An Inside Look At China’s Internment of Muslims, with BuzzFeed News’ Megha Rajagopalan

China’s mass internment of Muslims in its Xinjiang region is one of the world's most under-covered stories The country has detained one million people there, putting them through a “re-education” program meant to erase their language and culture, sometimes through forced labor and sterilization. Though comprehensive, on-the-ground reporting from Xinjiang is sparse, BuzzFeed News reporter Megha Rajagopalan has been on the story from the beginning. She joins the podcast to discuss her reports from Xinjiang itself, and how she worked with BuzzFeed contributors to monitor the internment camps using satellite imagery, finding that they are expanding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hey, Megha, how's it going?

• 1:04Speaker 01

  I'm good. How are you?

• 1:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm great. Is it okay if we speak a little bit about you getting kicked out of Beijing?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 1:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast. Today on the show, we have one of my former colleagues, Megha Rajagopalan, who's an international correspondent at BuzzFeed News. And I'm really excited to bring Megha on today because she has done the leading reporting on what's happening in Xinjiang region in China, where millions or about around a million people, according to reports, have been detained in some way for questionable for crimes. We don't even know exactly what's happening. They've been largely Muslim and there's a program going on inside China to essentially forcibly assimilate these folks. And it's a story that I don't think is getting enough attention, but Megha has been on the front lines of it.

• 2:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're going to hear a little bit about her reporting, her experience in China, and how she used tech to help find out what was going on in the region. So I couldn't be more excited to welcome Megha to the show. Megha, great to have you on.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great, so you recently published a story with a couple of other reporters, finding that in Xinjiang, which is a region in China, there had been a number of detention centers that hadn't been reported, but using a trick, looking at some of the blacked-out areas in Baidu Maps, you had found dozens of these detention centers. So I want to talk about that, I want to talk about the reporting process. But first, I'd love to hear, just from your perspective, what is Xinjiang and what's happening there? Like, take us, give us like the 10,000-foot view before we dive into it.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Okay, so Xinjiang is a really large region in western China that sits on the border of a number of Central Asian countries. You have a population there of some like 25 million people. About half of those are made up of Uighur Muslims and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities, and the other half are Han Chinese, so they belong to the dominant ethnic group in China. And Xinjiang has been sort of a less-developed part of China for some time. The government has kind of had its issues with the minority populations there for a long time, since the Communist Party came to power in 1949.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  But what I've primarily written about is the government's policies in Xinjiang, kind of in the Xi Jinping era. And it's during that time period that things got significantly worse. Starting in sort of late 2016, early 2017, the government started to implement this policy of, first of all, high-tech and very pervasive surveillance over Muslim minority populations, and on the other hand, mass internment and incarceration of a portion of that population.

• 4:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  So they're detaining, they're, sorry, they're detaining.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Detaining and incarcerating.

• 4:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, okay.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  So according to UN officials and some academic estimates, there are upwards of a million people who have been detained in that region since 2017. But these numbers are... I just wanted to add this. The numbers involve a lot of extrapolation and they're sort of hard to get to. But that's sort of the ballpark figure that everyone takes seriously.

• 4:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what does China say there? I mean, if they're going to incarcerate folks like this, like what do they say their crime is?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  So I think it's important to distinguish between people who are in extrajudicial camp facilities versus people who are in the normal prison population. In some senses, it's a distinction without a difference because the camps are not... The government calls the camps vocational training centers or schools. They are not that. They are internment camps. But the thing that you do to get to camps versus the kinds of things that you do to get to prisons are different. So for camps, people are being sent there for transgressions that are not even crimes under Chinese law.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  So I've met people who were told that they were sent for having banned apps like WhatsApp on their phones. You know, people who were sent for sending money to family overseas, for traveling and living abroad, particularly within the Muslim majority world. You know, there's all kinds of things like that that can get you sent to camps. Human Rights Watch has documented the existence of a system called the IJOP, which is the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, which has a much shorter Chinese name. It's essentially a kind of big data program where the government takes data

• 6:20Speaker 01

  from different aspects of people's lives, ranges from really mundane stuff like your electricity consumption and your kind of local travel patterns, all the way to stuff like religious practices, like ideology and stuff like that. And... Human Rights Watch has found examples where the system has been used to sort of help the government decide who gets sent to internment camps and who doesn't. So on top of that, then you have the actual prison system.

• 6:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, wait, before we get to that, I'm just curious. So obviously, China isn't really worried about the people downloading WhatsApp. So what's going on from a higher level? Are they just interested in making sure there are no Muslims in China? Like, what is their broader strategic goal of this, I don't know, system of oppression?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Well, I think they are concerned about people downloading WhatsApp, like, for sure. Like, you have to factor in that China has probably the most sophisticated internet censorship system in the world and surveillance system as well. So of course, it's quite important to them to, first of all, control the ways in which people communicate and also to monitor those communications. So that's why they try to drive people outside of systems that they cannot monitor. WhatsApp, of course, is end-to-end encrypted, and it also belongs to Facebook, which is a US company. So, you know, Chinese government's really limited in the ways that they can monitor it. So, you know, that's why they, like, it's a lot easier for people in China to use homegrown

• 7:51Speaker 01

  messaging systems like WeChat, and that's what's used in Xinjiang.

