NY Times' pseudo-expert accusing China of genocide worked for publicity arm
of far-right cult Falun Gong
BEN NORTON.JANUARY 28, 2021
The Grayzone
The New York Times recycled flimsy claims by a right-wing apocalyptic
extremist to accuse China of "genocide," in an op-ed by an American with
1/8th Uighur heritage who worked for Epoch Times, a far-right, pro-Trump
outlet backed by cult Falun Gong.
The New York Times published a factually challenged op-ed accusing China of
committing "genocide" against its Uighur minority. The article sourced its
spurious accusations to a right-wing operative who insists his research is
part of a divine "mission" against Beijing that is "led by God."
The author of the New York Times op-ed, Amelia Pang, happens to be a former
employee of the Epoch Times, a far-right propaganda arm of a fanatical
anti-China cult called Falun Gong. The extremist group preaches that
race-mixing, homosexuality, feminism, and science are Satanic plots, and
reveres Donald Trump as a God-like figure who was sent down from heaven to
destroy the Communist Party of China.
In a statement to The Grayzone, Pang said, "The Epoch Times and the Falun
Gong group do not represent my views in any way."
However, a review of her five years of work at the Epoch Times shows Pang
churned out hyperbolic anti-China reporting while publishing at least 17
articles promoting the Falun Gong cult or its cultural front group, Shen
Yun.
The New York Times' decision to run Pang's commentary was ironic in light of
the lengthy feature it published on the Falun Gong propaganda arm in October
2020, which branded the Epoch Times a "leading purveyor of right-wing
misinformation" that is "pushing dangerous conspiracy theories" with a
"willingness to feed the online fever swamps of the far right," and a
"growing influence in Mr. Trump's inner circle."
In her Times op-ed, Pang deployed her 1/8th Uighur heritage to portray
herself and her family as victims of a purported "genocide" carried out by
the Chinese government. At the same time, she acknowledged that she has
lived her entire life in the United States, and therefore has little
familiarity with China and its society.
Pang's op-ed ran just days before the Trump administration formally accused
Beijing of genocide. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a far-right
rapture-ready evangelical, alleged that China "has committed genocide
against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious
minority groups in Xinjiang."
The Pompeo State Department provided negligible evidence to bolster its
extreme accusations, yet alleged that China's campaign of "genocide" began
in March 2017.
The Grayzone has reported extensively on the Western disinformation campaign
against China, chronicling how discrimination against the Uighurs and other
minorities have been spun into accusations of genocide, including claims of
"concentration camps" holding millions of detainees. In nearly every case,
incendiary corporate media and State Department claims related to the issue
rely on questionable research by a single far-right operative with extremist
views and a network of anti-China NGOs funded by the US government and the
arms industry.
The New York Times has been a central conveyor belt for the transmission of
the US information war against China, providing it with a critical patina of
journalistic credibility and marketing it to the liberal intelligensia that
comprises the Times' readership.
Former Epoch Times reporter relies on far-right operative in New York Times
The New York Times printed Pang's op-ed, "It Took a Genocide for Me to
Remember My Uighur Roots," on January 10. The faulty article was a case
study in how little evidence corporate media editors require to green light
a piece as long as it accuses official US enemies of the most titanic of war
crimes.
The Times translated the op-ed from English into both simplified and
traditional Chinese so it could be read around the world.
In the article, Pang acknowledged, "I have lived in the United States my
entire life," and "no one [in my family] had ever visited Xinjiang apart
from my mother and one aunt, and neither of them had stayed in touch with
the relatives they met."
But she wrote, "my maternal grandmother was half Uighur" - or, her
great-grandmother was Uighur, which made her 1/8th Uighur. And in the
hyper-identitarian neoliberal culture that now dominates the New York Times
newsroom, this was enough to confer unassailable authority upon the author.
Despite her distant connection to China, Pang characterized herself and her
family as victims of the Chinese communist party. "China's forced
assimilation policies still reached me," she wrote, attributing her total
lack of knowledge of Uighur culture not to her family's fairly typical story
of assimilation as American immigrants, but rather to Beijing's supposed
cruelty.
