Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ Ferkat Jawdat - Fighting Against Chinese Repression About this episode Ryan speaks with Uyghur activist Ferkat Jawdat about the repression carried out by the Chinese government in his home province of Xinjiang, Jawdat’s journey to the United States, and what you can do to help protect human rights in Xinjiang. Ferkat Jawdat is a Uyghur activist who raises awareness of the crackdown on the Uyghur people by the Chinese government in Xinjiang. Jawdat emigrated to the United States from Xinjiang in 2011. For more information on the situation in Xinjiang, visit the Uyghur Human Rights Project. Donate to fund their efforts at: https://uhrp.org/supportThis episode is brought to you by Neuro. Neuro makes mints and gums that help you retain focus and clarity wherever you go. Made with a proprietary blend of caffeine, L-theanine, and other focus-building compounds, Neuro’s products are great for anyone who needs help focusing in these trying times. Try out Neuro’s gums and mints at getneuro.com. This episode is also brought to you by Native Deodorant. Native Deodorant is an amazingly effective green, vegan deodorant that actually works. It comes in several amazing scents like cucumber and mint or lavender and rose, and doesn’t use harmful compounds that plug your pores. Native Deodorant 100% risk free to try because of its 30 day return policy and free shipping and exchanges. Visit nativedeo.com/stoic or use promo code STOIC to get 20% off your first order. This episode is also 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.***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 Ferkat Jawdat: Homepage: https://www.uhrp.orgTwitter: https://twitter.com/ferkat_jawdatSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:04 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,
0:46 Speaker 00 to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.
0:54 Speaker 00 Hey, it's Brian Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm gonna get right into this one because the guest today has a really interesting, if not harrowing, story. His name is Prakat Jawdat. He's a Uyghur, a young man who came to America in 2011, basically fleeing what had been the serious threat of persecution. But unfortunately, his mother, also a Uyghur, was denied a passport as they tried to come to America. And so in 2017, when the Chinese government's crackdown on the Uyghur population began to escalate, she was detained.
1:36 Speaker 00 Two months later, she was sent to, that's essentially, a re-education camp. And Prakat has been, without his mother, without his family. And at the same time, he's trying to rebuild his life here in the United States as an immigrant. He's also having to deal with complete uncertainty and fear and worry about the safety of his mother. And... You know, he could have kept silent about this. He could have just tried to deal with it privately, but I think in a very stoic fashion, he's stood up, he's become an international advocate, brought all sorts of attention to the plight of the Uighurs. And he and his family have really suffered for this, and yet that has not deterred him. So when we
2:19 Speaker 00 talk about courage here on the podcast, we don't mean this in the abstract. We don't just mean, you know, the things you say on the internet. We mean, what do you do when you are faced with a really complex ethical dilemma, but also a moral obligation because you see something to say something. And, look, we'll get into his story, but it's really a harrowing and eye-opening story about something that's happening right now in the world. You know, we can read about the Holocaust, we can read about the Rwandan genocide, we can read about the Armenian genocide, we can read about these things, and it feels like they happened a long time ago. Maybe we even tell ourselves, oh, I would have done something. But this is happening right now. And so I think it brings up the
3:04 Speaker 00 question of what are you doing about it? Do you even know about it? Or are you too busy focusing on, you know, your own stuff? And certainly, I failed that test, is why I'm interested in exploring it, why we're going to have this guest and another one in a few weeks. That's one of the reasons. I reached out recently to the Uyghur Human Rights Project, which has been at the forefront of drawing both attention and resources towards the plight of, what is it, at this point, millions of people who are in concentration camps, who are being deprived of their rights, in some cases, being sterilized, being used for forced labor. It's a very alarming thing. I'll let Firkett do most of the talking here about that, because I think it's better to get it direct from the source. But I did
3:46 Speaker 00 want to give a plug for the Uyghur Human Rights Project. You can check that out at U H R. P.org and you can donate at UHRP.org/support which I have done. There are refugees, not currently in China, but all over who've managed to get out, have passports, who are trying to get somewhere safe. And it can be as little as a $3,000 plane ticket or the cost of a few hours of legal work to help free them, or it could just be helping cover some of their legal expenses when they come to a new country with little in the way of job skills. Or again, these problems can seem very big and very uninfluencible, but in fact, you can help an individual person get through this act.
