US State Department accusation of China ‘genocide’ relied on data abuse and baseless claims by far-right ideologue
The Trump and Biden administrations have relied on the work of a right-wing religious extremist, Adrian Zenz, for their “genocide” accusation against China. A close review of Zenz’s research reveals flagrant data abuse and outright falsehoods.
by Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal
Part 5 - An anti-gay, anti-abortion Christianist dedicated “led by god” against China
The BBC based its June 2020 report alleging “forc[ed] birth control to suppress population” on Zenz’s work, referring to him as a “China scholar” without mentioning his employment by right-wing institutions in Washington or his own hyper-ideological views.
Like the BBC, an AP report relied entirely on an advance copy of Zenz’s paper, but provided no background and whitewashed his right-wing politics or institutional affiliations. A CNN story published a month later and a CNN follow-up in September 2020 on alleged Chinese forced sterilizations in Xinjiang also relied on Zenz without mentioning his political background.
As The Grayzone has reported, Zenz is a far right Christian fundamentalist who claims to have been “led by god’ to defeat the Communist Party of China. While he is almost invariably touted in Western media as a leading scholar on China, he described himself in 2015 as “a lecturer in empirical research methods at a Christian university.” As late as 2018, in fact, Zenz was listed as a faculty member of the European School of Culture and Theology at Columbia International University in Korntal, Germany.
Zenz’s first published book, “Worthy to Escape: Why all believers will not be raptured before the Tribulation,” he and his co-author, Marlos Sias, urged Christian believers to subject unruly children to “scriptural spanking,” condemned homosexuality as “one of the four empires of the beast,” and argued that Jews who refuse to convert to evangelical Christianity during the End Times would either be “wipe[d] out” or “refined” in a “fiery furnace.”
In the End Times tome, Zenz predicted that the coming fall of capitalism would 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).”
Like other born-again evangelicals, Zenz is also fiercely anti-abortion and opposed to gender equality. “Another important God-given authority structure that Satan is attacking through the postmodern spirit is that of gender authority structures,” Zenz wrote. “Through notions of gender equality […] the enemy is undermining God’s unique but different role assignments for men and women.”
Zenz currently serves as a fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a Washington DC-based right-wing lobbying front born out of the National Captive Nations Committee. The latter group was founded by Ukrainian nationalist Lev Dobriansky to stifle any efforts at diplomacy with the Soviet Union. Its co-chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, was a leader of the OUN-B militia that fought alongside Nazi Germany during its occupation of Ukraine in World War II.
In April 2020, Zenz’s employer listed all global deaths from Covid-19 as “victims of communism,” blaming each of them on the Chinese government.
Zenz is also employed by the Jamestown Foundation, a neoconservative think tank in Washington DC founded as the outcome of efforts by Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director, William J. Casey, to establish an extra-governmental channel to pay Soviet dissidents. In the past, Jamestown leadership has spearheaded lobbying efforts to support separatism in Chechnya.
In their apparent zeal for escalation with China, mainstream Western outlets like the AP, BBC and CNN have accepted Zenz’s dubious research as absolute fact, while ignoring his background as a religious extremist who is ideologically committed to regime change in Beijing. If Biden and Blinken formally adopt the Trump administration’s “genocide” designation, they will have effectively endorsed Zenz’s shoddy and propagandistic research as well.
The genocide accusation may appeal to the Biden administration as a useful geopolitical cudgel, as well as a defense against right-wing Republic attacks painting the new president as “soft on China.” But it will only strengthen the hand of hardliners determined to provoke a dangerous and potentially catastrophic confrontation with a fellow nuclear-armed power.
“The United States has set out to vilify China,” former US Deputy Chief of Mission in Beijing and Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman told The Grayzone, and the accusation of Uyghur genocide “is the perfect issue with which to do so.”
Freeman opined that the Chinese “seem to be doing many cruel and counterproductive things in Xinjiang.” However, he cautioned against taking the genocide accusation at face value: “In the current atmosphere, we should be especially skeptical about any and all assertions by people who have become part of the current anti-China campaign in the West. Before we condemn, we should be sure of our facts.”
The Jamestown Foundation did not respond to a request for comment on Zenz’s research.
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