The “Xinjiang Police Files” revelations about the crackdown on Uyghur Muslims in China, published Tuesday by a media consortium, owe much to one man: Adrian Zenz. This German anthropologist has become one of the main targets of Chinese propaganda in recent years due to his work on the living conditions of this ethnic group.
It’s almost three in the morning in Minnesota, where he’s lived since 2019, but it doesn’t take Adrian Zenz more than 30 seconds to respond on Twitter. Yes, he is willing to answer some questions, but not for long because he is getting tired.
We want to believe you. And not just because of the late hour. This German anthropologist, a specialist in China’s treatment of the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority, has just had a very busy day.
The paranoia of the Chinese authorities
He is the one behind the “Xinjiang Police Files”, the new revelations published on Tuesday, May 24 by various media outlets about the repressive machinery launched by Beijing in the Xinjiang region, in the northwest of the country, where they live. the uyghurs.
“It is the first time that we have authentic documents that present the reality of the current police apparatus without any filter,” says Adrian Zenz. He obtained several thousand computer files with the records of 20,000 Uyghurs detained and the police guidelines applied between 2000 and 2018 in Xinjiang. They come from the hacked servers of the public security bureaus of two districts in this region.
The documents include speeches by Chen Quanguo, secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for Xinjiang, as well as common notes from security officers about people detained or monitored. “These files show the extent to which the authorities’ paranoia about the so-called Uyghur terrorist threat is shared from the top of the hierarchy to the bottom of the ladder,” says Zenz.
The revelations add to the case against Beijing in recent years. China has been accused of perpetrating “crimes against humanity” against the Uyghurs, according to the term used in a resolution adopted by the French National Assembly in March 2022.
Another proof of this repression are the illustrations, sometimes very visual, of Chinese practices. The archives contain 5,000 photos of Uyghurs aged between 3 and 94 years. “It’s very striking to see photos of 15-year-olds who are going to be sent to re-education camps,” says Zenz.
In a way, this gigantic archive is the culmination of the hard work that the 48-year-old German has put in over the years. For many, Zenz is one of the main faces of the international effort to denounce Beijing’s repressive policies in Xinjiang.
On the trail of Uyghurs by chance
He has become the man who “laid the groundwork for the biggest human rights confrontation between the West and China in decades from his small office in Stuttgart,” according to a 2019 profile in the US newspaper The Wall Street. Journal’.
A year earlier, Adrian Zenz had single-handedly pushed Beijing back. While the first reports circulated about China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims, China kept saying that there was nothing to see in Xinjiang. But Zenz ended up discovering on the Internet several official Chinese administrative documents – material purchase orders, budget reports – that established the reality of the construction of the internment camps.
The publication of these tests caused China to change its mind. Instead of denying everything, the authorities began to describe the camps as mere training centers.
“Adrian Zenz’s tenacity has greatly contributed to exposing the crimes of the Chinese regime,” says Magnus-Fiskesjö, an anthropologist and Uyghur specialist at Cornell University, interviewed by the ‘Wall Street Journal’.
But the German did not stop there. He was then the first to mention the figure of one million “interned” Uyghurs -which was later officially assumed by the UN-, to discover documents that establish the forced labor of Uyghurs in 2021 and to contribute to a better understanding of the magnitude of the techno-police apparatus established in Xinjiang.
It’s a win that’s all the more impressive because “I didn’t ask for any of this and got interested in it by accident,” says Adrian Zenz. He has a degree in anthropology from Cambridge University and barely knows the terrain of Xinjiang. He has only been there “once, fourteen years ago, as a tourist,” notes the German newspaper ‘Süddeutsche Zeitung’.
Instead, he is a specialist in Tibet, to which he has devoted most of his work. At the time he was studying the region, Beijing’s strongman in Tibet was Chen Quanguo, who practiced his “pacification” techniques there. When this Communist Party dignitary was appointed head of Xinjiang in 2016, Adrian Zenz decided to focus on this province.
Priority target of Beijing’s propaganda
In the absence of knowing the terrain, the anthropologist makes good use of his command of Mandarin and the mysteries of the web. After all, he has spent years financing part of his research “thanks to a second job as a programmer for a streaming company,” says the ‘Wall Street Journal’.
“Anyway, it’s impossible to do fieldwork in Xinjiang, and online data analysis is the best chance to understand what’s going on there,” says the man who has been a persona non grata in China since last year. and compares his work to that of a detective. And his method has been emulated. Whether it’s Shawn Zhang, a Chinese student in Canada who used ‘Google Maps’ to map the works of Xinjiang’s fields, or the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which runs the Xinjiang Data Project to collect public data on this province.
It has been enough for China. Between his revelations and the door he opened for others, Adrian Zenz has become one of the main targets of Chinese propaganda. The internet has become one of the worst places to find information about him, as anti-scholar articles written by pro-Beijing publications abound on social media and rank high in Google search results.
This “born-again Christian” (an individual who has rediscovered his religiosity) who works for the American Foundation for Victims of Communism, has been portrayed on numerous occasions as a far-right pseudo-investigator. He is even one of the few researchers critical of Beijing to have had a double page spread in the Global Times, one of China’s main official media outlets.
“I am not surprised that Beijing attacks me, but I have been very surprised by the scope of the criticism spread by people who feel compelled to defend China,” admits the anthropologist. It was difficult for him to assimilate this deluge of hatred, especially because “by attacking me, the reality of the suffering of the Uyghurs is called into question”, he concludes. A reality that the 5,000 archived photos of Uyghurs published in the “Xinjiang Police Archives” make it difficult to deny.
*Adapted from its original French version
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