The Daily Stoic - Megha Rajagopalan On Using History to Understand Modern Authoritarianism

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

Ryan talks with Megha Rajagopalan, a world correspondent for BuzzFeed News, about her reporting in China about human rights and how history informs our understanding of geopolitics.Megha Rajagopalan is a world correspondent for BuzzFeed News. She has covered major stories in Asia and the Middle East, and has been based in China, Thailand, Israel and the Palestinian territories. Megha has also written for numerous other outlets and has appeared on NPR, BBC World News, CNN, and other outlets.This episode is brought to you by Fast Growing Trees, the online nursery that delivers beautiful plants to your doorstep quickly and easily. Whether it’s magnificent shade trees, fruit trees with delicious apples and pears, privacy hedges, or beautiful flowers, Fast Growing Trees is the best place to buy your plants. And their 30-day Alive and Thrive guarantee means that you’ll be happy with whatever you buy. Visit FastGrowingTrees.com/stoic now and get ten percent off your entire order.This episode is also brought to you by the Jordan Harbinger Show. Jordan's podcast is one of the most interesting ones out there, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Megha Rajagopalan:Twitter: https://twitter.com/megharaInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/megmeghara/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. of necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward.

Listen to Business Wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ron Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. We've talked about this idea that at the core of stoicism is some sort of moral imperatives, right? The first this idea of sympathy, that we're all connected, that we owe a duty and obligation to other people, this idea of okayosis, this idea that we have a mutual affinity towards those people

as the driving sort of force of human kindness, why the stokes were politically active. Then, of course, you get all sorts of interesting ideas whether it's from Seneca who's saying, you know, wherever you see a person, there's an opportunity of kindness, there's Mark Sirrealist, the idea of the fruit of his life being good character and works for the common good. So that's at the core of stoicism. And then, of course, the stoics were politically active.

I don't mean that in the policy sense. I mean, they were active in the events of the world trying to do right by and for other people. And so I've become fascinated recently with the rise of China as a global world and economic power and some of the existential threats that potentially poses, namely the human rights crisis with the weger minorities and other minorities in China. And so today, my guest is a journalist for BuzzFeed, Megha, Rajika Polin, and she's not just a great journalist, but a journalist sort of on the forefront of reporting on what's going on in China,

actually, her visa was revoked by the Chinese government for some of the reporting she's done on a Weger internment camps, but she's also a big reader. I'd reached out to her. I'd read a really great piece that she'd written and she replied that she'd actually gets my reading list email where I recommend books every month. So we had that connection. I wanted to talk to her and so we have a great episode. I won't belabor the introduction because she's just a great writer. Someone you should be reading. She's a world correspondent for Buzzfeed. She writes on human rights issues and international politics and all sorts of interesting stuff. Definitely check her out.

She's great. You can follow her on Twitter as well. And one of the groups that we connected through the episode is the Weeger Human Rights Project. Look, I think there's something very serious going on in China right now. I'm just on the cusp of trying to understand it myself, but something very serious. And the more you read about it, I think the more it will sort of tug on some of the stoic hard strings we've been hopefully cultivating here and the books and the podcast over the years. So you can go to youhrp.org to read about the human rights crisis but more importantly, you can go to uhrp.org slash support

to donate money that helps relocate, keep safe, fight for the weavers who are undergoing what is sort of a real and ongoing persecution. Some would say genocide, I've been trying to make some support myself and I've strongly suggest you check it out. It's 501c3 tax exempt. It's a great nonprofit. I've got to know the people over there recently. Listen to this episode. It's not political, but it is

about what is happening in the world right now. And I learned a lot. And I think you will as well. If you think we should start with China, should we start with books? I guess it's like a good news, bad news situation. Either way, I guess, like about books, like what do you want to talk about? Well, I don't know.

I think one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot lately as things have been crazy is that one of the best ways to get sort of perspective and maybe some peace of mind is to step away from Twitter or the breaking news cycle and read history or read fiction. I'm just curious like given the whirlwind and chaos that what you cover currently is, how do you think about that?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I get asked a lot about historical context both from my editors and colleagues and from readers and stuff like that. So I'm always kind of seeking out answers to that question, like how do we contextualize what's happening in China right now and then also the geopolitical rise of China. So I do try to read a lot of history

as much as I can to try to get at some of those questions like outside of Chinese history. I guess that's not really stepping away necessarily from the day to day news cycle. But I think it can help us kind of answer some some deeper questions about politics around ethnic minorities, human rights, atrocities, and how the global community has responded to them in the past.

