The Daily - The Chinese Surveillance State, Part 2

Episode Date: May 7, 2019

In Part 2 of our series, we tell the story of an American citizen whose family members have been detained in Chinese re-education camps for Uighurs and members of other Muslim minority groups. We look at what his efforts to free them reveal about the global reach of China’s surveillance. Guest: Paul Mozur, a technology reporter for The New York Times based in Shanghai, spoke with Ferkat Jawdat, a Uighur and American citizen who lives in Virginia. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities have been sent to camps in vast numbers in what is China’s most sweeping internment operation since the Mao era.Chinese officers have attempted to suppress opposition from Uighurs abroad by detaining their relatives.The Trump administration has avoided addressing the persecution of the Uighurs during trade talks with China, fearing such a move could jeopardize a deal.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the story of one man whose family has been detained in Chinese government camps. What his efforts to free them are revealing about the global reach of China's surveillance. Paul Moser with part two of our series. It's Tuesday, May 7th. So Paul, yesterday you told us about how China is using its surveillance technology in this northwest region of China to control the minority population who lives there, the Uyghurs. Give us again a picture of

what life is like there for the Uyghurs. So first thing to kind of realize about China and this region called Xinjiang is that most of the 1.4 billion people who live in China are ethnically Chinese. But there are a number of small minorities. And one of the larger minorities is this group called the Uyghurs. And there's about 11, 12 million of them. They're a Muslim minority. They're much closer to sort of Central Asia in a lot of ways culturally than they are to Chinese culturally. And so there has naturally been some cultural clashes around that and frictions over the years. And in particular, one of the things that's happened is the Chinese have sort of systematically moved

a large number of Han Chinese into this region, trying to sort of turn what is a Muslim minority into something that's closer to the Chinese. So to kind of eradicate in a way the sort of markers of Uyghur cultural identity. And that's created a lot of tension, more pitched violent clashes. And so today, over the past few years, what we've

seen installed is just this incredibly sophisticated set of personal and technical surveillance. So you walk down a street in the city of Kashgar, where we were, you'll hit a checkpoint maybe every 200 yards and they'll stop people, they'll scan their IDs, they'll force them to take a photo for facial recognition, and then they'll move on. But then 200 yards later, you run into another one and then there's police everywhere. Right. And then you have cameras hanging from every corner. And then within communities themselves, you have informants that have been developed by the police as well. People who are sort of encouraged to rat to follow what the government wants it to do. And when you're reporting there, are you able to actually talk to Uyghurs?

Because it's hard to imagine from what you're saying, with every aspect of their life being surveilled, that they could safely or wisely speak to someone like you from the West? Right, and the answer is no. You know, we were in the city of Kashgar, and we were followed by a secret police team of about seven. And so every time you leave the hotel, and there's only one way out of the hotel because the rest of it is surrounded by barbed wire,

you have seven secret police following you. And if you talk to anybody, they take down their ID information. So if you buy a vegetable from a vendor, they take down their information. I could probably have gone for a jog and lost these guys. But even if you lose them, there are so many cameras around that you can't be certain that you're away from the gaze of the state. And so it's just too risky to talk to a single person in a meaningful way there. So all you can kind of do is just watch and observe and wander about the city.

Because to talk to someone is to pretty much guarantee that you will ensure they're in trouble. Yes. So how do you go about really understanding what's happening here? There's only so much that can be known when you're walking around being trailed by seven members of the secret police force.

Right, so we read a lot of documents, you know, the police write studies about how to control populations. There's all kinds of procurement documents about buying up technology to put into these places. And then one of the other things we do is there's an increasingly large amount of people have fled to other countries because of what's been going on or people who were outside the country can't return. And so what you end up with is these large populations of Uyghurs living in Istanbul and Kazakhstan and in the Persian Gulf and in the United States who can give us some sense of what's going on there through their own family networks and networks of friends.