4:31 Speaker 00 It's like something less than $20,000. You can essentially save a person who might otherwise be re-interred in a concentration camp. You can save them and you can follow Ferkat on Twitter. Go to at F E R K A T underscore J A W D A T. I asked him how we can help. He said, one reason, one way people can help is of course by, you know, trying, making sure that the things you buy have no association with this region of China. He said, also, you can donate to the UHRP, but also follow him on Twitter because he tries to get out the word about it. And so he's, he's looking to build his profile and platform to help the spread of this message.
5:16 Speaker 00 So check that out. There's a link in the bio, of course, to all this stuff. Again, listen to this interview, listen with your mind open. Don't let your political views influence what you're seeing and hearing. It's really important and we will hopefully have some more for you on this issue soon. Well, first off, let me thank you for doing this. It's been a journey for me to sort of try to wrap my head around this issue. And, and when I was asking who might be able to help me, your name came up several times. So I really appreciate this. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So let's pretend that I'm an American that knows nothing about the Uighur situation, that's maybe vaguely heard about it in the news. They know something, you know,
6:00 Speaker 00 is, they know people are concerned about something that's happening in China. They know it's potentially kind of an international flashpoint. Like, what would you say to them? How would you explain what this is?
6:13 Speaker 01 So, kind of give some background. The Chinese government took over the land, which called East Turkestan, in 1949. And then, earlier before that, on the late 1900s, they gave the name as Xinjiang, which means in Mandarin Chinese, the new territory or new dominion. So, since 1949, there have been many instances that the Chinese government oppressed, or tried to integrate Uighur identity into the major, the Han, identity Han culture. But, in China, there are fifty-six different nations, and then, Uighurs are one of the
6:54 Speaker 01 largest minority groups. So, we have our own unique identity, the culture, and then we are mostly believe in Islam. And then, we have our own language, the food, the clothing, everything is unique. And then, we even look different than the majority of Han Chinese people. So, when I was in China, I went to university in one of the Chinese cities. And then, I also went to Beijing for some other reasons. So, wherever I go, the Chinese people, they came up to me and then asked me in English while I was in China, like,
7:35 Speaker 01 where I am from. So, I had to reply them back in Mandarin Chinese that, "I'm an Uighur, and I'm from Xinjiang." So, they just get shocked. They were like, "Oh, so you are Chinese?" I said, "Yeah, I'm Chinese." So, sit up, and then...
7:52 Speaker 01 It kind of kept going until 2009. So, June 2009, there was a huge clash between the Uyghur workers, who were sent to inner Chinese cities as a factory workers, along with the Han Chinese workers there. So, a couple of the Uyghur people got beaten up so badly, and then some of them had died. So, on the July 5th, the university students in Vrumci, the capital city of East Turkestan, or as they called Xinjiang, they organized a peaceful protest. They were just sitting silently in front of government offices, asking their response for those killings.
8:35 Speaker 01 But it was brought up lots of tension between the Chinese police and the regular citizens, as well as the Uyghurs. So, it became a clash between the Uyghurs and the Chinese. So, more than 200 people died. And then, since then, China started their stronger campaign, and also they called as "Strike Hard Campaign" against three evil forces: the extremist, the terrorist, and then the separatist. So, especially after 2016, when the new Party Secretary, Chong Chuen Go, came to transfer to Xinjiang from Tibet, he started large-scale of the police state systems. Like, they have installed the cameras
9:20 Speaker 01 in every 50 meters, or every 100 meters of the street, on every corners. And then, they have set up, starting setting up like huge or large the camps, and then started detaining people who went to Turkey, or the other Islamic countries, or even came to US to visit their family members or study. On the beginning, they detained them for about 15 to 20 days and released them. And then, later on, it became much longer, and then more people are being detained. So my mom was one of them and along with like her two younger brothers and then five different people from my father's side.
