Collapsed on Quora 5: The Drama of Adrian Zenz.
This is the fifth of my ‘collapsed on Quora’ series, where I share answers that have been collapsed/ persecuted by Quora’s moderation.
The piece I’m sharing today is one of the longest I ever wrote on Quora, and is part of my series countering denialist narratives about specifically the ongoing Xinjiang genocide. There has been an immense amount of effort expended by the government of China to attempt to suppress discussion of this topic, and to spread misinformation and false claims as widely as possible. On the site Quora, where I spent a great deal of time reading, attempting to understand, and countering these narratives, there is so much state-based disinformation about Xinjiang that denialist propaganda actually dominates discourse there. That is, if you were to exclusively take your information on the Xinjiang genocide from Quora, you would probably come away thinking that it was all a hoax set up by the CIA or some similar such nonsense.
One of the predominant ‘lines of attack’ by genocide deniers trying to hide the truth about the Xinjiang genocide is to attempt to discredit the researchers and investigators bringing evidence to the light of day. In particular, one scholar in the field, Dr. Adrian Zenz, who has compiled an extraordinary amount of information and done an incredible amount of work to reveal some of what is taking place in Xinjiang to the world, is a major target for smearing. Genocide deniers relentlessly and endlessly attempt to attack and discredit this man, and by extension his work; this effort against specifically Dr. Zenz carries up to the very highest levels of the Chinese government.
I wrote the following answer to break down and dissect the most common attacks I have seen against Zenz, to determine their credibility, to identify the distortions, and to debunk them where necessary. It is therefore very much a ‘deep dive’ of an answer, not necessarily gripping to a wider audience, but more about points of clarification for anyone interested in this topic. It took a fair amount of research to pull together.
The question that it is an answer to simply asked whether there was any truth to the online attacks on Zenz that are so common on Quora. This was my response to that query.
Quora moderation quietly collapsed the answer in January this year without telling me, and a friend only noticed today (in May) and let me know:
So far, I have been given no reason why this answer has been collapsed.
So here it is! Let’s hope it can reach a wider audience on Medium:
I’ve been meaning to write a post on this for a while.
And looking at the uniform, almost scripted vilification in the other answers here, it looks like this answer is needed to clear up some misconceptions.
Warning: this is gonna be a long one.
For those of you who don’t know, Adrian Zenz is one of the most significant figures investigating China’s ongoing repression and genocide in Xinjiang. He’s an academic who gained his PhD from Cambridge university in 2010, and is considered one of the major authorities on the current Xinjiang crackdown.[1] As a scholar and investigator, he has prolifically hunted for clues as to what’s happening on the ground there, and has also published analyses of leaked documents, some of which were leaked to him by his own contacts in-province.
He currently works for the Victims of Communism Memorial Trust as a Senior Fellow in China Studies. Overall, he has played a very prominent role in interpreting, analysing, and evaluating the information emerging to the outside world about Xinjiang.[2]
Zenz.
Needless to say, China doesn’t like him very much.
In common with others[3] who have spoken out about China’s Xinjiang policies, whether as investigators, activists or witnesses, Zenz has been subject to a high volume of criticism and attack, some of which has been criticisms of perceived flaws in his research, much of which has been personal.[4]
It’s important to note that virtually all of the attacks have come not from academia, but from social media and official Chinese state media. Also prominent in penning hitpieces against Zenz have been news outlets that can charitably be described as ‘fringe’. The most notable of these is The Grayzone, which is notorious for its gutter-press peddling of conspiracy theories, its opaque funding, and its apologia for the abuses of Left-oriented authoritarian regimes worldwide.[5]
I took a little time to check out some of these claims made against Adrian Zenz. There are many things said about him, and a lot of it is pretty farfetched and honestly isn’t worthy of refutation. That said, a few core claims persistently keep cropping up in denialist writings and attacks on the man, and I think these claims are definitely worth evaluating and fact-checking. The rest of this answer will evaluate the following claims in order:
- Zenz’s PhD is a mail-order fake from a disreputable institution.[6]
- Zenz’s academic specialism is theology. He is moonlighting in a field that’s not his own without credibility.[7]
- Zenz works for a far-right organisation that is a front for anti-China activities.[8]
- Zenz is in the payroll of intelligence agencies/ involved in disinformation drives.[9]
- Zenz is a Christian fundamentalist who says he has a ‘mission from God’.[10]
- Zenz’s scholarship contains glaring flaws, in keeping with his lack of standing as a scholar.[11]
- Zenz cannot speak Mandarin/ lacks expertise with the subject matter.[12]
- Zenz is the sole source/ nearly the sole source for the Xinjiang genocide allegations. All the allegations hinge on evidence provided by him.[13]
This is the bulk of the criticisms that I’ve seen of him, and the ones that seem to have really proliferated on social media (Note to any CCP-apologists who might be reading this: are there any important criticisms that I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments! Thanks for helping me out, I want my answer to be as thorough as possible. Cheers guys :) )
Anyway, let’s begin the evaluation!
