Experts shoot down claims of China detaining Uyghurs

American and Canadian experts have challenged claims by a US-backed nongovernmental organisation that China has detained millions of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province.

The Chinese embassy in South Africa this week also punched holes in reports in Western media reports that China arbitrarily detained Uyghurs. The embassy said China legally operated training centres aimed at equipping people affected by terrorism and extremism with skills, “so they can be self-reliant and be reintegrated into society”.

Writing in The Grayzone, an online US-based publication, Canadian Ajit Singh and American Max Blumenthal entered the fray by rubbishing two studies conducted by Americans on the situation in Xinjiang.

“A closer look at these papers reveals US government backing, absurdly shoddy methodologies and a rapture-ready evangelical researcher named Adrian Zenz,” they wrote.

This month, the US House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act urging President Donald Trump to impose sanctions over allegations that Beijing had detained millions of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Singh and Blumenthal said: “To drum up support for the sanctions Bill, Western governments and media outlets have portrayed the People’s Republic as a human rights violator on par with Nazi Germany.

“Republican representative Chris Smith, for instance, denounced the Chinese government for what he called the ‘mass internment of millions on a scale not seen since the Holocaust’.”

They added: “The claim that China has detained millions of ethnic Uyghurs is repeated with increasing frequency, but little scrutiny is ever applied.

“Yet, a closer look at the figure and how it was obtained reveals a serious deficiency in data.

“While this extraordinary claim is treated as unassailable in the West it is, in fact, based on two highly dubious studies. The first, by the US government-backed Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), formed its estimate by interviewing eight people. The second study relied on flimsy media reports and speculation. It was authored by Adrian Zenz, a far-right fundamentalist Christian … believing in being led by God on a mission against China.

“He has testified before Congress, providing commentary in outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Democracy Now! – delivering expert quotes in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ recent China Cables report.”

Before Blumenthal questioned Zenz about his “religious mission,” at a recent event about Xinjiang, he received almost entirely uncritical promotion from Western media.

Singh and Blumenthal also claimed the CHRD, “which first popularised the millions detained figure, has also been able to operate without a hint of media scrutiny”.

They wrote: “The Washington-backed NGO makes claims of millions detained in China, after only interviewing only eight people. In a 2018 report submitted to the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination – often misrepresented in Western media as a UN-authored report – CHRD estimated that roughly one million ethnic Uyghurs have been sent to re-education detention camps and roughly two million have been forced to attend re-education programmes in Xinjiang. While CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, with their enormous estimate based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals.

“Testifying before the Senate foreign relations committee in 2018, State Department official Scott Busby stated this was the US government assessment, backed by our intelligence community and open source reporting.”

The authors of the report have also claimed that the CHRD “receives significant financial support from Washington’s regime-change arm – the National Endowment for Democracy”.

– brians@citizen.co.za

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