Megha Rajagopalan On Using History to Understand Modern Authoritarianism

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. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic 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 Sympathia, that we're all connected, that we owe a duty and obligation to other people. This idea of Ochois, this idea that we have a mutual affinity towards those people as the driving sort of force of humankind. It's why the Stoics were politically active. And 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 Marcus Aurelius, the idea of the fruit of this life being good character and works for the common good. So that's at the core of Stoicism. And then,

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  of course, the Stoics were politically active. I don't mean that in the policy sense. I mean that they were, 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, the human rights crisis with the, with the Uighur minorities and other minorities in China. And so today, my guest is a journalist for BuzzFeed, Megha Rajagopalan. And she's not just a great journalist, but a journalist sort of on

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  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 the Uyghur internment camps. But she's also a big reader. I've 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, and 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 Uyghur Human Rights Project.

• 2:38Ryan Holiday?

  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 heartstrings we've been hopefully cultivating here in the books and the podcasts over the years. So you can go to UHRP.org to read about the human rights crisis. But more importantly, you can go to UHRP.org/support to donate money that helps relocate, keep safe, fight for the Uyghurs 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 strongly suggest you check it out.

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  It's 501(c)(3) tax exempt. It's a great nonprofit. I've gotten 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. Do you think we should start with China, or should we start with books? I guess it's like a good news, bad news situation.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Um, either way, I guess, like about books, like what do you want to talk about?

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I don't know. I was just, 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, how do you think about that?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  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, or 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

• 5:06Speaker 01

  has responded to them in the past. Yeah, I can probably mention a couple of books, if that's helpful.

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  Please.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  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, you know, right, from, from engaging in the, in the war and everything. And he sort of linked that to the Holocaust and the liberation of the Nazi camps. And he said, you know, why is this not happening with current day, human rights atrocities with, you know, with the, the internment camps in China? You know, I had

• 5:56Speaker 01

  to point out that this was, you know, like, like, the US engagement in World War II was not like, was not a consequence of German atrocities against the Jews, right?

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  And it wasn't proactive either. I mean, Kennedy, Kennedy wrote a book called While England Slept.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:13Ryan Holiday?

  As, yes.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  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. And she, this was like prior to her career in the Obama administration, but I think, I believe she wrote it as a law student, but she documents kind of 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.

• 7:00Ryan Holiday?

  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's the problem. A lot of people have a sort of fundamental misunderstanding of how the events of World War II transpired. And so they sort of retroactively look at it as very clean, obvious, foregone conclusion, when actually it was this sort of fits and starts and mistakes and bad assumptions and rationalizations. And to understand that,

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  I think maybe gives someone a perspective to not sort of rise and fall on every news story.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  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 Uyghur 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

• 8:32Speaker 01

  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, you know, they, in my view, they sort of neglect to look at these countries

• 9:15Speaker 01

  as, you know, specific places with specific histories and, you know, specific things that are happening.

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was curious, because I want to get to the China thing in a sec. But I was curious too, like, what do you think of this argument? This is sort of early in the Trump administration. That there was an argument or there's sort of an in vogue theory that like we had to study Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War, what they're calling it, the Thucydides trap.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, well, as someone who loves the classics and has read Thucydides, and it does shape a lot of how I see things. So go to your point about having a wider view of history. How apt is that analogy? Or is it totally bogus?

• 9:58Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  So, and you know, the other thing is like, I mean, if we're specifically talking about the US and China, you know, 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 do when 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?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Like, I think that there is sort of an underappreciation amid this kind of very fraught news cycle of the kind of like years that the US and China have spent, you know, 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, you know, 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

• 12:14Speaker 01

  from China or Chinese influence, particularly with reference to technology companies that are making, you know, equipment that could be used in, you know, for military purposes and for intelligence gathering purposes and things like that.

• 12:28Ryan Holiday?

  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. 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, 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 Aegean Sea, or, you know, like, it's just, people are people, and we've always been doing this.

• 13:13Ryan Holiday?