9:59 Speaker 00 How I'm curious to because I want to get into that. I'm curious. So your decision to come to America, what was that like? I mean, I imagine just the journey of of immigrating is stressful and scary under ordinary circumstances. Just talk to me about the decision to leave where you're from and come to a new place.
10:19 Speaker 01 Yes. So in China, until recent years, I think a couple, two years ago, maybe the Han Chinese, they had one child policy, but for the minorities like Uyghurs and the Kazakhs, they allowed two kids. But I was the first, I was the oldest, and then I had a younger brother. And then in 1998, my mom, she gave a birth to my twin younger sisters. So since then, my father started getting lots of issues or challenges from his working place. And then by 2005, yeah, around 2005, that he got laid off from his work. And then he came
11:04 Speaker 01 to US to apply for asylum. And then once his case was approved, he applied for the whole family, including my mom and then the four kids. So at the time, all the four kids, like we were under the age of 18, so we were able to get our Chinese passports. And then although my mom was cleared by the US government to come to US to reunite with the remaining family members, she was declined to receive a Chinese passport. So since January 2006, it's been almost like 15 years right now that my dad and my mom got separated from each other. And then the last time I saw my mom in person was on 2010 September. So it's been more than 10 years right now.
11:51 Speaker 00 And for really no, no reason, right? Like no, no sort of justifiable reason. It's just a, an arbitrary policy that as human beings, you were, found yourself on the wrong side of.
12:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, so the, the local police, they gave different reasons. And then the reasons kept changing as we provide documents to support our justification or to get her a Chinese passport. Like they asked, on the beginning, they said that my dad, he came to US, he overstayed his visa. And then later on, after we came, the kid, like children, we came to US, they changed, like they started saying that, oh yeah, you have your whole family in the US right now. And then later on, they asked my dad to go back to talk to the local police, which my dad cannot because he applied for the political asylum.
12:45 Speaker 00 Right.
12:46 Speaker 01 And then later on, they asked us to provide some documents, both from the US side as well as the Chinese embassy or the consul in the, the United States, that shows that we never committed any crimes, mainly against the Chinese government, even though we are living in the US. So which we did, we got some documents notarized by the, the Chinese consul or the Chinese embassy here in Washington DC. And then we sent to them. And then they just kept changing their reasons.
13:16 Speaker 00 I feel like that would be so aggravating, but also like, how do you not just despair? You know what I, like, cause you're not, it's like, no amount of logic is going to work in this situation. And yet it's fundamentally unfair at the same time.
13:32 Speaker 01 It is, and then it's really stressful for my mom especially, and then as well as to us. Like every day and every time we talk about it, like that's the main conversation is like, mom, when can you come to US? Or she's asking us like, son, or like, when can we get together so we can live a normal life? Like the whole family together. So it's been fifteen stressful years for her especially. And then especially after that in like from two thousand and eleven that she has been living by herself. Like she has her mom and then her siblings in the same city. But still, at the end of the day, like she has to wake up by herself.
14:15 Speaker 01 She has to eat, she has to cook by herself. And then, at the end of the day, like she has to sleep by herself. And then sometimes, like if you cannot call her, maybe because of the Chinese government, they cut off the communication or we get busy. The twenty-four hours, like there is nobody that she can talk to. Like that that silence in the within the four walls is just eating her alive.
14:42 Speaker 00 So how do you keep hope going? Like, I mean, I could see someone just sort of, you know, I could see that breaking a person. How how have you guys maintained hope?
