Organ Harvesting, Falun Gong, Tibet, etc. (The WEST vs. CHINA)

[Anna]

@JW Insider  I found some more articles by former member of FG, Ben Hurley, and he confirms what you talked about a few posts back about the involvement of FG in several so called "independent" organizations. This is apparently only an 11 minute read 🙂

https://medium.com/@Ben_D_Hurley/the-agenda-that-drives-falun-gongs-media-organisations-62201ddeff66

The agenda that drives Falun Gong’s media organisations

Understanding the spiritual mission of Falun Gong can help us clearly identify which organisations they control.

Anyone who vaguely follows Falun Gong knows about organisations like The Epoch Times, New Tang Dynasty TV and Shen Yun. They’re not open about the extent they’re controlled by Falun Gong (completely 100%), but they don’t deny a connection.

But what about the other organisations that either hide or deny their connection to Falun Gong in order to reach a different audience? I’ve met progressives who would abhor Falun Gong’s conservative social teachings, but who love Chris Chappell’s China Uncensored.

TheBL.com has had some recent coverage for its close ties to The Epoch Times. But a quick glance at the outlet’s About Us section gives it away immediately as a Falun Gong media, as it contains the words Truth, Compassion and Forbearance (these are the three core stated principles of Falun Gong).

Similarly, the newspaper Vision China Times has carved out a niche for itself in Australia. No mention of its connection to Falun Gong in any of its material, despite this media outlet pushing Falun Gong’s agenda to a tee.

I don’t know the exact connection myself, and it’s beyond my ability right now to look into how it all works behind the scenes in terms of ownership structures and the hierarchy of power and control.

But these organisations promote Falun Gong’s agenda down to the most minute detail, and this is something I’m able to talk about due to my own experience working for Falun Gong media organisations, mostly The Epoch Times, when I was a Falun Gong believer. This article is about how to identify the message that Falun Gong wants to convey to the world’s people by various means, and how to identify the nuances of an organisation that is connected to Falun Gong.

Independent?!

One of the most common words I see Falun Gong media using to describe themselves is ‘independent’. This description doesn’t really hold under scrutiny.

Their coverage of Falun Gong is absolutely positive without exception, even though that organisation has some very negative traits including a slew of hushed up deaths due to teachings against taking medicine, and a cult-like compound in Cuddebackville, New York state.

Their coverage of the Chinese government is absolutely negative without exception, even though that organisation has some positive traits.

Their coverage of figures deemed supportive of Falun Gong (The Trump family, supportive Republicans) is absolutely positive, their coverage of figures deemed enemies (Hillary Clinton, Jacky Chan, Zhang Yimou, any CCP official who likes his or her job) is absolutely negative.

And their coverage of social phenomena like homosexuality, abortion, and pop music completely accords with Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi’s teachings.

I believe these media are less independent than those with a clear political bias or social agenda, because they aren’t transparent about their agenda.

Teachings about ordinary people

Key to identifying a Falun Gong organisation is knowing a little about the teachings. Most Falun Gong teachings are available on minghui.org, but there are a lot of secret ones that aren’t available, existing teachings are frequently revised or altered or completely disappeared, and the volume of teachings is just so massive that sifting through them is too big a task for most people. I read all of them multiple times when I was a Falun Gong believer up until around 2013.

Falun Gong teachings say that non-believers–called ‘ordinary people’–are pitiful, don’t know what they really need in life, are lost among desires, are covered in karma (a negative, black substance in another dimension) and are dirty. I’m not exaggerating, this is what the teachings say. All people who don’t believe in Falun Gong are going to hell unless Li Hongzhi saves them because there is no way for them to bear the suffering required to burn through all that karma and turn it into a good substance called virtue. Only the omnipotent Li has the power to do this, as he has done for his followers.

This is relevant because Falun Gong practitioners really can’t trust non-believers with the task they believe they have of saving sentient beings. Even though the organisation is getting richer and has experimented with hiring outside professionals such as dancers and musicians for Shen Yun, and young media graduates for The Epoch Times, this still poses a challenge because the organisation is unwilling to give non-believers a deep look into the workings of the organisation, or trust them with positions of responsibility. Almost all the work has to be done by Falun Gong practitioners, which means they are drawing from an already over-stretched group of believers. Resources are tight. There is often a crossover of resources with other Falun Gong projects, and you can find the same staff members popping up in a lot of them.

Falun Gong media sometimes refer to the handful of non-believers working for them in order to mislead people into thinking these organisations aren’t part of Falun Gong, but rather completely independent corporate entities with a few Falun Gong practitioners on their staff. But in all the examples I’ve seen, these non-believers are locked outside the fortress. A group of young graduates The Epoch Times hired in 2016, for example, were kept in a room separated from the rest of the editorial team by a locked door, according to NBC.

A good example is The Epoch Times commentator Ronald J. Rychlak, a Catholic who jumps whole-hog on board with The Epoch Times’ counter-attack of NBC News over NBC’s meticulously-researched articles which are critical of the Falun Gong media.

The Epoch Times isn’t trying to topple the Communist Party, Rychlak asserts. Workers at The Epoch Times aren’t mostly volunteers working there as part of their spiritual practice, he claims. Li Hongzhi “is not associated with the newspaper”, he says.

