Report rejects 'internment camps' fabrication by Adrian Zenz

BEIJING -- The claim made by Adrian Zenz, a so-called German scholar, that 1 million Uygurs were held in internment camps in China's Xinjiang has no factual basis, according to a report released by the Xinjiang Development Research Center on Friday.

The report, titled "Slanderer Adrian Zenz's Xinjiang-related Fallacies Versus the Truth," says, The Grayzone, an independent news website, said in an article published in December 2019 that the claim about 1 million Uygurs being held in internment camps was first proposed and then spread by the website of the Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), a Washington DC-based non-governmental organization supported by the US government, and the CHRD made the estimate by interviewing only eight Uygurs and rough estimation.

The report quotes The Grayzone as saying that Adrian Zenz made the estimate of 1 million Uygurs held in internment camps in Xinjiang, based on his own conjecture and a questionable media report. He himself had also acknowledged the uncertainty in his claim, according to The Grayzone.

In fact, the report points out, the vocational education and training centers in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region were essentially the same as the Desistance and Disengagement Programme (DDP) established in the United Kingdom and the de-radicalization center in France, and were fully in line with the principle and spirit of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy and the UN Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism.

By October 2019, all trainees in the vocational education and training centers had completed their studies and have now mostly achieved stable employment and improved life quality, the report says.