This is more appropriately labelled as counter evidence.
Considering the "millions" estimate was extrapolated from Zenz unsubstantiated feeling of ~1200 camps existing in 2017. These recent and relatively comprehensive GIS studies have conclusively proven that ~400 camps has existed _ever_, in varying states of construction and decommission in the past 3 years, i.e not all were operating concurrently. It's always interesting that Zenz estimates gets repeated in the same studies that simultaneously debunk them. I'm sure being funded by parties with anti-China interests has nothing to do with the manufacturing narrative process. For example Zenz was alleging up to 1M was interned in 2018. Choice quote from latest Buzzfeed piece by Killing regarding situation in 2018:
>"The business owner had heard rumors that the internment camps were not for education, as the government claimed, but mass detention. “We had heard that mass detention had occurred, that people were disappearing into these schools. We didn’t know much but we knew that it wasn’t a good place,” she said."
So 1/12th of an ethnicity is being rounded up and somehow it's still relegated to "rumor". Zenz claim around this time is 1/6th. That's about incarceration rate of black youth in US. 1/6 of your social circle gets round up, and it is not rumor territory. The entire allegation chain has been a coordinated clowns show. At the end of the day, XJ is less a human rights issue than a matter of manufactured consent for anti-China foreign policy. The latter would be less effective if XJ internment doesn't even eclipse US prison industrial complex. CCP is capable of interning millions, but so far the evidence points to the contrary.
They admit the number may not be precise (because China wouldn’t allow direct access of evidence), but it is “credible”.
This number agrees with the “detention targets” (of 10 percent of the population) shared by local officials, and the average estimates by local people.
Detention targets of local officials and estimates by local people are evidence. Not air-tight, but are reasonable when China forbids independent verification.
The second article also mentions indirect evidence, other than local reports or satellite images. All very conservative estimates give about 200,000. But these are very conservative estimates. The actual number is likely much higher, and suggests that “a million” isn’t too far off.
Some news reporting on the scale of the detention camps in Xinjiang, with satellite images [1], an account of a survivor [2], and how the 1 million number was estimated [3].