  And it's almost sad that we haven't learned that much since.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  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, you know, the world had never experienced, you know, in the 20th century and continuing on till now. But I think one way to see it is that, like, oh, yeah, like, you know, nation-states are made up of humans, and human, human nature doesn't necessarily change, therefore our behaviors aren't going to fundamentally change. But

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I guess I'm a person that does think that the, both the advance of technologies and also the advance of, you know, the nation-state and other kind of legal frameworks that bind nation-states together has, you know, significantly changed the way that civilizations interact with each other.

• 14:19Ryan Holiday?

  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 seen the way that like that all these things were sort of solutions or was the system sort of working out kind of a stasis that's actually really important and you go around, you knock over certain pieces, the whole thing could come down. But I think you're like 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.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:53Ryan Holiday?

  I don't think that's necessarily how the that's because of the systems and the 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.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you translated that line from Thucydides into Chinese diplomatise, 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 that's like a very apt description of part of their worldview and part of their approach to foreign policy, that it's large states that should have the kind of spheres of influence and the decision making power within those circles.

• 15:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's crazy that that they would be saying essentially the exact same thing 2,500 years apart.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:52Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, man. Well, so here's what I was thinking on the China thing, because I always benefit from 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 let's let's call it this sort of in its 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 has 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

• 16:37Ryan Holiday?

  smart people saying really serious things. And it feels like the temperature is being cranked up. How do you sort of bring someone up to speed?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness. What a big question. Um, okay. Let me think about this. So I guess the sort of the brief history of China, um, at least in the past few years. Um, 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. Um, it is the largest. Um, 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

• 17:32Speaker 01

  double-digit GDP growth, you know, it became the most powerful economy in Asia. Um, it expanded its economic influence, its geopolitical influence, started pouring more money into building up its military and defense capabilities. Um, you know, in short, it's become, um, you know, a leading world power. So in 2012, um, the current president of China, whose name is Xi Jinping, came to power. When he came to power, like all Chinese leaders, um, 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

• 18:11Speaker 01

  of the kind of populism and cult of personality that existed when Chairman Mao 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. Um, 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. Um, and you know, what he calls the Chinese dream. It's kind of a slogan. It's, um, it's not

• 18:56Speaker 01

  clear what it really means, but, um, you know, he spent a lot of time in his, um, you know, his speeches, um, and, you know, 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 human rights side, you know, he throughout his his tenure, he has essentially shut down a lot of important non-governmental organizations like, you know, like human rights lawyers, environmental organizations that look at look at environmental degradation.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  He has arrested feminists who were protesting against, you know, sexual harassment on public transportation. You know, China has has not had a free press like, you know, maybe ever, but, you know, there were 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 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,

• 20:22Speaker 01

  you know, one of the most significant things that has happened in China is that there's a 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, you know, 1.5 billion people. Small fraction of those people, it's a it's a kind of very sparsely populated, like kind of desert-heavy region that's rich in natural resources. And about half of that 25 million population is made up of Muslim minorities. So there's a minority group called the Uighurs, which some people have heard of, Kazakh Muslims, Kyrgyz, Uyghur Muslims, like other other groups like that. And

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Those minority groups have at times, 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, you know, starting around late 2016, early 2017, the government started to really crack down on them heavily. And it essentially implemented the system of mass surveillance, like digital and physical surveillance, as well as a system of dozens of mass internment camps all throughout the region. You know, according to like UN analysts and other estimates, there are upwards of a million people being held in these camps. You know, this is just a kind of example of the hard line that Xi Jinping has taken

• 21:47Speaker 01

  towards any form of dissent. The government essentially blames Uighurs and kind of the religion of Islam for fostering what it terms 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 it, you know, we're talking about mass internment camps, right? In the 21st century.

• 22:16Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  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 things.

• 22:32Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, this is, this is, this is really insightful. So it sounds like what you're really describing is the sort of brazen rise of an authoritarian state.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  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, 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 Central Asia, you know, in Europe, in Africa, in Latin America. A lot of these loans were made, you know, in exchange for things like resources.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  They were, they were made sometimes to countries that did not have like a super great history of, 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, 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, it tells you like, you know, 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.

• 24:00Ryan Holiday?

  There's real like sort of expansionist impulses behind it, which we really haven't seen since maybe the, the Cold War.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I guess so. Yeah.