This last one–that Li isn’t associated with the newspaper–is a real clanger. Li has delivered lectures directly to Epoch Times workers and NTDTV workers, he refers to these media as “our media” and back around 2007 he directly fired their editorial teams–evidence of which can be found in his 2007 video lecture to Australian practitioners which is unfortunately now a secret teaching and hard to find.

The basis for all Rychlak’s inside knowledge? “I have toured the building that houses the Epoch Media Group and met several of the people who work there,” he writes. “They all seemed happy and friendly.”*

Perhaps Rychlak should ask some of those people about their belief that the god in charge of his own religion is evil. But if he did, he would get a sanitised response. There are strong teachings about fitting in with society, getting normal jobs, not coming across as over-zealous and not talking about “high-level teachings” with ordinary people. Falun Gong practitioners will do their best to hide these beliefs and won’t talk about them openly. And that applies also to the few non-believers like Rychlak that they have working on their projects.

Saving people from Communism

Most of Falun Gong’s teachings aren’t very palatable to non-believers, but there are some key messages Falun Gong practitioners are trying to get across as part of their core mission. This mission is saving people from an impending apocalyptic judgement day where people will be judged on two criteria — their positive thoughts towards Falun Gong and their negative thoughts towards the Chinese Communist Party which is seen as the embodiment of all evil in the cosmos. Positive thoughts towards the CCP and/or negative thoughts towards Falun Gong both bode very poorly for peoples’ futures, they believe.

These beliefs are strong and absolute. So what this means is you should find an absolutely, 100 per cent positive attitude towards Falun Gong in their media, and an absolutely 100 per cent negative attitude towards the CCP, and Communism more generally. There isn’t any room for grey areas in the teachings, so I think the presence of any kind of nuance towards Falun Gong or the CCP suggests the media is not purely a Falun Gong media and there is some arrangement that I don’t know about or understand.

This report by Chris Chappell gives the gist of just how black-and-white the attitudes of these media are towards Falun Gong. He’s a very likeable, funny guy, but unfortunately his coverage of Falun Gong is very censored indeed.

Rychlak, the above-mentioned commentator for The Epoch Times, simply refuses to believe that Falun Gong practitioners and their media are motivated by a spiritual mission to save people from Communism–which they see as a kind of evil possessing spectre. And he refuses to believe they see Donald Trump as sent by heaven to destroy the Communist Party.

They do believe this. The widely distributed Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party (published in 2004 and since superseded by other publications with a similar purpose) is seen by Falun Gong practitioners as a spiritual weapon that cleanses the spectre of Communism from peoples’ bodies, thereby saving them from the impending apocalypse. For years after it was published, excerpts from the Nine Commentaries were printed in every single edition of The Epoch Times, English and Chinese.

The Nine Commentaries was a key part of the Tuidang or “Quit the CCP” movement, launched by The Epoch Times and promoted directly by Falun Gong practitioners around the world, which encourages people to renounce their membership to any and all Communist organisations. Records of withdrawals are published at the domain tuidang.epochtimes.com.

And regarding Trump being a kind of angel sent from heaven to kill the CCP, a lot of people in the growing community of former Falun Gong practitioners have told me this is now widely believed in the community, no doubt due to a secret teaching that has been passed around but not published.

Ultra conservative beliefs

The attitude towards modern social phenomena is also very telling. You could look at the attitude towards homosexuality or abortion, which Falun Gong warns against, or evolution which it teaches is rubbish. Speaking negatively about these topics is controversial, so they’re usually just completely ignored.

Falun Gong also believes that while religion was good in the past and helped maintain human morality, the gods behind all religions are evil now, which is a relatively recent development, so you probably won’t find positive references to religions and religious experiences. Falun Gong practitioners don’t regard their belief as a religion, and their own belief is exempt from this policy.

However you will find coverage of persecuted religious groups in China like house Christians as this aids Falun Gong’s political motives. And sometimes the distinction between religion and traditional culture–which Falun Gong supports–might be ambiguous.

Shen Yun performances–also believed to cleanse the communist spectre from people’s bodies–are usually promoted where possible.

Enemies and friends

Another telling trait is the attitude towards certain specific people. Hillary Clinton, Kofi Annan, Jackie Chan, Zhang Yimou are some names I know Falun Gong has a specific gripe with and you are unlikely to find anything positive on them. It’s likely if they HAVE to cover them due to a specific news event they will do it very matter-of-factly. If it’s news wires that they’re using they will be edited from the originals to take out any positive prose. Falun Gong media are very careful not to accidentally promote someone who is perceived as anti-Falun Gong or pro-CCP.

[JW Insider]

A more recent investigation published this year in Australia is reported here:

https://www.abc.net.au/foreign/the-power-of-falun-gong/12492696

Plenty of politics, but nothing about organ harvesting. Here's a portion:

---------------------------

The movement first gained global attention when its members became the target of ruthless persecution by the Chinese Communist Party, triggering widespread sympathy and support in the West.

The Falun Gong’s creed is Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance, but former practitioners now speaking out are accusing it of practising dangerous and divisive teachings.

This joint ABC Foreign Correspondent-Background Briefing investigation shines a spotlight on this global movement, revealing how Falun Gong has morphed from a fringe quasi-religious group into a powerful player in America’s conservative media landscape, working to ensure another term for Trump so he can continue his war of words with China.

Background Briefing’s podcast series also investigates the movement’s Australian operations, uncovering powerful political collaborators closer to home.