"I'm sorry it took a genocide for me to remember I am Uighur," Pang tweeted.
It is notable that the Times was so willing to entertain the accusatory
angst of a US pundit with 1/8th Uighur heritage, while it actively ignores
and silences the many Uighurs born and raised in China's Xinjiang province,
who support the Communist Party of China and the government's developmental
policies. The de facto policy is similar to its disportionate reliance on
quotes from liberal and Islamist exiles from Syria while refusing to quote
members of the country's loyalist majority living inside Syria.
Meanwhile, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have suspended
the accounts of prominent Uighurs and other Chinese Muslims who provided an
alternative perspective on the conflict. In Western media, only one
viewpoint is allowed: that that serves the interest of Washington and its
new Cold War.
Pang's Times article was also significant in the political marker it
established: It allowed the newspaper of record to accuse Beijing of
genocide, echoing the US government, while maintaining a veneer of
independence by doing so through an op-ed.
In her article, Pang moved well beyond criticizing Chinese discrimination
against the minority Uighur community and the government's heavy-handed
approach to combating Islamist extremist separatist groups in the region,
who have carried out a wave of terrorist attacks targeting both government
targets and civilians.
To make her case that the Chinese government was guilty of "genocide," Pang
misleadingly implied that the United Nations has accused China of the crime
- a disinformation tactic that has become common in anti-China reporting in
the Western media. But the UN has not done so.
"In recent years, identifying as Uighur has become a matter of life and
death," Pang wrote. "What started as a cultural genocide has progressed into
a literal one, as defined by the United Nations."
In this deceptively worded line, Pang linked to an article by US
government-funded broadcaster NPR, titled "China Suppression Of Uighur
Minorities Meets U.N. Definition Of Genocide, Report Says." This article is
also misleading.
The report both Pang and NPR were citing was not a United Nations document,
but rather an investigation by a far-right German academic named Adrian
Zenz.
The Grayzone has previously revealed Zenz.to be an extremist Christian who
opposes homosexuality and gender equality and claims to be "led by God" on a
"mission" against China.
Zenz even told the Wall Street Journal that his highly questionable work on
Xinjiang is "like a mission, or a ministry" for him. That is to say, his
research is explicitly motivated by his ideology, the precise opposite of
social science.
The far-right German academic is the source for practically every Western
media report alleging "genocide" and enormous concentration camps in
Xinjiang. Zenz, who has never spent no significant period of time in China,
and who has published no scholarship on Chinese politics, history or
society, is not so much an academic as he is a right-wing operative.
Zenz has also found time to volunteer his belief that God's apocalyptic
Rapture will soon come, and Jews who refuse to convert to Christianity will,
in his words, be "wiped out" and shoved a "fiery furnace," as journalist Dan
Cohen reported.
Zenz works for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a right-wing
lobby group that was founded by the US government and is linked closely to
the Republican Party. His research on Xinjiang is clearly politically
motivated by his explicit desire to demonize the Chinese government and
eventually overthrow the communist party.
Correspondingly, The Grayzone has documented how Zenz's methodology in his
reports on Xinjiang is comically shoddy, filled with gaping factual flaws
and logical leaps that would not withstand the scrutiny of impartial
academic experts.
As Ajit Singh and Max Blumenthal reported for The Grayzone, Zenz's estimate
that "over 1 million" Muslim minorities are held in "concentration camps" in
Xinjiang was based on a lone report by Istiqlal TV, an Islamist media outlet
run by Uyghur separatists based in Turkey. The outlet provides a friendly
platform for extremist supporters of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement
(ETIM), a separatist group that seeks to build an Islamic state in Xinjiang,
which it calls East Turkestan.
ETIM, also known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), is an al-Qaeda-linked
extremist militia that has carried out numerous terrorist attacks in
Xinjiang. It is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United
Nations, European Union, and many countries. Pompeo's State Department
removed ETIM from the US government's official terrorist list in October
2020, as part of Washington's intensifying cold war on China.