And so I found one man in Northern Virginia. His name is Ferkat Jodat. And we sat down kind of in a strip mall outside a Starbucks, sort of in his late 20s, smoking quite a lot, kind of chain smoking. And you can tell that the sort of traumas of what's gone on to his family have really affected him. He said he wants to take a stand and somebody needs to stand up and say this. And so he spoke with us and told us his story. And what's the story that Faircat told you? So basically, his father applied for asylum in the United States. And they're granted, you know, the ability to come over by the United States government. This whole family is able to come over, except for his mother.

His mother, for some reason, the Chinese authorities won't give her her passport. Like, we tried all the legal ways, all different legal ways to get my mom a Chinese passport. Then my mom, she talked to, like, all different levels of government offices, police, to get her a Chinese passport. So she can't leave? She cannot leave. And they keep changing the reasoning. They'll say, well, you need to do this and this.

She hasn't filed this piece of paper, so if you file this, then she can get it. Like, whenever they ask some documents, we just send them. Whenever they ask something, we just give them. They file it and then they say, oh, but you know, you also failed to do this. This is sort of one of the ways they sort of, you can get killed by bureaucracy in China. And so it became clear they weren't going to give her one. And so the mother is separated from her children and from her husband. And so the mother is separated from her children and from her husband. It's really hard. Like, she wakes up by herself.

She cooks. She eats. She sleeps by herself. So she was really depressed. So she then, you know, begins this 10 years of sort of living a more solitary life. The only way they can talk to her, and they talk to her very regularly every day, is over electronic communications. I used to call her sometimes like twice a day in the morning and the night it's just normal conversation like between a mom and a son how we miss each other and then especially on those like special

days like her birthday or my birthday or new year like some holidays we just wish that the next holiday or next special day next birthday we're gonna celebrate together in the u.s but this is also at the time when the crackdown really picks up. And, you know, checkpoints double and then triple and cameras start to appear and there's more and more informants going on. There's more sort of prohibition of Uyghur culture. And then in 2017, they get a message. And then in 2017, they get a message. 2017, November, I think it's mid-November. She told me one time on a WeChat that she was going to school.

She basically says, I have to go study. I have to go study. I have to go study. It means that she is going away to a camp. The Chinese say that these camps are about re-education, about teaching people to learn new trades. But in reality, from what we hear and what human rights groups say, they're much closer to almost concentration camps. You know, about 10% of the Uyghur population has been disappeared into these camps from what we know, about a million people. You have people spirited away to these places often at night. spirited away to these places often at night.

When they get there, they're made to kind of sing patriotic songs and hear lectures about Chinese Communist Party ideology, write self-criticism, sometimes do compulsory exercise. There are stories about abuse from prison guards and guards yelling at people. So if you act out of line, maybe you'll get sent to a camp or maybe your mother will get sent to a camp. So she went and we were scared. It's not clear why she's been taken away, your mother will get sent to a camp. It's not clear why she's been taken away, but she has been.

But then, a few weeks later, she comes back out of the camps. And when he gets her on the phone, many times she doesn't say a word. She just opens a video and then cries here. All she can kind of do is cry. I can see the fear in her eyes, and then I can feel that there is something that she wanted to tell me, but she wasn't able to. And why can't you tell him anything? We don't know for sure, but one of the things we've heard about these camps is that when

you get out, you're either made to promise that you won't talk or you're made to sign something saying you won't talk. And I think the people are aware that their connections to any family that might be overseas could get them in further trouble. And so, you know, it's one thing to be locked away in one of these places, but then it's a whole other thing to then realize that once you're out, if you talk to your family, that could put you back. And even worse, you can't process the stuff by telling them. It's a sort of level of control that almost boggles the mind because it's not just physical. It's emotional and it's about your relationships themselves. And I think that's one of the real scary things about this.

So, you know, this goes on for a few months. He has this kind of more strained, distant relationship with his mother. But February 6th, she sent me the last message saying that she's going to the school again. She disappears the second time. She was crying.

