‘ The prior claim was genocide, but without a shred of evidence, they ( US) are forced to downscale to claims of “cultural genocide”. Instead of providing evidence, which they, of course, cannot, the US is demanding that companies operating in Xinjiang do what should never be expected under the rule of law : to prove they are innocent. Of course since it’s hard to prove the negative, the US hopes to grab Xinjiang industry in a stranglehold, sucking hard earned gains and prosperity from the Uyghur people, in the hope that it will lead back to unrest, violence and terrorism.’
Tag Archives: Uyghur
reblog – Uyghur Tribunal: US-Funded Theater Attacking China by The New Atlas
What great investigative journalism looks like – Kudos to The New Atlas; Boo to AP
Fearing China
BBC scumbags – Kerry Allen and Sophie Williams are unprofessional, dishonest and lack journalistic integrity.
Compilations of youtube videos showing how vile and low Sophie Williams and Kerry Allen of BBC are with this hit piece, building lies to destroy livelihoods of people in Xinjiang. Now you wonder who are really doing the disnformation drive in China.
Kenneth Hammond on genocide in Xinjiang
Inclusion and opportunity —- something Canada, Australia and USA can learn about how to treat and not patronise the original inhabitants of the land from whom they rob.
That is a lot of money set-aside to take down China : the ‘ anti-China influence fund in the Strategic Competition Act.
Reblog:U.S. Xinjiang propaganda is about preparing for a Ukraine-style fascist coup in western China
Link here.
Text follows.
Rainer Shea Dec 3, 2020·6 min read
U.S. Xinjiang propaganda is about preparing for a Ukraine-style fascist coup in western China
In 2014, the U.S. imperialists perpetrated-and very effectively manufactured consent for-a fascist coup in Ukraine that served to create a regime which Washington could use to wage proxy warfare against Russia. Thanks to the Obama administration’s meddling in the transition process towards a new government following widespread unrest within the country, fascists were installed into power. From that year onward, these U.S.-empowered neo-Nazis have been carrying out ethnic cleansing against Ukraine’s Russian-speaking peoples, unleashing fascist militias which have taken advantage of the country’s descent into a failed state, persecuting political dissidents, journalists, LGBT people, and Romas, and waging war against Russia on behalf of their imperialist puppeteers.
And it’s all been legitimized in the Western ideological orthodoxy through a campaign to paint Russia as the unambiguous villain in the Ukraine situation, with the Crimean people’s democratically settled (and understandable) decision to become part of Russia being portrayed as a heinous territory grab by the bogeyman Putin. As Ray McGovern has written about why the Crimeans voted to join Russia, “there were extenuating circumstances, including alarm among Crimeans over what the unconstitutional ouster of Ukraine’s president might mean for them, as well as Moscow’s not unfounded nightmare of NATO taking over Russia’s major, and only warm-water, naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea.” Given the horrors that this unconstitutionally installed regime has since perpetrated, no amount of Western propaganda about how Crimea’s annexation referendum was “illegitimate” can dispute the wiseness of the Crimean people’s choice.
What does all of this have to do with Xinjiang? Well as I look at the propaganda and foreign meddling that Washington is carrying out in its supposed crusade to protect the human rights of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, what happened in Ukraine keeps coming back to haunt me. Because there are some alarming parallels between these two imperialist projects.
For one thing, in both Ukraine and Xinjiang the U.S. has been nurturing violent extremism. (And yes, a U.S.-faciliated pipeline of religious radicalism does exist, and it’s being aided by Washington’s Syrian war ally Turkey. This pipeline also runs directly from Syria to Xinjiang. These strains haven’t emerged from a vacuum.) In Ukraine the extremists have racial motives, and in Xinjiang they have religious motives. Though to say the motives of the Uyghur militants are purely religious wouldn’t be entirely honest, because they’ve been pursuing models of governance that are based off of one of the world’s most brutal ethnostates: Israel. A 2017 Times of Israel article describes the inspiration that groups of Uyghur radicals are finding within Zionism:
They don’t enforce an Islamic court system or replace local councils — unlike their close allies, the al-Qaeda-linked Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Arabic for Levant Liberation Committee. Instead, an older Uighur would convene young fighters in the evenings to discuss history and politics. Instead, an older Uighur would convene young fighters in the evenings to discuss history and politics. They looked to an improbable model for building an independent homeland: Israel and the Zionist movement. We studied how the Jews built their country,” Ali said. “Some of them fought, some of them provided money. We don’t have a strong background of that.”