Claim 1: Zenz’s PhD is a mail-order fake from a disreputable institution.
Adrian Zenz completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2010. You can find his name among the list of PhD’s awarded in the 2009–2010 academic year on the Cambridge Social Anthropology Department’s website :
Evaluation of this claim: False.
Claim 2: Zenz’s academic specialism is theology. He is moonlighting in a field that’s not his own without credibility.
See above. Zenz’s PhD was in Social Anthropology. The title of his thesis was: Tibetanness Under Threat? Sinicisation, Career and Market Reforms in Qinghai, P.R. China.[14]
The subject of his PhD is the forced Sinicisation of Tibet. Clearly this is a topic that is very closely related to his current research on Xinjiang (arguably for the last decade you could group them together under one topic and call it ‘Chen Quanguo studies’[15]) He has the academic background here; he is not an amateur in this field.
Evaluation of this claim: False.
Claim 3: Zenz works for a far-right organisation that is a front for anti-China activities.
Zenz is a research fellow of the ‘Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’, a non-profit whose stated purpose is “commemorating the more than 100 million victims of communism around the world and to pursuing the freedom of those still living under totalitarian regimes.”[16] It was founded in 1993, and its main activities are, according to its site, education, outreach and research. They design curricula for American high schools, run workshops and seminars on Communism and Communist theory, and fund research.[17]
Are they far-right?
Not really. At least, definitely not openly. Not unless you consider being ‘Anti-Communist’ to be ‘Far Right’. Which, if we’re being honest, only really makes sense if you are already a Communist. Being ‘Anti Communist’ and being ‘Far Right’ are clearly not the same thing. I found no evidence that they were pushing ideas like white-supremacism or Neo-nazism or anything traditionally associated with the far right. The setting up of the Foundation, as associated with an actual memorial in Washington DC, was mandated by the signing into law of the FRIENDSHIP Act in 1993 by Democratic president Bill Clinton, as part of the post-Cold War normalisation of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States.[18] This kind of history isn’t exactly characteristic of an extreme right-wing alignment, though I’m sure that many Quorans will disagree with the beliefs and stated intent of the Foundation.
But could they be a front for something else?
This is obviously harder to determine. I guess it’s possible that they could be far more unhinged beneath the surface. We all know that there’s a big difference between stated intent and actual behaviour after all. But is there evidence that they are corrupt, or not doing what they say they’re doing?
The Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington D.C.
One way to get a hint at this is to get a look at their money trail. Is there anything shady going on there? They are a registered charity so should get most of their funding through donations and endowments, rather than from cash-generating activities, so I decided to have a look at their evaluation on Charity Navigator, which is a neat little site that evaluates the reliability and transparency of charities. This is Charity Navigator’s rating for the Foundation:
This rating is based on transparency of funding, expenses, and the ease of access of records such as public minutes, the alignment and interests of the Board of Directors and so on. It is based on IRS filings. You can find those filings here:
As you can see, the Foundation has a very high rating of 100% for transparency and accountability. Their minutes are recorded and available for inspection and there are no known irregularities in their expenditure. Although I do not believe that they are obliged to reveal their donors as a charity, some that are publicly known included the Earhart Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, both philanthropic foundations supporting research in the Humanities, generally of a Conservative/Libertarian nature.
I see little evidence of underhand activity here, although there’s no doubt that the Foundation has a very specific intent and could therefore be said to have a political position. This doesn’t really reach the bar of ‘far right’ by any objective standard though. In this case, the foundation’s ‘far- rightness’ is a statement of opinion, not fact, and the transparent expenditures and accountable nature of the Foundation suggests that it is acting in accordance with its stated intent.
Evaluation of claim: Unfounded.
Claim 4: Zenz is in the payroll of intelligence agencies/involved in disinformation drives.
Now this is a claim that is partially derived from the idea that the ‘Victims of Communism Foundation’ isn’t legit, and partly on the idea that Zenz himself is a spook.
For example, I’ve seen this infographic going around, with CCP-apologists suggesting that it is damning proof that Zenz rustled up all the evidence for the Xinjiang genocide (or in this case the systematic separation of children from their parents) at the behest of the BBC:[19]
Let’s ignore the enthusiastic addition of all the little red arrows and boxes and concentrate on what Zenz is saying here. He’s telling us that:
- The BBC commissioned his research.
- Initially he declined, saying that he thought the evidence was too sparse.
- He gave the case a second look after they persisted, and did end up finding significant evidence once he began his investigations.
