Meet the man China is desperate to silence
It was right after Adrian Zenz published his report on the abuse of Uyghur Muslims in the Chinese province of Xinjiang that the wave of hacking attacks began.
Email after email began landing in his inbox from accounts with Uyghur-sounding names offering ‘‘evidence’’ and imploring him to click on a link.
His work exposing the mass internment and oppression of the minority Uyghurs has made him a top target for the Chinese government.
‘‘Their work against me is in many ways a sign of success,’’ Zenz, a one-man research centre operating out of a suburban Minnesota living room, tells The Telegraph. ‘‘It shows they are worried.’’
His latest report, released in December by the DC-based Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, included the shocking finding that more than half a million people from ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang were being forced to pick cotton for
Chinese factories. He laid out in unprecedented detail how authorities would go into Uyghur villages to conscript ‘‘workers’’: ‘‘Government reports abound with ‘success stories’ of officials who visit homes until family members ‘agree’ to work,’’ he wrote.
The report has already had farreaching consequences. The US has now banned cotton imports from the Xinjiang region, which is responsible for 20 per cent of the global supply.
The 46-year-old German scholar’s research has been quoted by the United Nations and US Congress. A previous paper of his on the forced sterilisation of Uyghur women provided the sole basis for the decision of the State Department to classify Chinese policy as a genocide.
But taking on the world’s greatest rising power has set up something of a David and Goliath battle.
In response to the report, Beijing took the highly unusual step of sanctioning Zenz, alongside five British members of Parliament and a handful of UK academics, seeing them banned from China. Then, the companies identified filed a lawsuit against him – the first known instance of a foreign researcher facing civil action in China over human rights work.
They claim Zenz’s reporting was not only untrue but damaged the ‘‘reputation of the industry’’ and led to significant financial losses. They are seeking compensation, an apology and a court order to stop him conducting any further research.
Zenz, who serves as a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, denies the accusations, pointing to the fact that 95 per cent of the report’s information was gleaned from publicly accessible Chinese government records.
The fluent Mandarin speaker spent months pouring over thousands of documents from obscure corners of the Chinese internet to join the dots to create a fuller picture of what was happening in one of the most closely guarded places on earth.
‘‘The Chinese are meticulous record-keepers,’’ he says. ‘‘In a way they are quite proud of what they are doing.
‘‘They congratulate themselves on finally getting the (Uyghurs) to do what they have always wanted them to do.’’
Authorities initially kept the vast indoctrination camps a secret, but as news of their existence leaked they have sought to portray them as a counterterrorism measure.
‘‘It’s all there, you just have to look for it,’’ says Zenz, who moved in recent years from Stuttgart to the US for his job. ‘‘There’s a lot of material that the officials themselves wouldn’t necessarily interpret the way the outside world would.’’
Working on uncovering the truth of the Xinjiang camps is extraordinarily difficult. Only a handful of academics have managed to get reliable information out, making him one of the most eminent scholars in the field.
As fellow China academic Gene Bunin put it, the government is most worried about Zenz ‘‘because his is the kind of evidence that China has the most trouble refuting’’.
While the lawsuit in Xinjiang brings little risk to Zenz as long as he remains outside China, he fears the litigants may now try to mount a claim against him in the US.