Does this aversion within some Uyghur jihadist circles towards the more extreme examples of Islamic law mean that a Xinjiang breakaway state wouldn’t be a theocracy? Perhaps not on the same level as the brutal Saudi regime, but it would undoubtedly be an ethnostate of the same type as Israel or post-coup Ukraine. This is apparent both from the fact that these circles are explicitly taking inspiration from the genocidal settler-colonial state of Israel, and from the fact that Salih Hudayar, the self-proclaimed “Prime Minister” of “East Turkistan” and the founder of the East Turkestan National Awakening Movement, is lobbying the U.S. government to recognize Xinjiang as an independent ethnostate and to instrumentalize Uyghurs as a force for proxy warfare.
As Steven Sahiounie wrote in 2018 his article From Idlib to Xinjiang: Uyghur Fighters Trained for Terror, the narratives we hear in the Western media about the “persecution” of the Uyghurs are about laying the ideological groundwork of mass Western support for such a war:
All of this is building a case for Arab, Muslim and Western support of the Uyghurs, in their impending face-off with China. Eurasia will be the battle ground, and disrupting the Belt and Road project seems to be the raison d’etre of that effort. Westerners need to ask themselves if they would like armed terrorists living next door to them (or with them, in the case of Syria), but if they terrorize people in Syria or China that is alright as far as the western mainstream polity is concerned. In that inverted reality, the terrorist becomes the victim under the mainstream media.
Sound familiar?
If the U.S.-backed World Uyghur Congress and its ideologically aligned jihadist forces were to get their way, a large chunk of western China would be turned into the same kind of fascistic war state that Washington made Ukraine into. In this scenario, the numerous terrorist attacks that these U.S.-radicalized Xinjiang jihadists have so far perpetrated against their fellow Chinese citizens will be just the beginning. The newly established state of East Turkestan would start a war against China, likely complete with the kinds of ethnic persecution campaigns and “filtration camps” that Washington’s Ukrainian Nazis brought about. Instead of Russian speakers, Han Chinese people and Communist Party sympathizers would be the targets of this reign of terror.
If this sounds hyperbolic, consider the atrocities that the U.S. has facilitated in Ukraine to further its cold war against Russia, then look at how far the U.S. has been willing to go in its cold war against China. Through its CIA front group the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington has orchestrated acts of horrific violence in the streets of Hong Kong, carried out by people who can legitimately be considered fascists; despite having claimed to be “pro-democracy,” they waved British colonial flags and called upon Trump to “liberate” Hong Kong, making their imperialist allegiances explicit. And last December Ukrainian neo-Nazis came to Hong Kong to participate in the protests, making the last decade’s U.S. foreign meddling come full circle.
The far-right anti-CPC religious cult Falun Gong, the anti-communist political factions within Taiwan, the labor infiltrators within China who’ve been assisted by the NED, and most of all the Xinjiang religious extremists share the same goal as the U.S.-backed Hong Kong protesters: to Balkanize China by establishing breakaway states that set themselves up against the Communist Party. It’s no surprise that these pro-separatist groups tend to be at least ideologically adjacent to fascism, because as has been shown in Ukraine and the numerous other countries the U.S. has carried out coups within, fascism is an effective way for the imperialists to create a proxy state.