The CCP-apologists say that he basically admitted he invented evidence to find juicy stuff for his report. There are a few problems with this explanation though. For example, there’s absolutely nothing weird about being surprised at what you uncover during an investigation. Research is by its very nature a hunt for the unknown. Being unsure about what the outcome of a project will be is a literal centrepiece of research and investigation. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be ‘investigation’. So him being surprised that he found more evidence than he expected doesn’t mean he invented the evidence. That’s contorted logic.
Also, why would Zenz publicly admit to something like this if it was so obviously incriminating? It’s actually difficult to interpret this as much other than a researcher’s surprise at the outcome of a project.
I reckon that a lot of the supposed incriminatory power of this tweet comes from China’s recent drive to demonise the BBC, especially over Xinjiang. There’s a lot of misinformation out there on it at the moment, and there’s evidence that this misinformation effort is actually quite coordinated, and instigated by high-level officials and diplomats. This recent academic report published by the International Cyber Policy Centre describes the nature of this misinformation and some of the evidence for it being coordinated:
Hell, you can even see disinformation about the BBC being spread by senior CCP members in other answers to this very question.[20] One of those answers has a video of Hua Chunying, a senior Chinese diplomat and director of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs[21] spreading such misinformation. In the video, she heavily implies that the BBC is only accountable to Ofcom, the press watchdog that keeps it in check and holding to its charter, when reporting on domestic affairs. In foreign reports, she claims, the BBC is not accountable to Ofcom. This would imply that the BBC could not be held accountable by Ofcom for its foreign reporting.
This is a false claim. The BBC is bound by Ofcom to report on foreign affairs to the same standard as domestic news, and to uphold its charter:
“The BBC should provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world.”
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/how_we_govern/2016/charter.pdf
Hua Chunying appears to be referring to the BBC World Service,[22] which is broadcast internationally, unlike the rest of the BBC. Because its jurisdiction is not limited to the UK audience, it is not directly accountable to Ofcom. However, BBC World Service is accountable to the BBC, which is in turn accountable to Ofcom. It is bound by a charter of its own:
“The World Service makes a global contribution to the BBC’s Mission to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.3
In particular, the World Service contributes to the BBC’s international news mission by seeking to address the global gap in the provision of trusted international news, by providing accurate, impartial and independent news and programming of the highest quality.”
This has nothing to do with reporting on foreign affairs. The BBC is not allowed to spread disinformation about China or any other country, and neither is the BBC World Service, contrary to Hua Chunying’s claims.
That was a slight digression, but the idea was to demonstrate that a lot of demonisation and disinformation has been spread about the BBC of late by China. The BBC just really, really isn’t this shady front for state intelligence or a raw propaganda outlet. For one, it’s totally transparent about funding:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/annualreport/2019-20.pdf
Plus the BBC is held accountable by Ofcom, the regulatory organisation that focuses and directs complaints from the Great British Public (tm). They really go for the jugular, and it can be pretty funny sometimes.
Seriously, as a UK resident I have say the sheer number of complaints about BBC impartiality, bias or whatever are incessant. Whenever you tune into the BBC, you’re gonna hear something about a standards complaint. The BBC is constantly being hammered about potential bias in their reporting, and is constantly hand-wringing in self-examination over whether their reports truly are sufficiently biased or impartial. Honestly, it gets pretty annoying sometimes. The BBC and the British public are actually deeply aware of the potential danger of the BBC’s abuse as a propaganda machine or an organ for disinformation. And the British public are also lowkey pissed off about it taking their money through the TV Licensing Fee.[23] So they watch it like a hawk. And pounce when they see a screwup. For real. It’s not credible to call the BBC an organ of state propaganda. So if Zenz accepted a commission from them, it doesn’t mean that he was serving some shadowy agenda. It’s a perfectly respectable thing to do.
Which is why he tweeted about it. Publicly.
The other claims seem to originate from a Grayzone article about the Newlines Institute, a think tank which Zenz works for:
(Note: If you really, really like scare-quotes, and think that any sentence can be improved by adding the words ‘so-called’ before all the nouns, then you’ll love the Grayzone and most Chinese English-language State Media.)
It tried to claim that the institute was based on a shady conspiracy based on the fact that:
- It was embedded in a university (Fairfax university of America) that had a poor record teaching undergraduates in its distance learning project.
- Nebulous ‘shady associations’ of some of the members of the institute.
Unfortunately for the Grayzone, this doesn’t really amount to much beyond a kind of ‘guilt-by-association’ argument, and they really do try to sling muck. Not only is it obvious that the Grayzone’s piece is uninterested in much beyond discrediting the seminal report deliberating the evidence for genocide in Xinjiang published by Zenz et. al.,[24] but the associations it talks about are vague, rather inconclusive, and aren’t really all that incriminating overall. So some guys in a foreign policy think tank might have connections with the US government or other interests? Honestly, it would be weird if there weren’t such connections. In other news, water is wet. Given how hard they tried here, the Grayzone reporters don’t really come up with much. And when making a claim like ‘Adrian Zenz is a spy’, the burden of proof really is on the accuser.