• 7:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but what I'm getting at is, like, why is it that there, why is it that it seems like Muslims in this region are the ones that are taking the brunt of this?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, I get what you're saying. So like, essentially, from the government's own statements, at the heart of this is a desire to sort of forcibly assimilate this group of people into Han Chinese culture, right? And that necessarily involves the eradication of their own cultures. So the Chinese government's perspective is that Uighurs in particular, who are the biggest, by far, Muslim ethnic minority group in Xinjiang, have

• 8:40Speaker 01

  You know, have separatist groups that are that are responsible for terrorism, are responsible for riots that broke up in or broke out in the city of Urumqi in 2009, that they're sort of causing unrest because of an ideology that they perceive to be toxic. So it's important to note that there have been terrorist incidents in Xinjiang, although according to the government, there haven't been any in the past few years. And they have punished all of the people that they have found to be responsible in those incidents. But what this particular campaign is essentially, you could see it as a form of collective punishment for an entire ethnic group for the crimes of, you know, a handful of people who have sort of already been punished.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  But that's sort of their perspective.

• 9:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so this has been going on since around 2016?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, like late 2016, early 2017.

• 9:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we don't, we don't, we have gotten bits and pieces of reports on this. Obviously, China doesn't have a free press in the same way that we do in the US. There've been a few journalists that have made it inside. I remember watching a Vice News special about a reporter who got in there. But you actually took a pretty different approach, which is analyzed satellite imagery that looked at what was happening on the ground and on and with uncensored maps and comparing that to blacked out areas on Baidu Maps. And then what did you find?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  So, okay, just to back up, I don't want to make it seem as if Xinjiang is a really difficult place to access. That's just not true. There are lots of journalists that have been to Xinjiang, including myself, for actually for a story for BuzzFeed in 2017, most recently. You know, you can get on a plane and fly there. It's not like it's North Korea. The the issues there are a little bit more subtle than that. When you go there, a lot of times you're monitored by police, you can't move about freely. And it's also, there are so many camps that it's just like logistically not feasible to go to, you know, all of them or even a significant number of them, especially with the level of surveillance that exists there. So I guess to

• 10:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  And you you also ended up getting kicked out of Beijing, but we'll, we'll get to that in the second segment. But sorry, go ahead. Yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, so just about this particular project. So I worked with Alison Killig, who is a licensed architect and also a human rights investigator, and Christo Buschek, who is a developer. And essentially, we started talking back, all the way back in, I think, 2018. And Alison and I met in a very strange fashion. We were working on this, like, citizen journalism handbook to help people become better investigators. And while we were working on this together at this kind of retreat, I started kind of talking her ear off about some of these issues in Xinjiang. And she got really interested. And then she started playing around with Baidu Maps.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And we were trying to kind of come up with a methodology for this. And she started to quickly notice that when she looked at places where we already knew that camps existed, based on like, kind of, previous data that had already come out, like, when you kind of zoomed in, these funny gray squares would appear. And when you zoom further, and they would disappear. But like, she'd be like, we were like, well, what are these gray squares? And then, you know, it's possible that it was because the imagery wasn't loading or something like that. But we didn't think that was the case, because that's actually like a different kind of, like, gray tile, like, blanked-out tile that appears when, like, the image just hasn't loaded. So we thought this might be a kind of censorship.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  So essentially, that was like the first data point. We wanted, like, Xinjiang is a huge region. Like, satellite maps are made up of, like, squares that are called tiles. And Xinjiang has millions of them. So there's no way we could have sifted through all of them. So we used this kind of, this kind of trail of clues from Baidu to sort of narrow down the areas that we would have to search. And that helped us. We didn't use the fact that it was blanked out in Baidu as sort of evidence of it being a camp. There were lots of areas of Baidu that are blanked out that are not camps, that are things like military facilities or other sensitive areas that the government doesn't want on, like, a public satellite map.

• 13:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, you cross-reference those.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 13:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  With the satellite imagery. So you want to tell us a little bit more about that?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so um essentially what we ended up doing was um we yeah, we we cross referenced that with um mostly with tiles from Google Earth. Um Alison also had this idea to look near um near cities and near towns, like basically where people had settled rather than these huge open deserts and and grasslands that you have in other parts of Xinjiang and and mountain ranges. Um so we've we that really narrowed the search because then we could focus on populated areas. Um and what we ended up finding is that um not only was the government accelerating its construction of, you know, these really scary facilities

• 14:00Speaker 01

  that have all the hallmarks of internment camps, um they like they were building them really big. Like we found several structures that um these are like compounds that um can house more than 10,000 people and we found at least one that can house more than 30,000.

