BadEmpanada’s whole shtick is basically to try to triangulate into positions between MLs and Western radlibs while rarely fully siding with either camp, although he does pretty much take up the tankie position on Cuba and has some decent content for Cuba and some other Latin American topics. While trying to forge what he thinks as the most perfect nuanced position on leftist issues, he’ll parrot some of the fallacious US state department narratives, but he will usually avoid using the more obvious bullshit Western propaganda that anticommunist chauvinist idiots like Vaush constantly fall for. He unfortunately does lapse at times into stereotypical Western leftist white saviorism behavior though (particularly in regards to China).

I watched his Xinjiang video and he basically does his usual routine with painstakingly trying to be the enlightened centrist on the issue. Rather than fully endorsing all the Western atrocity propaganda regarding Xinjiang, he comes to the conclusion that what happened doesn’t constitute a genocide by the legal international definition. However, he tries to suggest that it could be considered what he perceives as a possible “cultural genocide” under a much broader definition of the term (“cultural genocide” can be a vague term that lacks a real legal definition, unlike genocide) or that there is at least significant state-sponsored oppression against the cultures of certain Muslim minority groups. He acknowledged that the recent Newlines Institute report that claimed an outright genocide under the international legal definition was bullshit and their narrative relies extensively on dubious anonymous reports to US government propaganda outlets like Radio Free Asia.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t really distinguish between (he likely doesn’t even know the differences) the recent wave of foreign far-right Salafi jihadism and traditional Uyghur culture that was actually under attack from the fascist Salafist-takfiri separatists from terrorist groups like the Turkestan Islamic Party. Those in Xinjiang who had become radicalized by far-right Salafism from Saudi Arabia in recent decades considered Uyghurs who supported traditional Uyghur culture and Islamic practices (most are moderate Sufi/Hanafi that the Chinese government has historically had good relations with) to be kafirs. The Salafi terrorist groups were responsible for thousands of casualties in China including innocent Uyghurs and their Muslim leaders that the Salafi jihadists considered kafirs. Thousands of radicalized Salafi Uyghurs had traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight and train alongside terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda and had begun to return back to Xinjiang.

The Chinese government eventually decided to have a very clear crackdown against basically anything that could be associated with foreign Salafi jihadist influence with anti-extremism laws, deradicalization centers/reeducation centers, and vocational schools. The Xinjiang government also started intensifying employment and anti-poverty programs, education, enforcing family planning equally and removing exemptions in enforcement in the region (can help with poverty alleviation), heavy investments into public health (Xinjiang maternal and infant mortality rates have recently been reduced by almost half), and more economic development.

Due to not knowing the historical context of these problems in Xinjiang and just ignorance about China in general, BadEmpanada considers the deradicalization centers/reeducation centers/vocational schools as instruments of cultural repression against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Chinese minorities rather than a means for the government to deradicalize people from fascist Salafist-takfiri jihadism and lift vulnerable people out of poverty and isolation who were being targeted by Salafi terrorist groups. He doesn’t realize that Chinese is a multi-ethnic civic nationality. He even considers teaching putonghua to adults who already know and are literate in Uyghur to be an example of cultural repression. He omits information like affirmative action policies benefiting Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, government-sponsored halal accommodations, how extremely effective the COVID response was in Xinjiang (Xinjiang had one of the highest approval ratings for government response to COVID in China with only 3 deaths in Xinjiang vs the over 4,600 deaths in overall mainland China), and the banning of Islamophobic speech on the internet/social media.

A lot of the mistakes he makes in the video are largely the result of ignorance with being a white Westerner who does not speak the language and has never really been to China. He relies extensively on deceptive mistranslations of purported Chinese documents and Western interviews (BBC in particular) and the sketchy testimonies of Western government-backed exiles and defectors who have a history of inconsistencies and self-contradictions. He tries to cite the Xinjiang Victims Database which has been exposed for not verifying the claims that they publish and having the typical self-contradicting stories from Western government-sponsored exiles/defectors. It’s a situation that’s eerily similar to the one with unreliable stories from Western-backed North Korean defectors that consistently fall apart. He tries to spend a lot of time claiming that boarding schools in Xinjiang are a potential tool of repressing culture, but he omits the context of boarding schools already being very prevalent all over rural western China regardless of ethnic group and that most of the boarding schools are in western China. Boarding schools were already in high demand for rural and migrant worker families (of which many are Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang). Xinjiang’s boarding rate is only ranked in the middle among western provinces and autonomous regions. These schools are known for organizing traditional cultural activities and including the study of ethnic languages like Uyghur within the curriculum along with Mandarin as well. According to Aniwar Abulimit, head of the Educational Bureau of Kashgar prefecture in southern Xinjiang:

We provide subjects on ethnic languages in primary and middle schools, and teach Uygur, Kazak, Kirgiz, Mongol, Xibe and so on, thus protecting the rights of students from ethnic groups to learn their own languages and effectively promoting the inheritance and development of ethnic minority languages and cultures

It is certainly possible though that the Xinjiang government cast a net that was a bit too wide in its counter-terrorism campaign, got overzealous, and led to some potential false positives. Cases of isolated abuse were possible. Even generally pro-China sources acknowledge that problems with profiling, forced detention of those suspected of being radicalized by Salafi extremism, and mass surveillance exist and these problems could potentially cause some blowback. One of the biggest problems with the video though is that he basically offers no real solutions for China’s very real Salafi terrorist problems (something that most Westerners are very ignorant about or just significantly downplay to better portray China as a comically evil, repressive bogeyman) that Western imperialist powers like the American government want to exploit to balkanize China (America obviously has proven time and again that it doesn’t care about the lives of Muslims with its never-ending murderous wars and is the master of projection). He only offers largely flawed criticisms of China for his Western audience that is already bombarded with Western anti-China propaganda.

Economist Asatar Bair also made a detailed critique of the BadEmpanada video.