and monitoring of Uyghurs in China persists.” If this is proof of that, then it also proves that every country using facial recognition systems are persecuting and monitoring minorities. Not sure you want to open that can of worms.
IPVM are just clout goblins, looking to capitalize on the billion dollar ‘Yellow Peril’ industry. Next.
Three young Uyghur men want to talk, they are curious and clearly did not expect to meet a German here. Did we come to Xinjiang by plane? Do we like the food here? Their carefree attitude suggests that they’re not worried about getting into trouble if they’re seen with us.
…
The three men want to take us to a place across the river where more people gather to dance. On the way there, the butcher runs across a vending machine and wants to buy some water. We continue our stroll. But when he doesn’t reappear after a few minutes, his friend goes to find him. He doesn’t come back either. The policeman also suddenly disappears without saying goodbye.
Why would they get into trouble being seen with you? Because you had already made up your mind about Xinjiang before traveling there and every little thing seems suspicious to you? Then these three Uyghurs clearly got distracted or occupied by something else, and of course Spiegel spins that in the most negative way. Maybe they went to meet up with some friends? Maybe you just weren’t that interesting and they were done with you? Maybe you were peppering them with awkward, nonsensical, or accusatory questions?
During our trip to Xinjiang, we are monitored nonstop by unidentified persons in plainclothes. We understand that they will interrogate any of our random acquaintances as soon as we are out of sight.
Maybe because you’re clearly there to try to prove an ideologically driven narrative? Maybe because they don’t trust you, for good reason?
In one instance, we stepped out onto the first-floor balcony of a carpet store. In the street below, we could see a person with whom we had just been speaking being approached by someone who had been shadowing us.
Spiegel seems to imply that the people they talk to are being interrogated to, I don’t know, make sure they didn’t reveal any secrets or something? But, did they ever think it could be the other way around? These foreign reporters from a publication that spreads CIA propaganda about China are acting really weird and suspicious, and their ‘shadows’ are making sure they aren’t plotting anything or poisoning people’s minds with propaganda?
At Kashgar's livestock market, some of the traders clearly hadn't shaved for a few weeks – something you didn't see in 2021, since wearing a beard could land you in a camp. But none of them were wearing a full beard of the kind that pious Muslims in the rest of Central Asia often wear.
This ‘beards landing you in a camp’ claim comes from some other ‘leaked’ documents from China. They were also presented and ‘verified’ by Adrian Zenz, as outlined in this BBC article. They’re also complete bullshit, like everything that comes from Zenz.
The fact that Spiegel saw Uyghurs with beards also completely disproves this nonsense, yet they won’t admit it. Yawn.
In and around Hotan, clusters of boarding schools and technical colleges have gone up in recent years, preparing thousands of young Uyghurs for a productive life in blue-collar jobs. Additional such educational facilities are under construction – even in the middle of the desert, right next to the high-security facility with the police oath on the roof.
Hey Spiegel, this is what they were always doing. Preparing Uyghurs to integrate into modern society by teaching them Mandarin and basic skills or trades. You western puppets just lied about it and said they were actually ‘internment camps’ with zero proof. You did it because China is advancing more and more every year and your governments are terrified of their citizens realizing how much better it is when you move away from capitalism.
Our Uyghur driver tells us that his 13-year-old daughter also attends one of these boarding schools, adding that she's learning good Mandarin. Room and board are paid for by the state.
Even though the family lives just a few kilometers away, she only comes home on weekends. But that is what the new era demands.
They end the article with one last reach. Did Spiegel forget that boarding schools exist in pretty much every country on earth? Many of the kids attending them don’t even come home on weekends, just on holidays and for summer break. And as far as I know none are free, like they are in China.
This type of propaganda spin by Spiegel is one of the most interesting I’ve read by far. Everything they saw and experienced seems to undeniably prove that there was never any suppression of Uyghurs, yet they still stick to the propaganda line. This is coming from a publication that is considered ‘highly credible’. If you took every bit of western ‘suspicion’ out of the article, it would seem to imply that Xinjiang is a great place for the Uyghurs and that their culture is celebrated by the rest of the country.
It presents a stark contrast to, for instance, how the indigenous in my country (Canada) are treated. Go visit a reservation pretty much anywhere in Canada. Talk to the indigenous. Ask them why they don’t have clean drinking water. You’ll get a real interesting story out of that. Go visit a prison and see how disproportionally the indigenous are represented there. Do the same at East Hastings in Vancouver. Oh wait, the City of Vancouver sent their fascist cops to bulldoze the tents and throw out all of the homeless people’s belongings. Oops, too late.
I watched livestreams of the cops kicking homeless people out of East Hastings and loading all of their earthly possessions into garbage trucks to be taken to the dump. There is extensive proof of how Canada treats its homeless and indigenous population, and no one cares. Yet you pay one German anti-Semite to lie about China and every western media publication gets all up in a tizzy. It’s sad. Pathetic.
Now, take it away ChatGPT:
In conclusion, the narrative that Der Spiegel has spun about Xinjiang and the Uyghur population raises pressing questions about the power of the media in shaping our understanding of complex global issues. By presenting ordinary occurrences as evidence of human rights violations, the publication has contributed to a distorted view of China's actions. More troubling is the echo of Germany's Nazi past in the anti-communist undertones permeating these narratives. As we navigate the convoluted landscape of international politics and media, it is critical that we approach the information presented to us with skepticism and curiosity. Only by questioning, probing, and seeking a diversity of sources can we hope to see beyond the fog of propaganda and bias to the multifaceted reality beneath.
Now, subscribe or I’ll pay a German anti-Semite to lie about you: