Reinvestigation: French video program accusing Chinese company of 'forced labor' exposed as fabrications

BEIJING -- A recent French video program alleging that a Chinese company was "forcing" ethnic Uygurs to produce cotton textiles for French sports brand Decathlon has now been confirmed as a poorly fabricated piece of propaganda against China.

Since its broadcast on France 2 and YouTube, the TV program "Cash Investigation" has drawn widespread criticism from viewers, with many pointing to selective editing, misleading narratives and blatant disregard for facts.

On its YouTube channel, among the more than 1,000 comments in French, English and Chinese, the most upvoted ones condemn it as a "fake report," "pure lies" and a "mockery of journalism."

Why does the France 2 program trigger such widespread backlash and condemnation?

FABRICATED CLAIMS

In the program, two self-proclaimed French journalists, Justine Jankowski and Marine Zambrano, distorted a recruitment video from Jifa Group Co Ltd, a textile company in Shandong province, deliberately misrepresenting the Chinese term "Manqinjiang" (which means "full attendance bonus") as "Xinjiang" — twisting ordinary employment incentive into propaganda against China.

They sneaked into the company's workshop only to be chagrined by not finding any Uygur workers, and then turned to scouring Chinese social media for a new angle to trump up evidence of the so-called "forced labor" of ethnic minority groups from the company's recruitment videos.

Their attempt, however, was embarrassingly clumsy: the original Shandong-accented Chinese audio in the program was not fully wiped away, only lowered and overlaid with French narration.

One with knowledge of the Chinese language could easily find that the program purposely mistranslated the accented words.

Not content with mistranslations, France 2 editors escalated their deception using a recruitment video originally showing two clearly visible Han Chinese women. They digitally altered the footage to blur the face of a red-haired woman, while fabricating a narrative that she was a "persecuted Uygur from China's northwest" coerced into factory labor.

This deliberate distortion erased her true identity and voluntary employment status, weaponizing her image to falsely insinuate systemic oppression in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

"This is pure fabrication," the unblurred employee in the video, who wished to remain anonymous, told reporters, and presented the original footage. "They deliberately blurred my red-hair colleague in the video where both of us appeared, and falsely claimed she was from Xinjiang and 'forced' to work here."

If the blurred woman in the video were indeed Uygur, why not just release the original footage? If privacy was the concern, why wasn't the face of the other woman blurred as well? These are fair questions to ask.

DISTORTED REALITY

Jankowski and Zambrano, under the guise of "looking for a toilet," covertly recorded footage inside the facility. Failing to find any Uygur or other ethnic minority "forced labor" in the workshop, they instead latched onto an unexpected discovery, hastily framing it as "child labor."

Inside the workshop, they used hidden cameras to film a 12-year-old girl who came to see her mother working at the factory. Against the video's background audio, the girl's voice could be clearly heard saying that she came to see her mother because no one was home to take care of her during the summer break.

The two so-called journalists then coerced the girl into performing a task, recorded it, and subsequently manipulated the footage as proof of "child labor."

As a result of the program, Jifa has lost significant orders from Decathlon, which has then led to job losses and financial insecurity for its employees.

SAME OLD TRICK

To make their concoction sound credible, the program once again turned to a familiar face, Adrian Zenz, for endorsement.

With his pseudo-scholarly work on Xinjiang, Zenz, a member of the US government-funded far-right group "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation," has been trumpeted by some Western media outlets as a renowned expert on Xinjiang.

In 2021, Shache Xiongying Textile Co Ltd, an enterprise in South Xinjiang's Kashgar prefecture, sued Zenz for making false claims that the company uses "forced labor." His slander seriously damaged the firm's reputation and caused severe economic losses.

Barrie Jones, a former British journalist, has pointed out that Western media often spread disinformation about Xinjiang, with Zenz being one of the primary sources.

Maxime Vivas, a French writer and journalist who authored "Uygurs, to put an end to the fake news" and who visited China's northwest region in 2016 and 2018, shared a similar viewpoint.

Describing some Western journalists as "parrots," Vivas told Global Times during an interview, "They only repeat lies made by Adrian Zenz, an evangelist 'guided' by his faith — he once said that God ordered him to fight against China."

Motivations behind those manufactured "truths" are self-evident. Certain Western nations are unwilling to acknowledge China's rapid progress and successes. Consequently, they employ various tactics to undermine China and impede its steady growth.

As Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, once publicly admitted, the most effective way for the CIA to destabilize China would be to "foment unrest" in Xinjiang, and the so-called "forced labor" narrative could serve as a pretext for Washington to pursue that agenda.

Like Zenz, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a Canberra-based anti-China think tank funded by the US government, is another case in point.

However, the self-proclaimed "independent, non-partisan" think tank has recently shut down following the freeze on foreign funding by the United States. This has left Bethany Allen, head of China Investigations and Analysis at the institute, seeking assistance from other sources.

"Because of the US funding freezing, the entire global ecosystem of China nonprofits is facing an extinction event," said Allen, calling on other governments to fill the funding gap.

Allen's remarks sparked widespread criticism on social media, with some commenting that "You admitted you are doing propaganda for the U.S. government" and "Billions of US taxpayers' money went to paid troll like you to make up stories. I am happy that it stops."

TRUTH ABOUT XINJIANG

"I invite global journalists to embark on field investigations across the region to see a real Xinjiang, rather than be blindfolded by certain media focused on slandering Xinjiang," said Ma Xingrui, secretary of the Xinjiang regional committee of the Communist Party of China, at the recently concluded "two sessions" this year. He also said that people from all over the world are welcome to see the reality for themselves.

Xinjiang's progress is real and tangible. According to Xinjiang's agricultural authorities, the region's mechanization rate of cotton harvesting rose from 35 percent in 2014 to around 85 percent in 2023, and now exceeds 90 percent. With a jab at Western mudslinging, a popular joke in Xinjiang goes that the only "forced laborers" would be the cotton farmers' machines.

Last October, the World Media Summit in Urumqi gathered more than 200 representatives from over 100 international media outlets, offering them a firsthand opportunity to see the region.

With China's expanding visa-free policy, more foreigners could tour the country rather than gain their knowledge of the country via biased Western reports.

Javier Garcia, then head of the Beijing office of Spain's EFE News Agency, said that he had personally visited Xinjiang's cotton farms and witnessed firsthand the respect shown to workers. "I hope people will see China as it is, not through a lens distorted by bias and preconceptions," he said.