Day: November 23, 2022

The family of a land rights activist serving an eight-year sentence for “conducting propaganda against the state” has denounced the detention facility in north-central Vietnam where he is being held for harsh treatment following a hunger strike protest, the man’s father said Wednesday.

Former prisoner of conscience Trinh Ba Khiem, who is also a land rights activist, said authorities at Detention Center No. 6 in Nghe An province pressured his son, Trinh Ba Tu, to work after he had been shackled for 10 days following a 22-day hunger strike. 

“The detention center forced Tu to perform labor,” in October and November, said Khiem, who visited him on Monday, after prison officials lifted a previous ban on family visits to Tu. 

RFA could not reach prison officials for comment. 

Tu was arrested along with his brother, Trinh Ba Phuong, and their mother, Can Thi Theu, in mid-2020 on charges of “conducting propaganda against the state” for speaking out strongly on social networks about the Dong Tam land rights dispute.

The dispute centered on construction of a military airport opposed by villagers south of Hanoi.

The ensuing January 2020 clash left a popular local leader and three policemen dead. Twenty-nine villagers were arrested, and many were given stiff sentences.

In early May 2021, Tu and his mother were sentenced to eight years in prison and three years’ probation each. Phuong was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

After Tu held a Sept. 6-28 hunger strike to protest harsh conditions in prison, guards shackled his feet and beat him. He lost about 10 kilograms, or 22 pounds, and his health now is improving, Khiem said.

At the end of September, Tu’s family filed a petition with the Ministry of Public Security to investigate the matter. The ministry told the family to send the petition to the People’s Procuracy of Nghe An province. 

On Thursday, Do Thi Thu, Tu’s sister-in-law, met with Le Quoc Bao, deputy director of Division No. 8 at the provincial People’s Procuracy, who went to the prison to investigate the family’s complaint about Tu’s shackling and beating. 

Family suspects cover-up

Tu’s hunger strike came after he filed a petition with detention center officials on Sept. 4, condemning their decision not to suspend the jail terms of fellow prisoner of conscience, Do Cong Duong, and allow him to go home for treatment after he had taken ill. 

Duong, a citizen journalist, died in early August because prison officials did not allow him to receive timely medical treatment. Sources told RFA that Duong was healthy before being transferred to the detention facility.

Tu told Bao that on Sept. 6, Col. Tran Anh Que and Lt. Col. Truong Cong Hien from the prison met with him to discuss his petition. Two inmates convicted of drug trafficking also attended, at the request of the prison officials. Hien threw a cigarette lighter at him but missed, Tu later told his father. 

When Tu decided to leave because he thought the situation could become dangerous, one of the other inmates grabbed his neck and held him, while Hien hit him on the head and called for a baton, saying “I’ll be responsible if [he is] dead.” 

Because those involved in the incident later told Bao that they had not assaulted Tu, Bao said he could not confirm the beating in the absence of any evidence.   

Prison officials also told Bao that the shackling and a ban on family visits in October were disciplinary acts in response to what they said was Tu’s false denunciation of the facility regarding Duong’s case, Thu said. 

Prisoners normally have the right to one-hour monthly visits from their relatives, to make a 10-minute phone call every month and to receive provisions from their families. 

“I think Nghe An People’s Procuracy has covered up for Detention Center No. 6,” Tu’s sister-in-law told RFA by text message. “If an independent human rights organization or newspaper had conducted the investigation, Tu’s beating would have been revealed, or if Tu had been allowed to use a cell phone to record or film, the truth would have been exposed.” 

In late September, New York-based Human Rights Watch called for a proper investigation into Tu’s beating and shackling.

“That kind of treatment is outrageous and unacceptable, and the perpetrators should be held accountable for maltreating prisoners,” Phil Robertson, HRW’s deputy Asia director, said at the time.

HRW also called on the United Nations and foreign diplomats to appeal to the Vietnamese government to give them access to Tu at the detention center. 

Translated by Anna Vu for RFA Vietnamese. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Edited by Joshua Lipes.

Most Uyghurs in Xinjiang have not returned to mosques that Chinese authorities have reopened for limited religious services in response to heavy international criticism of repressive policies targeting the mostly Muslim ethnic group, sources inside and outside the country say.

Authorities in the restive northwestern region began scaling back their crackdown on religion in early 2020 by reopening some mosques they previously shut down during the height of religious persecution in 2017.  