And to be honest, whenever the Grayzone tries to smear someone through guilt-by-association allegations of shady connections, the charge kinda rebounds. This is seriously a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
The proper response to getting accused of shady stuff by the Grayzone.
Evaluation of claim: Unfounded.
Claim 5: Zenz is a Christian fundamentalist who says he has a ‘mission from God’.
This is one of the most common claims I see about Zenz, and looking into it… I kinda see why.
So, Zenz is a born-again Christian. He’s also very devout, an evangelical, who co-wrote a book in 2012 called Worthy to Escape: Why all Believers Will Not be Raptured Before the Tribulation.[25] Certainly an interesting title.
Well, I ordered it to see what he had to say and, honestly, it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like.
For starters, as he states in the foreword, he’s a Biblical literalist. He also clearly believes that biblical scripture can be used to tell the future. The book concerns End-Time prophecies through interpreting the Book of Revelation.
No point sugarcoating it, the book is a trip. Not my first choice of bedtime reading. His religious beliefs are pretty out-there and fruity by mainstream standards.
As for the quote about him having a ‘mission from God’, that comes from an interview with the Wall Street Journal. The direct quote is “I felt very led by God to do this (his research)”.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-german-data-diver-who-exposed-chinas-muslim-crackdown-11558431005
Now, I won’t defend or explain away his beliefs here, but I will point out that the latter statement about being ‘led by God’ is quite a Christian conceit, that need not imply a literal deity talking to you, but being guided into your vocation, perhaps by an ‘inner voice’ or by a strong conviction. That said, given his literalism, it’s probably fair to take him at his word here.
This doesn’t necessarily imply that his scholarship is lacking, though. We can’t just assume that because he’s got strong religious beliefs, that he is incapable of critical thought or quality scholarship in his chosen area of specialisation. I’ll talk about what I think of his scholarship in the next section. Millions of scientists and scholars balance their faith and their work around the world on a daily basis. Being religious doesn’t necessarily make you bad or irrational or stupid. That said, I can accept that this aspect of his work and beliefs will raise some serious question-marks about him for many people.
I’ll give this one to the CCP-apologists.
Evaluation of this claim: True.
Claim 6: Zenz’s scholarship contains glaring flaws, in keeping with his lack of standing as a scholar.
This one I’ve seen a couple of times around as well. Many of the justifications for this assertion are absurd, like the Global Time’s claim that Zenz forged all the documents that he helped leak,[26] but once again the Grayzone appears to be the main group pushing claims like this.
In particular, they published a critique of one of his reports that focused on an error that he made there: he mislabeled a graph of net IUD insertions in Xinjiang vs wider China as ‘per capita’ rather than ‘per 100,000’, which is what the data was actually showing. Here is the offending graph:[27]
This leads to the kind of hilarious idea that Xinjiang saw 1400 net IUDs inserted per woman in 2015, while in that year, China as a whole saw nearly 400 net IUDs per woman inserted on average. Clearly, that’s absurd.
In later editions of this paper, the graph has been fixed:[28]
They also claim that he makes the erroneous assertion that 80% of IUD insertion across China were performed in Xinjiang. As they say, the figures show that only 8.7% of IUD insertions across China were performed in Xinjiang. This second claim I will return to in a moment.
Now, the Grayzone and others got very excited about these supposed anomalies, and started claiming that this was proof of Zenz’s deliberate falsification of data to exaggerate the scale of forcible IUD insertion in Xinjiang. They suggested that this was a decisive proof that Zenz was deliberately exaggerating what was going on and has been engaging in atrocity propaganda over the extent of China’s birth-prevention programme in Xinjiang.
The only problem with this interpretation is that it makes no sense. It’s not the argument that Zenz is making in this part of the paper
Look at the graph again, and reread the accompanying commentary. It shows a fairly steady population-adjusted rate of net IUD-insertion in Xinjiang, that is substantially higher than the rest of China. There is a sharp peak in 2015, and then a decline in 2016, followed by a slow but steady increase in the 2016–18 period. Properly genocidal measures via prevention of births and other methods are thought to have started in Xinjiang in 2017, or late 2016 at the earliest, and the graph doesn’t really show a massive uptick in net IUD insertions at this time. However, from 2016–2017 onwards, the rate of net IUD insertions in the rest of China declines, presumably because of the rollback of the 1-child policy at this time.[29] It’s not changes in Xinjiang that cause that proportional increase in net IUD insertions in Xinjiang, but policy changes in the rest of China. What this graph is supposed to show is that birth control policy is differently implemented in Xinjiang to the rest of China, not that a massive increase in net IUD-insertions is a part of the directly-genocidal policies. Zenz doesn’t argue anything like that in the paper; this section of the paper is more about demonstrating inconsistent application of policy. That the Uighurs are being singled out for anti-natalist treatment. There wasn’t necessarily a big enough change in the application of this method to fully account for the striking Uighur fertility drop post-2018.