• 14:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, the comparison was like Central Park, uh something the size of Central Park.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which is enormous when you're talking about an internment facility.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 14:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  So what happens in these internment facilities?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Um, so I interviewed a lot of extetanees. I've I've spoken to quite a few over the years and um, you know, their stories have a lot in common. Um, so when people are inside, essentially they're subject to um like all kinds of um kind of really degrading treatment. Um, you know, the purpose, the the kind of a sensible purpose of these facilities is education in some sense. That's what the government says. And there's there's a kind of kernel of truth to that because people are taught Chinese language and then they're they're taught like Communist Party dogma. But in practice, what that looks like is like people go into these classrooms where there's a kind of opaque, like I think probably

• 15:14Speaker 01

  fiberglass, uh sorry, transparent um wall between the teachers and the students. There will be guards in the classrooms. Um, the students, like some people, uh like the I shouldn't call them students, I'm sorry, um, the Like the detainees, like, um, some people described being hit with batons if they got a word wrong in Chinese, um, described being humiliated, um, and in, in terms of their treatment, um, even beyond that, people described really, really dreadful, um, overcrowding, particularly in the first generation of camps, which were largely repurposed, uh, government buildings, like old folks homes and high schools and stuff like that. Uh, women talked

• 15:55Speaker 01

  about having their hair cut forcibly to chin length. Um, lots of people talked about being taken to solitary confinement, um, you know, being interrogated routinely, uh, being beaten with sticks. Um, there are now lots of reports of women undergoing forced sterilization. Um, so really all kinds of abuses, really anything you can think of are happening in these camps. And, and you, like, once again, I would stress that none of these people have been accused of anything. So it's, it's an incredibly kind of Kafkaesque system in that way, because you don't really know necessarily what your transgression even is when you arrive to these places.

• 16:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  And this is all just part of China's attempt to essentially assimilate, uh, force assimilate the Muslim community inside the country?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  I think assimilate them and then also, of course, control and confine them.

• 16:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what, but control, what do you mean, control?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Well, if you are afraid of being sent to a camp for writing a tweet or using VPN, then, um, if that, if the cost for doing those behaviors is that high, um, if you're afraid that having a prayer rug in your house is gonna get you sent to a camp, then you're probably not gonna pray or tweet, right? So like, I think if control is one of the goals, it probably has been accomplished.

• 17:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wow. And then, you know, China, obviously a massive country, doesn't seem like there's much that the world has done to it in terms of like, consequences. Is there something that the international community can do about it? And also, do you think that this has gotten enough attention? Because it does seem like, you know, if you're talking about somewhere near a million people going through some, something like this, um, you know, we've, in our world, we like to talk about making sure that things like this don't happen again. So, um, do you think there's enough attention to it? And can anything be done?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I mean, the can anything be done question is hard because it's almost like, like, we're coming at this as two Americans and we're thinking about a problem that's happening on the other side of the world and whether the, like, the implicit thing is, like, can the international community do something about this when actually the most straightforward answer is that the Chinese government could just stop doing this, right? Like, it, like, but that's not really something that is even sort of within the realm of possibility as a consequence of, of, like, pressure that would come from the media or something like that. Um, but, yeah, I mean, I think, actually, it, it is true that it

• 18:27Speaker 01

  hasn't probably gotten, even now, um, that it's a big international story. I still think it hasn't gotten all the attention that it's due, simply because, um, we don't know a lot, like, we don't know a lot about the kind of whole scope of what's happening there, um, from a lot of different perspectives, ranging from, um, you know, forced labor to forced birth control and other practices like that, um, you know, all kinds of things. Um, but, having said that, I think I've been covering this issue for a long time, and um, I do think that there's been a kind of steady uptick in the kind of understanding of this issue. Like, I mean, look at what happened this week with Milan, like, um, you

• 19:09Speaker 01

  know, these are, like, international headlines everywhere of people saying boycott Milan because parts of it were filmed in Xinjiang, um, you know, among other things. Um, and I can't really imagine that having happened even a year ago. I just don't think that it would have registered the way that it registers now. Um, so that's something. And then I would also say the Trump administration has actually taken a few concrete steps. Um, and it seems like it fits into their agenda for China and, um, they, like, they talk about it frequently, uh, more than other International governments by a lot. They have put sanctions on officials with direct responsibility for the abuses,

• 19:52Speaker 01

  including Chen Shenggou, who's the top Communist Party official in the region. They're putting curbs on imports from the region. So there have definitely been some steps that have been taken already. In terms of what those steps are going to accomplish, I think it's probably too early to say, but I'm interested to see if it will prove to be any kind of deterrent either for China or for companies with ties there or other actors.