• 24:12Ryan Holiday?

  So, so I like, I think one of the, one of the issues on the left in America is sort of maybe a skepticism about the alarms being raised. And I'm, I'm sort of curious for your take on that. So there's just sort of idea, maybe that, uh, 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,

• 24:56Ryan Holiday?

  for not just America, but the UN and all other countries, like where, how do you try to calibrate people towards like how like serious they should be taking this?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, actually, let me just go back to your previous.

• 25:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  I, I, 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 US.

• 25:24Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  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, around environmental regulation, or labor rights, or human rights, or censorship of the internet. You know, by-

• 26:08Ryan Holiday?

  Or global health.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, exactly. Transparency around health, as we've sort of learned very acutely during the coronavirus.

• 26:16Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that it's, it's better to sort of look at it from that perspective than to necessarily compare it to Soviet Union.

• 26:26Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I guess, to your second question about, you know, like, how, how do we look at this? I guess, I'm an Amer- like, I'm an American, you know, 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, there, 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 happens in the US affects everybody else in the world. And that, and that's not fair, but that, that is the way it is. But I think that-

• 27:08Ryan Holiday?

  We're also the media capital of the world, so we tend to, like, beam out our stuff, you know, like, through, and I think this is also kind of what China is fighting back against, but we sort of have the- The cultural nexus of the world, so naturally sort of a political nexus of the world as well.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  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 prism of whatever Trump or Biden are saying about it. You know, it's important to look at it on its own merits and in its own context. You know, it may be that, you know, people forget that when Trump took office, he was quite friendly to Xi Jinping. He said a lot of, you know, nice things to him. He had him to visit in Florida.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  And it was only sort of later that the administration adopted this like tough on China standpoint, right?

• 28:10Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  I mean, if you look at that, you know, supposing for the, just for the sake of argument, if the Trump administration had stayed on its kind of earlier course of being more friendly towards China, the narrative would be like, you know, Trump is appeasing this dictator, whatever, right? You know, I don't necessarily think that that's good or bad, but I'm, 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.

• 28:52Ryan Holiday?

  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 truer context.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:03Ryan Holiday?

  As opposed to following along inside the, the sort of, the, the worldview that we already have, which is inadequate to understand or explain this very different longstanding historical trend.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:21Ryan Holiday?

  So you kind of experienced, I was curious about your story, like, and maybe that helps bring this home for people. Like, you're not just sort of studying and writing about this sort of. Rise of authoritarian sort of governmental shift inside China. But, but I mean, two years ago, you were basically kicked out of China.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:40Ryan Holiday?

  Walk me through what that felt like.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, yeah, it was, I guess the, the short version of the story is that, um, you know, I like, um, this was in, in 2017, I visited Xinjiang and, um, I had the GPS coordinates or I had the location of, uh, one of these internment camps and I actually went on foot and, uh, visited it and took some pictures and stuff like that. I didn't go inside, but I, I did see it and I saw a 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, um, a lot of people read this piece. And, um, I, my visa was essentially, uh, it was a sick, it was, I think it was like, uh, effectively it was a six month visa and, um, it was up for, I was, I was meant to apply

• 30:28Speaker 01

  for a new visa, um, in February of 2018. Chinese authorities told me that it wouldn't be a problem. And then, um, 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 any more 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, uh, about the coverage. Um, you know, that nobody ever told me that it was about the coverage, but, um, you know, from the Chinese government, typically when journalists do lose their visas in China, um, it's, it's never portrayed to be about the coverage. It's usually, um, you know, they, there's some other explanation that's given for it.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  As far as like how it felt like, you know, I was pretty devastated. I had been in China at that point, um, I think for a total of seven or eight years, I, I probably about seven years, um, in total, like six as a journalist and then, um, a year and change as a researcher and as a student. And it was, um, you know, I spent my, most of my twenties there. I, I had learned the language. All my friends were there. Um, you know, I was like, I was, um, I had, 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.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  But I mean, in retrospect, I would probably be a little bit circumspect about returning to China for a visit now, given what's happening between the US and China.

• 32:02Ryan Holiday?