The change occurred after the United States and the parliaments of some Western countries declared China’s repression of the Uyghurs, including arbitrary detainment and serious human rights violations, amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity. In late August, the United Nations human rights chief issued a report into the accusations and concluded that the repression “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

Despite the “softened” stance toward Islam in Xinjiang, most Uyghurs who lost confidence in China’s religious policy that officially recognizes five religions, including Islam, because of the crackdown, have refrained from returning to the reopened houses of worship.

“After being criticized by the international community over the concentration camps, China defended itself by partially relaxing religious restrictions,” said Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, a political analyst based in the United States and vice chairman of the executive committee of the World Uyghur Congress. 

“However, since those who were taken to the camps have not been released yet, the residents did not believe in this ‘softening’ of the policy,” he said.

Fear that religion could be used to drive separatism

The Chinese government recognizes five faiths —Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Protestantism and Islam — but has long feared that foreigners could use religious practice to induce separatism. 

Under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has focused on Sinicizing religions to conform with the doctrines of the officially atheist party and the customs of the majority Han Chinese population. 

But Beijing views expressions of Islam in Xinjiang as extremist because of former independence movements and occasional violent outbursts in the region. 

In 2017, Xinjiang’s government implemented an anti-extremism law and began arbitrarily detaining Uyghurs in “re-education” centers in an effort to eliminate “religious extremism” and “terrorism.” 

Authorities also assigned party cadres to stay in Uyghur homes to monitor the behavior of the inhabitants and destroyed many mosques across the region, claiming they were structurally unsafe. They also hauled away Muslim imams and religious scholars as part of the crackdown.

Right to practice

But there have been some attempts to loosen controls.

In January 2020, authorities Korla, known as Ku’erle in Chinese and the second-largest city in Xinjiang, issued a document informing residents that they had the right to practice Islam. They then tried to persuade them to return to local mosques, said a policeman who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak with the media.

A member of a mosque management committee told residents that if they believed in Islam, they could perform regular religious activities at a local mosque that can accommodate 100-150 people, he said. 

“The residents said they believed in the faith, and some signed their signatures on a document,” the officer told RFA. 

But only four or five Uyghur pensioners dependent on government assitance are attending prayer services there, he said.

In Hotan prefecture, known as Hetian in Chinese, authorities have touted upgrades to existing mosques to encourage Uyghurs to return to them. 

“Sunny, spacious and clean”

At the Jeymehel Mosque, the prefecture’s propaganda department has used loudspeakers to try to attract worshipers.

The mosque was built in 1848 and was furnished with an air conditioner, water cooler, storage spaces for shoes and other personal items and a fire extinguisher when it was rebuilt in 2019, according to the department’s pre-recorded announcement. 

“Our mosque conditions are the best,” said the announcement as heard on a Xinjiang TV broadcast. “It is sunny, spacious, and clean, and the environment is comfortable. This renovation pleased our worshipers,” says a department announcement over loudspeakers with the sounds of Quranic verse in the background.  

In Kashgar prefecture, known as Kashi in Chinese and an area heavily populated by Uyghurs, 

authorities turned some mosques into centers disseminating political propaganda, locals told RFA in a 2017 report. They required caretakers of mosques to fly China’s national flag atop the buildings and ordered them to remove Islamic inscription from walls and replace them with large red banners expressing love for China and the CCP. 

Authorities previously shut down three mosques in the Chinese Bazar neighborhood of Ghulja, known as Yining in Chinese, and sentenced seven members of Tahtiyun Mosque to prison, sources there said. 

Severe clampdown in past

Religious suppression has been severe in Ghulja, recently complicated by a strict lockdown amid outbreaks of the coronavirus this August and September that in some cases led to the deaths of about 90 from starvation or lack of access to medicine in the city of roughly a half-million mainly Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims.

When the bodies were collected, authorities didn’t inform the families of the deceased about whether they handled their remains according to Islamic burial rituals, according to an earlier RFA report. 

Authorities demolished a mosque on Saman Street and locked up another mosque in Ghulja’s Tahtiyun neighborhood and removed its minaret, according to a retired police officer from the Ili Kazakh (Yili Hasake) autonomous prefecture, where Ghulja is located. 

They also closed the Tung’gan Mosque, a Chinese Hui Muslim structure, where seven clergymen, including the imam and muezzin, were imprisoned.