For reference, Zenz is trying to figure out what’s causing this fertility drop in Xinjiang:
Data from the China Statistical Yearbook, table 2.8.[30] Credit to Nathaniel who compiled the graph from this dataset.
The data of that preliminary graph plotting net IUD insertions over time suggests that the major change in Xinjiang fertility did not exclusively come about from an uptick in IUD use, but that their use wasn’t relaxed there like it was in other parts of China. The IUD insertion rate in Xinjiang remained steady, so it doesn’t really fully account for the fertility drop.
No, it looks more like the drop was because of all the forced sterilisations:
This graph is also from Zenz’s report.[31]
Funny how a detailed analysis of this graph never seems to make it into these denunciations of Zenz or his scholarship. They never really have a good explanation for what’s going on here, or for the evidence assembled his very extensive analyses of documentary and other sources that forms the bulk of his work. The graph that he mislabelled really is part of the prelude to the main thrust of his argument, and once corrected, it is pretty consistent with both the available data and with the rest of his paper. In no way does what he say hinge on the graph’s mislabelling, and only a wilful misinterpretation of his argument and the intended thrust of his paper can lead anyone to the conclusion that he did this on purpose. The sheer volume of noise that’s raised over this one error online is also quite indicative as well; it tells us that this is the most serious flaw that the dedicated little hacks over at Grayzone and Global Times could find in his work. What does it amount to? A minor labelling flaw in an incidental supplementary table in the prelude to his main argument that changes nothing about his paper’s argument when corrected.
News flash: Academics are humans, too. They make mistakes all the time. This is the kind of oopsie that would lose you a couple of points in a thesis, making you kick yourself and call yourself an idiot but not really affecting your argument. It’s very commonplace, and not compelling evidence of much besides the human condition.
The claim that Zenz misreported net IUD insertion rates, however, substituting the figure 80% for 8.7% of the total for China, is even more interesting. The fuss raised over this point actually betrays the mathematical illiteracy of his critics.
So, in the year 2019, Xinjiang province saw 8.7 percent of the total insertions of IUDs in all of China. However, Zenz chose to analyse the net insertions of IUDs both in Xinjiang as compared to the rest of China. That is, he subtracted away the figures for IUDs removed from those of IUDs inserted by province, and then compared the difference between inserted and removed IUDs, both in Xinjiang and in the other provinces, as well as the rest of China. Why did he do this? There are two main reasons why net insertion is a better measure of anti-natalist procedures over time than is a total tally of the insertion procedures:
- Obviously, a removal takes an IUD out of play, and ‘cancels out’ an insertion procedure. This permits Zenz to cut down on some of the ‘noise’ over the data on these procedures, to get a handle on how many IUDs are actually active at any given time.
- It is a measure of the change in the IUD policy. Are there more active IUD’s in play this year than last year? Then the net figure will be positive. Has IUD usage gone down as IUDs were removed? then the figure will be negative. Holding steady? then the net figure will be low/ near zero.
So Zenz added up all the insertions and removals and discovered that, because of the rollback on the 1 Child Policy and antinatalism in general across China, a lot of the provinces had net-negative IUD insertion rates where more IUDs were removed than inserted. However, there were outlier provinces which showed steady or increasing IUD-insertion rates that still tipped China into a net-excess of IUD- insertions for 2019, meaning that in 2019 there were still more IUDs inserted than removed in China. Of these provinces, Xinjiang accounted for as much as 80% of that excess. This is what Zenz meant, and he does explain clearly what he is doing in his paper.
So this criticism of Zenz’s report comes from misreading it. He really does explain all this in his text.
When this was pointed out, the critics doubled down in a really bizarre and mathematically inept way. This People’s Daily article[32] claims that Zenz’s method is wrong for a very odd reason:
“According to his logic, and take Henan Province for example, it registered a “net added IUD insertions” of 206,000, accounting for 69% of the national total. Adding the percentage of Xinjiang (80%) and that of Henan (69%) would be more than 100%, which makes no sense at all.”