• 20:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and I guess one of the obvious questions that I haven't asked yet is, I mean, why, so we know why China's doing this, right? They want to force assimilate the population. But, once again, why would they do it? Like, the cost benefit here seems to be, you know, I don't know, a little bit ridiculous, where like, you're talking about a population, I think we're talking about, and correct me if I'm wrong, about 25 million Muslims in this region.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  No, sorry, half that.

• 20:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so half, so 12 and a half, right?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  And China's a country of 1.5 billion people. I mean, what's the, I don't understand what they're looking to do if they, you know, to try to take such a small population and essentially, you know, erase their history, erase their culture. What's the possible benefit that they get out of this?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, it's a tough question. I can't speak for them, obviously, but I'm a person who, having covered China for as long as I did, like, I kind of, I think you shouldn't underestimate their, like, the government's obsession with what they would call social stability. You know, I think there is an element here of the government just genuinely believing that Islam is the thing that is the problem, that this culture, like, the cultures that exist there are the problem. Like, when you listen to what they talk about, they talk about ideology in the terms that people would talk about, like a virus, like, they'll call it like a virus, this idea of

• 21:50Speaker 01

  extremism being a virus. So like, if you think- About extremism and then you broaden the definition of extremism to include like anything like like fasting on Ramadan or praying or having religious texts. Then like it becomes like if you think that all of those things are extreme actions. And the government clearly does because they have banned things like wearing the hijab, like wearing a beard for men. Very, very like normal actions that um believer like uh followers of Islam would would take up. You know, if if that's what you believe, then um it makes sense to say, okay, this whole group of people needs to be brainwashed.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  In these like reeducation centers or what have you. I think that's sort of where they're coming from. It takes, of course, a certain kind of racism to um to really believe that about a group of people that's that big, but um you know, it's happened many, many times in history. So it's not surprising to me that it would happen again.

• 22:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and here it is happening again. And then let's talk a little bit about the people, right? So you, one of the things that I found remarkable about your story is you did speak with a lot of people who have been through the system. So what have they told you and how risky is it for them to speak with a reporter?

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, so when I first started reporting on this, it was really hard to get anyone to talk because even if you've left China. Excuse me, even if you've left China, you probably still have a family there and the government does go after people's families. And um this is a known thing, like they even do it in state media reports, they'll like for for ex- detainees who have spoken out, they'll go and interview their family and the family will be like, no, this never happened and it's all lies, stuff like that.

• 23:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wow.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Or like they'll ask, they'll they'll say like, stop talking or we'll put we'll detain your family member, right? I did I did a piece about a man who was in Scandinavia and um he he was worried about his teenage son. Uh, being sent to a camp um for for this exact reason. Um, so what happened after that is that um people figured out that like they kind of just gave up like they they were hoping for lenience by staying quiet and then they found out that they weren't going to get any lenience in many cases. So um people started speaking up a lot more and um that's why like if you look at Xinjiang news coverage now, you'll see a lot of named sources um in a way that you wouldn't necessarily have done before.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Um, so remind me, what was your other question?

• 24:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, just like what have they told you? But I'd also ask um for you, like what what calculation do you make as a reporter?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, because you realize that by printing these people's names, there's a chance there might be retribution.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. Um, that's something I think about a lot. Um, like I think I thought about it more a couple of years ago than I do now, just because I think the consequences of putting your name out there are a lot better known now um in these communities. Um, I always try to ask people about their family situation like early in the interview and I really do make clear to people if you have second thoughts, if you get cold feet, if you get some new piece of information about um, you know, your family that makes you think that if we publish this, they could be detained, then like, please tell me and we won't do the story. And that's happened to me uh twice that I can think of where we had a long conversation and the person got cold feet and backed out.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  And I as a reporter, I always be like, my door is open, even if you just want to talk, like I'm here for that. But um, you know, I would never want to put pressure on someone to publish. And like there, I think there have been other cases where I feel like people have been quoted in the press and I I don't know if consent was given and it really bothers me to see that, especially on video and stuff like that, because um, you know, people are taking huge risks. Um, the other side of that is that you don't you don't want to, in the name of protecting a source, actually stifle someone who really does want to speak out. You want to give them the opportunity to do that if they Have a story that's true and that's that's that's newsworthy. And there are a lot of people who are very direct who will say like, um, you know, I know this could have consequences for my family,

• 26:13Speaker 01

  but I feel like if I don't speak out, I'm betraying myself, I'm betraying my conscience and all that sort of stuff. Um, so I try to take that seriously when that does come out. And then the other thing is like often like, you know, we'll use first names. Sometimes we won't put the person's hometown, we'll just put their kind of adopted hometown, stuff like that. Um, so I think there are, there are sort of some ways around it.