Yeah, I can probably mention a couple of books, if that's helpful. Please. I was speaking actually to a high school class via Zoom. This class was in California recently, and they had some really good questions. And there was a student who asked about, you know, like he pointed out that Germany was quite a powerful economy

in the lead up to World War II. And he, like his point was that this had not, it had not stopped the allied powers from, sure, you know, right from engaging in the war and everything. And he sort of linked that to the Holocaust and the liberation of the Nazi camps. And he said, why is this not happening with current human rights atrocities,

with the internment camps in China? I had to point out that this was, the US engagement in World War II was not, like, was not a consequence of German atrocities against the Jews, right? And it wasn't proactive either. I mean, Kennedy wrote a book called, Well England Slept, as yes. Yeah, so anyway, so I ended up recommending them this book called,

A Problem From Hell, which you probably know, it's by Samantha Power. recommending them this book called A Problem from Hell, which you probably know, it's by Samantha Power. And this was like prior to her career in the Obama administration, but I believe she wrote it as a law student, but she documents not only how this promise of never again has sort of repeatedly failed throughout decades of genocide and human rights atrocities.

But also she tells stories about people who have sort of gone against that tide and taken it upon themselves in kind of a mission-oriented way to fight back against those atrocities. So I think that's a really pertinent work when we're talking about human rights atrocities, for sure. No, and I do think, although it's not quite stepping away into like, you know, the sort of light world of fiction, I do think it's probably reading those books

is giving you a perspective that's not just coloring your reporting, but also probably coloring the timeline by which you're judging a lot of these things. Like, I think that that's a problem. A lot of people have a have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the events of World War II transpired. These retroactively look at it as very clean, obvious foregone conclusion. When actually it was this fits and starts and mistakes and bad assumptions and rationalizations, and to understand that,

I think maybe gives someone a perspective to not sort of rise and fall on every news story. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I also, you know, I'm interested in Cambodian history as well because of the history of their genocide. You know, particularly because I think writing about Xinjiang and the Weger issue

at this particular point, if you're writing in English and on social media, you just get bombarded with all of these people saying you're making it all up and you're a liar and China is a wonderful like, you know, communist utopia and stuff like that. I can only assume that a lot of these people have not spent a significant amount of time in China and understood that it's a country like any other with, you know, lots of good things and lots of problems as well. But when you read about the history of the Cambodian genocide, it's impossible to miss that, you know, there were a lot of intellectuals in the West who simply did not believe the Cambodian refugees who were leaving and talking about atrocities there and about what Pol Pot had done. And a lot of these people were driven by a particular worldview

and they weren't necessarily doing the best job actually gathering information about what was going on in the ground. And it's interesting to me how that pattern of thought is still being replicated, not just on the Xinjiang issue, but with lots of other issues where especially the people in the US and Europe,

they like to see things through this, like US-centric lens, like everything is about US imperialism and the harms that US imperialism has done. And in my view, they sort of neglect to look at these countries as specific places with specific histories and specific things that are happening. Yeah, I was curious because I want to get to the China thing in a sec, but I was curious to like, what do you think of this argument?

This is sort of early in the Trump administration that there was an argument or sort of an invogue theory that like we had to study Thucydides and the Peloponnesian war, what they're calling it, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, what they're calling it, the, the acidity's crap. The black half, yes. Yeah, as someone who loves the classics and has read through Cidities, and it does shape a lot of how I see things to go to your point about having a wider view of history, how apt is that analogy or is it totally bogus? So I cannot claim to be any kind of scholar on Thucydides or the Peloponnesian War.

However, my understanding is that the idea of the Thucydides trap came about well before the Manhattan Project and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. So I don't actually, I kind of feel that that is really a game changing thing. Like when we're talking about this notion of an established power and a rising power feel that that is really a game changing thing. Like when we're talking about this notion of,

you know, an established power and a rising power necessarily coming into military conflict with each other, we have to factor in the idea that this can be, you know, in our world, this can be like a world-ending event. This can be an event where millions of people die. That has never been true before in history prior to the 20th century. So, and the other thing is, I mean, if we're specifically talking about the US and China, there is a high level of economic interdependence, which of course doesn't necessarily mean

that there will never be a military conflict between the two. There's still a lot of flashpoints, but it does mean that, you know, I think that there is recognition from some parties, at least on both sides, that there needs to be a lot of caution. I used to cover the South China Sea and then there's this like kind of never-ending discussion about creating this kind of rules of the road as to what ships you and they encounter each other,

how to signal to each other. There's this whole parallel discussion about if we have rules of the road, will that actually make risk taking more appealing? I think that there's sort of an under appreciation amid this kind of very fraught new cycle of the kind of years that the US and China have spent, sometimes unproductively trying to develop kind of tools of communication for, you know, the case where something like this does happen. You know, I think I just think that I guess what I'm saying is I think the stakes are very, very high and I think that there's a recognition on both sides that the stakes are really, really high. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't be having this extended discussion about quote unquote decoupling.

Like sort of, you probably know what it is, but just in case anyone doesn't, like decoupling is this idea that like US companies need to somehow separate their supply chains from China or Chinese influence, particularly with reference to technology companies that are making equipment that could be used for military purposes and for intelligence gathering purposes and things like that.

