
Reports of Uyghur forced labour imports to Australia: The mainstream media continues to produce China reports that are agenda driven, biased and based on poor or no research. There is no balance and rather than be constructive, there’s an all-out determination to be destructive.
The issue of Uyghur forced labour is vexed to say the least, and one might argue the western media narrative is doing more harm than good to China’s Muslim Uyghur population in Xinjiang province.
There is little doubt that the Chinese government’s treatment of its Uyghur population is heavy handed and persecutory, but characterisations of genocide and the internment of millions into forced labour lacks solid evidence.
What is known, but never reported in the mainstream media, is the US designated the Uyghur separatist group, ETIM (East Turkistan Islamic Movement), as a terrorist group from 2002 until 2020. That designation came in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, from which the US hoped to enlist China as a de facto partner in its global war on terror.
Until 2013, the US had detained 22 Uyghurs in Guantanamo Bay without charge. While thousands of Uyghur fighters are said to have been deployed to fight alongside Islamic extremist forces in the war against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Post 9/11, until 2016, there were more than 20 terrorist attacks across China attributed to Uyghur separatists, for this reason the Chinese government justified its crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
These facts give context to China’s crackdown but don’t rate a mention in mainstream reports on a part of China that the most vociferous genocide commentators have never been to.
Led by The Australian, Murdoch media has a 20 January 2025 report, entitled “Products from US-banned forced labour in China allowed into Australia.” Not helping its credibility is a link to a 2024 Sky News after dark clip where host Liz Storer displays a profound lack of knowledge of what’s actually going on in China. Without citing any sources, she declares for years the Uyghur people have been subjected to human rights abuses and that 1 million Uyghurs are presently suffering from Chinese government-perpetrated atrocities.
The Murdoch stories were based on a report in The Guardian (20 January 2025) headlined, “Thousands of imports enter Australia from firms blacklisted by US over alleged Uyghur forced labour links.” The Guardian based its report on documents released through FOI (freedom of information) requests of import declarations, showing that eight Chinese companies sanctioned by the US for alleged links to forced labour had imported goods into Australia.
The expert on forced labour relied upon for comment was a German academic Dr. Adrian Zenz, who now resides in the US. He obtained his PhD in anthropology before reinventing himself as a China expert.
Despite no evidence of him ever having travelled to Xinjiang, or indeed anywhere in China, Zenz is regarded as a pre-eminent expert on Uyghur mass detentions and atrocities. The views of Zenz have been widely challenged, a cursory Google search reveals this fact, yet The Guardian accepted his assertions without qualification. His research is funded by the US government’s Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Zero effort from The Guardian to conduct even a cursory examination as to who’s paying the piper.
Of course, The Guardian couldn’t help itself but trot out the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) citing its ‘stellar’ research on forced labour in Xinjiang. The research to which The Guardian points is a 2020 report entitled “Uyghurs for sale” which, ASPI asserts, chronicles systematic abuse of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Worth noting is the fact the report was funded by the UK Foreign Office. Anybody with a modicum of sense appreciates that think tanks get paid to come up with conclusions and their job is to find a narrative that fits.
Despite producing somewhat rubbery reports, ASPI is the gold standard in having mainstream media swallow those reports hook, line and sinker. Over the past five years there is little evidence Australian journalists have read anything beyond the executive summaries, if that.
The electronic version of the report is accompanied by half a page of corrections—in fine print. In total ASPI fessed up to having been forced to make 41 amendments to the original reports whose research extends to just 27 pages.
It’s yet another blatant example of the mainstream media reporting on “Bad China” and finding bad sources to fit the narrative.
The Guardian reports that ASPI estimates 80,000 Uyghurs were, between 2017 and 2019, shipped off into forced labour. A few paragraphs later it quotes Zenz as saying the number is 2.5 million. Which is it, and why was there no attempt to explain or verify the enormous discrepancy? Sloppy journalism is the answer.
The ASPI report comes with 285 end notes, all but a handful sourced from company websites, Chinese government websites and Chinese state media reports. Surely a journalist doing their job—bear in mind The Guardian labels its story as an exclusive investigation—would do some simple fact checking of their sources.
The logical question, that mainstream media reports ignored, is if China is perpetrating industrial scale genocide upon the Uyghurs and forcing millions into modern slavery why is this being advertised on government department websites and state-run media reports freely available on the internet?
The thrust of The Guardian and Murdoch media stories is that the US has assiduously identified and nominated Chinese companies relying on Uyghur forced labour. US sanction lists are hardly authoritative, with one (Bureau of Industry and Security Entity List), having erroneously (or maybe not) added a number of police stations to its list of banned companies from Xinjiang.
In the golden era of journalism—before the barons, political and corporate interests were completely running the media—there was a steadfast adage that if your mother tells you she loves you confirm it with two other sources.
Editors’ note:
China Media Watch is the first in a regular weekly column. We hope to counter much of the ignorance and bias of US propaganda on China that is recycled by our MSM.
John Menadue