Despite the massive and well-documented flaws in Zenz's research, Amelia
Pang cited him by name in her Times op-ed, echoing his work to accuse China
of overseeing a massive increase in "forced sterilizations" in Xinjiang.
In her article, Pang referred to Zenz simply as "an expert on China's ethnic
policies," conveniently overlooking his extreme-right political views and
his work for a US government-linked right-wing lobby group.
Despite his widespread portrayal as an "expert," it is not clear if Zenz
even speaks Mandarin Chinese or Uighur. The academic has not done any public
events showing proficiency in either language. When journalists from The
Grayzone asked Zenz about his qualifications, he blocked them on social
media.
Misleadingly distorting China's anti-extremism re-education centers
The first line of Amelia Pang's New York Times op-ed was based on a
distortion. She wrote, "The first time I truly realized I was Uighur was
just three years ago, when I saw the now-infamous viral photo of rows of
Turkic men in dark blue uniforms, sitting in a concentration camp in Hotan,
Xinjiang, a so-called Uighur autonomous region in China."
The photo Pang referenced has been heavily circulated by Western media
outlets and NGOs, and is upheld as practically the only image proving the
existence of "concentration camps" run by Beijing. This characterization is
deeply misleading, however.
The photo was not taken by some courageous prisoner or crusading
investigative journalist. It was published by the Chinese government in a
press release from 2014, from three years before the State Department
claimed the genocide began in Xinjiang.
In fact, the original image, which was proudly published on the Xinjiang
Bureau of Justice's own WeChat account, with a watermark identifying it as
an official photo taken by Chinese authorities. Western anti-China
propagandists have subsequently cropped off the watermark and presented the
photo as proof of China caught in the act.
Xinjiang re education center photos 2014
2014 photos from an Xinjiang detention center published by the Chinese
government
The photo shows a de-radicalization program at a Chinese detention center in
Luopu County, Xinjiang in April 7, 2014.
The Chinese government press release said the event featured talks from
local Muslim leaders and presentations focused on "social stability" and
"long-term peace" which "clearly clarified the traditional teachings and
rules of Islam and righteousness; clarified the serious harm of religious
extremism and violent terrorist activities; clarified the importance of the
unity and struggle of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang for common prosperity
and development; clarified the importance of Xinjiang's development."
Other photos taken at the same 2014 anti-extremist event in Xinjiang have
never been shared in Western media reports, and for obvious reasons: they
depict innocuous scenes that stand at odds with the official US government
portrayal.
Xinjiang re education center 2014
Photos taken by Chinese authorities at the same event at a re-education
center in Xinjiang in 2014
While the Chinese government has challenged hyperbolic accusations of
running "concentration camps," it has openly admitted to operating
de-radicalization centers for Islamist extremists - members of the same
separatist organizations that have carried out scores of mass casualty
attacks in the Xinjiang region, killing state officials and civilians alike.
It is certainly fair to characterize the tactics used in the Chinese
government's crackdown on extremism and separatism in Xinjiang as
heavy-handed, and even repressive, but the reality is a far cry from a
campaign of "genocide."
The term "concentration camp" in Western anti-China propaganda is clearly
meant to invoke the mass extermination that took place in Nazi death camps.
Washington's goal is to depict Beijing as a Nazi-like government, in order
to justify aggressive US actions against the country and an eventual push
for regime change.
The highly suspect research from anti-China activists like Adrian Zenz have
absurdly exaggerated the number of people who have passed through these
re-education centers. The bottom-feeding pundits desperate to validate
Zenz's shoddy research have resorted to cartoonishly preposterous propaganda
that portrays the situation as worse than the Nazi Holocaust.
Before the US initiated its new Cold War with China, Western corporate media
outlets openly acknowledged that China faced a major national security
threat in Xinjiang in the form of a Wahhabist separatist movement determined
to destabilize the entire region and ultimately break away.
In a 2017 report titled "Uighurs fighting in Syria take aim at China," the
Associated Press reported, "Since 2013, thousands of Uighurs, a
Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from western China, have traveled to Syria
to train with the Uighur militant group Turkistan Islamic Party and fight
alongside al-Qaida, playing key roles in several battles."
