Cutting through an overload of information to get to the heart of the story.
This is the point.
If you want to drown your dog, accuse it of having rabies.
This French proverb has been used by American scholar Barry Soutman to describe the West's smear campaign against Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Professor Soutman first visited Xinjiang in 1999 and has returned frequently ever since.
Over the years, he's seen the region's development and changes up close.
In an academic study,
he compared various quality of life indicators between the Uyghur population in Xinjiang versus people in the West.
And his findings are very interesting.
What exactly did he find?
How does life in Xinjiang compare to life in other parts of the world,
even in western developed countries.
Is it the hellscape some would have you believe?
Or is the real picture actually very different?
Welcome to the special edition of The Point, an opinion show coming to you from Beijing.
I'm Liu Xin.
To find out the real picture of what has happened in Xinjiang,
I'm pleased to be joined from Hong Kong by none other than Barry Saltman,
emeritus professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and distinguished Professor at Tsinghua University.
Professor Soutman, welcome to the point.