Up to 40,000 Native American children may have died at government-run boarding schools across the US, expert says as remains of 10 kids are exhumed fr

[Adecypher]

Again, please go ahead as you wish in such selections.

Actually I cannot even if I am compelled to ... until time, t = 0 is defined.

 

[VCheng]

Actually I cannot even if I am compelled to ... until time, t = 0 is defined.

It really does not matter what time period you care to define. Human nature remains the same.

 

[Adecypher]

It really does not matter what time period you care to define. Human nature remains the same.

Agree, this is just to define time scope.

 

[VCheng]

Agree, this is just to define time scope.

You can pick it, or wait for someone else to do so. I am okay any which way.

 

[Adecypher]

You can pick it, or wait for someone else to do so. I am okay any which way.

I will wait for consensus on timeframe.

 

[VCheng]

I will wait for consensus on timeframe.

Sure, please let me know if and when it is suggested and agreed upon.

 

[GiantPanda]

Mongols? Mughals? Chinese? Turks?

None of those peoples own continents today because they never cleaned out the natives completely like the whites. Nothing comes close to the genocides done to Australia and the Americas done by the whites and by Anglos in particular. Entire peoples were completely wiped out and their land taken away.

 

[VCheng]

None of those peoples own continents today because they never cleaned out the natives completely like the whites. Nothing comes close to the genocides done to Australia and the Americas done by the whites and by Anglos in particular. Entire peoples were completely wiped out and their land taken away.

So you are merely jealous of those who own continents now? Even then, if others do not have what they covet now, then it is more due to their own failures, and certainly not due to a lack of trying to do the same, with similar death tolls.

 

[crankthatskunk]

Mongols? Mughals? Chinese? Turks?

Any of them still holding contents!! Other people's land, now calling theirs!!!!

So you are merely jealous of those who own continents now? Even then, if others do not have what they covet now, then it is more due to their own failures, and certainly not due to a lack of trying to do the same, with similar death tolls.

Similar death tolls!!
Really, Count the two world wars and all other wars, occupations, invasion done in last 1000 years, starting from the time of Romans/Greeks etc. You will get your answers.
What others did is not even equal to the salt in a dish.

 

[TheDarkKnight]

Is this the only place where this was done? History will show clearly that such separations were endemic all across the world and times.

Well you can tell that your self to the natives in USA, who are making these discoveries an issue. And do dare say a similar comment to a holocaust survivor publicly.

Although this thread is about what happened in USA, but yes there are many places where crimes against natives and their children have been carried out: Canada, Australia, African colonies etc.

 

[denel]

Up to 40,000 Native American children may have died at government-run boarding schools across the US, expert says as remains of 10 kids are exhumed from unmarked graves in Pennsylvania

• Preston McBride, a Dartmouth College scholar, has documented at least 1,000 deaths from 1879 to 1934 at four of the over 500 schools in the United States
• The federal government does not know or is unwilling to say how many children attended the schools, how many died in or went missing from them
• For over 150 years, Indigenous children were uprooted from their communities and forced into US government-operated schools that focused on assimilation
• Many students were forced to cut their braids, dress in uniforms, speak English and adopt European names
• Among those who have called for a commission to fully investigate the legacy of Indian boarding schools is Interior Secretary Deb Haaland

By SANDRA SALATHE FOR DAILYMAIL.COM and REUTERS
PUBLISHED: 06:01 EDT, 22 June 2021 | UPDATED: 17:10 EDT, 22 June 2021

As many as 40,000 Native American children may have died from poor care at government-run boarding schools around the US, a researcher has claimed.

Preston McBride, a Dartmouth College scholar, has documented at least 1,000 deaths from 1879 to 1934 at just four of the over 500 schools that have existed in the United States, including the non-boarding schools on Indian reservations.

He offered his grim estimate for total deaths at government-run schools - which came about in the early 19th century and still exist today - in a Reuters report published Tuesday.


'It's quite likely that 40,000 children died either in or because of these institutions,' said McBride, who estimates that tens of thousands more children were simply never again in contact with their families or their tribes after being sent off to the schools.

'This is on the order of magnitude of something like the Trail of Tears,' he added, referring to the government's forced displacement of Native Americans between 1830 and 1850. 'Yet it’s not talked about.'

McBride's comments came after a team of archeologists began exhuming the remains of ten Native American children who died more than a century ago at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

Founded by Army veteran General Richard Pratt in 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (pictured) in Pennsylvania was among the 367 original government-operated institutions for Native American children

A team of archaeologists began work Saturday at the cemetery on the grounds of the Carlisle Barracks (pictured) to unearth the remains of 10 more Native American children who died more than a century ago at the Carlisle school

Of the ten deceased children, nine were from the Rosebud Sioux tribe in South Dakota and one was from the Alaskan Aleut tribe.

This is the Army's fourth disinterment project at the school in as many years.

Founded by Army veteran General Richard Pratt in 1879, Carlisle was among the 367 original government-operated institutions for Native American children. It's cemetery contains 180 graves of former students.

The federal government does not know or is unwilling to say how many children even attended the schools, how many died in or went missing from them, or even how many schools existed.

Preston McBride (pictured) a Dartmouth College scholar, has documented at least 1,000 deaths from 1879 to 1934 at just four of the over 500 schools that have existed in the United States, including the non-boarding schools on Indian reservations

Among those who have called for a commission to fully investigate the legacy of Indian boarding schools is Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary and whose department oversees Indian schools, which churches began running in 1819 through federal funding.