This is…a mindbogglingly dumb argument. It betrays complete mathematical illiteracy. Like seriously, wtf levels of bad logic and poor comprehension of the data. Here’s why:
The figure for net IUD insertions across China can be arrived at by taking the total all the IUD insertions in the country and subtracting away all the IUD removals that took place. If you did this in 2019, you would happen to get a net positive figure of 299,851. If you just look at Xinjiang, you would get a net positive figure of 239,457, or 80% of the total. If you do the same for Henan, you get a total of 206,281 net positive insertions, or 69% of the total. The article tells us that it ‘makes no sense’ that you can add these figures together and get a figure that’s more than 100% of the total for all of China.
So, the tiny flaw in this logic is that it forgets about all the other provinces of China, where because of the rollback on the 1- Child policy, net insertion rates were negativein 2019.
Think of it this way: if you were to subtract the net IUD-insertion rates of Xinjiang and Henan from that of all of China, then the net-insertion from all the other provinces would be negative. Excluding these two provinces, there was an overall drop in IUDs across China because of policy changes. If it weren’t for these outliers, then the total IUDs active in China would have dropped in 2019. Xinjiang accounts for 80% of the total bringing IUD insertion across China into the positive.
So there’s no reason why having two excesses from two different provinces added together exceeding the excess for the whole of China should ‘make no sense’. That just means that there are also provinces where the net insertion rate was negative to offset this total.
But it looks like this is lost on Chinese state media, who don’t understand subtraction.
And this brain-dead and mathematically illiterate error isn’t just peddled by fringe outlets, either. Here is the release by the Chinese embassy in Belgium repeating this error, relying on the Grayzone to do their fact-checking for them:
https://www.mfa.gov.cn/ce/cebel//eng/zt/xinjiangEN1/t1860060.htm
And here’s a thread of Zenz defending his paper[33] from this kind of attack on twitter:
What I see missing from any of these critiques and hitpieces, whether from propagandists, fringe news outlets or from social media conspiracy theorists (it’s never academics) is any understanding or appreciation for the depth and extent of research that has gone into any one of Zenz’s works. His efforts in seeking out, analysing, collating and contextualising sources from multiple different dimensions and forms are very significant, as is the work of collating and cross-referencing the different information in order to either determine credibility or to see how new evidence fits into what has been revealed so far.
In researching this piece, I had a read of a few of his papers, to have a look at what kind of a researcher he is. How he uses sources and argues his case.[34][35][36] What I found was the kind of painstaking efforts to verify, analyse and contextualise every source invoked and used to bolster his argument, that should be expected of an academic researcher. He is generally actually pretty skeptical and cautious in the claims he makes, and always supports his assertions with a relevant citation. His arguments tend to proceed quite clearly from presented information, generally making sense. When they proceed in an unusual or unconventional way, he is quick to acknowledge this. He is also generally quick to admit when he lacks specialised expertise in a certain sub-specialism relevant to an argument, acknowledges the limitations of his expertise and methods, and credits the work of others.
In other words, he writes academic papers, up to academic standards. He supports his assertions with a truly immense amount of research into mainly primary sources gleaned from the Chinese internet, and has a good command of a large volume of information. When I checked some of his Chinese-language sources to see how they matched up to what he said in a paper, they checked out.
I doubt that many of his critics, especially here on Quora, have actually bothered to read his works, to get a sense of what he actually says, what his sources are, and how he argues. For a taste of his writing and the nature of his analysis, I invite you to have a read of some of his articles:
And a more involved paper of his:
The fact is, he’s a scholar who has a track record carrying out high-quality research, which is something that very few of his critics can claim, or ever will be able to claim. I see a lot of Dunning-Kruger[37] at play here, with lots of instant experts in demographics, population statistics, international relations, minority rights, International law, and Xinjiang and Uighur studies popping out of the woodwork to point out ‘flaws’ in his research and deny genocide. Unlike Dr. Zenz, most of these people probably have absolutely no idea what it takes to write a rigorous and in-depth research report, and so don’t really understand what it is that they’re critiquing.
Never mind that academia is a rough-and-tumble world full of very smart and knowledgeable people who would be more than happy to take Zenz down a notch were he in error. Never mind that uncovering a neocon academic conspiracy would be some of these guy’s idea of Christmas, Hanukkah and 春节 rolled into one, or that he has been publishing high volumes of work on this topic for nearly 5 years that his work keeps getting corroborated by other lines of evidence.[38] [39] Never mind that the best ‘hit’ that has been landed on his scholarship by his enemies is a quibble over the mislabelling of a single supporting graph, clearly these internet sleuths and hacks have found a conspiracy that the world’s academics, journalists, analysts and human rights investigators have all overlooked.
Dunning. Kruger. This is what is called anomaly hunting, the seizing on small and supposedly-unexplained details in a large and interconnected body of knowledge and, rather than trying to genuinely seek out an explanation for these discrepancies, to immediately jump to the conclusion that you have entirely discredited the broader matrix of information, and have found something revolutionary. It’s a very common cognitive error among pseudoscientists and cranks of all stripes:
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/anomaly-hunting/
Zenz’s body of work is very high-credibility, and the vast bulk of his findings have never been seriously challenged.