And on the end, she said that she doesn't know when she can come back or if she can come back that's the last time i heard her voice so on march 5th 2018 like a month after my mom was arrested five people from my father's side like five people did run up in one day and then sent to the camps and at this point you know his family in the United States huddles together and says, well, what are we, what are we going to do? And, you know, they decide to wait because they don't, they don't know, you know, it's been now more than a year. You know, you get occasional hints

of what's happening. In one case, he got a message from a police officer. On April, I got a video from my aunt, which was sent to me by a Chinese police on WeChat. And then my aunt was saying that how much she missed, like, all of us. And then my mom is doing okay in the school. She's studying. But my mom, she needs her medicines. Saying to send money to support his mother because his mother has no family network. And then because her two younger brothers, they were all in the camp already. Saying to send money to support his mother because his mother has no family network. I sent the transaction ID to the Chinese guy that sent me the video. And I asked him to tell my aunt that I sent the money so she could pick it up.

I didn't hear anything. So after three months, I had to take the money back. In another case, you know, and this just shows you how wild this situation is. He got on a dating app, jumped to the local area because the dating app, you can go wherever you want geographically. So he plopped himself into his hometown on the dating app and found somebody he knew and asked that person like, hey, do you know what happened to my family? And did it work? I think he got a little bit of an indication of what was happening, but not a ton of information. But presumably even that kind of interaction might put the person he contacted at risk.

Exactly. And I think he was desperate enough that he was just willing to try anything. So I couldn't take it anymore. I said, no, I got to do something. So I started meeting with local government officials in the United States. Yes, in the U.S. You know, he's an American. My family is literally being taken from me. Right, right. What can I do here as an American? So I met with the former congresswoman from Virginia, Barbara Comstock's office.

She sent a letter to the Chinese ambassador here in the U.S. And then she sent a letter to the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the U.S. ambassador in China. Asking about my mom and then asked the Chinese government to release her as well as other Uyghurs. We haven't got any response from the Chinese embassy yet. And then he starts talking to media, too. So, you know, he reaches out, he talks to The Atlantic, he talks to BuzzFeed. I gave talks, I gave speeches at the rallies or university panel discussions.

And eventually he talks to some French press who actually go to Xinjiang and try to track down some of his family. I heard from some other people in the same city that my grandmother and my aunt, they were harassed by the Chinese government as well, too. His family is being threatened each time he speaks out. You know, when he talks, the police sort of go and threaten the family members. The police officer is flashing a picture of him, you know, his photo in Xinjiang and telling his family members, if this guy talks again, if he keeps talking,

well, there's going to be more problems. So he needs to stop. After I became so public, some of them asked me to delete their pictures from my social accounts, like Facebook, Instagram. People are unfriending him on Facebook, within social media. I'm kind of like a social guy. I have lots of friends.

Many of them are really close. I'm kind of becoming alone. But what's my choice? Last month, we met with Secretary of State

Mike Pompeo in D.C. He gets a meeting with Secretary of State Pompeo. And this is a real high-profile moment. I mean, this is real news. Wow. So we met and we explained how it's really destroying our lives here in the U.S. and how we ask the U.S. government, since they got upper-hand on trade talks,

to ask the Chinese government to shut down the camps and let them release our family members and let them come to the U.S. government, since they got upper-hand trade talks, has the Chinese government to shut down the camps and let them release our family members and let them come to U.S. And, you know, this meeting with Pompeo should be a triumph politically. But guess what happens just after that? What happens? My uncle and my aunt, they were transferred to another city, to the prison for seven or eight years in terms of... The family members are transferred from a camp to a prison, where conditions are probably far worse.

So his efforts to draw attention to this, which are succeeding, they're actually resulting in his family being punished in the worst way possible. Exactly. And in fact, in some ways, by engaging with it, he's causing that to happen to his family. And yet, Paul, you spoke to him after all this happened, which suggests that he is still speaking out about this. Exactly. And it's... Why? You know, he was clearly very torn up about it.