Native Americans have watched with horror and a sorrowful sense of recognition as news unfolded in Canada of the discovery of the bodies of 215 children in unmarked graves at one of what were known as indigenous residential schools.

The Canadian government said its indigenous residential schools, the last of which closed in 1996, carried out 'cultural genocide.' Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has found at least 4,100 students died in the schools.

Among those who have called for a commission to fully investigate the legacy of Indian boarding schools is Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (pictured)

Haaland, in an essay published on June 11 in the Washington Post, said the news from Canada made her 'sick to my stomach.'

'Many Americans may be alarmed to learn that the United States also has a history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as people,' wrote Haaland.

For over 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were uprooted from their communities and forced into US government-operated boarding schools that focused on assimilation.

Before shutting down in 1918, the Carlisle school housed some 10,000 indigenous children.

Many students were forced to cut their braids, dress in uniforms, speak English and adopt European names. Infectious diseases and harsh conditions claimed the lives of many children buried there.

The deaths were primarily from diseases made far more lethal in many of the schools because of poor treatment.

Marsha Small, a Montana State University doctoral student, is part of a team that has worked to locate unmarked graves at the Chemawa Indian School cemetery in Salem, Oregon, using ground-penetrating radar.

For over 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children (pictured) were uprooted from their communities and forced into US government-operated boarding schools that focused on assimilation.

Since 2016, dozens of Native American and Alaskan Native families have requested that their ancestors be returned from Carlisle school (pictured)

As many as 40,000 Native American children (pictured) may have died from poor care at government-run boarding schools around the US, McBride claims

The remains of 215 children were discovered at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia (pictured)

So far, Small has located 222 sets of remains, but says additional work is required to have a full accounting.

'Until we can find those kids and let their elders come get them or know where they can pay respects, I don't think the native is going to heal, and as such I don't think America is going to heal,' Small said.

Chemawa, founded in 1880, is still operating.

Native Americans acknowledge that the schools still operating have transformed in important ways.

Many are now under tribal oversight and children are taught their native languages instead of being punished for speaking them. However, the schools have yet to acknowledge their pasts, said the coalition's McCleave and others.

'Before we can move forward, they have to recognize that legacy,' she said.

And yes you are following in their footsteps with Uighur children.

Lies and lies with fake propaganda.... so go back to your Winnie Xi Pooh ... no bonus for you .


How China Spreads Its Propaganda Version of Life for Uyghurs
by Jeff Kao, ProPublica, and Raymond Zhong, Paul Mozur and Aaron Krolik, The New York Times June 23, 5 a.m. EDT

Thousands of videos of Uyghurs denying abuses against their community are showing up on Twitter and YouTube. They’re part of an elaborate influence campaign by Chinese officials to counter reports of human rights violations in Xinjiang.

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Recently, the owner of a small store in western China came across some remarks by Mike Pompeo, the former U.S. secretary of state. What he heard made him angry.




A Uyghur store owner criticizes the U.S. State Department’s declaration of genocide in Xinjiang. He says his experience in an “education and training center” removed his “religious extremist thoughts.”
A worker in a textile company had the same reaction. So did a retiree in her 80s. And a taxi driver.


Pompeo had routinely accused China of committing human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, and these four people made videos to express their outrage. They did so in oddly similar ways.


“Pompeo said that we Uyghurs are locked up and have no freedom,” the store owner said.


“There’s nothing like that at all in our Xinjiang,” said the taxi driver.


“We are very free,” the retiree said.


“We are very free now,” the store owner said.


“We are very, very free here,” the taxi driver said.


“Our lives are very happy and very free now,” the textile company worker said.





ProPublica and The New York Times analyzed propaganda videos featuring Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities from across Xinjiang.
These and thousands of other videos are meant to look like unfiltered glimpses of life in Xinjiang, the western Chinese region where the Communist Party has carried out repressive policies against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities.






Get Our Top Investigations
Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.



Email address:





Most of the clips carry no logos or other signs that they are official propaganda.


But taken together, the videos begin to reveal clues of broader coordination — such as the English subtitles in clips posted to YouTube and other Western platforms.


A monthslong analysis of more than 3,000 of the videos by ProPublica and The New York Times found evidence of an influence campaign orchestrated by the Chinese government.




The operation has produced and spread thousands of videos in which Chinese citizens deny abuses against their own communities and scold foreign officials and multinational corporations who dare question the Chinese government’s human rights record in Xinjiang.


It all amounts to one of China’s most elaborate efforts to shape global opinion.


Beijing is trying to use savvier and more forceful methods to broadcast its political messages to a worldwide audience. And Western internet platforms like Twitter and YouTube are playing a key part.


Many of these videos of people in Xinjiang first appeared on a regional Communist Party news app. Then they showed up on YouTube and other global sites, with English subtitles added. (The excerpts of dialogue in this article are translated from the original spoken Chinese or Uyghur by ProPublica and The Times. They are not taken from the English subtitles in the original videos.)


On Twitter, a network of connected accounts shared the videos in ways that seemed designed to avoid the platform’s systems for detecting influence campaigns.


China’s increasingly social-media-fluent diplomats and state-run news outlets have since spread the testimonials to audiences of millions worldwide.


Western platforms like Twitter and YouTube are banned in China out of fear they might be used to spread political messaging — which is exactly how Chinese officials are using these platforms in the rest of the world.