14:54 Speaker 01 It it keep keeps changing. Before this camp started, like we were hopeful because either side, like from my mothers or like us in the US, we didn't commit anything against the Chinese government or the US laws. And then she was cleared by the the US government to come to you to the US legally. So only thing that missing is her Chinese passport. So but the camp started and then she was detained for more than fifteen months on two different occasions. And then it became more challenging.
15:31 Speaker 01 So sometimes, to be honest, we we lose hope. But I I still got to do something like.
15:41 Speaker 00 Sure.
15:42 Speaker 01 So I still have to some find some way or try to find some ways to bring her to the US.
15:48 Speaker 00 Walk me through what these camps are. Because, you know, in the US, we we have such, as you know, we have this sort of heightened rhetoric about things. So it's hard to know like what's really bad and what's kind of bad and what's sort of being exaggerated for political purposes and what isn't. Like, you're calling them camps. I've heard them described as concentration camps. I've heard people say that it's genocide. What are these camps that people are being put into?
16:18 Speaker 01 So let's start with the reasons for people being locked up in those camps. Okay. There is no like specific the court procedures or some legal process about who will be being detained for how long or when will be released. So the police, they just come to your house at random places and then just take you to some unknown places. And then your family members, like your own, like husband or wife or your kid or your siblings, they cannot even ask about your whereabouts. If they get, if they question the police or the local government about their loved ones whereabouts,
17:01 Speaker 01 they will also be being detained. And then some people are being locked up because that they have some family members who are living outside of China. Like my mom, for example. She never committed any crime, but she was detained just because that she has her family members living in the US. And then my other relatives, they have some relatives or family members living outside of China. And then some of the reasons are like traveling to abroad or growing a longer beard for the man as a Muslim. And then or wearing a hijab or going to mosque or praying
17:45 Speaker 01 or fasting during Ramadan or having extra food in your house or owning a tent or having WhatsApp on your phone or having VPN on your phone or having like browse through the the foreign media or the news outlets. Like those are the reasons that people will just get locked up in those places. And then if you go inside the camps, like from the the former detainees, there have been Uyghurs, Kazakhs, both men and women. They haven't detained for months to years and then.
18:21 Speaker 01 Maybe because of some outside pressure like from the governments or the NGOs. Some of them have been released and then once they arrive safely to the other countries, they start speaking up. So there is a lady, a couple ladies in the US right now, actually. One of them, she gave a testimony in the US Congress, I think it's a year or two ago, where she said that it was a really small cell where they have sixty-four ladies. And then even though they sleep side by side at night, they don't have enough space to sleep, accommodate all the people. So they have to have one-third of them to stand up while the two-thirds of them are sleeping.
19:06 Speaker 01 And then they take turns. And then there are cameras in every single corner of the women's cell that monitors for twenty-four hours. And then sometimes the guards, that they just come and then pick a girl who's looking, like who looks nice and then just rape her in front of everyone else. And then all different torture, like the food deprivation, sleep deprivation. And then also they were brought to some factories, like they built up the camps. And then along with the camps, they also built some satellite factories around them. So they can directly transfer the people between the camps and then the factories.
19:50 Speaker 01 And they used them as slaves.
19:53 Speaker 00 Is that really the point of it? Like, that's something I'm having trouble wrapping my head around. I mean, there is a certain illogicalness to fascism and totalitarianism. It's so often just about control and sort of domination. But is the purpose of it ultimately to create a labor force? Is the purpose of it extermination? Is it just arbitrary, you know, like, is it, what, why, why are, what are they hoping to accomplish with the re-education camps and then with the excesses or the truly horrendous stuff you're talking about?
20:37 Speaker 01 I think there are multiple reasons. So one is like.
20:42 Speaker 01 Just one example is like when I was in elementary school at one of the the classes we learned that in socialism when it reaches on its peak, there will be no difference between the the nations or the people. There is only one nation or there is only one group of people. But we we grew up learning that there are fifty, sixty different nations with their own unique cultural identity. In China alone, let alone like other world, other countries. It it kind of shocked me at the time, but now if I look back, everything happening from Tibet to the South Mongolia recently, to the Uyghurs, the Kazakhs, and then the others.