From Australia, to Taiwan, to Los Angeles and the movement’s “Dragon Springs” headquarters in upstate New York, Foreign Correspondent’s Eric Campbell and Background Briefing’s Hagar Cohen explore the opaque world of the Falun Gong and its mysterious leader Master Li Hongzhi.

This investigation reveals how the group has harnessed social media, spending millions through made-up groups and fake identities to promote Donald Trump and his anti-Beijing policies.

“This is a matter of cosmic importance to them that Trump gets re-elected”, says one member of nearly ten years, who has now left the Falun Gong.

Another former insider says the movement promotes intolerant teachings which are racist and homophobic.

“I’m mixed race. I am quite possibly just homosexual. And those are the two kinds of people that are purportedly causing the end of the world,” says ex-devotee Anna, now in her 20s and living on the US west coast. 

As a child, “Anna” was taken by her mother to Falun Gong’s US headquarters, ‘Dragon Springs’, a sprawling but secretive 160-hectare compound in New York State.

It was, she says, a world of strange beliefs and intolerance.

“The leader of Falun Gong claims that race-mixing in humans is part of an alien plot to drive humanity further from the gods.”

Background Briefing follows Sydney resident Shani May as she tries to find out the truth about her mother’s relationship with the Falun Gong.  

Following the death of her famous jazz singer father Ricky May, her mother Colleen sought solace with the group. Soon Colleen stopped taking her blood pressure tablets, putting her faith in Falun Gong to cure her. Three years ago, Colleen died, aged 75.

“If it wasn’t for Falun Gong, she’d still be with us”, declares Shani.

Former followers allege there’s a cult-like abhorrence of modern medicine that’s claimed lives.

“In Falun Gong the teachings are, you don’t acknowledge illnesses”, says one ex-devotee.

According to Shani May, whose mother Colleen became so deeply involved with her beliefs that she lost touch with family and friends, “They're manipulating and they do it slowly…And as time goes on, you get further and further down the rabbit hole and they don't let you come back out.”

[JW Insider]

13 hours ago, Arauna said:

Why did they not allow UN to investigate Corona?  UN was not allowed to go to the facility where is was "alleged " to have started... were they affriad they would make stuff up?

You should look at the timeline again. Perhaps you saw the one shared on this forum back in mid-February:

China DID allow the UN to investigate the coronavirus by sharing information to the WHO about it almost immediately. About FIVE days after the first suspected case. This is even before it was identified as a new coronavirus. By December 31, the UN (WHO) was already investigating it and made its first announcement the very next day, on January 1. As more information was investigated, and more was learned, more announcements came over the next few days, and it was less than 3 weeks later that the WHO went to the facility where it was "alleged" have started.

This is MONTHS earlier than SARS was dealt with, and faster than any other novel coronavirus, ever. https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who-timeline---covid-19

SARS was first detected as an atypical pneumonia on November 16, 2002, and the UN (WHO) may not have been notified until February 10, 2003 after 100 people had already died. https://www.who.int/csr/don/2003_07_04/en/

The WHO issued a global alert for a severe form of pneumonia of unknown origin on March 12, 2003, and by March 24, the CDC laboratory analysis suggested a new coronavirus may be the cause of SARS. https://www.cdc.gov/about/history/sars/timeline.htm

In the case of the COVID19 coronavirus, the response and reporting to the WHO was almost immediate, and the facility was visited by the WHO within 3 weeks of China's December 31st announcement. (January 20/21).

The very first patient(s) had started coming in to hospitals on December 21st, but there were not enough similar cases to look into a source until multiple cases could be compared.

It was on December 26th that a doctor in China (Zhang Xixian) saw that FOUR patients were suffering from a pneumonia of an unknown cause. But it was not yet known at this time that ONE of those patients had been at a large Wuhan open food market.

The doctor reported this to the hospital and the hospital reported it to the District CDC, the next day on December 27th.

The next day, December 28th, it is reported to the health authorities of the entire province, and by now there are THREE more cases, and all three were found to have been at the same food market.

An investigation began by the CDC the very next day, the 29th, while the number of patients could still be counted on two hands. Some patients were moved to quarantining on this same day (December 29th). 

And now those local health authorities were sure enough about what they were dealing with to report it to national health authorities on December 30th. That was also the day that the local hospital warnings began leaking to the press and being reported on, and also the same day that Doctor Li Wenilang began telling his friends in his WeChat group to only tell their own friends about it to warn them. A nurse is likely infected by this same date (December 30th) and Doctor Li himself will soon be known to also have been infected.

And on December 31st all of China is informed on national TV and the CCP sends help down to Wuhan.

 

[Arauna]

UN is now accusing China....of Corona. lol.

I guess this doctor in the link below is also lying.... or the reporter is twisting facts.

Remember: dead people cannot speak - only those who have position with enough contacts and money to leave, only they can tell the stories. 

Also remember: Stories were leaking out of Germany but it was only when the soldiers went into Poland and Germany and saw the camps and the dead bodies piled up that anything could be confirmed.  China knows this.  They are actively hiding facts with a reign of fear. Their citizens live in fear to be caught speaking about anything related to inhumane treatments.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7g8m8/forced-abortions-and-removing-wombs-a-uighur-doctors-chilling-account-of-whats-happening-in-china-xinjiang?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=curated_vice_daily_1496188

Remember: when I told you they were doing abortions on Chinese women during the one child policy?  Well this is merely an extension of it...