• 26:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay. Let's just end this segment um with a question that you probably couldn't address in a story, but maybe you can do it on a podcast. I'd like to just speculate a little bit. Where do you, and I know like you can't really say for certain where this goes, but if you had to guess, what do you think happens from here in Xinjiang?

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I really hate this question. Um, I don't know. I mean, the, the thing is like, you're asking where do we go from here? But I don't even know if we have documented what here is. There's so much that we don't know about the crisis still. Like, we don't know um about how prevalent forced labor is because of the opacity of supply chains there. We don't know what's happening to children of people who are detained in full. Like, there's, there's evidence that children are being sent to state-run orphanages, but we don't know long-term what happens to these children. Um, we don't know, like, for what purpose. Ultimately, these super high-security facilities that we documented um were built.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Um, and we don't know, um, you know, about the possibility of state-controlled violence, of uh, of rape on a wide scale and other crimes specifically targeting women. Um, you know, there's just a lot to find out. Um, and I think knowing more about that stuff will tell us more about what's to come. Uh, I don't want to sound like I'm dodging the question.

• 27:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, this is great. Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sorry, go ahead.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, um, yeah, it's really hard to say. Like, the thing is, um, I feel like there's been uh some international pressure, but not, not like a lot. Um, but I think these campaigns take a lot of time and I don't think we'll know if the international pressure that is there has worked for um probably for, for a couple of years at least.

• 28:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and you know, you, I guess, one of the interesting things about your answer is you asked, you answered with a lot of questions that we need to solve. And we know the Chinese government isn't just going to go ahead and share it with us. And that the type of reporting that you do and the type of reporting, reporting that people who are on this story are doing is what's helping us learn a little bit more about this. So when we come back after the break, we're going to talk a little bit more about your reporting adventures in China and what eventually got you kicked out of the country. So, all right, everyone, we'll be right back after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about.

• 29:03Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 29:41Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 29:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here with BuzzFeed News correspondent, Megha Rajagopal. We're talking a little bit about what it's like to report the news in China. And now I really want to expand upon that because, Megha, you had a very interesting experience that might have been somewhat rare or, you know, something that didn't happen too often back when it happened to you, which is that you got kicked out of Beijing, but now seems to be happening much more frequently with international news organizations. So I'd love to hear from your perspective, what happened when you got kicked out of the country?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you're right. It's getting to be a pretty big club. Yeah, when I lost my visa, it wasn't that common. I think there was sort of-

• 30:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  And when did it happen?

• 30:40Speaker 01

  This was in 2018, in March. Yeah, so essentially what had happened was I had written my first piece, big piece, on the camps in Xinjiang and the kind of surveillance environment there in the fall of 2017. And I had gone to the region. I was the first journalist to actually find one of these internment camps because I had GPS coordinates or I had directions, I think, from a source who just knew where it was. And so I went, I took some pictures and we did a piece on it. And because it's BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed doesn't have a paywall, of course, a lot of people

• 31:20Speaker 01

  read it. And I didn't really have much of an inkling that anything was wrong, but I did get a call for a meeting with state security officials in the kind of, I think, fall or early winter of 2017, and that was kind of unusual. It wasn't-

• 31:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  What did you think when you got called into that meeting? Were you like, "This is the end of my time here"?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't like that. I mean, I didn't know who they were. They said they were government officials by phone and asked if I would, with the Beijing city government, they asked if I would meet. And then, once I showed up, they showed me their badges and they were state security officials. They identified themselves as such. So, we had them meeting. It was cordial, and yeah-

• 32:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  What did they say to you?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  They wanted to know about who I was talking to about my work and stuff like that. And, you know, they wanted me to sort of cooperate with them in giving information. And of course, I had no intention of doing that. But I just didn't give them much of any answers. And then, I think I wrote a little memo about the experience, just so I would have it for my records, in case anyone ever asked. But, yeah, and that was it. And then I didn't hear from them after that. So, I had no reason to think anything had gone wrong. And then, at the kind of end of the year, I had my annual meeting with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is the kind of main government ministry

• 32:47Speaker 01

  that journalists, foreign journalists, interact with in China. And it was a routine meeting.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I got to this meeting, which was in a Korean coffee shop across the street from the Foreign Ministry, best known for waffles, and we were sitting there drinking our lattes and they were like, "Listen, we don't like your reporting on human rights." And I was like, "Why?" And they're like, "Well, we think it's wrong." And I said, "Well, if there are any errors in the story, like, we can discuss and then maybe, you know, if it's, if it's, like, we can talk about running a correction, like, if there's something really wrong with the story." And he said, "Well, there are no errors that we could point to specifically, per se, but it was wrong nonetheless." I was like, "All right."