  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, you know, continue to write, make a small difference. But if you sort of step outside those bounds, you know, there could be consequences, probably the one you experienced 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? You know, do you, you know, is it about, you know, sort of being able to do the most

• 32:46Ryan Holiday?

  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?

• 33:08Speaker 01

  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 a journalist.

• 33:34Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  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, um, 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 um, one of the big red lines is just writing about the monarchy. They have a very, uh, they have a, they have a lese majesty law 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. Uh, uh, you have a pretty broad range. But the fact that that red line is there and it's like kind of clearly articulated,

• 34:20Speaker 01

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

• 34:36Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Um, China is not like this. So it's kind of strange to say now because now they've thrown out so many journalists that um, it seems like they've always been like this. And but it, 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 um, that are based in China and they, 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 out anyone since um, the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. So I never went around thinking, I'm going to lose my visa because they just weren't doing that.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  They would pressure you in other ways. You know, they would pressure the business sides of organizations um, 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 acquire state controlled 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

• 36:03Speaker 01

  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 also kind of become pawns in this kind of grand strategy game in a way that was never really the case before.

• 36:42Ryan Holiday?

  So do you see yourself more as sort of a, someone who got caught in the crossfire? Or do you see yourself as someone who made a powerful enemy?

• 36:50Speaker 01

  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 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, that's just how it works. And they know that. They're not like the, everybody that I've met in China's Foreign Ministry, which is the, the body that deals with journalists, is like 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

• 37:33Speaker 01

  do with my coverage because they had expressed that they were not happy with my reporting on human rights, kind of on, 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.

• 37:57Ryan Holiday?

  But I've got to imagine that as far as sort of looking yourself in the mirror, sort of at the end of your life, when you're like, hey, you know, did I, did I sort of, did I do my job with sort of courage and a commitment to my ideals? The idea of losing a visa because you, you know, published a very prominent story about, you know, what are in effect, modern concentration camps. That's got to be something that, that one, you're proud of, but two, that you wouldn't, you wouldn't trade. Like you wouldn't say, hey, if, 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.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  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, you know? I know people who have been exiled from their home countries, who will probably never see their families again. In the case of Uyghurs, a lot of people can't even phone their families or, 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.

• 39:20Ryan Holiday?

  Well, maybe let's, let's sort of wrap up there because it is the sort of most urgent and, and sort of vexing issue. How this idea that, that people are, literally millions of people are in internment camps. And, and it's, it's hard to say what sort of where the line of internment camp versus concentration camp begins and ends. But I've got to think when, when forced labor becomes involved, when sterilization becomes involved, when, 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 a human rights issue feels like, like a polite euphemism

• 40:04Ryan Holiday?

  for what is, you know, a, a sort of a horrendous crisis.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  It is, yeah, absolutely.

• 40:12Ryan Holiday?

  Um, what do you, so what, what, what do you, what do you, people need to know about this? Like, I guess that's, 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, uh, 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?

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:36Ryan Holiday?

  And, and then also, you know, feels very, uh, both accessible and human. Like, I, I just don't, I just don't know what to think about or what to do about it.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  It's hard. Um, you know, people ask me this all the time, like, what can I do about it? And there's no, there's not a great answer because, you know, there are definitely other major human rights crises around the world, like, you know, uh, I mean Yemen, for instance, uh, what the Rohingya Muslims are facing in Bangladesh, like, the list just goes on and on and on. Um, 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%, um, 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?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  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, in the States. Um, just like the kind of rising consciousness, like I've had, um, you know, People who work in government and stuff that, you know, tell me how important it is when there is press

• 42:16Speaker 01

  coverage and when constituents find out about it and stuff like that. I think it does make a difference to, you know, call your congressperson. You know, 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. You know, it's just started sort of being reported on in depth, kind of beginning of last year, I think. And, you know, it continues to be an issue. But that, I think, is something that 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

• 42:59Speaker 01

  a clothing manufacturer and audit your supply chain for things like forced labor and other abuses? Like, 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 is like such heavy government surveillance. And then there's sort of government control of, you know, people's movements and, 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, like Adrian Zens, who is a scholar of the, the current crisis in Xinjiang, who say that any company that has, has links to that region is