They are, in essence, high-speed propaganda pipelines for Beijing. In just a few days, videos establishing the Communist Party’s version of reality can be shot, edited and amplified across the global internet.

How the Videos Work

The dialogue in hundreds of the Xinjiang videos contains strikingly similar, and often identical, phrases and structures.




Most videos are in Chinese or Uyghur and follow the same basic script. The subject introduces themselves, then explains how their own happy, prosperous life means there couldn’t possibly be repressive policies in Xinjiang.


Here’s a typical clip, shot as a selfie.


Many people in the videos use the expression tusheng-tuzhang (土生土长), meaning “born and raised.” They claim that, as native Xinjiangers, they know best how their community is treated.
A four-character Chinese phrase meaning “born and raised” appears in more than 280 of the more than 2,000 videos attacking Pompeo that ProPublica and the Times found on YouTube and Twitter.


The people in more than 1,000 of the videos say they have recently come across Pompeo’s remarks, most of them “on the internet” or on specific platforms such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.


Many of those who appear in the videos claim to have recently seen former U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s declaration of genocide in Xinjiang.
An expression meaning “complete nonsense” and close variations of it appear in more than 600 of the videos.


People in the videos frequently use the expression hushuo-badao (胡说八道), meaning “complete nonsense” or “hogwash,” to dismiss Pompeo’s accusations.
Establishing that government officials had a hand in making these testimonials is sometimes just a matter of asking.


In one clip, the owner of a used car dealership in Xinjiang says: “Pompeo, shut your mouth.”





A video featuring a man who later acknowledged that his video was made by local propaganda officials.
When reached by phone, the man said local propaganda authorities had produced the clip. When asked for details, he gave the number of an official he called Mr. He, saying, “Why don’t you ask the head of the propaganda department?”


Multiple calls to Mr. He’s number were not answered. Seven other people in the videos whose contact information could be found either declined to be interviewed or couldn’t be reached. (The name of the car dealership’s owner is being withheld to protect him from retribution by Chinese officials.)


In another sign of government coordination, language in the videos echoes written denunciations of Pompeo that Chinese state agencies issued around the same time.


Beginning in late January, government workers across Xinjiang held meetings to “speak out and show the sword” against “Pompeo’s anti-China lies,” according to statements on official websites.


The clips’ effectiveness as propaganda comes in part because they will probably be most people’s only glimpse into Xinjiang, a remote desert region closer to Kabul than to Beijing.


The Chinese authorities have thwarted efforts by journalists and others to gain unfettered access to the indoctrination camps where hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been sent for reeducation.


On government-led tours of the region, foreign diplomats and reporters have been allowed to speak with locals only under Chinese officials’ watchful eyes, often in settings that seem staged and scripted.


For Western platforms hosting the Xinjiang testimonials, the fact that they are not immediately obvious as state propaganda poses a challenge.


To promote transparency, sites like YouTube and Twitter label accounts and posts that are associated with governments. The Xinjiang videos, however, carry no such tags.


YouTube said the clips did not violate its community guidelines. Twitter declined to comment on the videos, adding that it routinely releases data on campaigns that it can “reliably attribute to state-linked activity.”

How the Videos Spread

The video campaign started this year after the State Department declared on Jan. 19, the final full day of the Trump presidency, that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang.


Pompeo appears in a Jan. 19 interview about the State Department’s declaration of genocide in Xinjiang earlier that day.
“I’ve referred to this over time as the stain of the century — it is truly that,” Pompeo said.




Within days, videos criticizing Pompeo began appearing on an app called Pomegranate Cloud, which is owned by the regional arm of the official Communist Party newspaper, People’s Daily. The name of the app is a reference to a propaganda slogan that calls on people of all ethnic groups in China to be as closely united as pomegranate seeds.


From there, the videos often jumped onto other Chinese platforms before making their way onto global social media sites like Twitter and YouTube.


On Twitter, ProPublica and The Times found, the clips were shared by more than 300 accounts whose posts strongly suggested they were no ordinary users. The accounts often posted messages that were identical but for a random string of characters at the end with no obvious meaning, either four Roman letters, five Chinese characters or three symbols such as percentage signs or parentheses.


Some of the posts by the coordinated Twitter accounts shared the same video with nearly identical messages.
Such strings were found in about three-quarters of the accounts’ tweets. They caused the text of the posts to vary slightly, in an apparent attempt to bypass Twitter’s automated anti-spam filters.


There were other signs that the Twitter accounts were part of a coordinated operation.


All of the accounts had been registered only in recent months. Many of them followed zero other users. Nearly all had fewer than five followers. The bulk of their tweeting took place between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. Beijing time.


The text of several of the accounts’ tweets contained traces of computer code, indicating that they had been posted, sloppily, by software.


Posts by the coordinated Twitter accounts sometimes contain traces of computer code.
Twitter suspended many of these accounts in March and April, before ProPublica and The Times inquired about them. Twitter said the accounts had violated its policies against platform manipulation and spam.


The accounts did not upload Xinjiang clips directly to Twitter. Rather, they tweeted links to videos on YouTube or retweeted videos that had been originally posted by other Twitter accounts.


Those YouTube and Twitter accounts often posted copies of the same Xinjiang videos at roughly the same time, according to analysis by ProPublica and The Times. Nearly three-quarters of the copied clips were posted by different accounts within 30 minutes of one another. This suggests the posts were coordinated, even though the accounts had no obvious connection.