21:25 Speaker 01 Like everything is going in that like the same direction. They are forcing the other nations with their own identity to be sterilized or to be sensitized to become a Han Chinese like people. Like let them to sink in a Chinese way. Let them eat the pork or the same food as the Chinese people do. Let them dress up in the same way as the Han Chinese and then let them learn the Han Chinese history, the culture. So that's one aspect, like assimilating the different unique nations into the major Han Chinese society. And the second one is, as part of this one road, one belt,
22:09 Speaker 01 especially it is the whole system, whole program starts from our region, East Turkestan. From here, it expands through the Central Asia, then to the the Europe and other parts of world. So they want to get the region hundred percent in control, so they don't have any issues come up along the way that will destabilize the region or directly impact their one one belt, one road initiative.
22:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, this might be a little crazy, but I actually heard from a pretty high ranking government person that he was sort of saying that that his view of it is that it's it's almost like, and maybe this is histrionic, but I'd be curious your take, that it's almost like it's almost practice, right? Like that it's if you're sort of intent on world domination, what's happening with the Uighurs is sort of a pilot program or a test run on stamping down dissent or differences wherever you happen to be.
23:13 Speaker 01 Exactly. So they use the region and the Uyghur people as the lab rats or the test run for their high-tech surveillance or the AI, the artificial intelligence, the machine learning, the surveillance systems. And then also, like, they started like a cellphone scanning in our region for the Uyghur people. Later on, it was expanded to like Shanghai and then Beijing, some other major like Chinese cities, metro stations and the public roads. And then after this Hong Kong protest started, they started building camps around the area as well. And recently, there are a couple of articles about the huge scale
23:54 Speaker 01 camps are being built in the Tibet region as well. And then also, like, some other countries are looking up to China. So if they get succeeded, they will expand or export those technologies, like facial recognition cameras, the DNA scanning, sequencing machines, and then the methods, the policies that they have implemented towards the Uyghur people to other countries.
24:20 Speaker 00 So this argument that that what they're trying to do is sort of stamp out differences, that they want uniformity, they want a singular culture, you know, a cynical person might might sort of go like, well, what does it matter? Like, every, maybe you shouldn't just like, you know, people go like, well, just don't grow your beard long, or just, you know, sort of convert religiously. Or that one of the things I write about in Stoicism is With the with the ancient Stoics, they're they face tyrannical leaders as well. There was this kind of insistence on being yourself, on being different, even though that would often draw the ire of the rulers. There's a Stoic, I was just writing about, a guy named Agrippinus.
25:02 Speaker 00 And Agrippinus stands out in Nero's regime. He says, "I want to be the red thread amidst all the black and the gray." Like, he's like, "I want to stand out." The downside, of course, of standing out is eventually Nero has him executed. Walk me through the courage it takes to insist on your heritage or your religious identity when when people are basically threatening to take away your freedom if you don't comply.
25:34 Speaker 01 It is it is hard. And then sometimes it really challenges or risks your own lives or the people around yourself as well. So on the beginning, they started by locking up people who are kind of heavily on the religious side, like they pray five times or they have the beard or they wear hijabs. But it's not only about that, it's about everything. And then they just use those as the reason to lock you up. Like, my mom, as she had been separated from her husband for more than 10 years and then from her kids for like seven, eight years. It was about like in 2018 when she was detained.
26:19 Speaker 01 Like, she had lots of health issues. So she wasn't able to pray five times a day. She doesn't wear a scarf because she has to go to the police station, the government offices multiple times to get some ways, find some ways to get her a Chinese passport. And then she doesn't fast during Ramadan as well. But after all, she was detained for 15, more than 15 months. And then at some point, she was sent to a prison for seven years. After I spoke out, after I became a public, they released her. And then in last November, in 2019 November, the Chinese government, they released their own statement saying that my mom has never been detained.