• 33:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, interesting.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, great. So then we talked. It was, again, it was like, it was a polite conversation, touched on a range of subjects after they were done criticizing my work. And then at the end of the conversation, I asked, like, you know, "My visa's coming up, too. Do you expect any problems with it?" They were like, "No, no, no, just submit it and it'll be fine." So I was like, "Okay." But they asked me to wait until after the Chinese New Year holiday, which is a week-long holiday in China and the country kind of shuts down. It's a bit like Christmas in terms of its significance, I guess. So I waited until the first working day after the holiday. I submitted all my paperwork, got a red receipt, like, an email back, like, got it from the Chinese consulate in New York.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  And then, you know, like, I just waited. I had to leave the country for a different story and then, so then I ended up abroad because I just had planned to just be away and then my visa would be renewed and then I thought I would go back. But unfortunately, it wasn't renewed. I checked, I called to check in on it and they had, they said that they had lost the application, which, like, couldn't have been true because I got that red receipt. So at that point, I knew something had really gone wrong. And then, yeah, and then finally, I think around June of 2018, I received an email from the Chinese consulate in New York saying, "We do not approve this visa."

• 34:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  So how did you, how did you feel when you saw that you weren't going to get your visa approved? Because you had invested a lot at that point into reporting on China.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was devastating. Like, it was absolutely devastating. I had built my career there for the most part. Um, it's the country that I spent the most time in um since graduating college and um, you know, I spoke Chinese. My whole life was in China. I had never really lived anywhere else um much as an adult. Um, you know, all my friends were there. I had a lease on an apartment there. All of my furniture was there and, you know, I was um overseas and stuff like that. Um, and I just thought like, you know, this could be like, I don't know what I'm gonna do with my career now. Um, so and also, you know, I just didn't wanna leave in that way. Like, I'm not an anti-China person, like, at all.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Um, I, that's why I wouldn't have spent so many years in China if I hated China. Like, I mean, there are so many things that I love very, very, very much about that country. And um, the idea that I wouldn't be able to go back uh because of this decision that felt very arbitrary was, was quite painful.

• 35:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can you go back as a tourist or are you just like fully banned?

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know. I've never asked. I always assumed that I could go back as a tourist. Um, however, um, because of some recent developments, um, you know, both uh the jailing of um, the two Canadians that um have been held there in the Huawei case um in retaliation for the Huawei case. Um, as well as all of the recent measures that have been taken targeting um uh American journalists and Australian journalists. Like, it's a little bit scary to think about going back. Um, especially now that I've published a new batch of work that's quite critical of the government.

• 36:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay. And then so after you got kicked out, now let's get to the part that everyone seems to be getting kicked out. I mean, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Post, Voice of America, Time Magazine have all had either been fully kicked out or had restrictions put on them. Why is China kicking out all these journalists? It's sort of interesting to me that they even allowed them in in the first place if they're so sensitive about this coverage. So what do you think is behind this recent wave of expulsions?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so two things. So why do they let them in in the first place? A lot of people ask this, so I want to address this. So China is an authoritarian country, but it is not a tin pot dictatorship. This is a big economy with who that really, really cares about its international image and that including the whole world, not just the US and Europe, right? And part of being a big economy is that you have like investors have to trust that you have like a functioning system based on rule of law. You know, in terms of the stock market, in terms of property, like, like in terms of monetary policy, like all of these things. And you can't really get there if you don't have international media in your country, right?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  And if you think that sounds crazy now, because now we're talking about human rights and diplomacy and stuff like that. But it wasn't long ago that the only story really that was making big headlines about China was the economic story, like when they were at 10% GDP growth a year. That was the story about China. It was about poverty alleviation and economic development, joining the WTO and stuff like that. So it was during that era that a lot of journalists started to come to China and China started to become a big presence in the international media. So I guess like what's happened since then? So you asked like, you know, like, why are they throwing people out now? I think, you know, part of it is the very obvious, they don't like critical coverage. Like, I think that's part of it.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  But of course, as you pointed out, there was critical coverage before and all of these people kept their visas. So I think what's happening now is that a lot of these journalists have essentially become pawns in this kind of grand strategy thing that's happening between the US and China, where both parties are continually sort of upping the ante. I used to cover diplomacy in China and one thing that that's a really core part of Chinese diplomatic culture is just reciprocity. Like, it's like a very, very like tit for tat kind of driven diplomatic culture. So like, for instance, I used to cover state visits a lot and like whenever any US official

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Would visit China, um, you know, there would be a discussion uh about how many journalists are allowed in the room from each country, right? And um, as it was told to me by American officials, like the Americans would always say, well, we want like six journalists or like however many it was that they wanted. And the Chinese would be like, no, what for? Just like out of principle, they would want less. And then these discussions would go on like all night long. Like it was, it was so insane. I can, yeah. But like, this is like, this is what it is. So it's like for them, it's like you force our state media outlets to register as foreign agents in DC. Well, like we're going to retaliate against your media outlets. And it doesn't matter that US media isn't generally isn't state controlled, right? They see it as uh more or less analogous.