[TrueTomHarley]

Not quite having the resources just yet to plow through all of the above, just skimming it quickly instead, understand that what I say are but preliminary impressions. I know next to nothing about FG.

Are they secretive? Are they uncomfortably effective in spreading their message? Do they withdraw from “normal” society? Do they learn to lead “double-lives?” Do they mislead the regular people as to their true mission? Do they have some offbeat (and therefore ‘dark’) beliefs about what the future holds? Do they have members who die because of not embracing all that modern medicine has to offer? (at 75, no less, as though no one of that age has ever died otherwise.) Do they even have an elaborate “compound” in NYS? Are they non-violent, but still a cause for concern, since “all cults are non-violent until they are not”—that cute line from the #cultexpert—in his wacko world, the more peaceful people are, the greater the cause for concern.

When I see how JWs are slammed in the media as a cult, do I imagine that all the other “cults” are getting a fair shake? 

In TTvs the A, I wrote of the Moonies something to the effect of: Is is possible to lead a fulfilled life as a Moonie? They’ll have to make the case for it, not me. However, if the “mainstream” and “normal” life resulted in happiness, fulfillment, and provided answers to the deep questions that vex people, none of these cults would succeed in people giving them the time of day. Let them deliver a little bit before they condemn everyone else. 

 I might even prefer committed religionists to the vanilla people of today because you can “talk shop” with them. You are not faced with, as we are here in the US, people in a panic over discussing a Bible verse, people scared of going off the mainstream of conventional goals for fear of where that might take one, people who do not roll their eyes when you speak of what a verse might mean, and people who do not distrust your explaining a verse by appealing to another one—as though they already indulged you by listening to one, and what more do you want?

As far as I can see, joining one of these “cults” is getting off the “broad road leading to destruction,” in favor of the “narrow road that leads to destruction.” They both lead to destruction, one no more than the other. I don’t view “cultists”  as a threat to people any more than the “normal” life is a threat to people. 

Broad road or narrow road, the one factor that indicates they “lead off to destruction” is their rooting for various leaders of the world to succeed and for other ones to fail. They are part of the world when they do that. The “cramped and narrow road that leads to life” is marked by not being part of the world—not claiming that this or that human is God’s gift to humanity, not claiming that this or that leader must go down, but taking a neutral attitude towards them. “Pray for the king,” Paul writes to Timothy. “That way maybe he’ll keep out of our hair.” That is as “involved” as the religion that is true to God gets with regard to this world’s political structure of good guys and bad guys. Anything else, be it FG or conventional media, is equally part of the world in my eyes. Your “eyes may be opened” when you leave the FG, but it is only so they can be blinded by another source rooting for this world.

[JW Insider]

A musician (orchestra) for Shen Yun, Falun Gong's traveling ballet company, says in this video  starting at 7m:30s:

• "So [Li] Hongzhi was kicked out of China, and supposedly the religion was persecuted in China and they spread these stories of organ harvesting. so they will take Falun Dafa practitioners from China --the Chinese government will-- and they'll harvest their organs and sell them on the black market which, it's China, maybe that happens, but knowing what I know about the religious beliefs, uh, I'm just extremely skeptical of anything that this organization has to say."

One of the comments to the video was also interesting:

• Thank you Aarvoll. I got involved in Falun Gong after getting out of some very toxic 'love and light' communities. It caught my attention because I wanted something pure and clean. Lol, looking back the texts actually catch you right at the start, talking about how your Buddha self comes forward to draw you to Falun Dafa. Inconsistencies to the truth, compassion and tolerance fundamentals are really glaring in much of the text, and in what is considered 'proper' cultivator behaviour. The first time I really put on the brakes though was a couple of months in when I met a couple of the kids and tried to share chocolate with them. They were terrified to take it. And the parents were appalled that I'd offered. Like you said, these are really nice people, but the aura of fear is as thick as soup. That's not healthy spiritually or mentally by my reckoning. Just recently I've heard about a YouTube channel started up by EpochTimes, a Falun Dafa publication, who are in the thick of the disclosure/cultist spiritual community swallowing up social media right now. And they are on the nasty side of the fence, really pushing and supporting some twisted psychopathic behaviour and individuals. That was the last straw for me. Meditation is good. Conducting yourself through your life with the best of the cultivators characteristics is good. But extreme anything and handing over your capacity to think independently to group think.... That's not going anywhere good. Thank you for this video.

[Arauna]

6 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

When I see how JWs are slammed in the media as a cult, do I imagine that all the other “cults” are getting a fair shake? 

The cult was too popular and thousands were joining. This made the communist party uneasy and they outlawed it and started terrible propaganda against them.... part of which was spread in the west.  

I have seen umpteen videos of people and human rights lawyers talking about China's organ harvesting and the victims. There is a book - I mentioned it  above- which has been updated.  The author is a Canadian lawyer who worked with many cases of these victims of different religions - not just falun gong victims- in China.  he has no bias towards any religion and just wanted to get the facts out because no-one else was doing so.

I watched an very good interview with him wherein he said that the military was making a lot of money from tourism transplants.  In china prisoners were executed  for small crimes.  It came in very handy when the prisons were suddenly crowded with falum gong members - healthy body parts and could be matched very well.  The body parts brought in large sums of foreign money to the military.  Most of those who have done research into this can speak the language or pretended to be foreign doctors booking surgeries for patients.  They also could get statistics from various sources. 