27:01 Speaker 01 So from a person who was criminally as they claim, was sent to the camp to be re-educated. At the end, she was labeled or she was told that she has never been detained. So that's their logic. Like, there is no way that you can prevent it from happening.
27:20 Speaker 00 Sure. Right. It's like that famous, that poem about sort of first they came for the the Jews, then they came for the socialists, then they came for the the gypsies, then they came for me, but there was no one left to stand up for me.
27:35 Speaker 01 Exactly. So they, they came for the Tibetans. And then they came for the Uyghurs. And then right now is the Hong Kong. And then the yesterday about the South Mongolian or the other other minorities within other parts of China, like they start banning their own language from the schools. And then first time, like the first step is maybe the, the language and then the religion. And then the books and then the clothing and then the food. And then some other reasons that they can just come up is start locking up people.
28:10 Speaker 00 So you decided to, to speak out and, and again, I was, as I was saying, I realized even talking to me is probably not without cost for you. There was a time where you got a message from your mother, I think last year, right, where it was very clear that pressure was being put on her to silence you.
28:29 Speaker 01 Yes. So my mom was detained for the first time in November twenty seventeen. And then after twenty two days, she was released. And then we talked for another like two or three months until February six twenty eighteen.
28:47 Speaker 01 And then she was detained for the second time. Then she left me a voice message asking me to not to worry about her, to take care of my family and then asked us to study and work harder. But at the end, on her message, she said she doesn't know if she can come back or when she can come back. So
29:08 Speaker 01 a month later, five people from my father's side, my father's older sister, who was a government official, retired government official, along with her husband, their married son, my father's younger brother and the youngest brother's son. Five people from four different households were locked up in one day. And then here in the US, like
29:30 Speaker 01 Myself, my dad and other relatives, we came together to discuss about what should we do? Should we start speaking out? Should we start meeting some US Colonel officials or the NGOs? To seek some help? Or just stay silent, wait to see what will happen? At the end, we were like, we were scared because we know that if we start speaking out, or if we publicly criticize the Chinese government, we will put our family members in much more danger. So we stayed quiet. I stayed quiet from February until September twenty eighteen. But within that seven months, I wasn't able to get any information from my mom or other family members.
30:13 Speaker 01 The only thing I heard is, how was those camps as I described earlier? Like, there is a physical torture, there is a mental torture, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, the rapes, forced labor, forced sterilization. So everything I heard about or to see on the news about those camps made me decide to speak out from twenty eighteen September.
30:39 Speaker 01 So from that time, I risked especially my mom and everything. So I knew when I started speaking out that there are some prices that I have to pay, or there are some people that they will be suffered or punished because of the way I was speaking out. So which was proven to be true.
31:00 Speaker 00 I don't, I don't know your mother, obviously, but I it's, is it crazy to think that your mom would probably be proud of the stand you're taking and probably want you to be doing what you're doing?
31:14 Speaker 01 Yes. So
31:17 Speaker 01 at the beginning, I didn't know anything about my mom. And then I just wanted to do something so I can face my mom either in this world or the next world, like.
31:30 Speaker 01 When we see each other again for the next time, like I
31:32 Speaker 00 Sure.
31:32 Speaker 01 Just wanted to be able to say by looking at her eyes like, Mom, I didn't sit idle while you were suffering in the prison or the camps. I did something as a son to save you. So after I started speaking out, there are multiple times that I was indirectly threatened by the Chinese police or the government about my behaviors or my publicity. Like they questioned my aunt and my cousins forty eight hours in the police station. Asked them to sign a contract stating that they will cut off all the contacts with anyone in the US. If not, they will also be sent to the camps. My seventy five years old grandmother was also being threatened by the Chinese police.