Yeah, and look, it's not very reassuring, obviously, but I do feel like the sort of philosophical perspective that you get when you read these books is like, you go like, okay, obviously what's happening right now is very intense and very dangerous. And as you said, like literally hundreds of millions of people could die, as you said, like literally hundreds of millions of people could die. Then you also go like human beings have been doing this for thousands of years. This sort of jockeying and grinding

and bumping up against each other and misinterpreting and negotiating. And it's sort of like history is this. Now, it's not a loop. It's just, it's the same thing happening over and over and over again, whether it's islands in the South China Sea or allies in the GNC or, you know, like, it's just, people are people

and we've always been doing this and it's almost sad that we haven't learned that much since. I guess that's true. I mean, if you're talking about conflict, I do think that, you know, like just war theory and, you know, the writings of Christian scholars like Aquinas, you know, seem to have made a real impact on our thinking when it comes to creating multilateral institutions and treaties that govern activities during war. Obviously, you know, the counterargument is that we've seen a kind of rise in tolerance for civilian

casualties on a scale that the world had never experienced in the 20th century and continuing on till now. But I think one way to see it is that, oh yeah, nation states are made up of humans and human nature doesn't necessarily change, therefore our behaviors aren't going to fundamentally change. But I guess I'm a person that does think that both the advance of technologies and also the advance of the nation state and other kind of legal frameworks that bind nation states together has significantly changed the way that civilizations interact with each other. No, I think that's right. And yeah, often I think we're seeing right now people

sort of not understanding just whether it's US troops in Korea or like why Taiwan is seeing the way that all these things were sort of solutions or it was the system sort of working out kind of a stasis that's actually really important. You go around your knockover certain pieces. The whole thing could come down. But I think the epic line in Thucydides

is he says in sort of foreign policy, the strong do what they can and the weak struggle as they must. I don't think that's necessarily how the, that's because of the systems and the ideals that I think the US has tried to build itself around. That's not fully how we operate, although sometimes there is that element of real politic. But that does seem to me to be a decent description

of the sort of Chinese worldview when it comes to sort of doing whatever it wants. Yeah, if you translated that line from Thesydides into Chinese diplomaties, they would say big countries are big countries and small countries are small countries and that's just a fact. This is something that the spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry has said

probably repeatedly, I think. And I think that's like a very apt description of part of their world view and part of their approach to foreign policy that its large states that should have the kind of spheres of influence and the decision making power within those circles. Yeah, it is crazy that they would be saying essentially the exact same thing, 2,500 years apart.

Yeah. Oh, man. Well, so here's what I was thinking on the China thing, because I always benefit from hearing it in a new way and sometimes you learn things you didn't know. Like how would you describe what's happening in China, let's call it a sort of, and I know a bunch of interconnected issues, but like let's say you're a person who's kind of not been paying attention for a while.

You've been consumed with domestic politics. You've been, you know, maybe not, sort of, you've been not a particularly big student of what's happening out in the world. And this is kind of snuck up on you. All of a sudden you're hearing, sort of, Trump and Republicans saying a lot of really serious things about China, but then also, you know, sort of very moderate, smart people saying really serious things. And it feels like the temperature's being cranked up. How do you sort of bring someone up to speed? Oh my goodness, what a big question.

Okay, let me think about this. So I guess the sort of the brief history of China, at least in the past few years. So China is obviously a huge economy. It is the world's second largest economy by purchasing power parity, which essentially means like how much consumers power there is. It is the largest. And for a long while, it was growing at 10% GDP growth per year, which is really, really fast. And that's come down since the global financial crisis and stuff like that. But it remains because of those kind of decades of double digit GDP growth, you know, it became the most powerful economy in Asia.

It expanded its economic influence. It's geopolitical influence. It started pouring more money into building up its military and defense capabilities. In short, it's become a leading world power. So in 2012, the current president of China, his name is Xi Jinping, came to power. When he came to power, like all Chinese leaders, there wasn't that much information about him in public.

A lot of kind of personal details about Chinese leaders are purposely kept from public view because there's a real fear of the kind of populism and cult of personality that existed when term and mouth was in power. So that's really different from the US, like all these little prosaic details, like, you know, where somebody went to elementary school

and what their favorite foods are and stuff like that. You just don't know that about Chinese leaders. So when Xi Jinping came to power, there wasn't so much known about him, but as it turned out, he presided over some really significant challenges for China. And he also sort of showed that he had a very specific view about what he wanted China to be and what he wanted China's role in the world to be. And a big part of that is the rise of Chinese nationalism and what he calls the Chinese dream. It's kind of a slogan. It's not clear what it really means, but he spent a lot of time in his speeches and through party propaganda,

