I see reports such as these on a daily basis, most of them are quickly debunked. There are laws in China, and those laws apply to Chinese people, I'm not going to comment on this story individually, since I don't know the circumstances and certainly wouldn't take the words from the Guardian as factual, I've accused the Guardian of lying on several different occasions and produced evidence that demonstrates they have lied. In this case, it's just them publishing someone's story, so I won't do that.

If someone breaks the laws of China they get punished for it. I'm not in favour of any kind of incarceration for no reason, but, my experience of China is that they don't incarcerate unless there is a good reason, and, when they do, they usually educate and rehabilitate, a better system than some countries offer, but it would not be a nice experience to have to go through 10 or 11 hours of it on a daily basis.

No one who goes to prison gets a good experience, but think about this: If the Chinese government were locking people up and torturing them, would they be free to live in Europe and write about it now?

One of the biggest contradictions in the entire narrative is the number of people who have "escaped" persecution and are now writing about it. Why do I think of this as a contradiction? Because, if they had been in prison in Xinjiang and they were tortured and treated as these stories allege, there is no way China, the totalitarian, authoritarian (and guilty) state, that the articles purport China to be, would allow them out to tell the tales - this doesn't make any sense.

If the government is hiding a massive scale of human rights abuses, no one would be allowed out to tell the tales. Would they?

One more point; there is a massive unsecure border between Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, an even bigger border between Xinjiang and Mongolia, there are borders into Afghanistan and several other countries yet there isn't a single refugee camp on any of those borders - why would that be? because there aren't any refugees. Why aren't there any refugees? I know from my own travels, there are millions of Uyghurs living in Xinjiang, they work in shops, restaurants, hotels and they work on farms and in the markets, they are everywhere we look in the region. Surely, if those people who live in the region (and many of them send out daily TikTok videos), if those people felt fear for their lives or of imminent incarceration, wouldn't they do anything they can to get out? Think Rohingya in Myanmar, millions from the Middle East and East Africa all trying to escape from wars and persecution as I write this - this lack of refugees can't be explained if the stories about the region were true.

I accept there are problems in Xinjiang, no one in their right mind would deny it. I accept there are prisons, and wouldn't be at all surprised if there are people in those prisons who shouldn't be there. A situation which exists in every country in the world is that people who don't belong in a prison sometimes end up there. I would fight tooth and nail for my family if I believed they had been locked up for no reason.

However, I don't accept there is a systemic plan to destroy, remove or even to dilute Uyghur culture - that just doesn't fit with the evidence I've seen on my travels, quite the opposite in fact, Uyghur culture and Islam seem to thrive there.

So, a person with a family member who takes part in separatist activities overseas was arrested and questioned. I have no idea what she did, or why the Chinese government decided to hold this person for two years. I can only add that, if she was living overseas, no threat to China and only coming back to do some paperwork and then leave China forever, the entire article seems to be pointless - what's China's end game in arresting, torturing, imprisoning a person who just wants to leave the country and get on with her life - there's always something more, something she's not telling in her story and for this reason I would not necessarily dismiss this out of hand, but I would certainly look for another part of the missing story because for sure, this is not the entire story.