Evaluation of this claim: False.
Claim 7: Zenz cannot speak Mandarin/ lacks expertise with the subject matter.
This claim partly comes from the fact that Adrian Zenz is not ethnic Chinese, from defensive nationalists. It also derives from claims that some of the documents that he is said to have leaked show poor Chinese/ unusual Chinese usages, that a ‘real Mandarin speaker’ would have spotted. In particular, with respect to the Karakax List, a very significant document that Zenz received from a Uighur activist who leaked it out of Xinjiang. This document has some unusual linguistic features, most notably that the term for the Mandarin Chinese language used there, 国语 (guoyu), differs from the mainstream term used on the Mainland, which is more typically either 汉语 or 普通话. Any worthwhile speaker of Mandarin, the Zenz detractors claim, would spot this immediately. Clearly Zenz must be both inept and dishonest to not spot this anomaly as proof of fakery.
Unfortunately this line of argument doesn’t take into account that Xinjiang Mandarin is different to that in other regions, and usage differs. This term has been corroborated by leaked footage from the Xinjiang camps,[40] by other usage from other leaks, and appears to be a kind of new, politically-correct ‘euphemism used in Xinjiang and other ‘frontier’ Chinese provinces such as Inner Mongolia.[41]
So these arguments seem to show the accuser’s lack of familiarity with the subject matter, not Zenz’s.
What’s more, his corpus of work heavily relies on Chinese-language documents, both state media, press and government documents. I chased up a couple of these links in some of his papers to see if they said what he claimed they did. And they did indeed support the points he was making.
However,
CCP-apologists also point to a twitter thread in which Zenz asks his followers to read the writing on the prisoners vests in the infamous Korla drone footage, apparently unable to do so.[42]
Now, in fairness, it is pretty hard to make out what is written from the vests in the footage from the resolution and the angle, especially for a middle-aged man with less than 20–20 vision, and doubly so on a smartphone. Or perhaps he had a vague idea on what might have been written there (喀什市看守所, Kashgar city detention centre) but wasn’t sure and so asked his followers. Which are fair and reasonable things to do.
That said, he isn’t a native speaker, and seems to be an adult learner of Mandarin. So it is possible that he would struggle, especially with things like place-names. It is probably reasonable to assume that he doesn’t have the level of Mandarin of a native speaker. This is a general problem of Western scholarship on China: there are very, very few specialists, even at a high level, who have true mastery of Mandarin and other Chinese dialects. It’s something that I think the West needs to address, and urgently. It’s likely to be a real problem in the coming decade.[43]
Even so, it’s highly unlikely that Zenz ‘cannot speak Mandarin at all’, as some apologists like to claim. But it’s difficult to know where exactly on the spectrum between ‘beginner’ and ‘native-level proficiency or beyond’ that he falls. I can attest that his understanding and command of Chinese-language sources seems pretty good in his papers, but how much of this is translation software or help and how much is his general mastery of the language is hard for me to determine without further evidence.
Evaluation of this claim: Inconclusive.
Claim 8: Zenz is the sole source/ nearly the sole source for the Xinjiang genocide allegations. All the allegations hinge on evidence provided by him.
Yeah, this just isn’t true. Although Adrian Zenz is a prolific investigator who has analysed and commented on a lot of the evidence for the Xinjiang genocide, he is not the ‘sole source’ of the evidence for atrocity that streams out of Xinjiang daily.
This claim likely comes from the Zenz cache, which is a depository of government documents that was obtained by him from an in-province contact. It is substantial, numbering over 25000 files:
However, even the documents which Zenz could be said to have had a hand in leaking constitute only a subset of both the leaked documents and the evidence at hand. The China cables, for example, are another large cache of documents that were leaked not by Zenz, but by the ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists).[44]Leaks have arrived with us in a variety of ways.
Zenz’s research, as described here,[45] largely consists of trawling the Chinese internet for government bulletins, notices, and other texts or documents that might provide clues as to the situation in Xinjiang. As such, the large majority of the data for his research actually comes from the public domain. What this means is that the data certainly didn’t ‘appear’ at the behest of Zenz, but is actually open to verification by anyone. Even if Zenz initially draws attention to, say, a Chinese government bulletin detailing a particular incriminating practice, it is not reasonable to say that Zenz created it, or that Zenz alone knows where it came from. The great majority of his work and output has been verified and cross-referenced and is open to inspection by the public, and some have even evolved into open-source research projects that anyone can contribute to.[46]
The body of evidence for the Uighur genocide is vast, interconnected, and comes from many different dimensions[47] spreading back several years now. These include:
Leaked documents,
Satellite imagery,
Eyewitness testimony,
Leaked footage,
Logistics markers, as reflected in Chinese government expenditure patterns and more,
Population statistics and other Chinese government data.