It can also be an effective way to wage and manufacture consent for a proxy war. While Washington continues to use its Ukrainian puppet state to perpetuate a conflict with Russia, NATO’s propagandists are working to make this destabilization project appear legitimate. The neoconservative think tank the Atlantic Council wrote this year in regards to Ukraine that Russia “seeks to promote anti-Western narratives and discredit Ukraine’s post-2014 Euro-Atlantic trajectory.” And Buzzfeed has published an article which celebrates the election of Biden simply for the reason that Biden will use Ukraine to more aggressively advance anti-Russian cold war escalations; the article quotes a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who’s said that when Biden enters office, “all of the elements of the U.S. government that support Ukraine can be more explicit, be more vocal, be more enthusiastic, and be more evident.”
In the dreams of the imperialists, ten years from now they’ll be carrying out a similar consent manufacturing campaign for a similar proxy war that their Uyghur separatist state has started against China. But much to the lamentation of the cold warriors, China’s deradicalization programs have lessened the presence of religious extremist ideas within Xinjiang, and no new terror attacks have happened in Xinjiang during the last 42 months as a result. So all that the imperialists can do is spin increasingly outrageous stories of supposed human rights abuses in Xinjiang, hoping this will make up for Washington’s failure of an attempt to destabilize the region.
Why Gaddafi has to die and what has it got to do with Xinjiang?
Check out this video by Daniel Dumbrill.
Reblog from the Grayzone: US State Department accusation of China ‘genocide’ relied on data abuse and baseless claims by far-right ideologue
The world’s condemnation of China on Xinjiang is based heavily, or almost solely, on Adrian Zenz’s ‘research ‘. A total fraud.
Text from blog below.
See link here from The Grayzone
US State Department accusation of China ‘genocide’ relied on data abuse and baseless claims by far-right ideologue
GARETH PORTER AND MAX BLUMENTHAL·FEBRUARY 18, 2021
The Trump and Biden administrations have relied on the work of a right-wing religious extremist, Adrian Zenz, for their “genocide” accusation against China. A close review of Zenz’s research reveals flagrant data abuse and outright falsehoods.
Both President Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have endorsed former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s last-minute accusation of “genocide” against the Muslim Uyghur population in China’s Xinjiang province. But an investigation of published work by the researcher Pompeo relied on to level his genocide allegation reveals a pattern of data abuse and fraudulent assertions that substantially undermines the incendiary charge.
The US government’s accusation of genocide against China stems from a single source: a June 2020 paper by Adrian Zenz, a right-wing German researcher affiliated with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and neoconservative Jamestown Foundation in Washington, DC.
Articles by the Associated Press, CNN, and BBC also relied on Zenz’s article to claim that plunging Uyghur birth rates and the application of birth control measures in Uyghur counties of the Xinjiang region were proof of a policy of “demographic genocide.”
Just days after the publication of Zenz’s paper, Pompeo issued a statement denouncing China’s alleged policy of “forced sterilization, forced abortion, and coercive family planning,” personally crediting “Adrian Zenz’s shocking revelations.”
Biden backed the genocide charge last August when it first appeared in a flurry of media reports. His campaign spokesman told Politico, “The unspeakable oppression that Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have suffered at the hands of China’s authoritarian government is genocide and Joe Biden stands against it in the strongest terms.” Blinken, for his part, declared at his first press conference as secretary of state that he agreed genocide has been committed against the Uyghurs.
While Zenz’s employers describe him as “one of the world’s leading scholars on People’s Republic of China government policies towards the country’s western regions of Tibet and Xinjiang,” he is, in fact, a far-right Christian fundamentalist who has said he is “led by God” against China’s government, deplores homosexuality and gender equality, and has taught exclusively in evangelical theological institutions.
Lyle Goldstein, a China specialist and research professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department of the Naval War College, told The Grayzone that Zenz’s labeling of the Chinese approach to the Uyghurs as “demographic genocide” is “ridiculous to the point of being insulting to those who lost relatives in the Holocaust.”
Goldstein said the Chinese approach to Xinjiang “is a more repressive posture than we would like, but it sure isn’t genocide.”
Moreover, a careful review of Zenz’s research shows that his assertion of genocide is contradicted by flagrant data abuse, fraudulent claims, cherry-picking of source material, and propagandistic misrepresentations.
Genocide or equal treatment in family planning policy?
