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 4 - Inventing statistics, spinning tales to frame the official enemy
Among Zenz’s “major findings” was the claim that “80 percent of all net added IUD placements in China… were performed in Xinjiang, despite the fact that the region only makes up 1.8 percent of the nation’s population.”
According to the 2019 China Health Statistics Yearbook published by the National Health Commission – the original source of Zenz’s claim – the number of new IUD insertion procedures in Xinjiang in 2018 accounted for only 8.7 percent of China’s total. So Zenz’s “major finding” appeared to be off by a factor of 10, a staggering error that substantially undermined the explosive quality of his argument.
The relevant sections of the statistical yearbook Zenz relied on was translated by a native Chinese speaker and are displayed below. A full translation of the chart can be viewed here, and an archive of the entire statistical yearbook is here.
When Zenz attempted to defend himself against accusations of cooking statistics on birth control surgeries in Xinjiang, he ultimately cast further doubt on the quality of his research. Responding to a Chinese academic critic, he claimed that he had calculated Xinjiang’s 239,457 new net IUD insertions (devices added minus those removed) as 80% of the national total in 2018.
However, Henan province registered 206,281 new net IUD insertions, or 69%, in 2018. Hebei, meanwhile, registered 61%, amounting to a total of 210% of national net insertions. These numbers only make sense when calculated alongside provinces like Jiangsu and Yunnan that had more removals (-60% and -54%, respectively) than total national net insertions. By relying on such a bizarre metric, Zenz appeared to have attempted a cynical statistical sleight of hand to paint Xinjiang as a hotbed of birth control surgery.
In perhaps the most unintentionally absurd assertion in an article filled with them, Zenz asserted that the Chinese government inserted between 800 and 1400 IUDs per capita each year in Xinjiang. Which meant that each woman in the province would have had to have undergone anywhere from 4 to 8 IUD surgeries every day. With so much time spent on the operating table every day, it’s a wonder that anyone in Xinjiang could find time to work, or eat.
Elsewhere in his paper, the daffy data diver asserted that 73.5 percent of married women of childbearing age in Xinjiang’s Kuqa County had IUDs fitted between 2017 and 2018. In a footnote, Zenz claimed, “This data comes from a cache of over 25,000 local government files obtained by the author in 2019.” The article he provided as accompaniment, however, was written by himself for the Jamestown Foundation and contained no data on IUD operations in Kuqa County.
Zenz attempted to pad his shaky statistics with dramatic testimony from US-based Uyghur exiles who have been cultivated by the US State Department. The narratives of these exiles have been vehemently challenged by family members in Xinjiang, as well as by vocational center graduates and local doctors, who produced official hospital documents purporting to disprove their allegations.
In his paper, Zenz cited a September 2019 article in the US government-run outlet Radio Free Asia, containing testimony by a US-based exile, Tursunay Ziyawudun, who claimed she was forcibly sterilized and physically tortured in a Chinese internment center.
However, in February 2020, Ziyawudun changed her story entirely, telling Buzzfeed: “I wasn’t beaten or abused. The hardest part was mental. It’s something I can’t explain — you suffer mentally. Being kept someplace and forced to stay there for no reason.”
Ziyawudun changed her story again after being relocated to the US and cultivated by the US government-funded Uyghur Human Rights Project. This February, she told the BBC and CNN that she was gang raped by guards in an internment camp. The BBC report relied on none other than Zenz as its expert voice on China’s supposed policy of “systematic rape.”
Zenz’s propagandistic framing, cherry-picking of original source materials, and cooking of statistics fit a pattern of misrepresentation on display in a December 2019 paper he authored for a NATO-linked publication alleging a Chinese policy to force members of the Uyghur minority into “slave labor.”
As Ajit Singh reported for The Grayzone, Zenz painted an article about a government program providing Uyghur women with free childcare as evidence of forced family separation – a “shocking example of this ‘liberation’ of women from their children,” he called it. Zenz conveniently omitted a quote in the article from a Uyghur woman who said the free childcare “solved [her] problem, now there are people who take care of my children, I can in peace go to work… very convenient.”
Because Zenz’s papers are published by a neoconservative think tank that has functioned as a US intelligence cut-out, they are not peer reviewed by credentialed academics. But they do not appear to have undergone much fact-checking either. This has left Zenz exposed to embarrassing scrutiny from the internet, and forced him to edit out errors after questioning from random Twitter users.
While it’s hard to understand how Zenz has gotten away with so much statistical malpractice, a look at his background helps explain his ideological motivations, and provides important context on his negative focus on the application of birth control. He is an anti-abortion, anti-feminist Christian fundamentalist captivated by End Times theology, and has said that god has led him on a mission against the Chinese government.
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