basically ensuring that people feel really proud to be Chinese and feel that China is this kind of growing power within the world. At the same time, on the kind of like political political human right side, he throughout his tenure, he has essentially shut down a lot of important non-governmental organizations like human rights lawyers, environmental organizations that look at environmental degradation. He has arrested feminists who were protesting against you know sexual harassment on public transportation. China has not had a free press like maybe ever,

but there were sort of a little bit of leeway, like these things kind of there was a bit of a push pull. When Xi Jinping took power, like a lot of the kind of investigative journalism that was happening in the Chinese media started to disappear, he carried out this huge crackdown on corruption in his early years in office that essentially ended up jailing a lot of his political enemies. And I guess bringing it up to the past couple of years, one of the most significant things that has happened in China is that there's a region in the west of China called Xinjiang,

and it sits right on the border of Central Asia. And this region is home to some 25 million people. So China has, of course, 1.5 billion people, small fraction of those people. It's a very sparsely populated desert heavy region that's rich in natural resources. About half of that 25 million population is made up of Muslim minorities. So, it's a minority group called the Uyghurs, which some people have heard of. Kazakhstan, Muslims, Kirugas, Kui Muslims, like other groups like that.

And those minority groups have at time, especially particularly the Uighurs have had kind of conflicts with the government and with the ruling, oh, sorry, with the majority, Han population from time to time, but starting around late 2016, early 2017, the government started to really crack down on them heavily.

And it essentially implemented this system of mass surveillance, like digital and physical surveillance, as well as a system of dozens of mass and termine camps all throughout the region. According to you, like UN analysts and other estimates, there are upwards of a million people being held in these camps. This is just a kind of example of the hard line that Xi Jinping has taken towards any form of dissent.

The government essentially blames Uyghurs and kind of the religion of Islam for fostering what it turns extremist ideologies that lead to terrorism. There of course have been terrorist attacks in China, but the government has arrested everybody involved in those attacks. So essentially what we're talking about

is collective punishment for hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, for the actions of a small handful. So we're talking about mass and terming camps, right? In the 21st century. Like you have to have a lot of confidence to do that in plain sight in front of the international community. And I would say in some sense, the government was, is understandable to have that level of confidence because there hasn't been that much that's done about it. You know, I could

go on, there's a lot of thing. No, no, this is really insightful. So it sounds like what you're really describing is the sort of brazen rise of an authoritarian state. Yeah, I mean, I think the other kind of important part of this is the international side, which is that, you know, during this period of time because China has been such a successful economy, you know, came out of the global financial crisis in a better situation than a lot of the Western,

sorry, European countries and the US. You know, situation than a lot of the Western, sorry, European countries and the US, it had a lot of money that it chose to put into things like aid and infrastructure loans to lots of different countries in Southeast Asia, in Central Asia, in Europe, in Africa, in Latin America. A lot of these loans were made in exchange for things like resources. They were made sometimes to countries that did not have a super great history of paying back debt. So essentially, they were making loans to these countries that other lenders didn't want to give to.

And in exchange, they have received a lot of influence in those countries and loyalty from those countries in international institutions like the UN. So I think that's important because it tells you why is China different from any other country that may be committing human rights abuses. To me, the answer to that is that it's a much more significant and influential global power than probably any other country other than the United States. There's real sort of expansionist impulses behind it, which we really haven't seen since maybe the Cold War. Yeah, I guess so, yeah.

So I think one of the issues on the left in America is sort of maybe a skepticism about the alarms being raised. And I'm sort of curious for your take on that. So there's this sort of idea maybe that, you know, sort of this is being used for political purposes. It's not quite as urgent as maybe some people are saying that, you know, that this is a convenient tool by the right to distract from other issues, like interference from Russia or economic issues or domestic issues. Like when you try to calibrate the urgency, not just morally, but like sort of

from a national security standpoint for, not just America, but do you and in all other countries? Like how do you try to calibrate people towards like how serious they should be taking this? Yeah. Actually, let me just go back to your preview. Yeah. I kind of answered without thinking about it. You know, it's interesting that you use the word expansionist with China.

I don't think China is expansionist in the sense that the Soviet Union was, for instance, fighting proxy wars with the U.S. stuff like that. Even the way Russia has gotten involved in the Syria conflict, the way that powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia are vying for influence in the Middle East, the way that China has sought influence is very different from all of those other actors. Like China is not out there fighting proxy wars. What they're trying to do is, I mean, what they're engaging in is economic diplomacy in kind of a direct challenge to the US.

And what they're doing is much more subtle. Like what they want is to sort of reshape global norms around issues that we all think is really important. Like for instance instance around environmental regulation or labor rights or human rights or censorship of the internet, you know, by- Global health. Yeah, like exactly.

Transparency around health, as we've sort of learned very acutely during the coronavirus. Right. Yeah, so I think that it's better to sort of look at it from that perspective than to necessarily compare it to Soviet Union. Sure.