In Adrian Zenz’s 2020 paper for the Jamestown Foundation, he boasted that his findings “provide the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang meet one of the genocide criteria cited in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
Zenz was referring Article 2 (d) of that Convention: “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” But Article II qualifies the relevant acts as those “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
“Preventing births” by itself cannot be evidence of alleged genocide without evidence of intent to destroy the group in question.Otherwise, any birth control program provided to an ethnicgroup would be prima facie evidence of a policy of genocide against the group.
Zenz argued that population control measures applied to Uyghurscould be branded as “genocidal” because population growth rates fell by 84 percent in the two largest Uyghur prefectures between 2015 and 2018, and declined further in several minority regions in 2019. But more complete statistics that Zenz cited in his report, and data that he conveniently omitted, contradicted his conclusion.
Zenz provided statistics revealing that between 2005 and 2015, Uyghur population growth in Xinjiang was 2.6 times higher than that of Han Chinese in the Xinjiang region. (The chart displayed in his report is below).
Both official Chinese figures and Zenz agree that the Uyghur population in Xinjiang increased significantly between 2010 and 2018.
Zenz’s figures shows an increase in Uyghur population from 10.1 million to 11.8 million from 2010 to 2018, while Chinese government figures demonstrate an even larger increase from 10.1 to 12.7 million. That means the Uyghur population in Xinjiang grew by a staggering 25.04 percent.
Zenz shows the Han Chinese population rising from 8.5 to 9.8 million during the eight-year period, while Chinese government figures show a smaller increase in Han population from 8.8 million to 9 million.
Both the rapid surge in Uyghur population growth rates and the increased margin of the Uyghur majority over the Han population of Xinjiang in recent years are the result of the one-child policy imposed on Han Chinese couples by the Chinese government in 1979.
According to China specialist Martin King Whyte, the one-child policy was accompanied by a long-term pattern of abuses in its implementation, including “intrusive menstrual monitoring, coerced sterilizations and abortions, staggering monetary fines for ‘over-quota’ births, smashing of furniture and housing of those who resist and withholding registration for babies born outside the plan.”
Uyghur families, however, were exempted from the one child policy. Urban Uyghur couples were allowed to have two children, and rural Uyghur couples three. In practice, moreover, rural Uyghurs often had large families, with as many as nine or ten children in some cases, as even Zenz acknowledged.
In 2015, the Chinese government announced a relaxation of the decades-long one-child limit on urban Han couples, allowing urban couples to have two children and rural families to have three. In Xinjiang, where birthrates routinely exceeded previously established limits, local officials urged the equal application of family planning policy between Han and Uyghur couples.
In July 2017, Xinjiang’s regional government ended the exemption on the old child limits for Uyghurs. Uyghur couples were thus expected to follow the same limitations recently imposed on Han couples: two children in urban areas and three in rural regions.
As the Chinese government has freely acknowledged, a 5 percent decrease in the birth rate in Xinjiang between 2017 and 2018 was the result of the equal enforcement of family planning policy across ethnic lines.
While eliding this point, Zenz also overlooked the fact that China’s overall birthrate has fallen precipitously in recent years across the demographic spectrum as the population ages and contraceptives become more widely available through programs like the government’s annual free distribution of one billion condoms. For example, in the city of Guangzhou, which is far from Xinjiang, the rate of newborn babies has plunged to its lowest point in a decade.
Cherry-picking and distorting source material, framing free healthcare as genocide
Also in 2017, China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission announced a $5.2 billion healthcare investment in Xinjiang, stating its intention to strengthen a brittle health infrastructure in impoverished, rural areas of the region.
According to Chinese government statistics, maternal and infant mortality rates in Xinjiang were nearly halved by 2018, while average life expectancy rose as a result of increased public health investments. A 2019 study by Lancet described China’s improvement of maternal health and infant mortality reduction as a “remarkable success story.” Another study that year by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences arrived at a similar conclusion. How these positive health indicators could serve as proof of genocide was left unexplained by Zenz, who simply omitted the numbers from his report.