I do not really care if JW Insider does not believe this.  He will quote hundreds of pieces written by the far-left because they do not believe that China is doing this and most of them have closed their eyes to these atrocities because they made a lot of corrupt money in China during the boom. 

The aggressive policies of Xi ping is coming to roost because he has purged many of this rivals and I hope it will be his turn... but I doubt it ... because  the history of other communist dictators ....  apparently there are many shifts going on in CCP.   CCP is a closed book to the west because of extreme secrecy of communism.  But the above lawyer knows exactly how the entire political system works in China. CCP only allow journalists to see what they want one to see and they will invite you if you are pro-CCP.  Then there is also the saving of "FACE"  which is a legacy of the past.  If one criticizes Xi ping you will find yourself in jail very quickly today.  Since 2013 things have started to change drastically.

Time will tell - but I see a drastic change to import of totalitarianism in the world- everywhere.  And under such systems such as in China there is not really accountability for the human rights violations.  CCP purge opposition by saying there was corruption...... this is the main reason for deposing someone - not Human rights.

[Anna]

4 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

 I don’t view “cultists”  as a threat to people any more than the “normal” life is a threat to people.

I don't either actually. A cult is only dangerous and a threat when they (the cult) drug people and deprive them of sleep or use coercive tactics. The majority of "cults" do not do this. People join and remain with the cult of their own free will for various reasons which I won't go into here. Admittedly, charismatic leaders can be a problem for people who are naturally gullible, but in the end, no one is actually forcing anyone to do anything. 

4 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Your “eyes may be opened” when you leave the FG, but it is only so they can be blinded by another source rooting for this world.

Exactly. Like you though, I feel JWs are the exception, for the reasons you described. Regardless though, those who leave, also feel their "eyes have been opened". Reading Ben Hurley's story of his exit from FG, reminded me so much of another story that we both read, the author of which exited the JWs (funnily enough while she was in China).

 

[JW Insider]

6 hours ago, Arauna said:

UN is now accusing China....of Corona. lol.

I'm suspicious of this kind of statement. Because the term "accusing China of Corona" is such a nebulous phrase. What's your source?

The rhetoric that most anti-Chinese propagandists push goes like this:

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/rising-coronavirus-death-toll-proves-communism-kills-marion-smith

https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810

The people in the "LOL" crowd who love this rhetoric can even buy the T-shirt:

 

6 hours ago, Arauna said:

I guess this doctor in the link below is also lying.... or the reporter is twisting facts.

You probably didn't realize that the Vice story reeks of Adrian Zenz, who I mentioned earlier at the start of the Uyghur topic. Also, Vice itself is merely jumping on the bandwagon here. They built up an entire network by picking false narratives that the Western media loved to hear. If we get a chance, we can go into the ways they lied about Syria, Russia, Ukraine, and other stories from China. It's almost their entire raison d'etre.

For that matter, SerpentZA and laowhy86, mentioned earlier, inadvertently provide a ton of evidence that they play the same game on a smaller scale, realizing that all the money pours into their Patreon accounts when they hype up the anti-China propaganda.

But, back to the story. Interviewing people who make a certain claim is not the same as evidence. You or I could write a script for just such an interview to make it sound even more believable. The giveaway is often in the specifics of the claims, and wondering why they don't know certain types of evidence or why they leave it out.

In the case of Uyghurs, do they mention reports that their population has continued to increase? That the so-called "concentration camps" were mostly run by fellow Uyghurs? That most Muslim countries expressed approval of the training as a more humane way of dealing with Muslim radicalization and terrorism? That minorities were not under the one-child policy? That most minorities, including Uyghurs, actually approve of the job that the CCP is doing? That the one-child policy was not enforced with abortions, but with education about the reasons for it, and a higher tax on those Han Chinese who had more children. (Minorities and rural Chinese were exempt from the one-child policy.)

The vice link includes this:

• The woman, who performed these operations for 20 years before fleeing to Turkey, said at the time she felt it was “part of her job.” Now, she says she feels “such regret” and recognizes the damage caused to the Uighur population, whose birth rates have reportedly plummeted over the past few years.

Marco Rubio, the Senate co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said this: https://www.cecc.gov/publications/commission-analysis/xinjiang-reports-high-rate-of-population-increase

• The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has one of the highest rates of population increase among Chinese provinces, according to information from a January 23 work meeting on the population and environment reported January 24 on Tianshan Net. While the birth rate and natural rate of increase have held steady in the past five years, the population continues to grow by about 300,000 people annually, the article reported. The article noted that the floating and migrant populations, among other groups, will maintain a relatively fast rate of increase. . . .The 2000 census listed the Han population at 40.57 percent and Uighurs at 45.21 percent of a total population of 18.46 million.

Currently the best estimates put it in the same range that Wikipedia is reporting:

• Official figures released by Chinese authorities place the population of Uyghurs within the Xinjiang region to be just over 12 million, comprising approximately half of the total regional population.^[99] . . . As early as 2003, however, some Uyghur groups wrote that their population was being vastly undercounted by Chinese authorities, claiming that their population actually exceeded 20 million.^[102] Population disputes have continued into the present, with some activists and groups such as the Uyghur Congress and Uyghur American Association claiming that the Uyghur population ranges between 20 to 30 million.^{[103][104][105][106]} Some have even claimed that the real number of Uyghurs is actually 35 million.^[107][108] Scholars, however, have generally rejected these claims, with Professor Dru C. Gladney writing in the 2004 book Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland that there is "scant evidence" to support Uyghur claims that their population within China exceeds 20 million.^[109]

It should raise some red flags that the most official sources, even from anti-China Senator Rubio, would indicate a high percentage growth in their population (8 million to be over 12 million) and possibly a rise from 45% to nearly 50% of the population. How well does that jibe with headlines like this?

