Thread by @adrianzenz

THREAD: western university gets award for its collaboration w/ a Xinjiang paramilitary university who is directly implicated in re-education & forced labor, whose work teams reported on "problems" in Uyghur homes & paraded camp detainees to warn others. link.medium.com/wKCb0sROAab

New Zealand's @MasseyUni Professor Hugh Blair visits Xinjiang annually. In 2019, during the height of the internment drive, he received a Friendship Award from Shihezi University, the most eminent academic institutions of the paramilitary XPCC (blacklisted for HR violations).

Massey University defended its collaboration with Shihezi, saying that it is just about animal science. That's like Disney saying that it is customary to thank Xinjiang's Turpan propaganda office for letting them film in the shadow of concentration camps.
stuff.co.nz/national/30010…

Shihezi is the largest XPCC city and served as the XPCC headquarter until it was moved to Urumqi. Shihezi​ University traces its origins to an institution founded in 1949 by the People's Liberation Army, and is currently one of only two top-tier universities in Xinjiang.

According to gov't documents, Shihezi operates at least one vocational internment camp and one re-education camp, besides the usual prison and detention networks common to XPCC regions. The ASPI recently identified 380 facilities, the one in Shihezi was expanded in late 2017.

Maybe Massey University's sheep farming development collaboration is not far from one of these detention facilities. In any case, an academic who visits the region annually would have noticed the growing police state, and heard or read about the mounting atrocities.

As early as 2016, Shihezi university evaluated the past three years worth of re-education work against “evil religious cults”, and engaged in active lecturing on "re-education". It didn't just passively participate, but apparently played an active role in its development.

Shihezi University work teams were right at the forefront of the initial internment campaign, deployed to minority villages in Feb 2017 to participate in grid management. The team “promptly reported…problems found in the households visited…and proposed corrective measures.”

In March 2017, a Shihezi University work team operated in Shule County’s Uyghur regions. The event paraded individuals and their family members who were in re-education camps — persons who had “poisoned” those around them through religious extremism.

In Dec 2018, the work teams brought along 83 Shihezi University students to visit Uyghur homes, propagate “modern thinking”, and promote poverty alleviation through livelihood transformations and "labor transfer" (a coercive labor scheme).

However, Massey University doesn't see any problems with this collaboration. Neither did Volkswagen or Disney.

All this came only about because of a parliamentary submission published by @Anne_MarieBrady, for which she is now under investigation by the University of Canterbury.

Here is my letter to Canterbury about my findings on Massey and Shihezi:
adrianzenz.medium.com/letter-to-cant…

Brady's publication:
wilsoncenter.org/publication/ho…