So there is a report going around (originally by Der Spiegel and ZDF), based on “research” by Adrian Zenz, about German companies’ involvement in Uyghur oppression. I couldn’t find the document that Zenz is basing this on.

In this article, though not directly related to the allegations against BASF and VW, they put a face to Uyghur oppression: Gulpiya Qazybek, a Kazakh woman from Xinjiang (left for Almaty in 2019), confesses her involvement in spying on people and even helping detain them. She says her own mother was also imprisoned.

I read through a bunch of articles based on interviews with her, the first one I could find is from 2021 (see sources at the end).

I found some discrepancies:

  • None of the pre-2024 articles mention her being complicit. The older articles are just about her mother being in prison.

  • According to Der Spiegel, her mother was 65 in 2017, but according to Eurasianet, she was 78 in 2022.

  • According to Der Spiegel (Feb 2024), the mother was released and put under house arrest in autumn of 2023. The Telegraph article (Jan 2024) does not mention this, but says “Gulpyia campaigns relentlessly for the Chinese government to free her elderly mother”, implying she is still imprisoned.

  • According to Der Spiegel, two of them were responsible for monitoring 12 families. The Telegraph article, however, says “she was ordered to monitor 60 families”.

  • According to Der Spiegel, the mother was sentenced to 15 years. All the other articles say 12.

  • In 2021 New East Archive article, the timeline is: The mother gets detained more than 5 years ago, turns up in the hospital several months later. They get told that she was sentenced by a court 8 months after that. In the 2024 Telegraph story, the mother gets detained by the end of 2017, then, 8 months later, she is in the hospital, and then, the following year, they are told of her sentencing. So this “8 months” figure is after the hospital in story one, but before the hospital in story two. And the detention in story one cannot possibly take place by the end of 2017 (as in story two), because it is supposedly more than 5 years before Dec 2021, i.e. 2016 or earlier.

  • In the 2021 New East Archive article, she says she “know[s] of people who sleep in their clothes in case they are detained in the night.” In the 2022 Meduza story, the people sleeping in their clothes are her relatives. In the 2024 Der Spiegel article, the people doing this are farmers, but she (“we”) eventually did that also. This anecdote goes from basically hearsay to something that happened to her personally.

  • In the New East Archive story, her mother tells her she is in the hospital because she was kicked in the chest during interrogation, and there is no mention of any other health condition. In the Telegraph article, her mother “had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, and her health was failing”. Though the mother does does also tell her “they beat me.”

Sources