Zheng Song, School of Foreign Languages in Xinjiang University

Recently, foreign media, led by CNN and BBC, disregarded Xinjiang’s social stability and the fact that people of all ethnic groups live and work in peace, and frequently released false reports, which seriously distorted the correct understanding on Xinjiang of the international community. Tracing back to the source, the “Xinjiang-related research” proposed by Adrian Zenz, a German, is one of the bases for lies. In order to rectify the source, we must expose the lies related to Xinjiang under the cover of academic cloak.

Adrian Zenz, a German, is currently the backbone of an anti-China research organization set up by a country’s intelligence agency, which concocts anti-China rumors and slanders China. The five-year study in Cambridge failed to let him learn the excellent academic traditions, and led him to a pseudo-academic path. His doctoral dissertation studied the education of China's Tibetan ethnic minorities. At that time, he has been engaged in Tibet-related research wearing colored glasses. Since 2016, he has started to spread rumors, slander, smear and demonize Xinjiang crazily in his monographs, papers, research reports, hearings, academic conferences and news interviews. There is no credibility, academic values, or academic ethics in his Xinjiang-related research at all. He is completely an anti-China “gunman.”

Adrian Zenz peddles his “research on Xinjiang” in Europe, but Europeans are not interested in his research. After receiving a cold reception from the European people, he left Europe and go to other countries to continue his peddling. Adrian Zenz wildly distorted the function of “vocational education and training center,” and recently made false statements such as “forced labor,” “compulsory sterilization,” “cultural genocide,” and “genocide,” which confuses international judgment and seriously slanders Xinjiang's international image.

An American independent news website, “gray zone”, pointed out that Adrian Zenz’s Xinjiang-related pseudo-academicism represents the extreme right-wing extremist ideology, which is guided by extremely religious thought, in order to complete the so-called “God-given mission” and to prevent the downfall of capitalism. At the same time, the “gray zone” used a large amount of data and facts to point out that Adrian Zenz’s research abused data, distorted information, fabricated cases, taken out of context, and contradicted itself. “Extinction” is a complete lie.

Adrian Zenz promoted anti-Semitism in his book “Worth Escaping: Why All Believers Will Not Be Fiercely Attacked Before the Catastrophe,” claiming that Jews will be “refined in the furnace of God” and “eliminated.” Just ask, how can an extreme racist who discriminates against Jews sincerely care about people in other countries? As for why he engaged in Xinjiang-related research, he once said bluntly that he felt very clearly that God was guiding him to do all this, just like he was doing missions or preaching. A scientific researcher who needs to start from “God's mission,” how could his researches remain objective, fair, just, and win the trust of the world? Pseudo scholars, pseudo academics!

In fact, Adrian Zenz with some international anti-China forces deliberately concocted lies and rumors related to Xinjiang for their own ulterior political purposes, and attempted to use fake news to gain attention, pour dirty water and put a label on China. Adrian Zenz’s method of concocting lies is nothing more than “data falsification,” “out of nothing,” “presumptuous speculation” and “playing with numbers games.” Now, let’s take a look at Adrian Zenz’s methods on concocting the pseudo-academic research about Xinjiang. In 2016, he found a large number of recruitment advertisements, from which he inferred a map of the police force in Tibet. He wanted to speculate on the police force in Xinjiang, and therefore “exposed” the security construction status in Xinjiang. Then the assumption of “scale concentration camps” is proposed. The conclusions drawn using the method of speculations are indeed shocking. When this lie was defeated, in a report published by the Jamestown Foundation in Washington in May 2018, Adrian Zenz estimated that a total of 100,000 to more than 1 million people were held in the “mass concentration camps.” This conclusion came out with an uproar in public internationally, and many scholars questioned the accuracy of the data. In March 2020, at a UN group meeting in Geneva, Adrian Zenz provided a higher ceiling estimate of 1.5 million. He frankly said that this figure is speculative without the basis of facts, but based on “continuous expansion of detention facilities” and “verbal narratives of Uygur exiles and detained relatives.” How could a scholar’s academic report be supported by such arguments and materials? It can be seen that the inferred data and subjective assumptions constitute the basic core of Adrian Zenz’s Xinjiang-related pseudo-academic research!

No matter how these tactics are refurbished, they are vulnerable to the facts of social stability and ethnic unity in Xinjiang. Adrian Zenz’s unscrupulous rumors and slander will eventually be liquidated. Adrian Zenz, please stop your academic fraud, don’t close your eyes and deceive yourself! Our motherland is sacred and inviolable, and our beautiful Xinjiang is inviolable!