In March 2017, the Jamestown Foundation (Washington DC) published a three thousand-word report on “Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State” written by Adrian Zenz and James Leibold. A few months later, the same writers published another report, this one slightly longer at nearly five thousand words, with the more aggressive title, “Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang.” At that time, there was not much interest in these stories. Zenz came from the Victims of Communism Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up by the U.S. Congress in 1993 and funded by various right-wing sources, including the Heritage Foundation. Leibold is a professor of Chinese history at La Trobe University (Australia), but is also a senior fellow at the Australian government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The texts by Zenz and Leibold were seen initially as the work of ideological right-wing scholars with an axe to grind, rather than with evidence of any interest to anyone. These seemed more like fringe Cold War texts rather than anything serious.

The following year, in May 2018, the Associated Press’s Gerry Shih published a story after interviewing several Kazakhs in Almaty, Kazakhstan, about experiences that they claim they had in Xinjiang. Shih’s story, “China’s Mass Indoctrination Camps Evoke Cultural Revolution,” was the first in a Western corporate journal to report on a phenomenon that would later become almost household news in the Global North and in some parts of the Global South. A month before Shih published his report, the co-chairs of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, then Senator (and now Secretary of State) Marco Rubio and Representative Chris Smith, released a letter that made three important accusations against the Chinese government:

That the Chinese government had begun a “crackdown” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

That “as many as 500,000 to a million people are or have been detained in what are being called ‘political education centers,’ the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”

That “Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the XUAR have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, egregious restrictions on religious practice and culture, and a digitized surveillance system so pervasive that every aspect of daily life is monitored.”

These three accusations became foundational for a media campaign that followed, in which Zenz became an “expert” on the XUAR and on this “crackdown.” It is important to point out that behind Zenz is a cohort of Uyghur exiles who live in the Washington DC area and work for the U.S. intelligence community through the media (three of the main figures involved in this network are Shohret Hoshur, Omer Kanat, and Rushan Abbas—all three of whom are with the U.S. government’s Radio Free Asia). Exiles such as Kanat and Abbas founded the Uyghur American Association, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and the World Uyghur Congress with U.S. government funds. Zenz drew from these sources, as well as from Istiqal, a media outlet run by Uyghur exiles in Turkey. By the second half of 2018, it had become established wisdom that China was running “internment camps” for a million Uyghurs (as Lily Kuo’s article in the Guardian put it in October), and that there was a “Muslim Gulag” in Xinjiang (as Philip Wen and Olzhas Auyezov wrote for Reuters in November). At that time, there was no use of the word genocide. That word, with all the legal weight of the UN Convention Against Genocide (1948), requires clarity and rationale.

When addressing accusations of such gravity, it is worth examining what the UN Convention on Genocide actually requires. According to Article II of the 1948 Convention, genocide means “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting “conditions of life calculated to bring about…physical destruction”; imposing measures to prevent births; or forcibly transferring children from the group to another group. The drafters of the 1948 Convention explicitly rejected including “cultural genocide” after extensive debate, a term often deployed in Xinjiang discussions that does not have standing in international law. Intent (dolus specialis)—the specific determination to physically destroy a group—is the most difficult element to prove and must be demonstrated, not merely alleged.

In June 2019, Asiye Abdulaheb, a woman from Xinjiang who had been living in the Netherlands for a decade, received a digital file containing what she was told were leaked Chinese government documents. She posted a picture of one of the documents on X and was immediately contacted by Zenz and by Rian Thum, who teaches Chinese history in Manchester. Zenz asked for the documents and told Abdulaheb to delete her tweet. These documents became the “China Cables” and the “Karakax List,” which provided Zenz with the materials to write his reports on Xinjiang. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which published the China Cables, said it “does not comment on sources.” It did not matter that there was nothing beyond four documents leaked to a woman in the Netherlands who believed she got them because she can read Mandarin, and that there was no real corroboration of these documents beyond the word of Uyghur exiles who worked for the U.S. government and scholars such as Zenz, who had already begun to build a narrative of gulags and digitalized surveillance. At the time of writing, there has been no information about where these digital documents came from and none about whether they are authentic. (Western media organizations claimed that they did an internal verification, but no forensic authentication report has been released to the public.)

In June 2020, Zenz went further with another Jamestown report. A word on the Jamestown Foundation: founded in 1984 with the support of CIA director William J. Casey, it was established to assist defectors from the USSR and the eastern bloc and to use the knowledge of defectors in the Cold War. After the USSR collapsed, the Jamestown Foundation pivoted to provide expertise on counterterrorism and on Chinese Communism for, among other entities, the U.S. government, founding the China Brief in 2001. Zenz’s reports must be read in this context. His 2020 report is called “Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang.” Early into the report, Zenz lists the allegations he makes against the Chinese government and then says, “these findings provide the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang meet one of the genocide criteria” in the UN Convention. The word “genocide” had arrived, and it then gets used in journalistic accounts that cite this report.

On January 19, 2021, almost four years after Zenz’s first report, then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, after listing the accusations made by Zenz and others (for instance, one million civilians incarcerated, forced sterilizations, and forced labor), said that the Chinese government “has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.” Other countries, such as Canada, followed with this use of the term genocide.

What is rarely mentioned in Western reports is the international support China has received on its Xinjiang policies. In July 2019, ambassadors from thirty-seven countries sent a joint letter to the President of the UN Human Rights Council commending China’s “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights” and noting that “safety and security has returned to Xinjiang” with “not a single terrorist attack in Xinjiang” in three consecutive years. The signatories included Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates as well as others from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. By June 2021, this number had grown to sixty-nine countries issuing a statement in defense of China’s policies, with twenty-eight of these being members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), founded in 1969 to bring Muslim-majority countries into conversation with each other. This organization itself, after sending delegations to Xinjiang, issued a report in March 2019 praising China for “providing care to its Muslim citizens.” This support from Muslim-majority nations stands in sharp contrast to accusations from countries with much smaller Muslim populations, or even with long histories of illegal violence against Muslim-majority countries (such as the United States and the United Kingdom against Iraq and Iran).

Continued in Article