by Carlos Martinez, introduced by Dee Knight, August 2, 2026
The NY Times on July 28 ran a long and dramatic renewal of slanders against “Chinese government repression in Xinjiang,” featuring a horrific story of a person who is now claiming asylum in Germany after “escaping” from China. The sources for the man’s “credentials” are the NED-financed World Uyghur Congress, and the long-discredited Adrian Zenz, of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
The article renews the claim of “an estimated one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities held in internment camps” – a story long-since debunked, but now re-linked to the extensive collection of NYT stories from eight and ten years ago.
Carlos Martinez, founding co-editor of Friends of Socialist China provides a detailed answer to this latest slander, which follows:
How an uncorroborated Xinjiang account becomes “established fact”
With polls indicating that young people in the West are increasingly favorable to China, it’s clearly time for a new round of intensification of the propaganda war.
The New York Times has published a long profile of Zhang Yabo, a former Xinjiang police officer now seeking asylum in Germany, who describes nine years enforcing Xinjiang’s security campaign.
Like similar stories seeking to provide first-hand evidence of large-scale human rights abuses in China, this one is riddled with sourcing problems. The reporter states plainly that she “could not corroborate exactly what he did or did not do in Xinjiang” and “relied on his telling of the story.” People working with Zhang in Germany told her “we knew only what he wanted us to know.” He is “fuzzier on the worst abuses,” offering “fewer details about death, sexual violence and torture.” Furthermore, Zhang is an asylum applicant, with the obvious interest that entails.
And which are the voices backing up his story? Needless to say, Adrian Zenz puts in an appearance, first as “a Xinjiang expert”, later with his title at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation – an organization created by act of the US Congress in 1993 to memorialize the alleged victims of communism worldwide.
Zenz is the person who popularized the claim – presented as truth in the second paragraph of this article – that “an estimated one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities were held in internment camps.” Zenz is a fanatical anti-communist and religious zealot who claims that he feels “led by God” to spread slander against China. His only qualification is his ideological commitment to the New Cold War. In terms of his record as a researcher and author, we should just mention that his other published work includes a book on biblical end-times which recommends “scriptural spanking” for unruly children and identifies homosexuality as one of “the four empires of the beast.”
And what does Zenz say about Zhang? That he supplies “the ground-level reality of what we had mostly inferred” from documents and state media. Inferred! Nearly a decade after this slander campaign began, five years after the State Department declared a genocide, after parliamentary resolutions across the West and an entire sanctions architecture, and it turns out the “ground-level reality” was being “inferred.”
The other body vouching for Zhang is the World Uyghur Congress, which is helping him settle in Germany. The WUC is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which has publicly boasted that the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act “builds on work of NED grantees.” It’s well documented that the NED spends millions annually cultivating exile organizations in Xinjiang and Tibet in order to destabilize China and spread Cold War propaganda. The NYT mentions none of this.
The article’s central statistic – “an estimated one million” – carries no source at all. Its genealogy is well established: Zenz, Radio Free Asia, and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, whose funders include the Australian government, the US State Department, the UK Foreign Office, Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems.
Against this, the demographic record is stubborn. Xinjiang’s Uyghur population grew from around 10 million to 11.6 million between 2010 and 2020 – up 16 percent, against 2 percent growth for the region’s Han population. Life expectancy in Xinjiang has risen from about 30 years in 1949 to 77 today. All 420 poverty-stricken counties in China’s ethnic autonomous areas were lifted out of absolute poverty by 2021. Young people there receive fifteen years of publicly funded education. China’s overall incarceration rate is 121 per 100,000 – under a fifth of the US rate.
Whatever this is, “genocide” is not the word for it, and two of the most eminent authorities to examine the claim have said so. Jeffrey Sachs and William Schabas – Schabas being among the world’s foremost scholars of genocide law – have argued that the US genocide determination, which rested substantially on Zenz’s work, should be withdrawn as unjustified.
So what we’re left with is an uncorroborated account, from a man with a strong incentive, validated by an end-times ideologue at a Congressionally-founded anti-communist institute and by a State-funded exile organization, printed on the NYT front page as established fact – and no doubt, in due course, cited by an array of future articles as evidence. The cycle of propaganda continues.
*Featured Image: Worshippers leaving IdKah Mosque in Kashgar in 2008. This is the largest mosque in China.
Dee Knight is a member of New York City Democratic Socialists of America ‘s Bronx/Upper Manhattan organizing committee. He is also with the China Working Group of Democratic Socialists of America. He has written several books including “Befriending China, , and provided a chapter for “China Changes Everything”.