I mean, this is a man who is clearly beset by a lot of anxiety. He smoked like six or seven cigarettes in the course of, you know, the hour that we were talking. But, you know, the thing he told me that I thought was really powerful is he said, you know, I don't think I can see my mom alive in this world. But as a Muslim, I believe the next life. So the next step, I want to be able to say that I did something to protect her, to save her, for my people. Talking is what's right here. We need to get this out to the world.

And so, you know, we finished up. He sort of demonstrated a bit of the sort of Uyghur kindness that the region's famous for. You know, he offered to drive me to my next meeting, which was like 45 minutes away and totally unnecessary. So, you know, I sort of politely told him, no, no, no, it was fine. And then we parted ways, you know, back to his life in the suburbs of Virginia.

How many people like Faircat do you think there are at this point, given the immense pressure that China is exerting on these members of the Uyghur community, even abroad? I mean, thousands. Every Uyghur who's living abroad most likely has some relative or connection to somebody who's in a camp at this point. For all intents and purposes, for these people, they've disappeared from their lives. It's funny that when you talk to people, sometimes they sort of talk about, well, I'm not sure if they're still alive or not. It's the equivalent of death if you just no longer hear from them. And so oftentimes they wonder like, well, has my family member died or not? And then you have whole cities that aren't really sure about the fate of

the people around them. In that context, you know, waiting in line at a checkpoint, not knowing if an alarm is going to go off, watching a policeman and kind of eyeing him not sure if he's going to come and stop you going under a camera talking to a neighbor who could be an informant all of these things become fraught and things that are sort of stressful and i mean it's it's an exertion of control at just such a fundamental level i think it's hard to comprehend until you really think through the consequences of if i tell my kid something and they repeat it in class, it's possible I will disappear and they will go to an orphanage. And we have examples of that happening where, you know, a parent talks about the Quran to their kid and then, you know, the

kid brings it up in school and then the family disappears. These are the kinds of things that have been just fundamentally altered by these tactics. And it's just kind of mind-boggling. I guess what I meant is, of those thousands of Uyghurs living overseas, like Ferkad, how many are still speaking out given the consequences of speaking out? Some. Not a ton. But I would say more are worried about talking than are talking.

You know, I mean, Ferkhan is absolutely in the minority here. But when we spoke yesterday, it was all about the surveillance state inside China and how it so effectively suppresses the Uyghurs there. But this system, as you're describing it now, also seems very effective at suppressing the Uyghurs who have left China, which is a very strange achievement to be able to accomplish that in both of those worlds. Yeah, and I think if you think about those connections going overseas, that gives you a new lever that you can use within populations outside of your country. And Chinese authorities have been very effective at using that and knowing that, you know, yeah, you can use a Skype call to say hi to your grandmother, but you can also use a Skype call to threaten the life of somebody's grandmother.

And it's the same technology with a very different use, the sort of staggering power that it allows you to have and the way that it sort of just plows through borders and gives you sort of that ability to reach outside of of your country and extend you know what is effectively sort of a prison state to those outside the prison yeah to america you know you have people living in suburbs of washington dc who are in some ways being controlled by choices being made 6,000 miles away in Xinjiang. You know, as I listen to this, I have been astonished that this story isn't more widely known and talked about in the United States. And I wonder if you think that's in part because of what a successful job China has done in making the telling of this story so dangerous. Yeah, I think absolutely. I think, you know, if you had more people who could speak out, if you had more protesters, if we were

able to go in and do more reporting where we could talk to people on the ground, where we could go see these camps. Profile them, make them real. Yeah, anything. And they have brought people in, but they do it as a propaganda exercise. So they bring people into a camp that's been set up in a kind of Potemkin way to make it seem like everything is OK. And then they have their own media, which they use to send out videos of camps that make them seem like lovely places to learn a new profession. And that gets spread around because that's the only images anybody has. And that is part of what I think is creating the muted effect here. But I don't think we should neglect the other side of this, which is the money and the diplomatic power and influence that China has created and developed over the past decade or two decades. In general, what we've seen is that countries like Saudi Arabia, countries like Malaysia, countries like Kazakhstan, the places that would be the natural advocates for this just have not come out in a forceful way. Because of their financial relationships to China. Financial relationships, diplomatic relationships. You're saying the parts of the Muslim world that you would expect to be absolutely horrified by this, part of the reason that they are not speaking out is because they have deals, perhaps including deals for surveillance equipment with China.