Yeah. I guess to your second question about how do we look at this, I guess I'm an American. I grew up in the US and I went to a public school in the US and everything. And I think when you're from the US and I went to a public school in the US and everything. And I think when you're from the US, you cannot. It's very hard to step out of this mindset of seeing everything through the prism of US politics. And I'm definitely guilty of this. And I understand why it happens

because everybody in the world watches our politics and they care about our politics intimately, right? Because the US, what. what happens in the U.S. affects everybody else in the world. And that's not fair, but that is the way it is. But I think that... We're also the media capital of the world, so we tend to beam out our stuff. And I think this is also what China is fighting back against. But we sort of have the cultural nexus of the world, so naturally, sort of a political nexus of the world as well.

Exactly. Yeah, I think that that's on the nose. Like, that's absolutely correct. But I think with this particular issue, like if you're trying to understand like China's role in the world, like why is China important? How should we see these issues

that you see the president talk about and stuff like that? I think it's really important to not look at it through the prison of whatever Trump or Biden are saying about it. It's important to look at it on its own merits and in its own context. It may be that people forget that when Trump took office, he was quite friendly to Xi Jinping.

He said a lot of nice things to him. He had him to visit in Florida. And it was only sort of later that the administration adopted this tough on China standpoint. So I mean, if you look at that, supposing for just for the sake of argument, if the Trump administration had stayed on it's earlier course of being more friendly towards China, the narrative would be like,

you know, Trump is appeasing the stictator, whatever, right? You know, I don't necessarily think that that's good or bad, but I'm more just pointing out that if you're trying to judge China's actions based on what, you know, a US politician, even the president has to say about it, I think you've lost your way because these, like, you know, China's actions have to be judged on the basis of themselves and

kind of in the context of China's position in the world, not in the context of how they affect the US, I think. No, I think that's very well said. It's like we, we, we should zoom out and look at these things, not in isolation. It's ironically, we're looking at them in isolation so we can see them in their true or context as opposed to following along inside the sort of the the worldview that we already have, which is inadequate to understand or explain this very different long-standing historical trend. Yeah, exactly. So you've kind of experienced, I was curious about your story,

and maybe that helps bring this home for people. Like, you're not just sort of studying and writing about the sort of rise of a authoritarian sort of governmental shift inside China, but I mean, two years ago, you were basically kicked out of China. What, what, what, what what that felt like? Oh, I mean, yeah, it was, I guess the short version of the story is that, you know, I, like, this was in 2017, I visited Xinjiang and I had the GPS coordinates, or I had the location of one of these internment

camps, and I actually went on foot and visited it and took some pictures and stuff like that. I didn't go inside, but I did see it and I saw all of the signage, which said exactly what it was. And then we wrote a piece. It was published on Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed does not have a pay wall, which meant that a lot of people read this piece.

And my visa was essentially, it was a sick, I think it was like effectively, it was a six-month visa, and it was up for, I was meant to apply for a new visa in February of 2018. Chinese authorities told me that it wouldn't be a problem, and then I went to apply for it, and there was like a whole bunch of things that happened, like they said that they lost the application and this and that, and then finally in May, they said that they would not be issuing me anymore new visas. And they came up with kind of a process-related justification

for this, but it's sort of been widely interpreted that it was about the coverage. You know, nobody ever told me that it was about the coverage, but you know, from the Chinese government. Typically, when journalists do lose their visas in China, it's never portrayed to be about the coverage. It's usually, there's some other explanation that's given for it.

And as far as how it felt, I was pretty devastated. I had been in China at that point. I think for a total of seven or eight years, I probably about seven years in total, like six as a journalist, and then a year in change, as a researcher and as a student. And it was, I spent most of my 20s there,

I had learned the language, all my friends were there. I was like, I still have a real deep love for China and for Chinese culture. And it made me really sad that I had to leave in that way. I just never expected that that would be the case. And then at the time, I didn't, I wasn't thinking, oh my god, I'm banned for life or anything like that. But I mean, in retrospect, I would probably be a little bit circumspect

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podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. So knowing that you were on this kind of sort of rolling six-month visa, there must have been a part of you that sort of understood what the implications of that was, which is sort of like, if you stay within certain bounds, you know, you're probably good, you'll maintain your access, you could continue to write, make a small difference, but if you sort of step outside those bounds, there could be consequences, probably that when you experience being the least dangerous of those consequences,

just because this is a thing that goes into the sort of, although they weren't journalists, it's sort of a constant, stoic theme of sort of like, do you speak truth to power? Do you, is it of being able to do the most good over the longest period of time, you know, do you, do you have, is it better to be on the inside or the outside, you know, or do you, do you sort of blow yourself up? Right? Like, like, I'm just curious, like, how did you manage what must have been, sort of an ethically fraught

set of decisions, or did you not think about it at all? And that's why you just published what you thought you should publish. That's a great question. So, okay, so let me start by explaining that. So like you come up with this bargain in a lot of countries in the world, right? Because in many countries,

you need a form of accreditation just to work as a journalist there if you are not a national of that country or a permanent resident or something, right? So like in the US, for instance, you don't need a press card to work as a journalist. You don't need anything, anyone can go and be like, that's right.