A Chinese Hui Muslim imam from Uch’un Hui village in Ghulja was appointed to hold Friday prayer services at a mosque built a decade ago in the town of Qarayaghach, said a security official from the community. 

The locals recruited a Chinese Hui Muslim because no Uyghur imams could be found, residents said.

Differing treatment

The Chinese government’s treatment of Muslims differs according to ethnic and geographic lines, sources in the country say. Hui Muslims, who are perceived as less of a threat, are given greater leeway than Uyghurs to practice Islam, such as fasting during the holy month of Ramadan and wearing headscarves, they say.

“The worshipers pray only on Friday [when] they open the mosque,” said the village security chief, who declined to be named for safety reasons.

Four elderly Uyghur residents who receive government pensions went there to worship but had difficulty understanding the imam’s sermon because of his poor Uyghur language skills, which resulted in some words and phrases being almost comically misspoken, village residents said.

But the elders dared not laugh at or express dissatisfaction with him, they said.

One villager said the mosque remains closed on days other than Friday. 

“On other days, the security guards watch the mosque,” the person said, adding that the mosque’s loudspeakers are no longer used to call worshipers to prayer, except on Fridays.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Workers clashed with authorities at Taiwan-invested iPhone maker Foxconn in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou Wednesday, as hundreds of laborers staged a protest over delayed bonus payments amid mounting anger at China’s zero-COVID policy.

Social media footage showing workers pulling down barriers and throwing them at police, smashing security cameras and fighting with authorities in white protective suits holding plastic shields, chanting “give us our pay.” 

Police fired tear gas and a water cannon at the crowd, prompting some of them to chant: “Here comes the tear gas! Here comes the tear gas!” while others fought back with rocks and fire extinguishers.

In one video, workers surround a vehicle, calling for “justice” at Foxconn’s flagship factory, which saw a mass exodus of migrant workers amid claims of mistreatment and foot shortages during a COVID-19 outbreak last month.

The Associated Press reported that a video showed that police had kicked and hit a protester with clubs after he grabbed a metal pole that had been used to strike him. 

“There are so many people,” one person says in a video clip uploaded to social media. “We didn’t mean to cause trouble. We wanted to stand up for our rights, but they beat us … Several people were sent to hospital from the beatings.”

The factory has come to represent growing frustrations over China’s harsh zero-COVID policy that has forced residents to endure lengthy, repeated lockdowns.

Foxconn imposed a “closed-loop” system last month under which staff live and work on-site, isolated from the outside world. The system sparked anger over strict quarantine rules, poor conditions, and Foxconn’s inability to stamp out outbreaks.

Phoenix News cited a local media report saying Foxconn would give recently recruited workers who resign and return to their hometowns a subsidy of 10,000 yuan to cover salary, relocation costs and other expenses.

Before the unrest, the Zhengzhou plant employed about 200,000 people. But former workers estimate that thousands have fled the factory campus.

The protests that began Tuesday were staged by new workers hired to replace those who fled Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, last month.

“These Foxxconn workers are new hires from the nearby villages that the government helped to recruit,” said a resident of Zhengzhou, surnamed Li.

“The government gave each village a quota and the village cadres then helped to hire these workers. But once they arrive in the factories, the benefits are not as they were promised when they were hired. They feel they are cheated, so they want to leave,” she told RFA Mandarin.

Few Chinese media outlets have reported on the protests at the world’s largest iPhone plant.

On Tuesday, however, the Henan Daily reported that provincial Chinese Communist Party secretary Lou Yangsheng visited Foxxcon campus, urging the company to improve pandemic measures and restore normal factory operations.

Reuters news agency reported that Foxconn had aimed to resume full production at the Zhengzhou iPhone plant by the second half of November. But it quoted sources as saying the disruptions sparked by the latest unrest were likely to make the firm miss the target.

China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based advocacy group, said early this month that the conflict “has been a disaster for the Apple supplier in terms of both public relations and production, exposing the poor treatment of workers and jeopardizing supply ahead of the gift-giving holidays.”

The NGO added that “the crisis might have been averted or mitigated had the union intervened early to represent workers who voiced strong concerns that production was being put ahead of work safety.”

Translation and editing by Luisetta Mudie and Paul Eckert.

Hong Kong police have “disciplined” an undisclosed number of officers who logged onto an internal computer network to view images of a woman arrested on indecency charges for having sex on an apartment balcony, according to local media reports.

