Since at least
February 2018, a German-born anthropologist named Adrian Zenz has alleged that China is persecuting the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim minority that inhabits Xinjiang, China’s westernmost autonomous region.
Zenz is a Senior Fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC). His work has been published at the neoconservative Jamestown Foundation and the
Newlines Institute, which is a project of Fairfax University of America (formerly Virginia International University).
Zenz’s work is the foundation of
myriad claims by the
Western-aligned corporate press, the
Trump and Biden administrations, and U.S.-backed
NGOs that the Chinese Government is committing genocide against the Uyghurs.
Most notably, on his last day in office, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
cited Zenz’s work to
accuse the Chinese Government of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” for its treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. This charge included allegations of forced labor.
These allegations were
embraced by the Biden administration, which then doubled down on targeted economic sanctions. The sanctions, titled the “Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act” (UFLPA)
took effect on June 21, 2022. The Act creates a
rebuttable presumption that all goods “mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in Xinjiang or by an entity on the UFLPA Entity List are prohibited from U.S. importation” under federal law.
Much
ink has already been
spilled exposing Zenz’s
credibility issues.
For instance, the
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is a champion of anti-Russian Cold Warriorism whose principal founders included former National Security Advisor and
professed regime change architect Zbiegniew Brzezinski. Its second co-founder, Lev Dobriansky, was a close associate of
Ukrainian fascist and
WWII Nazi collaborator Yaroslav Stetsko.
Further, the Newlines Institute is
infested with “former U.S. State Department officials, U.S. military advisors, intelligence professionals who previously worked for the ‘shadow CIA’ private spying firm, Stratfor, and a collection of interventionist ideologues.”
Lastly, the Newlines Institute is overseen by Fairfax University of America—a private, for-profit university whose
accreditation was recommended for termination in 2019 after an audit found its curriculum to be “patently deficient,” noting concerns of “limited peer-to-peer and student-faculty interaction; failure of instructors to adhere to standards outlined in course syllabi; rampant plagiarism; graduate level courses lacking academic rigor; online courses that are not comparable in content to those offered in residence; and grade inflation.”
In February 2021,
it was revealed,
inter alia, that
Zenz made a grave statistical error in his June 2020 paper: “Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Birthrates in Xinjiang.” Zenz’s main claim was that in 2018, Xinjiang accounted for “80 percent of all net added IUD placements in China.” Zenz miscalculated this number by a factor of 10. In reality, Xinjiang only accounted for 8.7 percent.