32:18 Speaker 01 When I so at the end, when I sent up my kid's picture or my sister's picture along with some cash through like multiple friends to her house, she declined to look at those pictures. She declined to receive that money. My seventy five years old grandmother. And then
32:41 Speaker 01 later on, after I had a meeting in twenty nineteen March with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the three days after the meeting, I got the news that my mom, along with my aunt and uncle, they were transferred to the prisons from the camps. And then my aunt and my uncle, they were sentenced for seven to eight years because of my meeting with US government official.
33:08 Speaker 00 Have you have you felt any pressure here in America? Like, do you feel like their reach extends even into America? Like, have you felt uncomfortable here or noticed things that were perhaps strange or unnerving?
33:24 Speaker 01 Uh, not really directly to myself in the US. But the direct, I will say the direct threat will be easier than the the mental threat or the the threat that comes to somebody that you love.
33:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
33:40 Speaker 01 Because as a person that you can make a decision about what you do and then are you gonna suffer or are you gonna pay the price for your actions? But you don't wanna put your mom especially or your family members in danger because of the way that you are speaking out or because of the way that you are doing something. So that's the really hard choice, especially after on last last March that they transferred my mom from camp to prison. It took me a whole week to think, so what should I do next? Should I keep doing what I'm doing or should I just get scared and become quiet? Because I didn't wanna lose my mom.
34:21 Speaker 01 I was I was scared and then I knew that Chinese government is capable enough to do something or just let her die.
34:28 Speaker 00 Right. Oh, man. Well, what is so so the the courage that it takes for you, I I I get, right? There's there's risk there. What should like, what should I do? What should it? What should Americans do? E- especially, I mean, I think the logic there of of like, hey, look, this is a this is a pilot program. This is testing for a larger potential injustice. To me, makes actually ties up our self-interest in it, although the Stoics would argue that, you know, sort of the this idea of sympathy, we're all part of this larger whole and the idea that you could just turn a blind eye to the sufferings of other people because it doesn't affect you is
35:09 Speaker 00 just not how it works. But like, what what impact can a ordinary person listening to this have? What should we be doing?
35:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, there are there are a couple of things that the just normal citizen or the normal American people that they can do without harming anything or without losing anything. Like boycotting the Chinese products. There is nothing that can beat the free labor. Like here in the US, our federal minimum wage is seven dollars fifty cent. In any state, the loss that you can pay to hire someone to make your shoes is at least seven dollars fifty cent, which is fifty Chinese yuan. Your minimum, one dollar minimum wage will be fifty Chinese yuan. And then all months, it is maybe fifteen hundred Chinese yuan, which is like two hundred dollars.
36:03 Speaker 01 So for three days salary here in the US, that they can use multiple people as a slave labor in China to make those shoes.
36:14 Speaker 01 That's why many of our like factories or the businesses are moving back to China. And then I'm, I'm really glad that the President Trump that he's trying to bring back lots of things. So China is benefiting from the people like my mom, my brother, my uncle, my sisters, using them as a slave labor to make those products, the shoes, the clothes, the Nike sneakers or the Adidas. So I ask the other, all the people to boycott those, the made in China products. Because you don't know which one is made in,
36:53 Speaker 01 in the first, the camps, the camps, or the factories with the forced labor.
37:01 Speaker 00 It's a tricky, it's a tricky thing, right? For, for Daily Stoic, we, we make a bunch of different products. Uh, and, and so that was sort of my first, although I'd worked at a company called American Apparel for a number of years that was one of the largest garment manufacturers in the United States. But that was sort of one of my first experiences with sort of logistics and, and, and, you know, manufacturing. I think people, it's, it's hard, right? Like you're like, okay, we make these challenge coins. It's like. You could get it 10 times cheaper overseas. And so I think a lot of people just look at these things on a spreadsheet. I know I've looked at those spreadsheets and you go, hey, this is made in America and it costs. Well, I was just looking at the cost of print a book.