• 39:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Interesting. So is it the recent um, the recent forcing of these, of these publications from China to register? That's caused some of this stuff?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  I think it was the trigger, but um, I kind of felt like this was always going to happen at some point. But yeah, I think if you're looking for like a

• 40:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why was that?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, because of the direction things were going. I mean, I think China, um, China has sort of become less important to multinational companies than it previously was because they, their priorities, building up their national champ- champions and in many industries. So there was like that kind of, like that was one of the core lobbies for like greater engagement with China. And that lobby kind of lost a lot of power, a lot of interest in doing that um, after the Chinese market became less hospitable to them. So I think it was always moving in a direction where there was going to be like a little bit less engagement, a little bit more hostility. But then I think that, that kind of set up a lot in the past um, couple of years with the Trump administration.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  So um, I mean, having said that, I don't want to imply that it's the Trump administration's fault that journalists are being thrown out of China. That's not what I'm saying. I'm, I'm, what I'm saying is like, um, they did it in response to an immediate event. But I think they like the notion that, yeah, like the notion that throwing out journalists is a way to punish them for uh, for negative coverage has been a long, around for a long, long time, like far predating Trump.

• 41:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And I guess one obvious question to end this segment is um, how much has the coronavirus situation? Where like the US has blamed China, China has blamed the US for originating the virus. How much has that played into these, to the tensions? And then also the ability of reporters to do their job inside China?

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know if I can answer that, to be honest, because I haven't, I just haven't covered it. Like, uh, yeah.

• 41:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. All right. Well, that's, it's a good, first of all, like, I like when people, you know, when people say that they don't know the answer to something as opposed to, um, you know, try to riff on it. So I appreciate that. Um, two really nuanced segments, hopefully one more coming up. Uh, when we're, when we're back, we will talk about, uh, the movement in the US to ban TikTok and whether there are two different internets emerging. Um, one that is following the US vision, one that's following the China vision. We'll be back right after this.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 42:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here for one more quick segment with BuzzFeed News correspondent, Megha Rajagopalan. Um, we're going to talk a little bit about the TikTok situation. The US has been flirting with the idea of banning TikTok. Um, obviously, many US tech companies are banned. In China, Facebook isn't in there, Google isn't in there, although Google had been in there and decided to withdraw. Megha, what do you make of the whole fight, uh, between these two countries over control of the internet? And how do you think TikTok plays into that?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, it's a good question. I mean, I never thought that we would get to a point where there was serious discussion in the US about banning, uh, a particular app, um, because it was made in a country that was hostile to the US. Um, but I guess we are there now. Um, it's interesting. I guess to me, it's shown that, um, this vision of the internet that China and countries like China have established for a long time that was, uh, mocked, um, I think- By the US and other countries that had loose restrictions on the internet is now being adopted by the US, kind of like

• 43:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what is that vision?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  In a manner of speaking.

• 43:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  So like, for instance, like, we used to talk about the balkanization of the internet, right? Like, meaning that we would move from this, this kind of state of history that we're sort of currently in, where there's sort of free movement of information on the internet between countries, to a version of the internet that is like much more kind of regulated by country or censored by country, what have you. So China was obviously the pioneer of this with the Golden Shield Project, also known as the Great Firewall, where they have, as you said, like, cut out lots of internet services that other countries use. And, like, Bill Clinton referred to that model of censoring the internet as nailing Jell-O to a wall,

• 44:42Speaker 01

  like, meaning you can't nail Jell-O to the wall, right? It'll slide off. But then now we're in this situation where the US is actually now saying, "We're gonna do exactly what you did, and we're gonna cut out one of your apps, like, from our market." So I think that's really interesting, because that's sort of a vision of what the internet should be, like, kind of at a high level. Like, the US's reasons for banning TikTok are very different from China's reasons for banning Facebook. Like, to my understanding, the US is not banning TikTok because of a free expression issue, like, they're not trying to cut off speech, like, you know, they're thinking about, like, things like, basically like privacy, national security concerns.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  So it's a little bit different, but the outcome is more or less, you know, kind of comparable.

