You can look at what gets reported about Xinjiang and the repression of Uighur Muslims through the lens of atrocity, but also through the lens of similarity.

For example China imprisons about 1.5m Uighur Muslims out of its population of 1.44bn so ~0.1%. Australia imprisons about 15,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people out of 26m so ~0.05%.

There are massive differences, but the scale and degree are not anywhere near as different as the exceptional language of the reporting makes out. In fact the instruments and systems are similar in very many ways.

A lot of coverage of China suffers from this alienation effect where we'll read terrifying things about "social credit apps" over there while banks check our credit ratings, property managers search our tenant histories, employers access our mental health and criminal records.

Old mate says "They've got a terrible identity card system for Uighurs"—well we've got a dozen brutal temporary visa categories, lock people up offshore, price gouge via cashless welfare cards and down the road from me there's a juvenile prison with 100% Aboriginal inmates.

I'm not saying it's all the same, it isn't obviously. But making this connection to understand we're converging, together with China and a lot of other places, on a carceral dystopia for half of the techniques of which Australia has served as a global testbed is crucial.

Also, making critique about the Grayzone flattens differences—Syria, Venezuela, China are not the same—while accentuating the idea that the world is a geopolitical smorgasbord of conflict zones about which the enlightened western subject holds opinions. https://www.codastory.com/disinformation/grayzone-xinjiang-denialism/

Connective counter-narratives are vital, like the reminder that "regime change" in Syria was partly about breaking a multi-state alliance of pipeline territory control, or that Chinese dominance in consumer electronics manufacturing presently depends on US and Taiwanese chips.

Otherwise you can arrive at a politics like a game of Risk, where populations are symbolically substituted by states, or even by one leader, and you're lining up Obama, Trump, Xi, Maduro, Assad, Putin, Macron etc on the board and pretending that's the world.

I don't understand the world all too well—who does? But I know that when someone tweets about Benghazi for weeks on end but never mentions EU nations funding off-grid detention centres in Libya, something's up and that a seriously problematic obfuscation is ongoing.