March 23, 2022
William Echols
William Jones
Washington bureau chief, Executive Intelligence Review
“The allegation of so-called genocide in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is fabricated by some western media outlets and a total farce.”
FALSE
On March 21, the U.S. State Department imposed visa restrictions on Chinese officials allegedly responsible for rights abuses, including the repression of “ethnic minority groups.”
In January 2021, the United States became the first country to officially describe China’s treatment of one such group – the Uyghur Muslim minority in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region – as genocide.
More than 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have allegedly been subjected to mass internment, forced sterilization and labor, torture, religious repression and other forms of cultural erasure.
On March 21, Deng Xijun, China’s ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian nations, shared a video clip from New China TV, the official YouTube Channel of China’s Xinhua News Agency. The clip includes excerpts of an interview with William Jones, Washington bureau chief for the news magazine Executive Intelligence Review, in which he disputes any genocide in Xinjiang.
“The allegation of so-called genocide in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is fabricated by some western media outlets and a total farce,” the New China TV video summarizes Jones as saying.
Jones repeats various bogus Beijing talking points, including:
People in Xinjiang are still speaking and being educated in their own language(s).
People in Xinjiang are still practicing their own religion.
More mosques are being built in Xinjiang than anywhere else in the world.
The population of Xinjiang is growing.
Polygraph.info and other fact checkers have previously debunked many of these claims.
Executive Intelligence Review was founded in 1974 by Lyndon LaRouche, a fringe U.S. political activist and failed presidential candidate often described as ‘cultlike,’ who died in 2019.
“‘Journalists’ associated with the LaRouche’s news outlet, the Executive Intelligence Review, are regularly invited to Chinese government press conferences in Washington and are quoted extensively in Chinese state media, where they often parrot government propaganda,” The Intelligencer, an offshoot of New York magazine, wrote in its February 2019 obituary of LaRouche.
“[T]here’s the dangerous possibility that Chinese officials and academics actually think the LaRouche movement is a serious Western group.”
Jones is also a nonresident fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, a Chinese think tank.
Many of Jones’ claims regarding Xinjiang are misleading, if not false. For example, while Uyghurs still communicate in their own language, China has tried to reduce its place in society.
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