• 45:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  The most convincing argument I've heard for banning TikTok is that this is an app that shows you content based off of an algorithm, not really based off of a follow model. And it's possible that, you know, because

• 45:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  There are many tech companies in China that have serious connections to the Chinese Communist Party, and in fact, the ByteTent CEO has already apologized to the party for not censoring enough. That it's possible that maybe one day TikTok will rearrange its algorithm to show people content, you know, based off of the Chinese government's wants and sort of do some culture control. That way, without anyone ever knowing. Is that a serious concern from your perspective?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  I've heard people say that, yeah, I have heard people say that. It's interesting, like, I don't think it's outlandish, however, it is a hypothetical, I think. And it also, I think the problem with this argument is that to make this argument, you have to accept that manipulating algorithms is fundamentally a problem. And, you know, and you have to accept that even if it's not the Chinese government doing it, if it's some other bad actor that's doing it. And it's really hard, then, to say, actually TikTok is the only one that's vulnerable to this, right? Because that's what you're really saying. You're saying TikTok is more vulnerable to this than other social platforms.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  And I'm not completely sold on that argument, because, I mean, we all know that Facebook had, it's very famously had its algorithm manipulated, right? So they're now kind of conscious of that and taking some steps to try to ensure that doesn't happen again. But, you know, I mean, we both know that it's been touch and go at Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms in the US, right? So the question to me is like, you don't, when you're talking about tech governance, you don't necessarily want to apply rules based on the place that the company is based, right? Like, I don't know if that's necessarily the best way to approach tech governance. It seems to me that it would make more sense to have one set of standards and then apply

• 47:41Speaker 01

  it to all these companies, right? So. When you're talking about algorithms, what we really want is transparency, right? Because this is like, we're talking about social media companies as a vehicle for speech and these algorithms that are essentially regulating speech, right, in a public square. And we don't, the issue, like, the larger issue here is that nobody sees these algorithms because the companies consider them proprietary and there's no kind of like independent governing structure that determines like which algorithms are just and which are free from influence and all of that sort of stuff. So like, all of the tech companies have this problem, right? So I don't really see necessarily a strong reason to apply it to TikTok in a way that

• 48:24Speaker 01

  is different from all of the other tech companies.

• 48:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I mean, the reason would be that TikTok seems more easily influenced by a state power than the others. I mean, that would be the straightforward argument to do it to TikTok.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, well, I'm more convinced by the argument that it's a platform that shows you stuff like kind of not based on follows, but just based on like the algorithm.

• 48:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  I think that's more convincing. But when you're talking about, you know, is it easy for like nation-state actors to influence the platform, like, that was already done at Facebook, right?

• 49:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's true.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so it's like, I don't, like, how can you really make that argument, right?

• 49:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, we found, yeah, but we found out about Facebook and I guess like people would say we might never find out about TikTok because like you mentioned, it's not a follow based model, so it could just be some subtle shifting of the algorithm to point to one thing, but.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Who knows? Okay, so let's just wrap up with another question that I'm sure you will hate. You're in, let's say you're in President Trump's position.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 49:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  What would you do to TikTok?

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Alex, I'm a journalist. Why would you ask me this?

• 49:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Because I don't know, I have a podcast and I feel like it's fun to to ask questions like this that people hate, so.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  What would I do with TikTok? Oh, gosh. I mean, you know, I'm an old fashioned girl who believes in the free and open internet.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  I don't think, I think it's a bad path to to like, I mean, I'm not saying any regulation of TikTok is out. I'm not saying that at all. But I think blocking an app based on a decision that is made because like about its home country is is opening the door, even if it's legitimate, it's still opening the door to other actions that are like this, that are that will be taken on by future administrations that we cannot predict, right? It will set a precedent for internet censorship in the US in a way that has never been done before. And I don't necessarily know if that's a good thing. Like, I don't know if we want to set a precedent

• 50:30Speaker 01

  where everybody in the world is living in their own little app ecosystem and not communicating with each other. I don't know if that's necessarily a better world. Having said that, I think that, you know, if the Trump administration were going to say, or if anybody was going to say, like, let's not ban TikTok for the entire US populace, but like, you know, if you're in the military, if you're in a government role, don't use it, you know, or certain kinds of people don't use it, you know, in certain occupations and stuff, that makes sense to me from this national security perspective. It's also like, you know, this this argument that the Chinese government could use it to create an influence operation. I I kind

• 51:11Speaker 01

  of feel like, I mean, yes, it's definitely possible to do, but it's also, like I said, it's kind of a hypothetical, right? So it feels like we're punishing the app for something that hasn't even happened. And I don't understand why that should be when when the the, sorry, the companies that were manipulated by by Russia, you know, have have said that they were manipulated by Russia, by Iran, by other state actors, like, haven't really faced any consequences in the US for that, right? Other than kind of a PR nightmare.

• 51:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right. Yeah, well, look, Meg, super interesting stuff. I'm going to keep reading your work. I want to thank you for doing it. It's helped me become way more informed and the world become more informed about it. And it's good to see it really reaching a broad audience. Before we go, just let people know where they can find your stuff.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  You can find me on buzzfeed.com or buzzfeednews.com, sorry, or on Twitter at M E G H A R A.

• 52:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great. Thank you, everyone, for listening. It's been another great week here on the Big Technology Podcast. We hope to see you next week for another great discussion.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

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