Most of these accounts — seven on Twitter and nearly two dozen on YouTube — posted dozens of videos that originally appeared on Pomegranate Cloud. The accounts seem to have served solely as warehouses to store the clips, making it easier for other accounts in the network to share them.

How the Campaign Is Evolving

The effort continues to evolve. In some cases, state media and government officials have begun to openly spread the clips attacking Pompeo. Other videos have found new issues and people to target.


In one clip, a woman denies accusations of forced labor. “I have five greenhouses, and no one forces me to work,” she says.





In a widely reposted propaganda video, farmworkers deny accusations of forced labor.
She turns the camera toward several other women behind her.


“Friends, is anyone forcing you to work?” she asks. “No!” they cry in unison.




The clip was posted by Global Times, a state-controlled newspaper, on the Chinese platform Kuaishou on Jan. 25. Two days later, the video was posted on Twitter and YouTube by the warehouse accounts within 30 minutes of one another. Just over a week later, two representatives for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted the clip on Twitter as well.

The greenhouse video has been tweeted by officials from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The ministry did not respond to a faxed request for comment, nor did the Xinjiang offices of the Communist Party propaganda department.


Two months later, another wave of videos, shot in the same style and distributed in a similar way, raged against H&M and other international clothing brands that have expressed concern about possible labor abuses in Xinjiang’s cotton and textile industries.


In one video, a Uyghur woman sits on a couch with her husband and young son.





A separate ongoing video propaganda campaign denies reports of forced labor in Xinjiang’s cotton industry.
“Mom, what’s H&M?” the boy asks.


“H&M is a foreign company that uses our Xinjiang cotton and speaks ill of our Xinjiang,” she says. “Tell me, is H&M bad or what?”


“Very bad,” the boy says stiffly.


The clip was posted on Pomegranate Cloud on March 29. Six days later, it was posted on Twitter and YouTube, 20 minutes apart, by two warehouse accounts. As with all of the other clips that appeared on those platforms, English subtitles were added somewhere along the way, seemingly for the benefit of international audiences.


The anti-H&M campaign continues. By June 21, more than 800 cotton-related videos had been posted to Pomegranate Cloud, a large share of which were later reposted on YouTube or Twitter.


New videos are being uploaded to Pomegranate Cloud nearly every day. That means the campaign, which has already enlisted thousands of people in Xinjiang — teachers, shopkeepers, farmhands — could keep growing.


The audience outside China for the videos could also keep expanding.


The warehouse accounts on YouTube have attracted more than 480,000 views in total. People on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms have cited the testimonials to argue that all is well in Xinjiang — and received hundreds of thousands of additional views.


In a phone interview, Pompeo said friends, and occasionally his son, had come across the Xinjiang testimonials online and sent them to him.




As clumsy as the videos seem, he said, their influence should not be dismissed: “In places that don’t have access to a great deal of media, that repetition, those storylines have an ability to take hold.”


China’s propaganda efforts will keep getting better, Pompeo added. “They’ll continue to revise and become quicker, more authentic in their capacity to deliver this message,” he said.

How the Videos Divided a Family

For one Uyghur activist living in exile in the United States since 2005, the videos have had a more personal impact.


Several of the Xinjiang videos feature family members of Rebiya Kadeer, 74, whom the Chinese government has accused of abetting terrorism. In one clip, two of Kadeer’s granddaughters lash out at Pompeo while out shopping for a wedding.





The campaign contains several different videos that feature Rebiya Kadeer’s granddaughters.
“Grandma, I recently saw online that Pompeo’s making reckless claims and talking nonsense about our Xinjiang,” one granddaughter says. “I hope you won’t be fooled again by those bad foreigners.”



Left: Rebiya Kadeer outside her home in Fairfax, Virginia. Right: Framed photos of Kadeer’s imprisoned son and other members of her family. Credit: Jared Soares for The New York Times
Kadeer said the videos were the first time she had heard her relatives’ voices in years.


“I have been crying in my heart about my children,” she said in a phone interview.


Kadeer said the videos had given her a chance to see what had become of her granddaughters. The last time she saw them, they were infants.






Florida Governor Signs Law Reforming Program for Brain-Damaged Infants


“Some people will believe these videos and believe Uyghurs are living a happy life,” she said. “We can’t say they have locked up everyone. But what they’re saying in these videos — it’s not true. They know they’re not speaking the truth. But they have to say what the Chinese government wants them to say.”


Methodology


The data analyzed for this article includes videos, metadata and social media posts collected from Twitter, YouTube and Pomegranate Cloud between Feb. 18 and June 2. We downloaded more than 5,000 videos posted to these platforms between Jan. 23 (the date of the first campaign video following the State Department’s Jan. 19 declaration of genocide in Xinjiang) and May 31. On Pomegranate Cloud, we collected clips targeting Pompeo by searching for posts mentioning him after Jan. 19 that contained video. We collected videos denying forced labor in Xinjiang’s cotton industry from a section dedicated to them in the app.


On Twitter and YouTube, the campaign videos were collected from what we call “warehouse accounts,” those whose videos were shared by a network of more than 300 coordinated Twitter accounts. This network appeared to work in coordination to like and retweet content that supported Chinese government policies, such as the campaign videos, as well as news articles and editorials from state media. To define the network, we manually identified a small group of accounts and their indicators of automation, specifically posts containing identical content followed by strings of random characters. We then identified additional network accounts by programmatically searching for other accounts that boosted the same content and had the same indicators.


