Things to know about all the lies on Xinjiang: How have they come about?

VI. The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) is the first organization to propagate that China has detained millions of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang. With the support of the US government, the organization used crude and clumsy research methods and the conclusions produced are seriously flawed.

◆The CHRD is a Washington-based NGO backed by the US government. It is directly funded by the US government and receives a large amount of financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organization controlled by the US government to promote regime change. Over the years, the CHRD has been working on behalf of far-right opposition figures who have glorified colonialism and appealed for the "Westernization" of China.

◆In 2018, the CHRD submitted a report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination — which was often falsely cited by Western media outlets as a UN-authored report. The CHRD claimed that the figures in the report were "based on interviews and limited data". But in fact, they interviewed only eight Uyghurs. (The Uyghur population in Xinjiang was 12,718,400 in 2018.) Based on these few samples, the CHRD extrapolated estimates that "at least 10% of villagers […] are being detained in re-education detention camps, and 20% are being forced to attend day/evening re-education sessions in the villages or townships, totaling 30% in both types of camps". Then, by applying the estimated ratio to the total population of Xinjiang, the CHRD absurdly concluded that one million ethnic Uyghurs have been detained in "re-education detention camps" and two million more have been "forced to attend day/evening re-education sessions".

◆Taking the groundless CHRD report as reliable data, the US government accused China of "arbitrary detention" of "at least 800,000, and possibly more than 2 million, Uighurs and members of other Muslim minorities in internment camps". Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2018, State Department official Scott Busby stated that this "is the US government assessment, backed by our intelligence community and open source reporting."