So I'll give you an example. So in Thailand, you need press accreditation. And Thailand, I don't know how it is now, but when I was living there, you know, working as a journalist in like 2017, it was sort of a known thing that there are certain red lines that you just don't cross. And one of the big red lines is just writing about the monarchy.

They have a very, they have a, they have a Les Magi-Sélo, that they definitely use to punish people who say things that are even kind of borderline defamatory about the monarchy, let alone like a news article that would be really critical, right? Other than that, you can report on a lot of stuff in Thailand. You have a pretty broad range. But the fact that that red line is there and it's like kind of clearly articulated,

it means that a lot of journalists, actually probably most journalists who are based there are just gonna stay away from that. And if they do publish something on the monarchy, maybe they'll do it from outside of Thailand, and so forth, right? So like, you know that if you cross that line, you're probably gonna get arrested or something like that.

Right. China is not like this. So it's kind of strange to say now, because now they've thrown out so many journalists that it seems like they've always been like this. But it's really not the case. You know, when I was, when I lost my visa in 2018, they hadn't really thrown out that many journalists.

There are probably a few hundred foreign journalists that are based in China and they threw out maybe on an average of one a year, I think probably since around 2010 or 2011. And before that, they hadn't really thrown at anyone since the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. So I never went around thinking, I'm gonna lose my visa because they just weren't doing that. They would pressure you in other ways. They would pressure the business sides of organizations that wanted to appeal to Chinese consumers, like so for instance, like

Bloomberg sells terminals to Chinese banks. So it's very easy for them to pull that lever and say, we'll have to state control banks not to buy your terminals anymore. They would do a lot of stuff like that. They would intimidate you. They would go after your any Chinese nationals that you happen to be working with, anyone you interview, they would try to scare you, all of that stuff happened to me, but I didn't really care about any of that because I just, you know, I mean, I knew that this was not a country where they were regularly jailing journalists who were foreign nationals and stuff like that. So it didn't really cross my mind to think about that.

But in retrospect, I think what happened is that, I think I lost my visa sort of on the cusp of relations between the US and China really, really deteriorating. And now we're in this period where things have gotten so bad that both countries are taking what they perceive to be retaliatory actions against the other. And China is, and all of these journalists, instead of necessarily being punished for

their coverage, which is what was happening in the past, have all kind of become ponds in this kind of grand strategy game in a way that was never really the case before. So do you see yourself more as sort of someone who got caught in the crossfire? Do you see yourself as someone who made a powerful enemy? I don't know. I mean, I still don't, I don't see the government as my enemy at all. Like, you know, I still, I guess it sounds idealistic, but I still feel that I was just doing my job, you know, it's, it shouldn't be a shock to them that, you know, foreign journalists will come in and be critical of various things that are happening in the country.

That's just how it works. They know that. They're not like everybody that I've met in China's foreign ministry, which is the body that deals with journalists is extremely smart. They're all well-traveled, have top educations and speak perfect English and all that stuff, like they know exactly how it works. I do think that I probably lost my visa. I mean, I suspect that it probably had something to do with my coverage because they had expressed

that they were not happy with my reporting on human rights, kind of on several occasions. So I think it was probably more about that. The State Department did put out a statement about me losing my visa, but that was after it had already happened and stuff. So I don't think that there was anything going on behind the scenes like what is probably happening now.

But I've got to imagine that as far as sort of looking yourself in the mirror, or sort of at the end of your life when you're like, hey, you know, did I sort of, did I do my job with courage and a commitment to my ideals, the idea of losing a visa because you published a very prominent story about what are in effect modern concentration camps. That's got to be something that one, you're proud of,

but two, that you wouldn't trade. Like you wouldn't say, hey, if you knew that having unpublished that story or not publishing that story, you could be there in China right now, I can't imagine you would, you would take that trade. No, I mean, yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. Like, to be clear, I mean, it was,

it was hard for me emotionally and sort of personally, but I did not face any great hardship. I would never claim that I have. I know people who have gone to prison for doing things that upheld their ideals. I know a lot of people that have gone to prison for stuff like that for years in some cases. I know people who have been exiled from their home countries

who will probably never see their families again. In the case of Wiggers, a lot of people can't even phone their families or even send messages to them on messaging apps. Like, compared to these people, I have faced absolutely nothing and I'm more than happy to have done whatever small thing I did to bring more attention to the internment camps. Well, maybe let's sort of wrap up there because it is the sort of most urgent and sort of vexing issue. How this idea that people are, literally millions of people are in internment camps. And it's hard to say where the line of internment camp versus concentration camp begins and ends. But I've got to think when forced labor becomes involved, when sterilization becomes involved,

