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I asked him (Jerry Grey of Jery’s China) if he would willingly live under a draconian regime of surveillance and arbitrary detention like the one that operates in Xinjiang, controlling the region’s Muslim population under the guise of combating terrorism.

“Would I like it? Course not. I wouldn’t like it at all,” he said.

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Pro-Beijing

Pro-Beijing influencers and their rose-tinted view of life in Xinjiang

A network of social media personalities cast doubt on Uyghur abuses in Xinjiang

• By Isobel Cockerell
• 7 August, 2020 
• feature

When Jerry Grey, a British-Australian living in Guangdong, China, went on a cycling holiday to Xinjiang in the late summer of 2019, he was blown away by the region’s spectacular scenery and architecture. A particular highlight of his trip was visiting Turpan, the ancient oasis city in the east of the region, where he admired an 18th-century mosque with the tallest minaret in China.

Grey, 62, who visited Xinjiang as a tourist, said he couldn’t find any traces of the sprawling concentration camps he had read about in the press. “I never saw one,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t there. It’s a huge place, but we did cycle down some very, very long stretches of open road.”

Grey, who is a former London Metropolitan police officer, admitted that he found Xinjiang’s surveillance network and continual police checks oppressive. “It was a pain in the butt,” he said. “But at no stage were they ever abusive.”

I asked him if he would willingly live under a draconian regime of surveillance and arbitrary detention like the one that operates in Xinjiang, controlling the region’s Muslim population under the guise of combating terrorism.

“Would I like it? Course not. I wouldn’t like it at all,” he said. “But would I move? Probably not. If they said to me, ‘You can’t use a VPN and you can’t use your Twitter account,’ and things like that, then I might consider it. Because my lifeline to the outside world is through the internet.”

Despite Grey’s acknowledgement of heavy surveillance in Xinjiang, he has devoted the past five months denying the existence of detention camps in the region, citing his bike ride as evidence. 

In March, he was in quarantine after returning home from a trip to Thailand. It was six months on from his visit to Xinijiang. “I was bored silly, so I opened up my Twitter account and thought, ‘I know what I’ll do. One of the things I can do is I can start tweeting about the bike ride.’”

Grey began with two followers and now has more than 4,000. Many of them are Chinese users, living both within the country and abroad. His Twitter page is a relentless rehashing of his camp-free cycling tour. “We didn’t see any concentration camps, but the days and nights in Xinjiang require a lot of concentration to get through,” he quipped in one July 15 post. 

Grey has, inevitably, attracted the attention of Chinese media. On the day we spoke, he was scheduled to speak with the state TV channel CGTN directly after. 

“Their propaganda department absolutely sucks. And I think – maybe I’m being used, but I’m being used to deliver a message that I believe in,” he said. “They’re not telling me what to say.”

Other Beijing-based news outlets have already featured interviews with Grey: “Australian offers candid observation of Xinjiang distinct from Western characterizations,” ran one headline on the website of the Global Times newspaper in June. 

Though Grey’s individual reach is modest, he is part of a network of users that all share a similar message. He calls them his “comrades in arms.” 
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Carl Zha, a Chinese-American Twitter user with 43,000 followers, spends his mornings surfing in the turquoise waters of Bali, Indonesia, before returning to his fiancee, three puppies, and his job as an influencer posting and broadcasting about China. Zha, 43, was born in China a month after Mao Zedong’s death and left for the U.S when he was 13. Over the past two years, he has become known for his content about Xinjiang. His posts are devoted to attacking Western reports of human rights abuses in the region and painting coverage of Uyghur oppression as an influence operation designed to incite tension between the U.S. and China.
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Zha’s podcast about China, titled “Silk and Steel,” hosts mostly like-minded guests, including Jerry Grey. Zha said he wasn’t opposed to speaking with Uyghurs and told me that he had featured a Hong Kong protester on the show. 

“I’m not just a shitposter that posts a lot – my podcast is my income stream. That’s what’s supporting me to live in Bali,” he said. 

Zha and Grey are part of a group of bloggers, YouTubers and social media personalities – backed by legions of automated accounts – who seek to play down Uyghur oppression in Xinjiang. They see reports of Uyghur human rights abuses as attempts to attack Beijing, and believe that Western coverage of the Xinjiang crisis forms part of a state-funded offensive against China. 

Though the accounts of Zha and Grey are run by real people, there are hundreds of accounts within their network which appear to be inauthentic. These coordinated accounts, seen by Coda Story, all spout Chinese propaganda content claiming Xinjiang is happy and thriving. Some claim to be run by Uyghurs. If they were authentic Xinjiang Twitter accounts, their users would require a VPN to access them – a practice that can mean instant arrest in the region. 

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Pro-Beijing influencers and their rose-tinted view of life in Xinjiang

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