The AP continued: "Uighur militants have killed hundreds, if not thousands,
in attacks inside China in a decades-long insurgency that initially targeted
police and other symbols of Chinese authority but in recent years also
included civilians."
The outlet quoted a Uighur militant who said his group traveled to Syria "to
learn how to use the weapons and then go back to China." Another extremist
said they were basing their movement on Zionism, and hoped to create an
Islamist version of Israel in modern-day Xinjiang.
"The end of Syria's war may be the beginning of China's worst fears," the AP
wrote.
Uighur Turkistan Islamic Party TIP ETIM Syria children
Uighur child militants from the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) / East
Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Syria
While Washington has preferred killing Islamist extremists like these with
drones and military interventions, China has resorted to re-education
centers.
For Beijing, the Xinjiang region is extremely important. It is a key
geo-strategic location that lies at the heart of the New Silk Road that will
provide an economic bridge between China and Central Asia.
Washington has made it clear that it wants to sabotage Beijing's Belt and
Road Initiative, an ambitious global plan to link Global South nations and
recenter Asia in the global economy.
And the United States knows it can throw a massive wrench in China's plans
by encouraging separatist movements in Xinjiang.
This is precisely why Washington's regime-change arm the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout established by the Ronald Reagan
administration at the end of the first Cold War, has poured millions of
dollars into Uighur separatist groups.
The NED publicly boasted of its support for the Uighur separatist movement
on Twitter in December 2020.
The accusations of genocide and concentration camps in China also fail to
take into account global perspective. The United States has less than 5
percent of the planet's population, but nearly 25 percent of its prisoners.
In the American system of mass incarceration, detainees are often imprisoned
with draconian sentences based on preposterous, unfounded charges, where
they are held in miserable, torturous conditions. Slave labor is also
widespread in the US prison system, and a hugely disproportionate percentage
of those prisoners are Black, Latino, and Indigenous.
But few countries would formally accuse the United States of committing
genocide against minority groups - and if they did, mainstream Western
journalists certainly would not eagerly echo their claims. But when the
accusations are made against China, pundits like Pang can reap endless
mainstream media opportunities by amplifying them or filtering them through
their personal narrative.
Careerism in the new Cold War
Pang is the author of "Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the
Hidden Cost of America's Cheap Goods," a book advancing the forced labor
allegations made against China by the US State Department.
Through she presents herself as a liberal, Pang supported the Trump
administration's economic attacks on the Chinese government, clamoring for
the most aggressive measures available.
In January, the Trump administration announced strict trade policies banning
the import of cotton and tomatoes from China's Xinjiang province, the
autonomous region where most Uighurs live.
The right-wing Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which employs Zenz
and has extensive links to the US government, claimed credit for helping to
advancing the new policy.
Pang took to Twitter to praise the Trump administration's economic
restrictions.
When Pang published her op-ed with the New York Times, the newspaper of
record curiously omitted her five years of work for the Epoch Times from her
bio.
Pang's publicly available LinkedIn profile shows that she worked for the
propaganda of the Falun Gong cult between 2011 and 2016.
Amelia Pang Epoch Times China LinkedIn
Ironically, the New York Times' reporting on the Epoch Times acknowledged
that many of Falun Gong's "strident accounts of persecution in China can
sometimes be difficult to substantiate or veer into exaggeration."
The New York Times referred to the Epoch Times as a "global-scale
misinformation machine that has repeatedly pushed fringe narratives into the
mainstream," noting that the Falun Gong propaganda outlet has even promoted
the outlandish QAnon conspiracy theory.
Pang frequently reported on China-related issues for the Epoch Times. Some
of her articles included blatant PR for Falun Gong, with titles like
"Listen: Musicians From Sweden to Mexico Sing for Falun Gong."
Amelia Pang Epoch Times
Pang's anti-China Epoch Times reports go all the way back to 2011, when she
amplified Falun Gong protests and described China's National Day, the
anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, as a "National Tragedy
Day to rebuff the Communist Party and its history of violence and atrocity."