Throughout his paper, Zenz framed the expansion of public healthcare services in Xinjiang as evidence of a genocide in the making. For example, Zenz pointed to a photograph of Uyghur residents of rural regions of Xinjiang receiving medical consultation at a free health clinic as part of an “effort to enforce the thorough implementation of increasing intrusive birth control efforts.”
However, the photograph depicted an elderly couple who were far too old to have children, and was dated May 2017 – months before the Chinese government announced an end to the child limit exemption for Uyghurs.
According to the original source of the photograph, an article in China News, it depicted a regiment from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps deploying to a rural province as part of the government’s poverty eradication program. There, the doctors “measured blood pressure, electrocardiogram, blood sugar, height and weight for poor villagers who came to see the doctor for free… More than 200 poor people were diagnosed and treated, and more than 100 common drugs were distributed on the spot.”
At another point in his paper, Zenz cited an August 2019 document from Xinjiang’s Wenquan County government office as evidence of “greater pressure to implement intrusive birth control methods.” He referred to a single mention of 468 “birth control surgeries,” which could alternately be translated as “family planning operations,” but provided no evidence that the operations were coercive. Revealingly, Zenz omitted the next line, which expressed satisfaction with a birth rate of 8.11 percent.
Zenz proceeded to ignore the rest of the document, which touted the increased provision of free mental health services, polio vaccinations and AIDS prevention treatment as well as poverty alleviation measures and the construction of new hospitals and medical clinics for the population of Xinjiang.
How did a massive investment to improve the health of previously neglected rural communities fit within the framework of a policy of genocide? Once again, Zenz avoided the issue entirely.
Inventing statistics, spinning tales to frame the official enemy
Among Zenz’s “major findings” was the claim that “80 percent of all net added IUD placements in China… were performed in Xinjiang, despite the fact that the region only makes up 1.8 percent of the nation’s population.”
According to the 2019 China Health Statistics Yearbook published by the National Health Commission – the original source of Zenz’s claim – the number of new IUD insertion procedures in Xinjiang in 2018 accounted for only 8.7 percent of China’s total. So Zenz’s “major finding” appeared to be off by a factor of 10, a staggering error that substantially undermined the explosive quality of his argument.
The relevant sections of the statistical yearbook Zenz relied on was translated by a native Chinese speaker and are displayed below. A full translation of the chart can be viewed here, and an archive of the entire statistical yearbook is here.
When Zenz attempted to defend himself against accusations of cooking statistics on birth control surgeries in Xinjiang, he ultimately cast further doubt on the quality of his research. Responding to a Chinese academic critic, he claimed that he had calculated Xinjiang’s 239,457 new net IUD insertions (devices added minus those removed) as 80% of the national total in 2018.
However, Henan province registered 206,281 new net IUD insertions, or 69%, in 2018. Hebei, meanwhile, registered 61%, amounting to a total of 210% of national net insertions. These numbers only make sense when calculated alongside provinces like Jiangsu and Yunnan that had more removals (-60% and -54%, respectively) than total national net insertions. By relying on such a bizarre metric, Zenz appeared to have attempted a cynical statistical sleight of hand to paint Xinjiang as a hotbed of birth control surgery.
In perhaps the most unintentionally absurd assertion in an article filled with them, Zenz asserted that the Chinese government inserted between 800 and 1400 IUDs per capita each year in Xinjiang. Which meant that each woman in the province would have had to have undergone anywhere from 4 to 8 IUD surgeries every day. With so much time spent on the operating table every day, it’s a wonder that anyone in Xinjiang could find time to work, or eat.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=GarethPorter&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1308481116203036679&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2021%2F02%2F18%2Fus-media-reports-chinese-genocide-relied-on-fraudulent-far-right-researcher%2F&sessionId=3ffd3f07e4a53b99eaba42fc4d1c3a74ef513ddc&siteScreenName=TheGrayzoneNews&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
Elsewhere in his paper, the daffy data diver asserted that 73.5 percent of married women of childbearing age in Xinjiang’s Kuqa County had IUDs fitted between 2017 and 2018. In a footnote, Zenz claimed, “This data comes from a cache of over 25,000 local government files obtained by the author in 2019.” The article he provided as accompaniment, however, was written by himself for the Jamestown Foundation and contained no data on IUD operations in Kuqa County.