While the police told journalists that no crime had been committed, the case has raised public concerns over privacy and data protection in law enforcement.

Police said in comments quoted by the Chinese-language Ming Pao newspaper that the officers were unconnected to the case but had viewed the case files purely to check out the woman’s appearance.

Officers had also screenshotted a video of the couple’s encounter that went viral in June and shared the images on WhatsApp, the English-language South China Morning Post reported.

As many as 100 officers not involved in the case had logged on just to look at images of the woman, an internal investigation of login data revealed, it said.

The police told both papers that the investigation into the incident is now complete and that the offenders had received “appropriate disciplinary action,” the papers reported.

The police force attaches great importance to the integrity of personnel, and will spare no effort to deepen its integrity management culture and prevent misconduct, the papers quoted them as saying.

An employee who responded to RFA’s questions at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner on Monday said the agency doesn’t comment on individual cases, but that “it is paying attention to developments” in the case.

They said any organization that collects, holds, processes or uses personal information must comply with Hong Kong’s Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance and other data protection regulations.

“Anyone who suspects their personal data privacy has been violated and can provide prima facie evidence may make inquiries or complaints to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner,” the employee said.

Questions remain

Hong Kong barrister Albert Luk said he wasn’t entirely sure that a crime hadn’t been committed.

Luk said the officers who viewed the material could have committed “dishonest use of a computer,” a criminal offense carrying a potential custodial sentence.

In April 2021, investigative journalist Bao Choy was found guilty of “improper searches” of an online car license database after she used the site to access number plate ownership records for her documentary on the July 21, 2019, mob attacks at the Yuen Long MTR station. 

“If these other police officers weren’t members of this investigation team, theoretically, they shouldn’t be privy to the identity of the suspects, which is supposed to be kept secret,” Luk told RFA.

However, he said it wasn’t clear exactly how the officers managed to view the files.

“We can’t be sure whether the police who did this tried to do it secretly, or whether it was all done openly,” Luk said. “We don’t know what channels they used.”

Luk said the non-investigating officers could also be suspected of “misconduct in public office,” but that the evidence released by the police didn’t provide enough evidence to prosecute anyone.

He said the case shows that there are obvious loopholes in the way the police force stores personal data, however. “We may not have any real evidence that the police broke the law, it doesn’t seem right, looking at it from outside,” Luk said. “At the very least, it highlights a loophole in the system.”

He recommended that police look at their own systems to plug any loopholes as soon as possible and to prevent similar incidents from happening again.

Curiosity as an excuse

Current affairs commentator Sang Pu, also a qualified lawyer, said “curiosity” was no excuse.

“The complaints and internal investigations section is using ‘curiosity’ as an excuse to claim that no criminal activity was involved,” Sang told RFA. “But there are no exemptions for ‘curiosity’ in the laws of any country, including China.”

“It’s just unbelievable that they’re using ‘curiosity’ as an excuse.”

Sang agreed that the officers could have committed criminal offenses including the “dishonest use of computer,” and “misconduct in public office.”

“The impression I get is that the Hong Kong police know what the law says, and break it anyway,” he said. “They do so without consequence, and yet they suppress any kind of dissenting speech.”

Hong Kong passed amendments to its privacy law in 2021 banning “doxxing,” or the online disclosure of anyone’s personal information, including those of officials suspected of wrongdoing. 

According to the city’s Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance, nobody should use personal data “for any new purpose unrelated to the original purpose when the data was collected without first obtaining the data subject’s express and voluntary consent.”

A 26-year-old customer service assistant was prosecuted by the privacy commissioner in October 2021 for posting details about his ex-girlfriend online without her consent, an offense that carries a maximum of two years’ imprisonment.

And a former immigration clerk pleaded guilty last year to “misconduct in public office” after accessing records pertaining to 215 government officials, judicial officers, police officers and other public figures and their family members without authorization.

She was jailed for three years and nine months, and described by the judge who sentenced her as a kind of “online al-Qaeda.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Authorities in the southwestern Chinese region of Guangxi have jailed a prominent critic of the ruling Communist Party for four-and-a-half years after he spoke out about a woman found chained in an outbuilding in Jiangsu earlier this year, RFA has learned.

