you didn’t notice any severe (even by Chinese standards) surveillance while you were there?

No. I also resent the implication of "by Chinese standards" when China has less CCTV per capita than the US and a far less globally pervasive intelligence apparatus than the CIA, NSA or Five eyes.

han-washing

What do you mean by this?

disneyification of uyghur culture

No. It was just a living working city with Turkic architecture, different cuisine, and people living their lives as they do in all cities.

I think they’re trying to do away with the culture…

Maybe, but if that were true, I’d expect to see any hallmarks of ethnic cleansing or cultural erasure: banning language, banning customs, deportations, forced removal, and so on. That simply does not appear to be happening.

great firewall

It’s an IP/domain/protocol blacklist that is easily bypassed by everyone through easy access to VPNs as it's meant to keep certain platforms out (for good reason, just look at how America used their monopoly on social media platforms in SE Asia to push antivax nonsense during Covid or how Facebook facilitated the Rohingya genicide) not keep us in.

govt criticism is illegal

Categorically untrue. The entire point of local party offices and the 12345 hotline is to provide channels for complaints and criticism.

communist party affiliation is required to rise in certain industries

State ownership of important industries is good actually.

I don’t think the absence of proof is the smoking gun you think it is.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Thank you for that, George Bush. Did you ever find those WMDs?

Deciding to abandon any evidentiary standard because of vibes about a country, especially when those vibes have been shaped by a hostile media apparatus, is bad.

(i am not a Holocaust expert don’t hang me if I’m wrong) i don’t think evidence of the Holocaust was widely available while Nazi Germany was in power, the reason we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it happened is because they’re not there to obfuscate the evidence anymore.

I think it’s important to distinguish between the two situations. The Holocaust was largely carried out in occupied territories to the east, where tourists, journalists, and unauthorized visitors had no access. It also happened in a period when the world was far less connected than it is now.

Today, most people carry a high-quality audio/video recorder and publishing device in their pocket, and satellite imagery is far more advanced. Xinjiang also receives millions of visitors a year. Given all of that, it seems unreasonable to claim there is some secret genocide going on when the evidence presented mostly points to abuses during the crackdown on ETIM. And before that gets twisted: yes, those abuses are still bad. But they are much closer to the treatment of marginalized communities by states like the US than they are to anything remotely comparable to genocide.

Modern genocides are effectively impossible to hide. Look at Rwanda, or more recently Gaza: even with Gaza heavily destroyed and access severely restricted, there are still hundreds of hours of footage and documentation.