Hi, I see that this is your first comment here on HN, so let me warmly welcome you to the community.

> This report's major source comes from a video broadcasted by CCTV

Actually, they have a second, likely much more informative source, namely this government report: https://web.archive.org/web/20200507161938/https://ciwe.nank...

They say it was intended for senior officials and accidentally posted online, which makes it sound exciting, but it looks to be full of dry descriptions and government slogans, so I wouldn't blame you for not reading it. (Personally, I added it to the pile of stuff to read later.)

> which means this video could not be a video describing any bad state policy logically. And I feel it is more about how you would like to explain what you see and it is highly subjective.

It only means that whoever was responsible for approving the video at CCTV didn't think it showed a bad policy. And as you say, that is a highly subjective assessment. It's not surprising that someone at the BBC might see things differently. Even when there's agreement over which outcomes are good and bad, most policies have multiple effects, and depending on how important someone thinks each effect is, they'll come to a different conclusion on the overall impact of the policy.

For example:

- the goal of poverty alleviation is something that both BBC and CCTV can probably agree is a good thing

- the goal of assimilation is something the BBC is going to see much more critically as a loss of culture, partially as a result of backlash to Britain's own history of assimilationist policies, which led to the extinction of languages like Cornish and Manx, not to mention the colonies.

- the article describes Uighurs being separated from their Han colleagues, which both contradicts the goal of assimilation and unlikely to find the BBC's approval anyway, because segregation is frowned upon as well.

- ...but they might change their mind on that if they learn it's to ensure they can eat halal food. On the other hand, they'll never swallow the idea of assigning which food someone gets to eat based on their ethnicity, rather than offering multiple options and letting them choose.

- pressurizing people who don't voluntarily sign up for the labor transfer program is something both BBC and CCTV would see critically, but I feel like CCTV would put the blame on the people who don't know what's good for themselves and don't sign up enthusiastically, while the BBC sees it as a sign that the policy really is bad and needs to be improved until people are willing to participate, otherwise forcing them is another point against it.

> CCTV is broadcasted nation wide and it is likely many foreigners living in China watched this as well

Did you watch it when it was broadcast back then? If not, you might be overestimating the audience it got. I doubt there are very many foreigners constantly watching CCTV. When I was in China, the only time I watched actual TV instead of video-on-demand was when I wanted to learn some of the local dialect, so I tuned into a local TV station. (That didn't really work, because the Mandarin subtitles frequently only loosely matched what was being said, so I barely learned a handful of words.)

> it is very easy to obtain such a video, so no international reporting doesn't mean anything to hide.

I don't think they're trying to imply that this was somehow hidden, but I think they're proud anyway to be the first English-speaking journalists to have paid attention while watching old CCTV recordings. (Okay, most likely they got a tip from someone else, making their job easier.)

> I don't know exactly what happened there at that time but the article is far from convincing from my point of view.

Well, there are many possible things here to be convinced of or not: That the government is bad, that the government's way of dealing with minorities is bad, that this specific policy is bad, that some aspects of the policy are bad, that this is worth paying attention to at all...

Personally I think it's worth paying attention to, because these poverty alleviation and labor transfer programs aren't limited to Uighurs but target the rural poor more generally, which is testimony to China's reliance on the supply of cheap migrant labor to maintain growth. If those migrants feel coerced, exploited or even just treated like outsiders without hukou, who knows how they'll show their anger?

Finally, if you don't mind me asking: how did you find this article? Was it linked on another site or have you been reading HN for a while and simply didn't have a reason to make an account until now?