Does anyone know what this is actually satellite photography of?

  • @folaht@lemmygrad.mlM
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    2 years ago

    No, but I think I’ll add another rule to this forum, because this is something that’s been bothering about youtube lately a lot and I’ve seen it happening before on other forums.

    “If you don’t know, don’t post.”

    or even better

    “Posts are to serve it’s readers, not it’s posters.”

    Ever since Youtube content creators have been dominated by the old mainstream channels, it’s content creators lately seem to think that youtube is there for serving themselves rather than it’s viewers.

    News channels often seem to contain questions, letting their viewers do the journalistic work for them and of course, not in a genuine way.

    Or their title contains ‘the “REAL” story about X’,
    suggesting that there are two stories. Real and fake.
    But upon watching the video, only a single story is provided.

    I’m waiting for a new type of network that could provide an easy alternative to youtube that will have such rules in place, but for the mean time I’m here and I want this forum is to be informative as well.
    Especially because this is a lemmygrad channel, a socialist channel where one serves according to their ability, to each according to their needs.


    And to specifically address your post, you ask a very short question while also posting a satellite image.

    It leaves me dangling on how you came across the image, what you do and do not know, why you’re asking the question and what your motive is.

    It caused me to search for more information and not find anything of worth.

    It could be a prison complex.
    China has been on a buliding spree for decades now, so it’s not weird to also see it’s prisons being modernized as well.

    It could also not be a prison complex.
    There’s been a lot of sources from the US and allies that have been very unreliable as sources on any information concerning China the last few decades.
    Regular prisons, factories, schools have all been conflated as re-education centers in the last ten or so years, so there’s no telling whether this isn’t yet another example of that.

    Ürümqi is a city between 3.5 and 4 million people, just like Los Angeles.
    Los Angeles County has 200,000 people in prison, with it’s largest prison containing over 10,000 people.
    Considering that China has less people in prison than the US, Ürümqi should still have at least 10 thousand prisoners in total for just the city of Ürümqi.

    In case you’re surprised that there are prisons existing in a communist province of over 10 million people, communism does not turn everyone in angels as a political system does not alter one’s DNA.
    That’s mostly a medical and technological issue and only eventually an economical one.

    Ürümqi also has had terrorists attacks in and likely from the city as well. I’ll refrain from showing images or links as they contain the images of dead bodies, but one such attack happened in May 2014 in case you want to look it up.

    More than that, I can’t tell.

    If you are genuinely curious about it and have gained first-hand knowledge and evidence of the site, please provide it to us, unless it IS a prison filled up with drug traffickers, murderers, child molesters and terrorists and your knowledge contains information that is helpful to them.

    If you’re not and have referred to the Islam the ‘the religion of peace’ in any comment on a negative video or post, plus all similar references to any part of the Islamic religion or it’s people, please be consistent whenever you’re talking about Uyghurs, Uyghur criminals in prisons and ETIM. And don’t forget to look up ETIM’s relation to ISIS, Al-qaeda and terrorists crossing borders to countries such as Syria.

    • @k0sm0nautOP
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      12 years ago

      Sorry if I struck a nerve. I wasn’t sure where to post this and I thought this was the most active China-related community. The photo was found in this BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-22278037 . I’ve seen a lot of debunking of satellite images revealing them to be innocuous things like high schools, government buildings, or typical prisons. I didn’t know if any information like this existed about the images above. But, I couldn’t find any based on several simple searches.

      Do you know of a community where this post would fit better? Thank you!

      • @folaht@lemmygrad.mlM
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        2 years ago

        It’s okay.
        And it’s mostly just me posting.
        The larger community is on reddit /r/Sino, but there are even larger communities on red like /r/China that consists primarily of non-Chinese China haters.
        I post a lot because of the size of /r/Sino being so large that there’s always something interesting there to copy-paste and I sometimes find interesting tidbits as well. I do this because I don’t think reddit is the right platform for pro-sovereignity discussions unless it’s the US.

        Since I have come across many anti-China posts from certain sources, DW, Wion, NYT, Bloomberg, BBC, public broadcasting news from my own country, late night shows including from my own country, Falun Gong, ADVChina and SCMP commenters, it makes the situation for me very tense and I apologize if I came on too strong.

        So yes, this community is not a good post for this, because I live in Europe and I can only do simple searches as well.

        I’m a curious person too, so I will do my own simple searches as well and attempt to contact with youtuber immigrants in China, see if they bite.


        Perhaps it’s best to share our search results.

        thechinawiki.com seems dead. Russia TV has no mention of Dabancheng.

        I found an article in Chinese that seems to have copy-pasted a BBC article on it from 2018 and 2015.

        Dabancheng(District) is mentioned as: 达坂城(区)

        And prison as: 监狱

        The area has it’s own website. http://www.dabancheng.gov.cn/

        They have a phone number if you feel particularly brave enough.

        My advice is to try and contact Daniel Dumbrill with your question. I can’t find any points of contact besides twitter and facebook and I stopped using them for years now and I’m not going back to using them again.

        • @k0sm0nautOP
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          12 years ago

          Thank you! I’ll keep doing some research and if I ever find anything, I’ll share it!

          • @folaht@lemmygrad.mlM
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            2 years ago

            I have looked at it again. I found the place on google maps and openstreetmap.
            From what I can tell the twelve U-buildings really is a prison complex, while the H-buildings do not seem to have a wall surrounding it.
            There’s another even newer prison of similar size quite close it.
            You can tell by the watch towers.

            What I’ve also found is this in Ürümqi. This one lacks guard towers and no longer has a road leading up to it, but an adjacent road. Plus one space seems to be now used as a parking space. Has it turned into something else already?

            This is another one. This one looks really really old.

            This one has a giant hole in it on the left.

            I stand by my guess that they’re just relocating their older prisons.

      • @pimento@lemmygrad.ml
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        22 years ago

        The satellite image just shows that some buildings were constructed, probably apartments. The article doesnt even mention this supposed “camp” at all. You could make similar images for any country in the world. So what is there to debunk?

        • @k0sm0nautOP
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          12 years ago

          Well, the caption for the image was “Satellite images show rapid construction of camps in Xinjiang, like this one near Dabancheng.” The article doesn’t mention anything beyond that about it though so I couldn’t find any information about it.

          If it is apartments, I would love to know that so then I can always show people making claims of concentration camps that this one specifically is innocuous. Which, is a piece of the puzzle about the sinister story that western media outlets have created out of almost nothing.

          There have been tons of other claims like this that have been disproven and I wanted to know if anyone here was familiar with this one.

            • @k0sm0nautOP
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              32 years ago

              I believe they are apartments more than I believe that they are concentration camps. But, that isn’t enough for a lot of westerners. They believe the BBC regardless of its proven us as a propaganda outlet