Absolutely. And I think it even goes further than that because it's the way that China structures its diplomatic relationships. China sort of basically will tolerate no dissent. If somebody protests an American action, you're not going to cut them off from the international world or immediately pull all American loans and American aid necessarily. But in China, we see that kind of a thing happening over and over again. And so I think countries have learned and they know that you are not to go against them on these sorts of topics and you just have to stay quiet. Paul, how does this end in your mind? Does it end with the Chinese government succeeding in the idea that seems to be behind all this to make the Uyghurs more or less indistinguishable from the ethnic Chinese?

It's hard to see how they achieve that goal in any kind of short or medium term, right? I mean, I think we know pretty obviously that if you pull people into camps and berate them about their culture and shove propaganda down their throats and have them write criticisms of themselves, they're going to sort of retreat to an even deeper set of convictions about who they are and what they stand for. But at the same time, if you cannot read a Quran, you can't grow out a beard, you can't go to a mosque, if you can't be yourself in your own homeland, then does it matter? Haven't they already won anyway, even if inside people do kind of still carry their Uyghur identity with them? And if you do that long enough, you know, maybe you have two

generations that are angry at you, but if you can keep it up long enough, then maybe people just forget. Then maybe it stops existing. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. What is your favorite Uyghur instrument? Dutar. Dutar. I don't know how to play it.

Do you like Abdurrahim Hayt? Yes. Beautiful, right? It is beautiful. It is beautiful. Despite the Trump administration's decision not to confront China over its detention of Uyghurs, a few days ago, a senior official in the U.S. Department of Defense accused China of operating what he called concentration camps. Asked by a reporter why he chose that phrase, the official, Randall Shriver, said, quote,

What we understand to be the magnitude of the detention and what the goals are of the Chinese government and their own public comments make that a very, I think, appropriate description. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. You can see this hole in the ground where one of the Palestinian rockets hit right next to a house completely, destroying the wall here and pushing shrapnel. On Monday,

Israel and Gaza reached a tentative ceasefire after days of combat that killed 22 Palestinians, including militants and children, and four Israeli civilians. A rocket here killed the owner of this house. So when rockets come into neighborhoods like this, it certainly absolutely rattles nerves. The ceasefire was brokered by Egypt and the United Nations, and includes measures to ease the economic crisis in Gaza, which has reached an acute state of poverty. crisis in Gaza, which has reached an acute state of poverty. Since the start of the latest violence on Friday, which appeared to begin with a Gazan sniper shooting two Israeli soldiers, militants in Gaza fired more than 600 rockets into southern Israel, and Israel struck 350 militant targets in Gaza. And the House Judiciary Committee will vote on Wednesday

to hold the Attorney General in contempt after he missed a deadline to negotiate the delivery of the special counsel's full, unredacted report. Democrats said that the vote could be avoided if the Attorney General, William Barr, changes course before Wednesday. But if the Attorney General, William Barr, changes course before Wednesday. But if the vote occurs and the full democratically controlled House of Representatives also holds Barr in

contempt, it would be the second time in U.S. history that such a penalty was imposed on the Attorney General. The first time was in 2012, when a Republican-controlled House held Eric Holder, the Attorney General under President Obama, in contempt for failing to turn over documents about an investigation into gun sales. Finally, a major U.N. report released on Monday found that human activity has put as many as one million species of plants and animals at risk of extinction, many within decades. The report found that as the human population passes seven billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing, and mining are altering the natural world at an unprecedented rate.

are altering the natural world at an unprecedented rate. Today, 75% of the world's land-based habitats and 66% of its marine life have been severely altered by humans. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.