when there's sort of real threats being made to people who are speaking out about said camps, it's, I mean, it is almost human rights issue feels like like a polite euphemism for what is a sort of a horrendous crisis. It is, yeah, absolutely. What do you, what do you, people need to know about this? Like, I guess that's sort of where I've come to it. I came to it late, but sort of struggling with,

it sort of feels like it's halfway between this like distant, untouchable thing, which, you know, for a lot of people in the Holocaust, it sort of feels like it's halfway between this like distant, untouchable thing, which you know for a lot of people in the Holocaust, it was like well that's in occupied hostile territory, what can we do about it? And and then also you know feels very both accessible and human, like I just don't know what to think about or what to do about it. It's hard. You know, people ask me this all the time,

like, what can I do about it? And there's not a great answer because, you know, there are definitely other major human rights crises around the world. Like, you know, I mean, Yemen, for instance, whether a hangar Muslims are facing in Bangladesh, like, let's just go on and on and on. But, you know, in not all of those,

but in many of those, as an individual, you can actually do something really good by giving money to a humanitarian organization, right? I mean, not 100%, but okay, like for instance, for the Rehingya, like you could do a lot just by giving money to an organization that provides medical care% but, okay, like for instance, for the Rohingya, like you could, you could do a lot just by giving money to an organization that provides medical care, clothing, food, like basic necessities, right? In this case, you can't really, we can't solve the money through, or sorry, we cannot solve the problem in that way because it is not a humanitarian problem. It is a problem of, you know, of human rights and diplomacy

and geopolitics, which sort of limits what individuals can do, I think, necessarily. However, I do think that if you're an American or if you're in Europe or you live in a place where you have access to elected officials and stuff like that, then if you care strongly about it, it makes sense to call them. I think that has actually done a lot in the States, just like the kind of rising consciousness. Like I've had, you know, people who work in government and stuff, that you know, tell me how important it is when there is press coverage and when constituents find out about it and stuff like that. I think it does make a difference to call your Congress person.

The other big part of this, like you mentioned this, but is the forced labor issue. This is a relatively new phenomenon in the context of the camps. It's just started sort of being reported on in-depth beginning of last year, I think. And it continues to be an issue. But that, I think, is something really like directly touches us as consumers, you know, when we can look at clothing brands and say, why is your supply chain linked to this region? And I think the kind of important point there is that, you know, if you think about practically, what does it mean to be a clothing manufacturer and audit your supply

chain for things like sports labor and other abuses. You need access to those factories and you need access in an unfettered way. That's really, really hard in a place like Xinjiang where there's such heavy government surveillance and then there's sort of government control of people's movements and things like that. So I think it places a much greater burden on these companies

to sort of prove that their supply chains are free of forced labor and they have not been able to do that. They really haven't. And there are scholars like Adrian Zenz, who is a scholar of the current crisis in Xinjiang, who say that any company that has links to that region is inherently compromised. And I think in a way that makes sense to me.

So I guess if I were a consumer in the US right now, I would really be thinking about my choices in what I purchase as it relates to this crisis. There are lists, if you Google, there are lists of all of these companies that do this, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has put out research on this CSIS, the Think Tank in Washington, DC has put out research on this. There are a lot

of resources in that way. And the third thing that I would mention is that there is an organization in Kazakhstan called Adagert, which is involved in doing really good work around advocacy and also around health for former detainees that I would really recommend looking up. They don't have a ton of money. When I visited them last, they were in a kind of old office building and we were sitting in a conference room

and the lock in the door had broken. So they were tying the door together. So it would be like, what the piece of ribbon? So they are kind of broke. I think. I don't want to speak for them, but I think that, you know, they have things on the internet where they've been fundraising. I wouldn't necessarily say give money or don't give money, but you can go online and check them out and, you know, see if it's worth your time, I think. I take your point that it's not a sort of a third world humanitarian crisis and that

like, hey, they don't have access to clean drinking water or something in the way that, you know, like donating money to save people from malaria, there's like a sort of an immediacy to it. And so I get that, I do see how that sort of disempowers people. But what I was so both surprised and kind of inspired by, and this is how you and I connected through the Weaker Human Rights Project, is, you know, I got an email from them. They're like, hey, here's a person who recently got out of the camps, and we've, you know, secured a sort of a special, like a silent visa for her to come to America.

She's boarding a flight right now. And it was like, all that what was needed was because they can't work when they come here because of the asylum visa. It was like a thousand dollars a month in living expenses. And it was like, oh, I can cover that for a while. That's like, I think it took what seemed like a totally

enormous sort of statistically large problem and brought it back down to a very small human issue that one person could help another person with almost as if you had told an American in 1941 that hey, if you have a spare bedroom and a Jewish person could stay there, you're saving them from the Holocaust. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Oh my God.

