Adrian Zenz appears to figure in most of China bashing campaigns. He is a fervent critic of the Chinese government’s policies on Xinjiang and lays strong charges of genocide, rape, slave labour, forced sterilization, incarceration and religious suppression of the Uighurs. No wonder that Zenz is hailed as a hero in the west and his “research” articles and testimony are used by the Occident to levy sanctions against China.
Who is Adrian Zenz and what is driving him to his hate campaign? Zenz is a born-again Christian, and has stated that he feels “led by God” in his research on Chinese minority groups. He is a German anthropologist known for his studies of the so called Xinjiang internment camps and alleged Uighur genocide. He is a lecturer in social research methodology at the Evangelical theological institution Akademie für Weltmission [de] associated with the distance learning focused bible college Columbia International University where Zenz also serves as a lecturer. He is also a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), which is a non-profit ant-communist organization in the United States, authorized by a unanimous Act of Congress in 1993 for the purpose of “educating Americans about the ideology, history and legacy of communism.”
In 2019, Zenz “studied” the mass detention of Uighurs in so-called internment camps in Xinjiang based on Chinese government documents and spreadsheets pointing toward factories with interned workers from the internment camps. In July 2019, Zenz published a study that laid out some of the repressive qualities of those camps, and gave a “speculative upper limit” of 1.5 million for the total number of people detained at any time since late 2016 in Xinjiang internment camps, based on extrapolations from food allowance subsidies figures.
Ajit Singh declares that the reliance on the voluminous but demonstrably fraudulent work of Zenz is not surprising, given that the report was financed by the Newlines Institute’s parent organization
Zenz is the author of ‘Tibetanness’ Under Threat? a study of the modern Tibetan education system. In the book, he examines the career prospects of students who major in Tibetan-language studies and the notion that the greater market value of Chinese-language education threatens Tibetan ethno cultural survival.
A 2019 article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described Zenz’s research methods on Tibetans as unconventional and exciting little interest in the professional world. The article stated that Zenz had analysed job postings for security personnel in Tibet, compared them with data on self-immolation by Tibetans, and then used that data to draw his conclusions about the Chinese government’s policies of repression.
Zenz had his moment of glory, when he was invited to testify before the US Congress, which based on his testimony, sanctioned China. On March 8, 2021, Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, in collaboration with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, released a report charging China of atrocities against the Uighurs, following a last-minute accusation made in January by the outgoing Trump administration, along with similar declarations by the Dutch and Canadian Parliaments. It was published shortly after the release of a remarkably similar report on February 8 that was commissioned by the U.S. government backed World Uighur Congress, and which alleged that there is a “credible case” against the Chinese government for genocide.
Ajit Singh, lawyer, journalist and a contributing author to Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (Brill: 2019), in his Op-Ed ‘Independent’ report claiming Uyghur genocide brought to you by sham university and neocon ideologues lobbying to ‘punish’ China says that the report relies most substantially on the “expertise” of Adrian Zenz, the far-right evangelical ideologue, whose “scholarship” on China has been demonstrated to be flawed, riddled with falsehoods and dishonest statistical manipulation.
Ajit Singh declares that the reliance on the voluminous but demonstrably fraudulent work of Zenz is not surprising, given that the report was financed by the Newlines Institute’s parent organization, the Fairfax University of America (FXUA). Mr. Singh reveals that FXUA is a disgraced institution that Virginia state regulators moved to shut down in 2019 after finding that its “teachers weren’t qualified to teach their assigned courses”, academic quality was “patently deficient,” and plagiarism was “rampant” and ignored.
Just days before the Newlines Institute published its “expert” report accusing China of genocide, an advisory board to the U.S. Department of Education recommended terminating recognition of FXUA’s accreditor, placing its license in jeopardy. Ajit Singh finds that the Newlines report presents no new material on the condition of Uighur Muslims in China. Instead, it claims to have reviewed all of “the available evidence” and applied “international law to the evidence of the facts on the ground.” He declares that rather than conducting a thorough and comprehensive review of “the available evidence,” the report restricted its survey to a narrow range of flawed pseudo-scholarship along with reports by U.S. government-backed lobbying fronts for the exiled Uyghur separatist movement. It was upon this faulty foundation that the report applies legal analysis related to the UN Genocide Convention.
The columnist opines that a careful review of Zenz’s research shows that his assertion of genocide is concocted through fraudulent statistical manipulation, cherry-picking of source material and propagandistic misrepresentations. His widely-cited reports were not published in peer-reviewed journals overseen by academic institutions.
Zenz and his work on Xinjiang have been criticized by the Chinese government. In March 2021, many Chinese companies filed a lawsuit in Xinjiang against Zenz to recoup economic losses and restore their reputations due to “Zenz’s ‘rumors’ of forced labour in the region”.
It is this dubious source, on which an enlightened Occident is relying to castigate China.
The writer is a retired Group Captain of PAF. He is a columnist, analyst and TV talk show host, who has authored six books on current affairs, including three on Chinaaq