We cataloged more than 3,000 unique campaign videos out of the more than 5,000 collected. To pinpoint duplicates among videos containing various compression rates, visual artifacts and subtitle languages, we calculated a fingerprint for each video by running a sample of its frames through the Google Cloud Vision image labeler. We determined videos with similar fingerprints and durations to be duplicates. We manually sampled and reviewed the results from this process to minimize false positives and false negatives.


To identify non-campaign videos on YouTube and Twitter, we first obtained their subtitles by using optical character recognition on frames taken from them at regular intervals. We considered videos that did not mention Pompeo or cotton to be non-campaign videos. Videos on Twitter and YouTube always had subtitles in English and Chinese. Videos from Pomegranate Cloud had subtitles in Chinese only when Uyghur was spoken. We considered all videos collected from Pomegranate Cloud to be campaign videos, but did not review each manually. We also used the subtitles of the YouTube and Twitter videos to analyze their content.


Sophie Chou reviewed the code and analysis.

How China Spreads Its Propaganda Version of Life for Uyghurs

by Jeff Kao, ProPublica, and Raymond Zhong, Paul Mozur and Aaron Krolik, The New York Times June 23, 5 a.m. EDT
Thousands of videos of Uyghurs denying abuses against their community are showing up on Twitter and YouTube. They’re part of an elaborate influence campaign by Chinese officials to counter reports of human rights violations in Xinjiang.

• Twitter

Facebook https://www.propublica.org/article/...ganda-version-of-life-for-uyghurs-in-xinjiang Copy
Republish
Co-published with The New York Times
阅读简体中文版。
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Recently, the owner of a small store in western China came across some remarks by Mike Pompeo, the former U.S. secretary of state. What he heard made him angry.

A Uyghur store owner criticizes the U.S. State Department’s declaration of genocide in Xinjiang. He says his experience in an “education and training center” removed his “religious extremist thoughts.”
A worker in a textile company had the same reaction. So did a retiree in her 80s. And a taxi driver.
Pompeo had routinely accused China of committing human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, and these four people made videos to express their outrage. They did so in oddly similar ways.
“Pompeo said that we Uyghurs are locked up and have no freedom,” the store owner said.
“There’s nothing like that at all in our Xinjiang,” said the taxi driver.
“We are very free,” the retiree said.
“We are very free now,” the store owner said.
“We are very, very free here,” the taxi driver said.
“Our lives are very happy and very free now,” the textile company worker said.

ProPublica and The New York Times analyzed propaganda videos featuring Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities from across Xinjiang.
These and thousands of other videos are meant to look like unfiltered glimpses of life in Xinjiang, the western Chinese region where the Communist Party has carried out repressive policies against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities.


Get Our Top Investigations

Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.
Email address:
Most of the clips carry no logos or other signs that they are official propaganda.
But taken together, the videos begin to reveal clues of broader coordination — such as the English subtitles in clips posted to YouTube and other Western platforms.
A monthslong analysis of more than 3,000 of the videos by ProPublica and The New York Times found evidence of an influence campaign orchestrated by the Chinese government.
The operation has produced and spread thousands of videos in which Chinese citizens deny abuses against their own communities and scold foreign officials and multinational corporations who dare question the Chinese government’s human rights record in Xinjiang.
It all amounts to one of China’s most elaborate efforts to shape global opinion.
Beijing is trying to use savvier and more forceful methods to broadcast its political messages to a worldwide audience. And Western internet platforms like Twitter and YouTube are playing a key part.
Many of these videos of people in Xinjiang first appeared on a regional Communist Party news app. Then they showed up on YouTube and other global sites, with English subtitles added. (The excerpts of dialogue in this article are translated from the original spoken Chinese or Uyghur by ProPublica and The Times. They are not taken from the English subtitles in the original videos.)
On Twitter, a network of connected accounts shared the videos in ways that seemed designed to avoid the platform’s systems for detecting influence campaigns.
China’s increasingly social-media-fluent diplomats and state-run news outlets have since spread the testimonials to audiences of millions worldwide.
Western platforms like Twitter and YouTube are banned in China out of fear they might be used to spread political messaging — which is exactly how Chinese officials are using these platforms in the rest of the world.
They are, in essence, high-speed propaganda pipelines for Beijing. In just a few days, videos establishing the Communist Party’s version of reality can be shot, edited and amplified across the global internet.
How the Videos Work

The dialogue in hundreds of the Xinjiang videos contains strikingly similar, and often identical, phrases and structures.
Most videos are in Chinese or Uyghur and follow the same basic script. The subject introduces themselves, then explains how their own happy, prosperous life means there couldn’t possibly be repressive policies in Xinjiang.
Here’s a typical clip, shot as a selfie.

Many people in the videos use the expression tusheng-tuzhang (土生土长), meaning “born and raised.” They claim that, as native Xinjiangers, they know best how their community is treated.
A four-character Chinese phrase meaning “born and raised” appears in more than 280 of the more than 2,000 videos attacking Pompeo that ProPublica and the Times found on YouTube and Twitter.
The people in more than 1,000 of the videos say they have recently come across Pompeo’s remarks, most of them “on the internet” or on specific platforms such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

Many of those who appear in the videos claim to have recently seen former U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s declaration of genocide in Xinjiang.
An expression meaning “complete nonsense” and close variations of it appear in more than 600 of the videos.