• China forces birth control on Uighurs to curb Muslim population growth...

• www.france24.com › France 24 › Asia-pacific

• Jun 29, 2020 - China forces birth control on Uighurs to curb Muslim population growth ... transformed Xinjiang from one of China's fastest-growing regions into ...

This "German scholar" who makes claims of having heard about documents in 2019 Adrien Zenz is actually the source of most of this propaganda.

• A report released by German scholar Adrian Zenz in June 2020 also discussed forced sterilization of Uighur detainees in the camps.  “Documents from 2019 reveal plans for a campaign of mass female sterilization in rural Uyghur regions, targeting 14 and 34 percent of all married women of childbearing age in two Uyghur counties that year,” Zenz wrote. 

Zenz writes whatever he wants. It doesn't have to be corroborated. If you were to click on the word reportedly in the phrase from Vice (whose birth rates have reportedly plummeted over the past few years), you get a BBC article that starts out: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53220713

• The report, by China scholar Adrian Zenz, has prompted international calls for the United Nations to investigate.  . . . Mr Zenz's report was based on a combination of official regional data, policy documents and interviews with ethnic minority women in Xinjiang.

But have you tried to figure out what these policy documents say, or notice that his evidence is often just taking "official regional data" and saying it must be wrong because it is official from China? The supposed interviews with minority women in Xinjian are not verifiable, there were only about 8, and they were not in Xinjian, apparently all from women in Istanbul, who may have never been to China, or likely left with their husbands to fight as terrorists for ISIS, for all we really know.

Vice, btw, has been doing this kind of thing for years. It's a psy-op just like Radio Free Asia, a US propaganda arm, like VOA, which has been run by Steve Bannon and company. Oddly, Vice admits this on their own site: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dm74q/these-uighur-journalists-are-investigating-the-fate-of-1-million-muslims-in-china

• Some of the most crucial reporting on Uighur Muslims comes from the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia channel in D.C.

If anyone doubts the Steve Bannon and "tough on China" policy, just google Radio Free Asia and Bannon, or start here: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/18/21295549/trump-bannon-pack-global-media-china-wednesday-massacre

• Trump and Steve Bannon want to turn a US-funded global media network into Breitbart 2.0

• Michael Pack’s purge of the US Agency for Global Media, and his effort to produce tough-on-China journalism, explained.

So, who is Adrian Zenz?

For this I'll use a biased report from https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1197187.shtml in the next post. It's from a biased source, but I can show that its most important claims are true, from the admissions of Zenz himself.

[JW Insider]

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1197187.shtml

As I said, the source is biased, but the most important parts can be verified, by Zenz himself.

-----------------------------

Editor's Note:

A German "scholar" named Adrian Zenz has recently stood out on the anti-China stage. With his "reports" accusing China of "detaining" Uygurs and other minority groups or imposing "sterilization" on ethnic minorities in its Xinjiang region, Zenz has been welcomed by US and Western media as "a leading expert" on Xinjiang. However, Chinese scholars from a Xinjiang-based think tank, Xinjiang Development Research Center, found the so-called expert on Xinjiang is a far-right Christian, who is fabricating unfounded reports to slander China's policies in Xinjiang and cater to the US and some Western countries' aim of attacking China. Zenz's "reports" that have been cited and hyped by some Western media are full of lies, farfetched assumptions, and baseless accusations. 

Who is Adrian Zenz?

Adrian Zenz, an evangelical "scholar," has recently been making so-called reports on Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, aiming to slander China's policies in the region. 

Who is Adrian Zenz? What did he do to make the US and Western countries tout him as one of the "leading" experts studying China's Xinjiang and Tibet Autonomous Region?

Zenz, born in 1974, is a German. He gives himself a Chinese name as Zheng Guoen. He used to work for the European School of Culture and Theology and went to China's Xinjiang in 2007 as a visitor. 

Starting in 2016, Zenz began commenting on China's Xinjiang, and wantonly slandering and distorting China's policies in the region. He made up more than 10 reports relating to Xinjiang, including one published in February titled The Karakax List: Dissecting the Anatomy of Beijing's Internment Drive in Xinjiang and another in July titled Sterilizations, IUDs, and Coercive Birth Prevention: The CCP's Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birth Rates in Xinjiang. 

He also kept making sensational and unfounded accusations against China, including that around "1 million Uygurs are illegally detained in Xinjiang," "Xinjiang imposes birth control measures on Uygurs and minorities," and "Xinjiang is having culture genocide on minorities."   

Under the vehement support of the Western media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, Zenz gained infamy on the anti-China stage and has been welcomed as "an expert on Xinjiang." He has received enthusiastic approval from anti-China politicians from the US and become a focal member of a research group on Xinjiang's vocational training and education center that was set up and controlled by a US intelligence agency.

In recent years, Zenz has been busy in shuttling between the US Congress, European Parliament and Canadian Parliament, making groundless accusations against China's Xinjiang policies to incite attacks and pressure on China by using the so-called "human rights problems of Uygurs." In March, together with many US politicians and members of the "East Turkistan" separatists, Zenz attended an event themed "China's Systematic Persecution of Uygurs" at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, stirring up anti-China discourse in the international community to contain China by distorting Xinjiang topics. 

