Funding anti-China organizations, creating rumors... Well-known American journalists started to concoct fake news about Xinjiang
Editor's note: The "grey area" of the US independent news investigation website has exposed how the US government funded various anti-China organizations and individuals, and how some US media disregarded facts and fabricated various conspiracy theories and rumors involving China. Max Blumenthal is the editor and founder of the website. He is also a well-known journalist and best-selling author. On July 25th, experts and scholars from 48 countries including China, the United States, Russia, Britain, Canada, etc. Max Blumenthal participated in a seminar on the theme "Any new Cold War against China is against the interests of mankind". The following is the main content of his speech.
As a professional media person working in the US media environment, I would like to talk about the role that US media plays in promoting this "new cold war", especially the role of US corporate media and the US National Security Agency in influencing media narrative techniques. What happened.
It is especially ironic that the US government forcibly closed the Chinese Consulate in Houston when China did not have any obvious provocations or at least China did not provoked any incidents to provoke the United States. The darling of the neoconservatives, Senator Marco Rubio, the de facto head of the anti-China coalition in Congress, defended the actions of the United States on the grounds that the Chinese Consulate in Houston was a base for espionage. This is also the reason the US government has taken actions against Chinese companies such as Huawei and TikTok. I think this is quite ironic, not only because of the lack of evidence for this statement, but also because since the passage of the Hong Kong National Security Law, it has long been an open fact that the United States and Hong Kong protests are linked together.
According to reports, the U.S. government's important foreign propaganda agency responsible for overseeing "Radio Free Asia" and "Voice of America", the American International Media Agency, donated US$2 million for the protests in Hong Kong, including providing logistics and secure communications to the protesters equipment. As we know, these are not entirely peaceful protests. If the riots in Hong Kong are "peaceful gatherings," then the recent events in Portland, the United States, look like pacifists' blind dates.
The US media organization spent 2 million US dollars to destabilize China's territory! If Chinese media such as Xinhua News Agency or China International Television provided communication equipment to American protesters in Portland and paid them directly, can we imagine the US reaction? This will trigger the largest confrontation between the United States and China in decades. But this is exactly what the United States is doing in Hong Kong at the moment.
We have recently seen that leaders such as Huang Zhifeng and Luo Guancong in exile, who are considered to be leading the grassroots protests, have frequently met with the US Secretary of State Pompeo and have begun to show their strength in the growing anti-China lobby in London and Washington.
What the "grey area" website does is to expose the relationship between the US government and the protest leaders whenever these protests erupt. We have been committed to this for many years-exploring the micro-social and political relationship between the United States and the opposition in countries seeking regime change.
As a reporter, I investigated the role of the US government in promoting media coverage of China, which began on a trip to Capitol Hill in 2018. There, the leaders of both parties in Congress, including the current House Majority Leader Pelosi, participated in the recognition of North Korean dissidents—many of whom were cited by the US media when reporting North Korean news. "Source", South Korean intelligence agencies paid large sums of money for their appalling testimony exposing North Korea's "evil deeds."
The event was hosted by the National Democracy Foundation, a regime change organization funded by the US government. There, I met a man named Omer Kanat, a person in charge of the "World Wealth Council". At the end of the ceremony, I noticed that the media was paying attention to this character, so I wanted to know who he was.
I realized that he was the leader of a right-wing anti-communist lobby group funded entirely by the US government. This organization is very similar to the organization established in Washington by the "Cuban American National Foundation", Venezuelan Guaido and its allies. They are committed to implementing US policies in various countries, creating political pressure, and promoting regime change. They provide information to the American media, and almost none of these media mention the funding of the US government.
I approached Omer Kanat and asked him about a statement that was widely circulated at the time, that is, a conclusive statement I saw in the mainstream media—in the so-called "concentration camps" in Xinjiang, China Detained millions of Uyghurs. I asked him where is the source of these amazing numbers? He told me that one of the sources was the "World Welfare Council." Of course, the "World Welfare Council" is funded by the US government, and it has provided many such testimonies and "information sources" to the American media.