More evidence emerges every day. To get an idea of the scale of this evidence, I recommend you check out this document that was compiled by an old Quoran who took interest in this topic, Thomas Swan. It’s a truly gargantuan assembly of available evidence, all compiled in one bibliography. It’s a little out of date now (evidence has continued to emerge), but it ought to give you an idea of the scale and the scope of available evidence supporting the expert consensus of genocide in Xinjiang:
And here is another compilation of evidence:
And here:
Zenz certainly figures prominently in these bibliographies, but he’s far from the only source. And the vast majority of his output is commentary on publicly available evidence, not on leaks that he himself is responsible for.
Thomas even compiled a bibliography of sources of evidence for widespread repression in Xinjiang that excluded Zenz, and only included pre-2017 documentation to provide a sense of just how well-documented the process of escalation towards the current genocidal situation truly is:
There’s zero credibility to the idea that all the evidence for genocide and repression in Xinjiang leads back to Zenz, could have been cooked up by him. None. It’s brazen disinformation, an extraordinarily false and erroneous idea.
Evaluation of this claim: False.
Conclusion:
To answer the original question, the great majority of these accusations are unfounded or openly false, and the accusers are low-credibility. Furthermore, it is very wrong-headed to focus on Zenz as the ‘sole source’ of the Uighur genocide.
There’s a lot of misinformation out there, on this topic. Some is probably anti-vaxx-tier conspiracy theorising by people with a bad case of Dunning-Kruger but a lot definitely is Chinese state disinformation. It’s good to keep this in mind when online.
Zenz is a credible authority in his field. As a rule, those accusing him are not.
Footnotes
[3] China counters Uighur criticism with explicit attacks on women witnesses
[4] China accuses outspoken scholar on Xinjiang of fabrication
[5] Grayzone, Grifters and the Cult of Tank
[8] Slanderer Adrian Zenz a puppet of anti-China forces: report
[9] US State Department accusation of China ‘genocide’ relied on data abuse and baseless claims by far-right ideologue — The Grayzone
[10] Xinjiang think tank unveils Adrian Zenz as swindler under academic disguise
[11] Report debunks Adrian Zenz’s Xinjiang-related fallacies
[13] Daniel Dumbrill on Twitter
[14] ‘Tibetanness’ Under Threat?
[16] About | Victims of Communism
[17] About | Victims of Communism
[18] Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation — Wikipedia
[19] China -XinJiang — Uyghurs
[20] A lot of pro-CCP apologists denounce Adrian Zenz as “not a good source” or at least a flawed one, how much truth is there to these accusations against his person and is it right to focus on Zenz as the ‘sole source’ of the Uyghur genocide?
[22] BBC World Service — Wikipedia
[23] Television licensing in the United Kingdom — Wikipedia
[24] https://newlinesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/Chinas-Breaches-of-the-GC3-2.pdf
[26] Xinjiang think tank unveils Adrian Zenz as swindler under academic disguise
[27] https://jamestown.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Zenz-Internment-Sterilizations-and-IUDs-UPDATED-July-21-Rev2.pdf?x11327
[28] Sterilizations, IUDs, and Coercive Birth Prevention: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birth Rates in Xinjiang — Jamestown
[29] One-child policy — Wikipedia
[30] China Statistical Yearbook 2020
[31] Sterilizations, IUDs, and Coercive Birth Prevention: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birth Rates in Xinjiang — Jamestown
[32] Things to know about all the lies on Xinjiang: How have they come about? (3)
[33] A Response to the Report Compiled by Lin Fangfei, Associate Professor at Xinjiang University
[34] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327451657_%27Thoroughly_reforming_them_towards_a_healthy_heart_attitude%27_China%27s_political_re-education_campaign_in_Xinjiang
[35] “Wash Brains, Cleanse Hearts”: Evidence from Chinese Government Documents about the Nature and Extent of Xinjiang’s Extrajudicial Internment Campaign
[36] The Karakax List: Dissecting the Anatomy of Beijing’s Internment Drive in Xinjiang
[37] Dunning–Kruger effect — Wikipedia
[38] Exclusive: China sharply expands mass labor program in Tibet
[39] Tracking China’s Muslim Gulag
[41] “National Language” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
[43] The Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (I)
[44] China Cables | China’s Operating Manuals for Mass Internment — ICIJ
[45] The German Data Diver Who Exposed China’s Muslim Crackdown
[46] Open-source satellite data to investigate Xinjiang concentration camps
[47] Survey of blocked Uyghur websites shows Xinjiang still cut off from the world | Reporters without borders
