Adrian Zenz, Jamestown Foundation and the 'free' press

Today I noticed an interesting article on the Associated Press website, not signed by a journalist per se (“by The Associated Press”), article that claims “China forces birth control on Uighurs to suppress population”. And I did a bit of information digging to find out who would write such an article.

While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”

The hundreds of millions of dollars the government pours into birth control has transformed Xinjiang from one of China’s fastest-growing regions to among its slowest in just a few years, according to new research obtained by The Associated Press in advance of publication by China scholar Adrian Zenz.

According to a new research by Adrian Zenz. Adrian Zenz is a Jamestown Foundation analyst, the same Jamestown Foundation that has Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency (yes, that one, the NSA) on its board. Let’s see who else is on the board:

• Matthew Bryza, with a 23-year career as a U.S. diplomat.
• Michael Carpenter, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans and Conventional Arms Control, a career Foreign Service Officer with the State Department.
• Michael E. Kavoukjian. From 1994 to 1998 he was on leave to the U.S. government, where his duties included acting as special adviser to the U.S. Mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
• Timothy Keating, a highly decorated, retired Admiral in the U.S. Navy and the former Commander of the United States Pacific Command (CINCPAC), where he worked to preserve the security of our nation across the Asia-Pacific region.
• Robert Spalding retired from the U.S. Air Force as a Brigadier General, after more than 25 years of service. He was a China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, as well as a senior defense official and defense attaché to China.
• Michelle Van Cleave, a member of Jamestown’s Board of Directors, served as the National Counterintelligence Executive under President George W. Bush. As the head of U.S. counterintelligence, she was responsible for providing strategic direction to and ensuring the integration of counterintelligence activities across the federal government.
• Michael Vickers is widely recognized as one of the nation’s top national security professionals, with unprecedented senior tenure across Republican and Democratic administrations. He was a key operational strategist for the two great wars of our time: the operation in the 1980s to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan that helped bring an end to the Cold War – the largest and most successful covert action program in the history of the CIA – and the ongoing war with al-Qa’ida. He played a major policy and planning role in the operation that killed Usama bin Ladin. (sic)

Ok, so this is weird, right? Let’s see who this Adrian Zenz is.

From 2014 until present 2019 he worked at the European School of Culture and Theology, a missionary school in Korntal, Germany, as a Researcher and PhD supervisor. This school is connected to Columbia International University, an evangelical Christian university in South Carolina, US (the doctorate degrees from CIU can be acquired online). Also, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation(he claims to be a Senior Fellow in China Studies at VCMF) has close connections to the CIA (Peter Mattis for ex. is a former Research Fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and former CIA counterintelligence analyst who has written extensively on Chinese intelligence since leaving the agency in 2010).

Zenz’s work on China is clearly inspired by his biblical worldview, as he recently explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “I feel very clearly led by God to do this,” he said. “I can put it that way. I’m not afraid to say that. With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.”

Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity. Zenz outlined these views in a book he co-authored in 2012, titled Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation. In the tome, Zenz discussed the return of Jesus Christ, the coming wrath of God, and the rise of the Antichrist. Zenz predicted that the future fall of capitalism will bring to power the Antichrist within a “few decades.” He identified the force that “will usher the Antichrist into power” as “the economic and financial fall of ‘Babylon’, with ‘Babylon’ symbolically representing the world’s global economic system (capitalism).”

“Another important God-given authority structure that Satan is attacking through the postmodern spirit is that of gender authority structures”, Zenz continued. “through notions of gender equality […] the enemy is undermining God’s unique but different role assignments for men and women.”

Yeah, I don’t know … this is very weird. Let’s go on.

According to a NCHRD report, (keep in mind that NCHRD is a Washington DC-based NGO that is backed by the US government, even Reddit picked up on that) the only source I could find for the 1 million Uyghurs is based on the 8 interviewees. Yes, 8. Eight.

I can’t believe that people are using this article as a legitimate source.

I’m not even gonna begin with some of the claims of “3.5 million Uyghurs” made by several prominent Uyghur independence figures in the west. Radio Free Asia is the usual source of these claims and are likewise guilty of such re-publishing of sources until it’s diluted to the point that people actually think it is a real primary source. (I’ve seen blogposts republished on RFA used as “on the ground evidence”) Source

Oh yes, Radio Free Asia. The same Radio Free Asia that was funded by the C.I.A.

Radio Free Asia began broadcasting to mainland China in 1951 from an elaborate set of transmitters in Manila. It was an arm of the Committee for Free Asia, and the C.I.A. thought of it as the beginning of an operation in the Far East that would rival Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. - source

Between several hundred thousand and more than 1 million Muslims have been detained in China’s mass “reeducation” camps in the restive province of Xinjiang, Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology in Korntal, Germany, said in a report released Tuesday. Zenz is a leading authority on the current crackdown in Xinjiang. - source. Spoiler: the report is “released” by the same Jamestown Foundation. Ok, that’s not really a spoiler, we were kinda expecting that, right? Same numbers, “likely at least several hundred thousand, and possibly just over one million”. Quoting an article from Newsweek Japan. Article that is based on a single report from Istiqlal TV, a Uyghur exile media organization based in Turkey.

I am no journalist but that’s not ok.

So we have the N.S.A. and the C.I.A. and an evangelist who hates homosexuals and thinks gender equality is bad. And don’t even get me started on the connection between Adrian Zenz and James Leibold and the fact that he (Adrian) said that he has been only once in Xinjiang, in 2007 as a tourist. For his research backing his claim of 1 million Uyghur internees, he used open source Internet resources, such as calls for tenders and job offers from the Chinese government in Xinjiang province, and then making estimates about the extent of those interned in Chinese reeducation camps. - source

Journalism is really easy, right? Right?

crickets