People in the videos frequently use the expression hushuo-badao (胡说八道), meaning “complete nonsense” or “hogwash,” to dismiss Pompeo’s accusations.
Establishing that government officials had a hand in making these testimonials is sometimes just a matter of asking.
In one clip, the owner of a used car dealership in Xinjiang says: “Pompeo, shut your mouth.”

A video featuring a man who later acknowledged that his video was made by local propaganda officials.
When reached by phone, the man said local propaganda authorities had produced the clip. When asked for details, he gave the number of an official he called Mr. He, saying, “Why don’t you ask the head of the propaganda department?”
Multiple calls to Mr. He’s number were not answered. Seven other people in the videos whose contact information could be found either declined to be interviewed or couldn’t be reached. (The name of the car dealership’s owner is being withheld to protect him from retribution by Chinese officials.)
In another sign of government coordination, language in the videos echoes written denunciations of Pompeo that Chinese state agencies issued around the same time.
Beginning in late January, government workers across Xinjiang held meetings to “speak out and show the sword” against “Pompeo’s anti-China lies,” according to statements on official websites.
The clips’ effectiveness as propaganda comes in part because they will probably be most people’s only glimpse into Xinjiang, a remote desert region closer to Kabul than to Beijing.
The Chinese authorities have thwarted efforts by journalists and others to gain unfettered access to the indoctrination camps where hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been sent for reeducation.
On government-led tours of the region, foreign diplomats and reporters have been allowed to speak with locals only under Chinese officials’ watchful eyes, often in settings that seem staged and scripted.
For Western platforms hosting the Xinjiang testimonials, the fact that they are not immediately obvious as state propaganda poses a challenge.
To promote transparency, sites like YouTube and Twitter label accounts and posts that are associated with governments. The Xinjiang videos, however, carry no such tags.
YouTube said the clips did not violate its community guidelines. Twitter declined to comment on the videos, adding that it routinely releases data on campaigns that it can “reliably attribute to state-linked activity.”
How the Videos Spread

The video campaign started this year after the State Department declared on Jan. 19, the final full day of the Trump presidency, that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang.
Pompeo appears in a Jan. 19 interview about the State Department’s declaration of genocide in Xinjiang earlier that day.
“I’ve referred to this over time as the stain of the century — it is truly that,” Pompeo said.
Within days, videos criticizing Pompeo began appearing on an app called Pomegranate Cloud, which is owned by the regional arm of the official Communist Party newspaper, People’s Daily. The name of the app is a reference to a propaganda slogan that calls on people of all ethnic groups in China to be as closely united as pomegranate seeds.
From there, the videos often jumped onto other Chinese platforms before making their way onto global social media sites like Twitter and YouTube.
On Twitter, ProPublica and The Times found, the clips were shared by more than 300 accounts whose posts strongly suggested they were no ordinary users. The accounts often posted messages that were identical but for a random string of characters at the end with no obvious meaning, either four Roman letters, five Chinese characters or three symbols such as percentage signs or parentheses.
Some of the posts by the coordinated Twitter accounts shared the same video with nearly identical messages.
Such strings were found in about three-quarters of the accounts’ tweets. They caused the text of the posts to vary slightly, in an apparent attempt to bypass Twitter’s automated anti-spam filters.
There were other signs that the Twitter accounts were part of a coordinated operation.
All of the accounts had been registered only in recent months. Many of them followed zero other users. Nearly all had fewer than five followers. The bulk of their tweeting took place between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. Beijing time.
The text of several of the accounts’ tweets contained traces of computer code, indicating that they had been posted, sloppily, by software.
Posts by the coordinated Twitter accounts sometimes contain traces of computer code.
Twitter suspended many of these accounts in March and April, before ProPublica and The Times inquired about them. Twitter said the accounts had violated its policies against platform manipulation and spam.
The accounts did not upload Xinjiang clips directly to Twitter. Rather, they tweeted links to videos on YouTube or retweeted videos that had been originally posted by other Twitter accounts.
Those YouTube and Twitter accounts often posted copies of the same Xinjiang videos at roughly the same time, according to analysis by ProPublica and The Times. Nearly three-quarters of the copied clips were posted by different accounts within 30 minutes of one another. This suggests the posts were coordinated, even though the accounts had no obvious connection.
Most of these accounts — seven on Twitter and nearly two dozen on YouTube — posted dozens of videos that originally appeared on Pomegranate Cloud. The accounts seem to have served solely as warehouses to store the clips, making it easier for other accounts in the network to share them.
How the Campaign Is Evolving

The effort continues to evolve. In some cases, state media and government officials have begun to openly spread the clips attacking Pompeo. Other videos have found new issues and people to target.
In one clip, a woman denies accusations of forced labor. “I have five greenhouses, and no one forces me to work,” she says.

In a widely reposted propaganda video, farmworkers deny accusations of forced labor.
She turns the camera toward several other women behind her.
“Friends, is anyone forcing you to work?” she asks. “No!” they cry in unison.
The clip was posted by Global Times, a state-controlled newspaper, on the Chinese platform Kuaishou on Jan. 25. Two days later, the video was posted on Twitter and YouTube by the warehouse accounts within 30 minutes of one another. Just over a week later, two representatives for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted the clip on Twitter as well.
The greenhouse video has been tweeted by officials from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The ministry did not respond to a faxed request for comment, nor did the Xinjiang offices of the Communist Party propaganda department.
Two months later, another wave of videos, shot in the same style and distributed in a similar way, raged against H&M and other international clothing brands that have expressed concern about possible labor abuses in Xinjiang’s cotton and textile industries.
In one video, a Uyghur woman sits on a couch with her husband and young son.

