(Part 2) As for "incompetence rather than malice":
There is a saying that aptly summarizes the issue: the central government told the Xinjiang authority to cut the hair, but they cut the entire head instead.
Local governments and police forces in China tend to be overzealous in implementing central policy. This is either because they're eyeing a promotion by showing how well they've reached KPIs, or because they're risk averse and don't want to deal with being punished for allowing a terrorist to slip through the cracks.
They also tend to brush with a broad stroke, hence lots of collateral damage which catches innocents in the process.
These are long standing issues and occur outside Xinjiang too, though slowly improving over time as competency improves. But it's especially bad in Xinjiang because:
1. Competent people don't want to be in Xinjiang: they tend to move elsewhere.
2. The central government wanted the terrorism issue under control as fast as possible. Incompetent officials and policemen focus on a singular goals and can't be bothered with something like collateral damage.
It's neither a racism nor official policy issue because:
- The head of Xinjiang is a Uyghur, and lots of government officials and policemen are Uyghurs. Uyghur policemen are trying to cut corners by racially profiling their own ethnicity.
- Official policy is give minorities preferential treatmenf through something similar to affirmative axtion. Minorities were exempt from the One Child Policy and they receive extra points on university exams. Laws are applied more leniently to minorities. This is not new and has been the case since the PRC's founding in 1949.
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Forced labor is limited to prison labor. Deradicalization centers have no prison labor as far as I know. There is no evidence of cotton, tomato or solar panel forced labor. My contact in Xinjiang is pretty furious about the recent US ban because this ban actually harms the lives of normal Uyghurs who make a living through these products.
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Regarding comparison to the US's conduct in Afghanistan: you paint a very different picture than the one I know of. For example, this: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/af...
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Regarding international visits and transparency: there have been international visits.
Delegations from many non-western countries (including many islamic countries) have visited and said everything was fine, even saying they're impressed by the level of safety and development. A few years ago the UN sent a counter-terrorism expert to visit, who then wrote a positive report.
Of course, there are complications:
- The US protested that the report is not valid because a human rights expert should have been sent instead. They also protested that maybe we shouldn't send anybody to Xinjiang at all, because if the report turns out to be positive then that will give China undeserved legitimacy. Hmm.....
- Visits by non-western delegations are considered untrustworthy by western countries. The rhetoric goes that non-western countries have been bought by China. But this notion deprives those countries of their agency, and ignores the fact that friendly relations between China and the global south started way before China was rich.
If you ask me, the entire situation has been so thoroughly politicized that a neutral, objective inspection by foreign countries is not possible. Western countries won't accept any other outcome than "millions of Uyghurs are being genocided". There are a lot of dishonest reporters out there.
Which brings us to the next point...
At the same time, China distrusts western countries' neutrality and objectivity, and so they are incentivized to become less transparent.
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Regarding transparency and secrecy:
The west is essentially punishing China for being transparent. They used to divulge more about Xinjiang, but after a series of dishonest western media reports and propaganda, they became increasingly wary to the point where they'd rather shut everything down and making things more opaque. This becoming more opaque extends to issues beyond Xinjiang as well: as the US increasingly sanctions China using data obtained through transparency, China becomes more opaque in response.
China has always been clumsy in its communication with the west (though the opposite is also true). The issue of transparency is a long-standing issue. The Chinese government, and more generally Chinese people, tend to respond to any controversy by staying silent rather than through rebuttals. In Chinese culture, speaking is silver and silence is gold — a bit the opposite of many western cultures. Staying silent doesn't necessarily mean covering up: it means they gave up on communicating and are going their own way.
But of course, this behavior only makes westerners more suspicious, where silence is seen as evidence of sinister practice.
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Regarding China's reputation of having been caught and therefore deserves a guilty until innocence proven attitude:
Is "having caught" really true? You mentioned internment camps but that very issue is under dispute. So let's ignore that one for now.
Forced abortions: if you're talking about the One Child Policy, then that hardly counts has "having been caught in the act". The One Child Policy and its implications have always been public knowledge. I find this example very weird.
Organ harvesting: these claims come from Falun Gong. But where is the evidence?
There was organ harvesting, but not the kind alleged by Falun Gong. What they did was using organs of already-executed prisoners, which I agree is questionable but it's also on a whole different level than killing random people for their organs, as Falun Gong alleged. More importantly, China stopped this practice around 2015 on its own volition.
I assert that the claim that China cannot be trusted on the grounds of past crimes, is very dubious if you look deeply into the actual evidence. There are a lot of allegations without evidence. Some allegations are based on true underlying issues, but heavily distorted. Some are straight up lies. The bad reputation is built on a pile of sand, with very few actual bricks in the pile.
I saw on the ground in China early 2020 how the entire COVID issue was massively distorted by foreign media. The entire Li Wenliang censorship story was misrepresented. Wuhan was allegedly full of dead bodies which have been covered up, and everybody was forced by the government to stay at home rather than voluntarily doing so. No.
It is true that western countries tend to be more transparent (though I question your assertion that any journalist can visit any jail; can they visit Guantanamo?). But concluding that opaqueness is automatically sinister is also a stretch. This notion is especially problematic because the US is abusing transparency of foreign countries for the sake of upholding its own supremacy and for imposing sanctions, rather than as a way to truly encourage good and just governance.
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The end. As you can see, the Xinjiang issue is complex, and consists of a mix of many different issues. Multiple facts which appear contradictory are actually true at the same time.
I spent 2 days writing this. As you can imagine, with all this complexity it's really difficult to explain to most people what's going on.