The Guigang Municipal People’s Court on Nov. 20 handed down a four-year, six-month jail term to Lu Huihuang — who has previously also called for democratic reforms — after finding him guilty of “incitement to subvert state power,” the rights group Weiquanwang reported.

“[Lu] refused to accept the judgment and has expressed his intention to appeal,” the report said, describing Lu as a “freelance and online writer, a dissident citizen, rights activist and political prisoner.”

He was taken away from his home in Nanning city by police from Guigang on Feb. 18, 2022 “for calling on the ruling Chinese Communist Party to thoroughly investigate the case of the chained woman in Xuzhou,” the site reported.

Lu is currently being held in the Guigang Detention Center in Batang township, Guigang, it said.

Guangxi resident Nong Dingcai said Lu’s friends had been informed of his sentence, and of his intention to appeal, by the detention center.

“The detention center called some of his friends in China, saying that Lu Huihuang had been sentenced to four-and a half years,” Nong told RFA.

“The charge was ‘incitement to subvert state power.’ He has requested an appeal.”

Nong said not all of the information about Lu’s case has been released, and his family members are under close surveillance.

Authorities have yet to release any official information about Lu’s case. In China, the crime of “incitement to subvert state power” is considered confidential and related trials are held in secret.

Suggesting democratic reforms

According to Weiquanwang, Lu has written a number of essays and open letters to the Communist Party leadership since 2013, proffering suggestions on democratic reforms to China’s political system.

“[The articles] suggested that the Communist Party carry out democratic and constitutional reforms as soon as possible, and found resonance with people online,” it said, adding that the articles were extensively forwarded and read via groups on the QQ and WeChat social media platforms, as well as being published on overseas websites like Beijing Spring and China Labor Watch.

It said Lin had previously served a two-and-a-half year jail term in Guangdong’s Conghua Prison, during which he was tortured with electric shocks, kept in manacles and forced to sleep on the floor for long periods of time because he refused to plead guilty or make a “confession.”

Fellow dissident Lin Shengliang said Lu’s criticism of the case of the chained woman was likely just an excuse for the authorities to re-detain him.

“It’s thought that Lu Huihuang’s secret detention was linked to the case of the chained woman, because he published too many posts about it on his group chats,” Lin told RFA. “But given the harshness of the sentence, there were probably other baseless accusations too.”

He said supporters who had tried to visit Lu’s parents had also been detained.

“Given that his parents are under security measures, a lot of people who went to visit them were immediately taken away by local police and village officials,” Lin said.

He said Lu has been unable to hire an independent lawyer, because his family are being “cooperative” with the authorities, which generally means agreeing to have him represented by a government-appointed lawyer.

“Lu Huihuang actually asked a prison guard to get a message to me asking me to help him find an attorney, but the local state security police didn’t allow us to mail the instruction letter to Lu Huihuang so he could sign it,” Lin said.

“We don’t know what is happening with him, how legal the investigation, prosecution or trial were, nor whether he was tortured.”

New era of authoritarian rule

Lin said the authorities have entered a new era of authoritarian rule.

“Under the new authoritarianism, the government uses a powerful state machine to crush dissidents,” he said. “As the social and political environment continues to deteriorate, the crime of inciting subversion of state power will be more widely and freely used by China’s powerful agencies.”

In December 2021, authorities in Guangxi handed down a three-year jail term to outspoken rights lawyer Chen Jiahong for “subversion,” amid fears for his safety in detention. Chen had been a prominent critic of the government. 

On China’s tightly controlled internet, Chen was known for inscribing the slogan “Set up an assassination detail, liquidate this evil bureaucracy and promote democracy” in Chinese calligraphy and posting it to social media.

Fellow Guangxi lawyer Qin Yongpei was detained in early November 2021 by the Nanning municipal police department during a raid on his Baijuying legal consultancy company, after speaking out many times about misconduct and injustices perpetrated by police and local judicial officials. 

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

In Brief

The China Central Television-sponsored program, “The Scoop: How America’s AI Manipulates the Narrative,” has exploded in popularity. In an effort to refute U.S. accusations of genocide in Xinjiang, the program cites a report published by Stanford University that “exposes” how the United States has spread lies through “vast networks of fake accounts” on social media platforms in order to sway global public opinion.

Asia Fact Check Lab found that the report from the Stanford Internet Observatory focuses on the spread of pro-Western propaganda in the Middle East through over a hundred sham AI accounts. But nothing in the report backs up CCTV’s claims that the “rumors concerning Xinjiang” are a “ridiculous … false narrative” perpetuated by the United States.