• 43:43Speaker 01

  inherently compromised. And I think, you know, 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, you know, what I purchase as it relates to this crisis. There are lists, if you Google, like there are lists of all 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 Atajert, which is involved in doing Really good work around advocacy and also on around health for former detainees that I would

• 44:27Speaker 01

  really recommend looking up. They don't have a ton of money. When I visited them last, they they were in a kind of old office building and the we were sitting in a conference room and the lock on the door had broken. So they were tying the door together. So it was with a piece of ribbon. So they are kind of broke. I think I don't want to speak for them, but um, I think that um, you know, they have things on the internet where they've been fundraising. You can I wouldn't necessarily say give money or don't give money, but you can go online and check them out and um, you know, see if it's if it's worth your time, I think.

• 45:00Ryan Holiday?

  I take your point that it's not, it's not a sort of a third world humanitarian crisis in 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 were like, hey, here's a person who recently got out of the camps and we've we've, you know, secured a sort of a special,

• 45:40Ryan Holiday?

  like asylum 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 in living expenses. And I was like, oh, I could 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,

• 46:19Ryan Holiday?

  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?

• 46:29Speaker 01

  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-ditainees and, you know, I, I cover a lot of stuff around human rights, so I, I end up meeting a lot of people in these types of situations. And it's crazy to me because I, 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? Um, they would be like totally like, of course. And, but, but the, the reality is, um, you know, in Kazakhstan especially, a lot of these ex, like ex-ditainees 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

• 47:11Speaker 01

  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, you know, if you actually came from one of these camps, you probably have a lot of residual health effects, like, um, you know, 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, it's very cold in these places. So, um, if you're there in winter, it becomes a big problem. It's like all of these things. And of course, they're, 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

• 47:53Speaker 01

  and nightmares and stuff like that. And the thing is, if, like, if they had access to just like basic medical care and, you know, I mean, Teres and I, the, um, the woman that you're helping, um, her, she might, I don't know if they told you, but her house burned down, you know, like shortly, actually after I interviewed her, um, her house was like set on fire. I'm, 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 Kazakh herself, her husband is Kazakh, she's, she's a Uighur, she's coming to this country and she finally is getting settled and then her

• 48:35Speaker 01

  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, um, mental health issues as well. Like, it's just a really stunning thing. And like, um, you know, the thing is, it's, it's funny because like you're supporting her now because you, she's in the US and, um, you know, you found out about her situation and stuff, but like, It's, it's, I feel like if, 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, there's so 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, there's no way to kind of like make those connections. I've just found that really frustrating.

• 49:20Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that, that's what I sort of gathered from the, the, the Uyghur 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 so- social safety net is, they're not going to be extradited, extradited 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, and to, or, or that all they needed was a lawyer to help them, uh, get the visa to

• 50:00Ryan Holiday?

  get the plane ticket, which maybe they could have paid for. So I think, I think something, you know, that I take from Stoicism is like, you can't let like, 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 go to, 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, when you read about survivors of the Holocaust, really, it doesn't come down to, although some of them, hey, we were liberated by the, you know, the, the whatever airborne division, but it's much more

• 50:43Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. I definitely try to practice that in my life. Like, 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. Um, I would, I just wanted to add though, that there's something just that people should be aware of, which is that I think in Tersinai's case, um, 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, and so forth.

• 51:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Um, if, if she were actually in Xinjiang, that wouldn't be the obstacle. And the reason that the, the government has collected passports for all of these people, like Muslim minorities. So the, 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 like money can't solve the problem, I really mean it. Like it's, it's not just about mobility and stuff like that. But I do think, um, you know, this kind of thing does make a difference for people in the diaspora community who are, have made it out, but are still struggling.

• 52:09Ryan Holiday?

  No, and look, somebody like my, I have two grandparents who are refugees from Europe in the Second World War and, 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, or 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.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Hmm, yeah.

• 52:44Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you so much. This, I'm so glad we connected and thank you for the work you're doing and please, please keep writing.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  No worries. Thanks so much for having me on.

• 52:52Ryan Holiday?

  If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.