Zenz attempted to pad his shaky statistics with dramatic testimony from US-based Uyghur exiles who have been cultivated by the US State Department. The narratives of these exiles have been vehemently challenged by family members in Xinjiang, as well as by vocational center graduates and local doctors, who produced official hospital documents purporting to disprove their allegations.
In his paper, Zenz cited a September 2019 article in the US government-run outlet Radio Free Asia, containing testimony by a US-based exile, Tursunay Ziyawudun, who claimed she was forcibly sterilized and physically tortured in a Chinese internment center.
However, in February 2020, Ziyawudun changed her story entirely, telling Buzzfeed: “I wasn’t beaten or abused. The hardest part was mental. It’s something I can’t explain — you suffer mentally. Being kept someplace and forced to stay there for no reason.”
Ziyawudun changed her story again after being relocated to the US and cultivated by the US government-funded Uyghur Human Rights Project. This February, she told the BBC and CNN that she was gang raped by guards in an internment camp. The BBC report relied on none other than Zenz as its expert voice on China’s supposed policy of “systematic rape.”
Zenz’s propagandistic framing, cherry-picking of original source materials, and cooking of statistics fit a pattern of misrepresentation on display in a December 2019 paper he authored for a NATO-linked publication alleging a Chinese policy to force members of the Uyghur minority into “slave labor.”
As Ajit Singh reported for The Grayzone, Zenz painted an article about a government program providing Uyghur women with free childcare as evidence of forced family separation – a “shocking example of this ‘liberation’ of women from their children,” he called it. Zenz conveniently omitted a quote in the article from a Uyghur woman who said the free childcare “solved [her] problem, now there are people who take care of my children, I can in peace go to work… very convenient.”
Because Zenz’s papers are published by a neoconservative think tank that has functioned as a US intelligence cut-out, they are not peer reviewed by credentialed academics. But they do not appear to have undergone much fact-checking either. This has left Zenz exposed to embarrassing scrutiny from the internet, and forced him to edit out errors after questioning from random Twitter users:https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=GarethPorter&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1339216186077286402&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2021%2F02%2F18%2Fus-media-reports-chinese-genocide-relied-on-fraudulent-far-right-researcher%2F&sessionId=3ffd3f07e4a53b99eaba42fc4d1c3a74ef513ddc&siteScreenName=TheGrayzoneNews&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
While it’s hard to understand how Zenz has gotten away with so much statistical malpractice, a look at his background helps explain his ideological motivations, and provides important context on his negative focus on the application of birth control. He is an anti-abortion, anti-feminist Christian fundamentalist captivated by End Times theology, and has said that god has led him on a mission against the Chinese government.
An anti-gay, anti-abortion Christianist dedicated “led by god” against China
The BBC based its June 2020 report alleging “forc[ed] birth control to suppress population” on Zenz’s work, referring to him as a “China scholar” without mentioning his employment by right-wing institutions in Washington or his own hyper-ideological views.
Like the BBC, an AP report relied entirely on an advance copy of Zenz’s paper, but provided no background and whitewashed his right-wing politics or institutional affiliations. A CNN story published a month later and a CNN follow-up in September 2020 on alleged Chinese forced sterilizations in Xinjiang also relied on Zenz without mentioning his political background.
As The Grayzone has reported, Zenz is a far right Christian fundamentalist who claims to have been “led by god’ to defeat the Communist Party of China. While he is almost invariably touted in Western media as a leading scholar on China, he described himself in 2015 as “a lecturer in empirical research methods at a Christian university.” As late as 2018, in fact, Zenz was listed as a faculty member of the European School of Culture and Theology at Columbia International University in Korntal, Germany.