A separate ongoing video propaganda campaign denies reports of forced labor in Xinjiang’s cotton industry.
“Mom, what’s H&M?” the boy asks.
“H&M is a foreign company that uses our Xinjiang cotton and speaks ill of our Xinjiang,” she says. “Tell me, is H&M bad or what?”
“Very bad,” the boy says stiffly.
The clip was posted on Pomegranate Cloud on March 29. Six days later, it was posted on Twitter and YouTube, 20 minutes apart, by two warehouse accounts. As with all of the other clips that appeared on those platforms, English subtitles were added somewhere along the way, seemingly for the benefit of international audiences.
The anti-H&M campaign continues. By June 21, more than 800 cotton-related videos had been posted to Pomegranate Cloud, a large share of which were later reposted on YouTube or Twitter.
New videos are being uploaded to Pomegranate Cloud nearly every day. That means the campaign, which has already enlisted thousands of people in Xinjiang — teachers, shopkeepers, farmhands — could keep growing.
The audience outside China for the videos could also keep expanding.
The warehouse accounts on YouTube have attracted more than 480,000 views in total. People on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms have cited the testimonials to argue that all is well in Xinjiang — and received hundreds of thousands of additional views.
In a phone interview, Pompeo said friends, and occasionally his son, had come across the Xinjiang testimonials online and sent them to him.
As clumsy as the videos seem, he said, their influence should not be dismissed: “In places that don’t have access to a great deal of media, that repetition, those storylines have an ability to take hold.”
China’s propaganda efforts will keep getting better, Pompeo added. “They’ll continue to revise and become quicker, more authentic in their capacity to deliver this message,” he said.
How the Videos Divided a Family

For one Uyghur activist living in exile in the United States since 2005, the videos have had a more personal impact.
Several of the Xinjiang videos feature family members of Rebiya Kadeer, 74, whom the Chinese government has accused of abetting terrorism. In one clip, two of Kadeer’s granddaughters lash out at Pompeo while out shopping for a wedding.

The campaign contains several different videos that feature Rebiya Kadeer’s granddaughters.
“Grandma, I recently saw online that Pompeo’s making reckless claims and talking nonsense about our Xinjiang,” one granddaughter says. “I hope you won’t be fooled again by those bad foreigners.”
Left: Rebiya Kadeer outside her home in Fairfax, Virginia. Right: Framed photos of Kadeer’s imprisoned son and other members of her family. Credit: Jared Soares for The New York Times
Kadeer said the videos were the first time she had heard her relatives’ voices in years.
“I have been crying in my heart about my children,” she said in a phone interview.
Kadeer said the videos had given her a chance to see what had become of her granddaughters. The last time she saw them, they were infants.

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“Some people will believe these videos and believe Uyghurs are living a happy life,” she said. “We can’t say they have locked up everyone. But what they’re saying in these videos — it’s not true. They know they’re not speaking the truth. But they have to say what the Chinese government wants them to say.”
Methodology
The data analyzed for this article includes videos, metadata and social media posts collected from Twitter, YouTube and Pomegranate Cloud between Feb. 18 and June 2. We downloaded more than 5,000 videos posted to these platforms between Jan. 23 (the date of the first campaign video following the State Department’s Jan. 19 declaration of genocide in Xinjiang) and May 31. On Pomegranate Cloud, we collected clips targeting Pompeo by searching for posts mentioning him after Jan. 19 that contained video. We collected videos denying forced labor in Xinjiang’s cotton industry from a section dedicated to them in the app.
On Twitter and YouTube, the campaign videos were collected from what we call “warehouse accounts,” those whose videos were shared by a network of more than 300 coordinated Twitter accounts. This network appeared to work in coordination to like and retweet content that supported Chinese government policies, such as the campaign videos, as well as news articles and editorials from state media. To define the network, we manually identified a small group of accounts and their indicators of automation, specifically posts containing identical content followed by strings of random characters. We then identified additional network accounts by programmatically searching for other accounts that boosted the same content and had the same indicators.
We cataloged more than 3,000 unique campaign videos out of the more than 5,000 collected. To pinpoint duplicates among videos containing various compression rates, visual artifacts and subtitle languages, we calculated a fingerprint for each video by running a sample of its frames through the Google Cloud Vision image labeler. We determined videos with similar fingerprints and durations to be duplicates. We manually sampled and reviewed the results from this process to minimize false positives and false negatives.
To identify non-campaign videos on YouTube and Twitter, we first obtained their subtitles by using optical character recognition on frames taken from them at regular intervals. We considered videos that did not mention Pompeo or cotton to be non-campaign videos. Videos on Twitter and YouTube always had subtitles in English and Chinese. Videos from Pomegranate Cloud had subtitles in Chinese only when Uyghur was spoken. We considered all videos collected from Pomegranate Cloud to be campaign videos, but did not review each manually. We also used the subtitles of the YouTube and Twitter videos to analyze their content.
Sophie Chou reviewed the code and analysis.