Only within two years, Zenz, who started as a scholar on theology, turned himself into an "authoritative expert" on Xinjiang. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Zenz said his work against China is inspired by this biblical worldview. "I feel very clearly led by God to do this," he said.

A 'scholar' fishes for personal gain with fabricated reports

A closer look at Zenz's so-called "academic reports" reveals he uses academic research to disguise anti-China purposes.

Previously, when Zenz saw the US and Western countries using Tibet issues to interfere with China's domestic affairs, he made up a series of articles on Tibet and intentionally offered them to politicians and media to hype. And now, when the US and the West turn to target Xinjiang, Zenz leapt to take the helm - without any academic researches and studies, he batted out shoddy reports on Xinjiang - to get public attention and fish for personal gain. 

These so-called reports about Xinjiang are full of lies and fabrications and have no credibility. For example, in the report on "forced birth control in Xinjiang" he cited proven liars, including Zumrat Dawut, Mihrigul Tursun, and Tursunay Ziyawudun, to support his conclusions. These figures emerged in 80 percent of the current stories about Xinjiang hyped by Western media - they are puppets manipulated by anti-China forces and made lies abiding by manipulators' instructions.

Zumrat was cited by Zenz as saying she was forced to be sterilized after returning from a training center. According to information from relevant authorities, Zumrat has never been to any training centers in Xinjiang. She applied to have a contraceptive operation after giving birth to her third child at the maternal and child health care hospital in Urumqi in March 2013.

As for Mihrigul, she was detained by the public security bureau in Qiemo on April 21, 2017 for inciting ethnic hatred and discrimination. She was found having syphilis and other infectious diseases and out of humanitarian concern, she was released on May 10, 2017. She has never been to any training centers and was never forced to take any medicine. Mihrigul also claimed her brother was tortured to death in the training center in Xinjiang but this was later debunked by her brother. Tursunay was divorced due to infertility and has never had a UID or contraceptive operation. The "daughter" she has in Kazakhstan is actually the daughter of her current husband's niece. 

Aside from citing liars, Zenz's reports are full of imagination based on bias. He assumed Xinjiang's regular recruitment of police officers is to prepare for "detaining" Uygurs and other minority groups, described Xinjiang's boarding schools as a guarantee for massive "detention," and slandered local residents' voluntary employment outside Xinjiang as "forced labor" organized by the local government. 

Zenz's reports are also full of assumptions; words like "may" or "estimated" are usually seen. He also presets conclusions and seeks "evidence" to support them. He initially asserted that Xinjiang is having "birth control" on Uygurs by listing the free physical check to all residents in Xinjiang as evidence, saying the move is to find violators of "birth control" measures. He claimed Xinjiang is "restricting" the freedom of ethnic groups and used Xinjiang's CCTV facilities which serve for transportation management and social security as "evidence."

Colluding with anti-China forces and separatists

Zenz has never been a so-called "Xinjiang expert" but can be more appropriately described as an academic swindler and an attack dog of anti-China forces.

In his "Karakax List," Zenz described himself as a senior fellow in China studies at the far-right Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. 

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was established by the US government in 1983. It was described by journalist Joe Conason as "the organizational haven for neo-Nazis, fascists, and anti-Semitic extremists from two dozen countries," according to US media outlet The Grayzone. 

Zenz claimed to have provided some statistics for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). ASPI has been exposed as a "right-wing, militaristic" think tank funded by US and Western governments, mega-corporations and weapons manufacturers.

Aside from working with overseas anti-China forces and warmongers, Zenz has colluded with separatists from Xinjiang and overseas. In September 2018, together with Dolkun Isa, a separatist from Xinjiang and also head of the World Uyghur Congress, a US-backed network seeking the fall of the China, Zenz attended the 39th UN Human Rights Council. In 2019, together with the head of Uyghur American Association, a project affiliated to the WUC and its members, Zenz attended a hearing organized by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and made an anti-China speech. In February, working with members of another WUC project the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), Zenz made the "Karakax list" and hyped the topic via a CNN report.  

"We lie, We cheat, We steal," the remarks made by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have become the best annotation of Zenz's shoddy moves.

As Xinjiang people enjoy social stability, economic development, and harmony among ethnic groups, Zenz's wretched interventions should be despised by Chinese people and the international community.

[JW Insider]

Another biased source I've quoted from before is the Gray Zone. The primary journalist here is Max Blumenthal, an American living in Washington DC. Typically, we believe that we can look at two biased sides and end up somewhere in the middle. Since we've dealt so much with the anti-China side of the bias, we can deal with a defensive side too. But it is not true that we should always end up somewhere in the middle. It's similar to the disagreement about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. One side said yes, one side said no, so a lot of people think: "Well, there must have been some at least."

Here is a very large portion of the interview that Blumenthal gave to the Global Times (GT): https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1186693.shtml I am providing larger than usual portions of quotes from resources, because it gives a bigger and better context for evaluating the truthfulness or lack thereof.

I should add that, in spite of claims to the contrary, I don't accept any of the claims by either side as true, nor by those who take a middle approach. Nothing about this debate is necessarily all true or all false. It's just that the more we learn about the motives of all sides, the better able we are to evaluate and make up our own minds. Nobody is completely truthful, and even when people defend the side with more truth than falsehood, they are apt to be frustrated enough to want to make up exaggerations to make their own side look better.

