China’s Foreign Ministry announced support Tuesday for a series of lawsuits filed in Xinjiang, home to the nation’s Uyghur concentration camps, against German academic Adrian Zenz, one of the most prominent researchers exposing human rights abuses in the region.
The Foreign Ministry admitted that Zenz’s reports exposing slavery, indoctrination, and family separations in Xinjiang have caused significant financial damage to businesses in Xinjiang. As China is a communist state, all companies have direct ties to the government, suggesting Beijing itself has struggled economically from the backlash to its genocide campaign against majority-Muslim ethnic groups.
International observers, including the U.S. government, have estimated China has forced as many as 3 million people into concentration camps in Xinjiang, mostly people of Uyghur, Kazakh, or Kyrgyz ethnic backgrounds. Eyewitness accounts from survivors of the camps say they were forced to learn Mandarin, a language not native to the region, memorize Communist Party propaganda music, and worship Xi Jinping. They also testified to experiencing extreme torture, systematic rape, testing indicating potential live organ harvesting, slavery, and forced abortions and sterilization.
Zenz’s research has revealed the widespread use of communist indoctrination in an attempt to wipe out Islam in Xinjiang, and the use of “boarding schools” to indoctrinate the children of those trapped in concentration camps.
“The name Adrian Zenz, a so-called German academic, has frequently come up at our press conferences. Hiding behind the banner of academic research, he has been busy cooking up anti-China rumors, with Xinjiang as his particular obsession,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, responsible for a conspiracy theory alleging that the United States caused the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, told reporters Tuesday.
Zhao called Zenz’s extensive reporting and evidence “disinformation” and accused Zenz of being part of a broader conspiracy by “forces with ulterior motives,” without elaborating.
“Many companies and residents in Xinjiang suffered heavy losses after Zenz’s rumor of ‘forced labor’ came out of nowhere,” Zhao admitted. “They detest and abhor such malicious smearing acts. Their decision to seek legal redress against Zenz reflects a stronger awareness among the Chinese citizens to safeguard their rights through the law. We support this.”
The state-run Global Times newspaper announced “a number of enterprises and individuals” in Xinjiang, without elaborating, had filed lawsuits in a local Xinjiang court against Zenz because he had “damaged their reputation and caused them to suffer economic losses.”
The description of the lawsuit appears to indicate that the grounds for the lawsuits will be claims of defamation, but the Times did not specify the legal theory behind the actions or how much money in redress the plaintiffs are demanding. The newspaper contended Zenz’s research was not credible in part because of his alleged Christian faith.
Zenz’s research has revealed previously unknown details on the subjugation of Uyghur people and other minorities in China. Among his most recent reports is the revelation that the Chinese Communist Party developed specific “poverty alleviation” mobile phone applications to help companies staff their manufacturing centers with Uyghur slaves. The study, published in December by the Center for Global Policy, estimated half a million people are currently working as slaves in the cotton-picking industry, their transfer from government custody to government-approved companies facilitated by advanced technology.
In October, Zenz published a report revealing China experienced a 76-9-percent increase in the number of children in boarding schools between 2017, when the Uyghur concentration camps are believed to have first opened, and 2019, suggesting the mass extraction of Xinjiang children out of their natural family units. Over 10,000 of the children identified to be in boarding schools in the report had at least one parent trapped in the concentration camps system.
Zenz’s earlier reports also disputed China’s claims that the concentration camps were “vocational training centers” for individuals who did not have sufficient job skills.
“There is abundant evidence from government documents that there are several types of dedicated re-education facilities in Xinjiang, and that the officially-stated primary goal of the VTICs [Vocational Training Internment Camps] is not vocational training but ‘transformation through education,” Zenz wrote in 2019. “Government claims that Xinjiang has no ‘concentration camps’ are both semantically and technically false, and contradicted by the state’s own terminology.”
China’s announcement of lawsuits against one researcher appears not to have deterred many others working to expose the truth of government oppression in Xinjiang so far. On Tuesday, the Guardian noted a new report published by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, an American think tank, with no links to Zenz’s work that concludes China is guilty of every element of the crime of genocide. The report spans 25,000 pages and blames the Communist Party exclusively for genocidal acts such as “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”