• Change Appearance

China sending children of exiled Uighur parents to orphanages, says Amnesty
Published
19 March

image copyrightAFP
image captionA file photo shows a Uighur woman with children in China's northwest Xinjiang region
China has forcibly separated Uighur families by taking young children into state orphanages, according to human rights group Amnesty International.
In a new report, Amnesty has called on China to release all Uighur children being held in orphanages without the consent of their families.
The charity spoke to parents who left children with relatives in China when they were forced to flee the country.
Rights groups say China has detained more than a million Uighurs.
The Chinese government has also faced allegations of a wide range of human rights abuses against the Uighur people and other Muslim minorities, including forced labour, forced sterilisation, sexual abuse and rape.
The government denies it is holding Uighurs in detention camps in the Xinjiang region in north-western China. It says the camps are "re-education" facilities being used to combat terrorism.

Because access to Xinjiang is heavily restricted by the Chinese, Amnesty spoke to Uighurs who were able to flee Xinjiang before the repression of the Uighur people intensified in 2017.
Mihriban Kader and Ablikim Memtinin fled from Xinjiang to Italy in 2016 after being harassed by police and pressured to give up their passports, Amnesty said. They left four children in the temporary care of grandparents, but the grandmother was taken to a detention camp while the grandfather was interrogated by police, the charity said.
"Our other relatives didn't dare to look after my children after what had happened to my parents," Mihriban told Amnesty. "They were afraid that they would be sent to camps, too."
In November 2019, Mihriban and Ablikim received a permit from the Italian government to bring their children to join them, but the children were seized by Chinese police on the way and sent to a state-run orphanage, Amnesty said.
"Now my children are in the hands of the Chinese government and I am not sure I will be able to meet them again in my lifetime," Mihriban said.

• Who are the Uighurs?
• Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape
• 'Credible case' China carrying out genocide
• The long read: China's tainted cotton

Omer and Meryem Faruh, who fled to Turkey in late 2016, left their two youngest children, aged five and six, with grandparents because they did not yet have their own travel documents, Amnesty said. They found out later that the grandparents had been arrested and sent to a camp and have not heard from their children since.

Amnesty's report calls on China to provide full and unrestricted access to Xinjiang for UN human rights experts, independent researchers and journalists, and for all children held without their parents consent to be released to family.
"China's ruthless mass detention campaign in Xinjiang has put separated families in an impossible situation: children are not allowed to leave, but their parents face persecution and arbitrary detention if they attempt to return home to care for them," said Alkan Akad, Amnesty International's China researcher.

media captionThe BBC's John Sudworth meets Uighur parents in Turkey who say their children are missing in China
The Chinese state has created a vast and secretive network of camps in Xinjiang and is estimated to have detained more than a million Uighurs and people from other Muslim minority groups.
Reports have emerged in recent years of appalling human rights abuses, from forced sterilisation of Uighur women to torture and systematic rape inside camps.
China denies there are any human rights abuses taking place, and has called former camp detainees in exile liars and actors. China is also accused of intimidating and smearing witnesses who have spoken up, and of using witnesses's relatives in Xinjiang as leverage against them.
The US, Canada, and the Netherlands have declared that China is committing a genocide against the Uighur people. A similar bill was rejected by the UK parliament.

 

[GiantPanda]

Mass murderers who committed genocide across entire continents in the US, Canada and Australia are now claiming "genocide" of Uighurs who are in the millions. All for geopolitical gain against China.

You people really cheapen the use of the word genocide. The lies and hypocrisy are mindblowing. White people propaganda are tops

 

[denel]

Mass murderers who committed genocide across entire continents in the US, Canada and Australia are now claiming "genocide" of Uighurs who are in the millions. All for geopolitical gain against China.

You people really cheapen the use of the word genocide. The lies and hypocrisy are mindblowing. White people propaganda are tops

of course you are following in their footsteps and using them as an excuse and goyal foil tactic.... you are the new colonialist on the block.

try again. or consult KCNA specialist.

 

[denel]

Pretty hard not to believe you are not White South African, probably a Boer or something considering how quick you are to excuse the massive genocides committed by Western colonialism which has emptied out three continents or how quickly you turn a blind eye to the ongoing colonization and extraction economies that European countries like France and Britain still maintain in Africa, but are so quick to label everything Chinese as evil. I do not believe for a second that you aren't White South African.

i dont answer to you... i am who i am.....

amazing... you ccp bots... when you know you cannot win an argument, you turn to race cards.... and NO, I AM NOT WHITE AND I AM NOT CURRY MUNCHING INDIAN AND DEFINITE NOT AN MSG CHINESE.... I am allergic to MSG.

so get lost and write to the point.

 

[denel]

No. You need to answer me. Because it confirms exactly why you have the views you do. I just find it very interesting that you love to spread hatred against China AND THE CHINESE PEOPLE, painting them as all around evil and denigrating them every chance you can get, even while the vast majority of Chinese people are humble, hard working people. Yet you seem to be completely MUTE when it comes to the vast legacy of colonialism and genocide that the Western colonials have committed. To this day, France enriches itself based on its colonial legacies, and European and American enterprises in Africa are largely dominated by extractive industries that have only contributed to Africa's poverty. Meanwhile even though China is by no means an angel, its relationship with Africa has been far more balanced. Africa only started to enjoy healthy economic growth after it engaged with China and that was after centuries of being plundered to the FUCKING BONE by the West.

So honestly, your words hold absolutely no credibility. You are a fucking racist and hatemonger and it is clear why you hate China so much. Because the rise of China threatens the bread of colonial apologists like you who have milked colonialism for so many centuries.

MOST .... are respectful Chinese... they are not YOU... YOU are bad news ... communist party bot..


watch your language ....

You are the racist not me....