This is a bit of a digression. But I think about this all the time because a big part of my job is interviewing ex-detainees and, you know, I cover a lot of stuff around human rights. So I end up meeting a lot of people in these types of situations. And it's crazy to me because I think like there are so many people in the US that if you ask them, can you just make a bank transfer to this person for a few hundred bucks

so that they can make their rent? They would be like totally, like of course. And but the reality is, you know, in Kazakhstan, especially a lot of these ex, like ex-detainees and other people that are coming from the region, they show up. They don't have necessarily a lot of skills or education because they may have grown up in a farm.

They are able to get legal status in the country, but they don't get a whole lot else. And on top of that, if you actually came from one of these camps, you probably have a lot of residual health effects. I don't think I've met a single person that didn't have some serious health problem out of, from after coming out of these camps just because the conditions are so bad, like people are under eating, they are overcrowded. It's very cold in these places. So if you're there in winter, it becomes a big problem. It's like all of these things. And of course, they're dealing with serious,

serious post-traumatic stress. And they don't have a lot of resources to know how to cope with these things, like flashbacks and nightmares and stuff like that. And the thing is, if they had access to just basic medical care, and, you know, I mean, Terson, the woman that you're helping, she might, I don't know if they told you,

but her house burned down, you know, like shortly after I interviewed her, her house was like set on fire. I still don't know exactly what happened, but I mean, think about, like, you know, even setting aside all of the various possibilities, you know, like think about coming to a new country. She's not even cosmic herself. Her husband is cosmic. She's a weaker. She's coming to this

country and she finally is getting settled. And then her house burns down, right? And then at the same time, she's at risk of being deported back to China at that time. She's dealing with all these health issues and mental health issues as well. Like, it's just a really stunning thing. And like, you know, the thing is, it's funny because like you're supporting her now because she's in the US and, you know, you found out about her situation and stuff,

but like, I feel like if someone had known or if people had known about her situation back when she was in Kazakhstan, then like it would have helped her so much. And there's so many people like her that even kind of small amounts of money would go such a long way towards just materially improving their lives,

but there's no way to kind of like make those connections. I've just found that really frustrating. Well, that's what I sort of gathered from the Weaver Human Rights Project. It was like really sometimes the issue between sort of life and death for these people is like, can they get on a plane ticket? Can they get a plane ticket from Kazakhstan to the United States? Because once they're here, as bad as our social safety net is, they're not going to be extra

to extra-dited or taken. So, so it's like, if seriously if people could just donate money to get them on a plane, it's like other, there are other charities that will help them with the rest of it, right? And so, all they needed was a lawyer to help them get the visa to get the plane ticket, which maybe they could have paid for. So I think So I think something that I take from Stoicism is like, you can't let the crush of the enormity of the problem sort of make you despair or make you think that the only thing you can do

is call your representative. There are like, you could also just help individual human beings. And I think to bring this full circle, when you're talking about studying history, when you really read, whether it's the story of Anne Frank or that book, The Painted Bird, when you read about survivors of the Holocaust,

really, it doesn't come down to, although some of them, hey, we are liberated by the, you know, the whatever airborne division, but it's much more like, hey, this human being at a farmhouse in Austria helped me for two nights, and that's what saved me. You know, like that really human beings helping one other human being sort of extrapolated out enough makes an enormous difference.

And certainly, even if it doesn't make a geopolitical difference, it makes a difference for that person in that moment. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. I definitely try to practice that in my life. I honestly, like, because I write about kind of big abstract subjects sometimes, I feel like if I didn't do that stuff, I really would despair, which would be really counterproductive.

Also, I just wanted to add though, that there's something just that people should be aware of, which is that I think in a personalized case, what you said is absolutely true that you know, she, I don't know what her exact situation was, but I assume that someone would have had to pay for her flight and so forth. If she were actually in Xinjiang, that wouldn't be the obstacle. And the reason that the government has collected passports for all these people, like, Muslim minorities.

So the first obstacle is getting your passport, which the overwhelming majority of people don't even get to that point. So like, when I say that money can't solve the problem, I really mean it. It's not just about mobility and stuff like that. But I do think this kind of thing does make a difference for people in the diaspora community who have made it out, but are still struggling.

No, and look, somebody like I have two grandparents who are refugees from Europe in the Second World War, and like somebody covered for them and let them come here. And I do feel like, you know, like human beings have the obligation to pay forward the advantages that allow them to do it. And you're right. It's not, you can't go like, oh, hey, like all sponsors, six people from these camps to come here. It's, there are a few people who have been released or have escaped or were are under the impression that they're about to be taken.

And those people can be saved. And you can make a small difference there. Yeah. Thank you so much. I'm so glad we connected. And thank you for the a small difference there. Yeah. Thank you so much. I'm so glad we connected and thank you for the work you're doing and please, please keep writing. No worries. Thanks so much for having me on.

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