Pang also wrote at least 12 PR pieces openly promoting Shen Yun, a dance
form that is used as a cultural front for the Falun Gong cult. In one, she
quoted an Obama White House staff member who called it the "best show around
the world."
Epoch Times Amelia Pang Falun Gong musicians
An article by Amelia Pang in the Epoch Times promoting Falun Gong - next to
ads promoting Trump coins and Israel
Pang also churned out a puff piece on anti-China separatist leader Rebiya
Kadeer, the multimillionaire Uighur oligarch who, from inside the United
States, previously ran the right-wing group the World Uyghur Congress, which
is funded by the US government's NED regime-change arm.
In the fawning profile, Pang herozied Kadeer as the "Dalai Lama of
Xinjiang." Noting that Kadeer was "China's Richest Woman" and "the seventh
richest person in China at the time," Pang touted the Uyghur separatist
leader as "one of the Chinese Communist Party's top public enemies."
Not only was Pangaware of the US government funding for Kadeer's separatist
activities, she celebrated it in the article. "Remarkably, Kadeer has
managed to get funding from the National Endowment for Democracy and private
donors for the two organizations she heads, the Uyghur American Association
and the World Uyghur Congress," Pang wrote.
Pang also noted how, in a private meeting with George W. Bush in 2007, the
US president praised Kadeer as "far more valuable than the weapons of
[China's] army or oil under the ground."
Amelia Pang Epoch Times Rebiya Kadeer Uyghur
In this Epoch Times puff piece, Pang went so far as to accuse China of
"harvesting the organs of live Uyghur prisoners."
As her source for the accusation, Pang cited a book by Ethan Gutmann, an
eccentric American anti-China activist who has testified for the CIA, US
Congress, and Knesset. His research has been funded in part by the NED.
Gutmann also worked for neoconservative think tanks like the Project for the
New American Century (PNAC) and Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD),
key institutional forces behind the Iraq War and the push for a war on Iran.
Gutmann's highly ideological research, which is often based on little more
than rumors, was called into question even by the former mayor of Taipei,
Taiwan, Beijing's principal political rival.
Pang also noted in her Epoch Times article that Xinjiang is
geo-strategically important for China. "Xinjiang is four times the size of
California; most important, it has an oil-rich region that is the size of
France. Its land is also rich with minerals and natural gas," she wrote.
She added ominously, "it would be in the Chinese regime's best interest to
reach an accord with the Uyghurs. Xinjiang is a critical place for China's
development in the coming years. Riots and unrests are not attractive to
investors."
The Grayzone contacted Amelia Pang with a request for comment, inquiring if
she was aware of the Epoch Times' close relationship with Falun Gong and if
she has had any affiliation with the cult. She replied with just one line:
"The Epoch Times and the Falun Gong group do not represent my views in any
way."
Anti-China book promoted by influential US regime-change activist
At the top of her personal website, Amelia Pang advertises her book, "Made
in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America's Cheap
Goods," which is due in February 2021.
The book's homepage highlights a blurb written by Orville Schell, the
director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, an
influential NGO funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and other foundations
with historic links to the US intelligence apparatus.
Schell also has an eyebrow-raising record of work the Ford Foundation, a CIA
cut-out, in Indonesia from 1964 to 1966, at precisely the time when the
country's US-backed military dictatorship was enacting an actual genocide.
With help from the CIA, Indonesia's dictator Suharto murdered between 1 and
3 million communists, left-wing sympathizers, labor organizers, and ethnic
Chinese people, in what the CIA privately admitted was "one of the worst
mass murders of the 20th century," alongside the Nazi Holocaust.
Schell undertook his Ford Foundation fellowship in Jakarta when he was a
graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley - the same
institution where an infamous group of Indonesian economists known as the
"Berkeley Mafia" were trained with Ford Foundation funding in the capitalist
shock therapy they imposed on Indonesia's formerly socialist-oriented
economy.
The endorsement of Pang's book by a figure like Schell highlights the
usefulness of her writing to Western foreign policy elites. Her work was so
useful, in fact, that her many years of employment by a far-right publicity
arm for an anti-China cult that even the New York Times has lambasted was
apparently necessary to conceal.
