“It is the first admission that they really are suffering major economic losses,” Zenz said. “Suing an academic — there is an element of desperation in there.”
The lawsuit comes as Zenz and other researchers have been building a case that Beijing’s treatment of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang meets the definition of “genocide” under the Geneva Conventions.
The United States has imposed economic sanctions on Xinjiang over the past year in response to evidence documented by researchers, including Zenz, of a mass campaign of detention and forced labor targeting Muslim Uighurs in the region. The sanctions include a blanket ban on cotton from the region, which accounts for 87 percent of the cotton grown in China.
Zenz, who is German, began researching conditions in Xinjiang several years ago as an independent scholar, and since 2019 as a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization.
Chinese state media outlet Tianshannet reported late Monday that unnamed companies had filed a lawsuit in Xinjiang against Zenz. China’s Foreign Ministry confirmed it on Tuesday.
“Many companies and residents in Xinjiang suffered heavy losses after Zenz’s rumor of ‘forced labor’ came out of nowhere,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a routine briefing on Tuesday. “They detest and abhor such malicious smearing acts.”
Zenz does not really have to worry about the lawsuit if he stays out of China, said Donald Clarke, a law professor at George Washington University. But he may have to hire a lawyer if the Xinjiang companies try to seek overseas enforcement of a judgment against him.
“He would have to get a lawyer to make these arguments, which points up the real threat of lawsuits like this: their capacity to harass,” Clarke wrote on the China Collection blog.
Tianshannet said the companies that filed the lawsuit were damaged by Zenz’s “rumors” of forced labor in the region and demanded he apologize, restore their reputations and compensate for their losses. More companies and individuals may join the lawsuit, Tianshannet said.
