So, you will often see businessmen, academics and others with pecuniary interests in China express concern about repression in Hong Kong, or the treatment of the Uighurs, or maybe a bit of disquiet about all those irredentist claims in the South China Sea and elsewhere, and the hope that the regime will moderate given continuing engagement.
However, they will not acknowledge the real scope and horror of what is happening, such as the case for viewing the treatment of the Uighurs as genocide, or the sheer awfulness of what is being done to them. This article by posted on the BBC website underscores the reality of what is being done to Uighur women in particular.
But contrast that with the exquisitely even-handed description of the Uighur situation by NBC, the network that has the American rights to cover the Beijing winter games, with it being described as a matter of "allegations" that the CCP regime "vociferously denies".
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Journalist Andy Browne, one of NBC’s China experts, called it “the most sensitive issue” of the Olympics and said only that Western governments and human rights groups “allege” that the Chinese government is engaged in the systematic repression of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
“They allege that this is a massive program of social engineering aimed at suppressing Muslim Uyghur culture, language, tradition, identity,” he added. “They allege a host of human rights abuses, forced labor, coercive birth control practices, indoctrination and that all this adds up to a form of cultural genocide.”
He adds: “It has to be said that the Chinese government emphatically denies all of this. They say that accusations of genocide are the lie of the century.”
Browne’s presentation of China’s denial prompted Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin to criticize NBC for taking a “both-sides” approach to human-rights abuses.
The broadcasters painted China’s well-documented human rights abuses as mere allegations put forward by a geopolitical rival.