Zenz’s first published book, “Worthy to Escape: Why all believers will not be raptured before the Tribulation,” he and his co-author, Marlos Sias, urged Christian believers to subject unruly children to “scriptural spanking,” condemned homosexuality as “one of the four empires of the beast,” and argued that Jews who refuse to convert to evangelical Christianity during the End Times would either be “wipe[d] out” or “refined” in a “fiery furnace.”https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=GarethPorter&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-2&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1292893910973452289&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2021%2F02%2F18%2Fus-media-reports-chinese-genocide-relied-on-fraudulent-far-right-researcher%2F&sessionId=3ffd3f07e4a53b99eaba42fc4d1c3a74ef513ddc&siteScreenName=TheGrayzoneNews&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
In the End Times tome, Zenz predicted that the coming fall of capitalism would bring to power the Antichrist within a “few decades.” He identified the force that “will usher the Antichrist into power” as “the economic and financial fall of ‘Babylon,’ with ‘Babylon’ symbolically representing the world’s global economic system (capitalism).”
Like other born-again evangelicals, Zenz is also fiercely anti-abortion and opposed to gender equality. “Another important God-given authority structure that Satan is attacking through the postmodern spirit is that of gender authority structures,” Zenz wrote. “Through notions of gender equality […] the enemy is undermining God’s unique but different role assignments for men and women.”
Zenz currently serves as a fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a Washington DC-based right-wing lobbying front born out of the National Captive Nations Committee. The latter group was founded by Ukrainian nationalist Lev Dobriansky to stifle any efforts at diplomacy with the Soviet Union. Its co-chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, was a leader of the OUN-B militia that fought alongside Nazi Germany during its occupation of Ukraine in World War II.
In April 2020, Zenz’s employer listed all global deaths from Covid-19 as “victims of communism,” blaming each of them on the Chinese government.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=GarethPorter&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-3&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1248984306212536322&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2021%2F02%2F18%2Fus-media-reports-chinese-genocide-relied-on-fraudulent-far-right-researcher%2F&sessionId=3ffd3f07e4a53b99eaba42fc4d1c3a74ef513ddc&siteScreenName=TheGrayzoneNews&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
Zenz is also employed by the Jamestown Foundation, a neoconservative think tank in Washington DC founded as the outcome of efforts by Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director, William J. Casey, to establish an extra-governmental channel to pay Soviet dissidents. In the past, Jamestown leadership has spearheaded lobbying efforts to support separatism in Chechnya.
In their apparent zeal for escalation with China, mainstream Western outlets like the AP, BBC and CNN have accepted Zenz’s dubious research as absolute fact, while ignoring his background as a religious extremist who is ideologically committed to regime change in Beijing. If Biden and Blinken formally adopt the Trump administration’s “genocide” designation, they will have effectively endorsed Zenz’s shoddy and propagandistic research as well.
The genocide accusation may appeal to the Biden administration as a useful geopolitical cudgel, as well as a defense against right-wing Republic attacks painting the new president as “soft on China.” But it will only strengthen the hand of hardliners determined to provoke a dangerous and potentially catastrophic confrontation with a fellow nuclear-armed power.
“The United States has set out to vilify China,” former US Deputy Chief of Mission in Beijing and Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman told The Grayzone, and the accusation of Uyghur genocide “is the perfect issue with which to do so.”
Freeman opined that the Chinese “seem to be doing many cruel and counterproductive things in Xinjiang.” However, he cautioned against taking the genocide accusation at face value: “In the current atmosphere, we should be especially skeptical about any and all assertions by people who have become part of the current anti-China campaign in the West. Before we condemn, we should be sure of our facts.”
The Jamestown Foundation did not respond to a request for comment on Zenz’s research.
ADRIAN ZENZBIDEN ADMINISTRATIONCHINADONALD TRUMPETIMEVANGELICALSGENOCIDEJAMESTOWN FOUNDATIONJOE BIDENMIKE POMPEORIGHT-WING EXTREMISMTONY BLINKENTRUMP ADMINISTRATIONUYGHURSVICTIMS OF COMMUNISMVICTIMS OF COMMUNISM MEMORIAL FOUNDATIONXINJIANG
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.
MAX BLUMENTHALEDITOR-IN-CHIEF
The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
tell it like it is 