Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Two academic centers in China on Friday expressed a warm welcome to Maureen A Huebel, an Australian scholar, who has been under attack from anti-China forces after announcing her plan to visit China's Xinjiang region in 2024, saying they are willing to work with the Australian scholar and assist her in conducting research in the region.

Since Huebel announced on Twitter in March that she was planning to go to Xinjiang in 2024 to research poverty alleviation, she has been hounded by trolls and disturbed by people who insulted her on Twitter, and sometimes even received death threats.

For a long time, China's Xinjiang region has been demonized by outside forces, which have also affected reports and academic research on the region and fooled the international community. Ms Huebel has faced cyber bulling and attacks for merely expressing her willingness to know the truth and to conduct research in the region. She is not the only one who had similar experience, according to a release from the Institute of China's Borderland Studies at Zhejiang Normal University.

We have noticed Ms Huebel's research plan to go to the Xinjiang region and as an academic institute which has studied the region for a long time, the Institute of China's Borderland Studies at Zhejiang Normal University, is willing to offer assistance. "On the journey of exploring and researching Xinjiang, you never walk alone," read the notice of the institute.

The Institute for Communication and Borderland Governance of Guangzhou-based Jinan University also commented on Huebel's experience.

Out of political needs and ideological bias, some Western countries have hyped topics on China's Xinjiang region, including making allegations of "genocide" or "forced labor." While some anti-China media and politicians are spreading disinformation, the voice for justice from Chinese scholars has been suppressed, read the release from the Guangzhou-based institute.

"We have empathy for Ms Huebel for similar experiences," said institute, expressing willingness to contact Ms Huebel and to accompany her to the region to assist with her academic research.

In an article Huebel wrote to the Global Times in March, she said that she first became seriously interested in studying China when she noticed rising levels of Australian poverty and homelessness. Xinjiang was identified as among the fastest GDP growth of all Chinese provinces and regions.

"I wanted to learn more as I couldn't reconcile the fact that there was a 'genocide' in Xinjiang with evidence that there was a growing population and no refugees," said Huebel.

However, when she joined Twitter to conduct preliminary research, she came under fierce attack. She contacted Adrian Zenz, a notorious anti-China "scholar" and asked him for field research notes and methodology and published peer-reviewed journals, only to find herself blocked, Huebel said.

Together with other Americans, Zenz had Huebel indefinitely suspended from Twitter. Huebel said she had to ask Monash University to write to Twitter to state that she was formally associated with the University. Twitter then reinstated her.

"The more opposition I got, the more determined I became to forge a path to complete my project. I was blocking trolls that did not contribute to the research, sometimes 10 at a time, who ganged up on me, to what is called a Twitter pile-on," Huebel wrote.