In Depth 

“The Scoop: How America’s AI Controls the Narrative” is a weekly show produced under the CCTV-sponsored brand Yu Yuan Tan Tian. The show can be seen on most major official media outlets and web portals. Its self-proclaimed aim is to discover why exactly people buy into these “ridiculous rumors” about Xinjiang and to “expose” America’s covert effort to shape global public opinion through “vast networks of fake accounts” spreading lies on popular social media sites. The program then describes reports of forced labor in Xinjiang as “false” and uses a report from The Stanford Internet Observatory to back up its claims. 

The program intersperses references to the report with interviews from three Chinese professors, with the intent of exposing how U.S. military and intelligence uses “AI facial recognition, personality profiles, fake accounts” to create and spread “lies.” The narrator claims to reveal the U.S. “conspiracy … to invade both our land and our minds,” and urges viewers to exercise “independent judgment and logical thinking.” 

The Stanford Internet Observatory is a cross-disciplinary research project focused on pointing out reckless use of social media. Since 2019, the project has released 34 reports analyzing the context and causes behind social media accounts deleted due to user violations. 

The specific Stanford study cited by The Scoop is titled, “Unheard Voice: Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert influence operation.” Asia Fact Check Lab found that it focused on a hundred or so AI accounts in the Middle East and Central Asia suspected of spreading pro-Western propaganda. The majority of accounts were located in Afghanistan and Iran, with a few in Central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan. In total, there were 81 accounts on Facebook, 46 on Twitter, and 26 on Instagram. The account languages were a mixture of Turkish, Russian and Arabic, with neither Chinese nor English ever featured. The objective was to “continuously forward the interests of the United States and its allies; while simultaneously combating Russia, China and Iran” through the use of deceptive tactics to spread pro-Western rhetoric in the region.

For example, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, the accounts released a slew of criticism against Russia, sometimes reposting related reports from outlets such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Social media sites deleted the accounts after discovering they were generated by AI technology.

The Stanford study mentions “Xinjiang ” and “Uyghur” just three times: once in an overview of accounts active in Central Asia, once when mentioning two AI accounts posting news on “genocide” and “reeducation camps” in Xinjiang, and once within a photo caption detailing a post from the same two accounts. Critically, the report does not argue for or against the validity of the information spread by these Xinjiang accounts. 

The same Stanford group also released a second report entitled “One Topic, Two Networks: Evaluating Two Chinese Influence Operations on Twitter Related to Xinjiang,” which The Scoop did not mention.

This second report reveals in detail how the Chinese government orchestrates thousands of fake accounts to spread false narratives and deny its atrocities in Xinjiang. Published in December of 2021, the report calculates that in recent years the Chinese government has created over 30,000 accounts on Twitter, classifying them based on time and type. In 2021 alone, the number of Twitter accounts found and suspended for spreading “false narratives” about Xinjiang totaled to 2,128. The report emphasized findings regarding human rights violations in Xinjiang released from a variety of international organizations and mainstream media outlets, including the United Nations, Amnesty International, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and Reuters. It then went on to show how these accounts systematically attempted to use propaganda fueled smear tactics in order to coerce global public opinion. 

Conclusion

“The Scoop ” misleads viewers into thinking that the Stanford report it references supports the Chinese government’s official narrative regarding Xinjiang.  However, the results of both the referenced and unreferenced Stanford reports do not deny the facts of surveillance, oppression and forced labor occuring in Xinjiang. Quite the contrary, they both show that these facts exist and expose the Chinese government’s attempts to cover them up. 

Lacking any marked political leanings, tThe series of studies released by Stanford reports focus on technical analysis, researching both the methods and results employed to spread propaganda information on social media. The reports themselves lack marked political leanings. They analyze any message withmessagepropaganda with potential political motives or an intent to influence public opinion, whether the source is Chinese or American. The results of these studies do not deny the facts of the surveillance, oppression and forced labor occuring in Xinjiang. Quite the contrary, they both demonstrate the existence of these facts and expose how the Chinese government attempts to cover them up. 

References

1. The Scoop: How America’s AI Manipulates the Narrative

2. Yu Yuan Tan Tian

3. Unheard Voice

4. One Topic, Two Networks

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a new branch of RFA, established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our reader’s understanding of public issues.