[4] He is a director and senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-communist think tank established by the US government and based in Washington, DC.

[8][9] He later received a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, with a doctoral thesis on minority education, job opportunities, and the ethnic identity of young Tibetans in western China.

[1] In July 2019, Zenz wrote in the Journal of Political Risk that he speculated that 1.5 million Uyghurs had been extrajudicially detained, which he described as being "an equivalent to just under one in six adult members of a Turkic and predominantly Muslim minority group in Xinjiang.

[30] In July 2020, Zenz wrote in Foreign Policy that his estimate had increased since November 2019, estimating that a total of 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities had been extrajudicially detained in what he described as "the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust," arguing that the Chinese Government was engaging in policies in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

In the book, he examines the career prospects of students who major in Tibetan-language studies and the notion that the greater market value of Chinese-language education threatens Tibetan ethnocultural survival.

[48][49] Zenz's work to expose human rights abuses in Xinjiang has been the subject of widespread international attention and has been widely cited in media reports.

[54][need quotation to verify] As a result of his work on Xinjiang, Zenz has become a target for coordinated disinformation attacks from pro-Beijing and Chinese state-run media, as well as other state-affiliated entities.

[64][65] The United States banned imports of cotton from Xinjiang shortly after Zenz published a report describing widespread use of forced labor in the region.

[69] In her statement to the committee, the script of which she did not release for publication, Leutner, who was invited by the parliamentary group Die Linke as an expert to the 66th session of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid in the German Bundestag in November 2011, classified the internment camps in Xinjiang as part of the "preventive measures against extremism" with programmes "to combat poverty", "for professional qualification" and "to create jobs".

"[73] These amendments tabled by Daly and Wallace were not included in the adopted version of the EU Parliament's joint resolution of 17 December 2020 on forced labour and the situation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Instead, paragraph 1 of the resolution "strongly condemned the state system of forced labour exploiting in particular Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz and other Muslim minorities in factories in Xinjiang, both inside and outside detention camps".

The fact that Zenz works for the right-wing conservative think tank "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation", which has "close ties to the CIA", also casts him in a "dubious light".

[75] When asked about Adrian Zenz in his role as "the Western media's most important source for the accusations against the Chinese government" and his accusation of "a demographic genocide campaign", sinologist Björn Alpermann of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg explained in an interview with the weekly newspaper Jungleworld published in February 2022, it is not necessary to "sympathise with Adrian Zenz as a person or approve of the political agenda of his donors to come to the conclusion that birth control in Xinjiang has been tightened".

[76] In the daily newspaper Neues Deutschland, Uwe Behrens described a report published in March 2021 by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy as a "string of unverified secondary information and statements by Uyghurs living abroad", which was "ultimately based on the internet research of anthropologist Adrian Zenz".

[77] In 2023, political theorists Alain Brossat and Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado described Zenz as "instrumental" in the step that renamed China's campaign in Xinjiang from "mass arbitrary detentions and related violations" to "genocide".