I asked how reliable the source was, and Kanat said, “Well, our source is Western media and some testimony.” He described a kind of circular feedback between the US media and dissidents funded by the US government. These dissidents portrayed China as the rebirth of Nazi Germany. This extremely suspicious statement provided the basis for Congress to pass the "Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act" and the United States to launch a list of related sanctions.
("Gray Zone" Special Correspondent) Ajit Singh conducted a more in-depth investigation and found two main sources of relevant data. The first is a person named Zheng Guoen. This person’s way of thinking is very similar to Pompeo, and his expertise in Chinese, Chinese politics and society is as much as Pompeo—the latter has long served as a professional The He brothers and Kansas evangelical puppets.
Zheng Guoen expounded his worldview in a book he wrote in 2010. Unsurprisingly, he is not a sober expert on China issues, but an evangelical right-wing fanatic who claims to be "guided by God" to preach against the Chinese Communist Party. In the book, Zheng Guoen called for "using the scourge mentioned in the Bible" or corporal punishment to deal with unruly children, and portrayed diversity and homosexuality as demonic plots. However, Zheng Guoen was called an authoritative "scholar" on Xinjiang by the American media. As Ajit revealed in the "grey zone" report, Zheng Guoen's material relies on isolated testimony, and the selective data used is biased and extremely untestable.
Another source of the inflammatory statement that "millions of Uighurs are detained in refugee camps" is an NGO called "Chinese Human Rights Defenders." Again, this organization is funded by the US government. In fact, it is headquartered in Washington, in the same office as Human Rights Watch. "Human Rights Watch" relies on the sources of "Chinese Human Rights Defenders" to produce its own research report on China's Xinjiang-related policies. As Ajit revealed, the “Chinese Human Rights Defenders” relied on the testimony of a total of eight Uyghurs from Xinjiang and inferred that the total number of Uyghurs in the “concentration camps” ranged from 250,000 to 100 based on the total population of the villages where these eight people lived. Between ten thousand.
The point is, when you see these numbers and find the source, you need more evidence to confirm the claims. Examining the quotations of these sources in the US media, you will find that they do not mention "World Welfare Council", Zheng Guoen or "Chinese Human Rights Defenders". The media will not tell you the background of these organizations and their political agendas. You are the U.S. government to support and fund them to the maximum.
The same is true for the reports that appeared this year about China’s “forced labor” in Xinjiang, which were published in cooperation with the actions taken by Congress against China. As Ajit reported for the "grey zone," the source of this explosive narrative was once again boiled down to two sources closely related to the US National Security Agency. The first is the Australian Institute of Strategic Policy, which is funded by the US State Department, the British Foreign Office, and the military industry. Another source is the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, which has almost exactly the same funding source as the Australian Institute of Strategic Policy.
Although the hostile narrative that promotes the "New Cold War" will only benefit the militarists and right-wing elements in American society, it has successfully marketed it to liberal intellectuals in the middle class through language containing humanitarian sentiments. Therefore, we have seen left-wing media organizations such as "Jacobin" and "Instant Democracy", as well as the "Nation" weekly magazine that I discussed before, which is willing to be the mouthpiece of the US government, stirring up hysterical anti-China and anti-communist sentiments among readers. These reports on Xinjiang are absolutely unquestionable in the respectable liberal left-wing media. Questioning these reports means crossing an invisible red line. Even if an American reporter raises questions in the name of seeking the truth and seeking international cooperation when writing a report, it will be difficult for him to gain a foothold in the mainstream American media. As Vijay Prasad (Director of the Indian Institute of Social Studies on Three Continents) said earlier, we are witnessing a mixed war by the United States against China. Part of this strategy involves information warfare, in which journalists are transformed into frontline propaganda soldiers. On their laptop keyboard, hovering the hidden hands of the National Security Agency. In November this year, despite the political storm that may send Democrats into the White House, the hostile narrative of the "new Cold War" will still accompany us. Therefore, our job is to provide the public with the background and facts that they have missed, and to provide the media with an alternative alternative.