VANCOUVER—Standing at a podium in a large room with views of the woods, the Chinese government official took the question about mass internment camps for Muslims without hesitation.

Muslim Uighur minorities in the Xinjiang region of China “lack social and economic opportunities,” explained Yu Jiantuo.

So the Chinese leadership “chose the approach to provide vocational educational training to them.”

Yu was answering the question from a Star Vancouver journalist as he spoke at the University of British Columbia’s Point Grey Campus on Thursday.

It was a public event on China’s global infrastructure projects hosted by the Institute of Asian Research at the UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.

A UBC moderator then said there were other audience questions Yu should move on to address.

Yu is assistant secretary general of the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF), which is run by China’s government, the State Council. And his answers, critics say, are another example of Chinese state propaganda being spread on Canadian university campuses.

Last year, a United Nations human rights panel estimated that one million ethnic Uighurs are being held in what resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”

And this July, 22 countries at the UN jointly condemned the continued mass internments and urged Beijing to shut down the camps and stop related violations against Muslims.

But Yu said Thursday the camps were only “short-term training programs” and he wasn’t “sure if they were compulsory.”

Yu’s remarks echoed Chinese government denials of the human rights abuses. Beijing says the camps in Xinjiang are for vocational training and, since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it has defended any crackdowns on Uighurs as necessary in the name of rooting out Muslim extremists.

Earlier this year, the Star reported that the same research institution at UBC hosted Hu Angang, a controversial Chinese academic who was allegedly influential in laying the ideological foundation for the internment of Muslims.

At the time, UBC professor Paul Evans argued the decision to host Hu was based on free speech.

After the latest incident this week, observers say Canadian universities have an obligation to avoid providing a “megaphone” for Chinese government propaganda.

“The claim that the camps used by the Chinese government to incarcerate one million Uighurs in Xinjiang are not in fact concentration camps is typical of regime propaganda and is completely false. The prison-like conditions inside these camps are well known,” says Marcus Kolga, a senior fellow researching foreign disinformation at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

“So while free speech is important, if lies and propaganda are left unchallenged then we risk facing the eventual death of truth,” Kolga told the Star Vancouver.

Stephanie Carvin, assistant professor of international relations at Carleton University, agrees it can be beneficial to hear the Beijing line on Xinjiang, but she was “disappointed” with UBC’s handling of the situation.

“If someone from the Chinese government came to an event where I was at and denied the camps, I would feel an obligation to correct that. I can’t speculate as to why UBC faculty did not challenge it, but in my view they should have,” she said.

The two moderators of Yu’s talk were Institute of Asian Research professor Yves Tiberghien and a senior fellow of the institute, Evan Due.

In a statement to the Star Vancouver, Tiberghien said he had another obligation to attend and was not present in the room during the question-and-answer session.

This left Due to act as moderator, even though Due also works as a consultant for the China Development Research Foundation, making him an adviser to Yu.

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Due did not respond to questions about whether he felt he was an appropriate moderator for the talk, given his employment at the Chinese government research institution.

Tiberghien said he wants to make it clear that he “absolutely condemns the detention camps and human rights abuses taking place in Xinjiang,” and explained that Thursday’s event was “a bit done in a rush.”

The Institute of Asian Research is building a Xinjiang Documentation Project to collect, preserve, assess and ensure public access to information on the repression in the region, and has hosted a range of speakers, including ones highly critical of the Chinese government.

Timothy Cheek, director of the IAR, said he is looking into the issue and he personally “abhors the detention camps and broader repression in Xinjiang.”

With files from Jeremy Nuttall and The Associated Press

Joanna Chiu is a senior reporter for Star Vancouver covering both Canada-China relations and current affairs on the West Coast. Follow her on Twitter: @joannachiu

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