You can read 1,000 pages of argumentation, and not learn the truth about a matter. But it's still better to have read those thousand pages with an open mind, than to just spend the same amount of time, without looking into a matter at all, or feeding on only a single side of an argument.

---------------------------------

GT: Some people claimed The Grayzone has a pro-China attitude, especially on the issues of coronavirus and Xinjiang. Do you agree?

B: The Greyzone does not speak for China any more than we speak for the United States. But we speak for people in the West who are opposed to war, and who are skeptical of the narratives that were being fed.

We're an independent website. We put a lot of effort into understanding the propaganda and stories that we hear. And, when we hear a story again and again and again, that is leading us to become more hostile towards another country, that's when our alarm bells go off, and we start to investigate.

One of our contributors, Ajit Singh, is a specialist in anti-China propaganda. He is also studying Chinese society and Chinese politics. He is in school to become an actual China expert. He helped expose stories behind reports on “millions of Uygurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang” by just simply looking at the sources and going deeper and deeper into the story until he found the original source.

One of the sources about [the claim] was a Chinese dissident organization and a group of Chinese activists who are opposed to the Chinese Communist Party and who are based here in Washington. They're called Chinese human rights defenders, and they are funded by the NED, the US government's regime change arm. They produced a study that claimed that there were 600,000 and a million Uygurs in “concentration camps.”

But the study only interviewed a few Uygurs, and then from those interviews, they calculated the population of the villages from where those Uygurs came from and then extrapolated from the population, the total number. It's a completely phony methodology from a partisan US-backed group.

The other source was Adrian Zenz, who is also part of a right-wing, US government-backed group called Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

This group, as an extremist group, exists to erase socialism from the earth, and they are funded by the US government. They have meetings in the US capitol. They have a memorial here in Washington. Zenz himself is a Christian extremist, and he has said that he is on a mission from God against China. But this is the person who is considered the leading expert on Xinjiang in Washington, and who has been quoted in many respected journals on this story.

Ajit Singh, our contributor, looked into Zenz’s source and found that his source was a Uygur separatist publication called Istiqlal TV, which is broadcast out of Turkey and has given voice to many extremists. Basically, they appear to have invented it out of whole cloth.

I want to emphasize; I have not been to Xinjiang. I can't claim for certain what's happening there. I've read many reliable reports that there is an enormous amount of surveillance there. But the point is that we are being fed a story, which is aiming to make the American public believe, China is Nazi Germany, and that will only lead us to war. And, this story appears to be a massive exaggeration. I would like to talk about it to the American public. It's unfortunate that only a Chinese network wants to interview me about it. But that's the kind of situation we're in.

I would definitely like to come as a tourist and be able to see for myself. I would like to visit Wuhan and see everything with an open mind.

But now I'm stuck at home. I have not had a haircut in a month. Everything is closed, and it's very frightening to me that my government is using this situation to try to push us closer to war with a country that very few Americans understand, and very few Americans have visited.

All I can do from where I am right now is to expose the American institutions and figures that are deceiving the American public into war with, whether it's China, Venezuela, or Iran.

GT: As criticizing China has become politically correct in the US, have you come under some pressure for releasing stories on China?

B: Yes, we face heavy criticism, and we face many insults. People say, “you are genocide denier” or “you support other fascist country of China.” People say we support Russia and were paid by Venezuela and Cuba.

We face a lot of pressure for it. We faced fake lawsuits. I've been arrested and jailed because of the fake allegation made against me by the Venezuelan opposition here in Washington. Our writers are constantly insulted on social media. But one thing that people cannot do to us is accuse us of factual inaccuracies or debate us. We've extended the opportunity for some of our critics to debate us, and they usually say no.

The Greyzone was founded in 2015 to shine a light on the excesses of American foreign policy and how it was affecting us at home. Since then, we have taken on some of the hardest topics to discuss in the US, which I believe are leading the US to war.

We're simply there to expose the lie of the day. Whenever the public is being lied to and dragged into greater hostility with other nations, they don't understand; we're there to help them unpack the lies. We don't publish editorials. We publish simply reporting and analysis.

And we are an independent website. We are completely independently supported. We are not supported by any states or billionaires. We are supported by our readers.

[JW Insider]

1 hour ago, César Chávez said:

The question shouldn’t be, China VS West but how accurate the reports are about organ farms in China or any other country that doesn’t value human life as God intended.

This is a good point. The real issue here is whether reports are accurate or not. To me it never was a question of China vs the West, in a sense of deciding whose side one should take.

It's about recognizing how a propaganda war is the real context of MANY questions about accuracy. Currently, it seems that the people on the offensive are mostly in the West, and the people on the defensive are mostly in China. And it really is about a barrage of questions, not a single one like "organ farms." If the question of Uyghurs wasn't there, it would be about Covid19, or currency manipulation, or theft of corporate secrets, or Tibet, or Tiananmen Square, or South China Sea fishing rights, or murderous famines under Mao Zedong. This will invariably morph into Russia and the USSR and opinions about Communism/Marxism/Socialism. Therefore, the idea that ties all these together, imo, is the usual war of words between China and the West. (Of course, this also allows for a certain slipperiness for those who might not wish to deal with problems of propaganda; if one topic gets muddy, one can just throw out another bit, and another bit, and another bit. The effect is supposed to be additive, even if individual bits don't hold up to evidence.)