37:44 Speaker 00 It was like $17 to print it in the U.S. from one manufacturer. And it was $1.27 to ship it in, you know, to manufacture it in China. So I think people look at these spreadsheets and they go, well, there's just no, there's no way I can, you know, it's, it's an obvious choice. But I think your point is what that's obscuring is massive, massive human rights violations and a complicity in a thing you would never want on your conscience. So it's actually been really hard for us to, to find, like, we sort of had this thing where like we're, whenever we can, as much as we can, we're going to make everything in the U.S. Sometimes it's hard because you, you hire someone and then they subcontract it out.
38:29 Speaker 00 You can't always be sure. But it's, it's actually been like a lot of work to try to manufacture here in America. And, and so I think consumers by deciding to support people who do that, you make it easier.
38:46 Speaker 01 Exactly. So, yes, and then another thing is like, it's not only about the human rights or feeling pity for someone like the Uyghurs that you are boycotting the Chinese products, but also like China is the strongest threat, the biggest threat to the U.S. economy, U.S. democracy in many different ways.
39:06 Speaker 00 Right.
39:07 Speaker 01 And then it's not only about the Uyghur issue. It is about the Uyghurs, the Tibet, the Hong Kong, the South Mongolian, or any other people, like even the Chinese, Han Chinese people themselves within the, within China or living under the CCP rule. But also, once they get rid of the blockers as the Uyghurs and Tibet, the China won't stop within the Chinese borders. Like we have seen that they are expanding towards the Indian borders. And then they expand through like other countries through one road, one bill. And then they challenge the U.S. army, the U.S. forces or the U.S. influence in around the globe because they have economic.
39:53 Speaker 01 Strong ties with other countries as well. So if we can cut their economic side, if we can at least like hurt them dollar every day or like dollar per person,
40:07 Speaker 01 we can save our next generations as well. It's not only about my mom, it's not only about my people. I'm a Uyghur American living in Washington DC. I work for the, as a contractor of the US government on the affordable care project for the healthcare that go. I'm a Uyghur American, but I'm speaking out not only because of my mom, but my people, but also for my own kids who are born in the US while living in Washington DC area for their future.
40:40 Speaker 00 So, and I realize like I don't want to get you in trouble. So, so feel free to sidestep this however you need to sidestep. But I'm curious too, you know, if, if America wants to be this sort of, this sort of beacon of freedom, if it wants to have a moral voice in saying like, hey, this is wrong. How, how can, how can we do that? When we also turn a blind eye to injustices here at home? Like I'm, I'm thinking about the argument of it's, it's rather strange. When you look, for instance, at the history of the second world war, America goes to Europe to, you know, sort of fight the Germans to stop that totalitarian state, you know, to ultimately ends up stopping the Holocaust,
41:25 Speaker 00 racial discrimination, religious discrimination, et cetera. Meanwhile, we have what is effectively an apartheid system in the American South and we've turned an eye to any injustices ourselves. So I'm not saying that a state has to be perfect to get involved, but it does strike me as tricky that the sort of, that, that different political voices are coming down on different sides of the Uyghur China issue. And there's some moral complexity there. Do you get what I'm saying?
41:57 Speaker 01 I got it. Yes. So I'll say like, you don't have to be perfect enough to judge me or stop me from doing something illegal or unhuman. Like I'm not the perfect person, but if I see someone is getting beaten up on the street, should I stand up? Yes, I should, because that's my moral.
42:19 Speaker 01 Like obligation to stop something from happening. And then, yes, here in the US, like, we have lots of issues. Like, we are number one on the COVID cases. And then we have more than 200,000 people who lost their lives. Every single one of them is precious. But they are like family members of somebody else. We have Black Lives Matter. We have some other issues. But it doesn't mean that we have to stop questioning other people, other governments.
42:52 Speaker 00 Right. No, it's like, like, the NBA is an interesting, to go to your point about sort of using capitalism in business and where you're spending your dollars. The NBA is sort of very active about Black Lives Matter. And then it's been quieter on the human rights abuses in China. And it's been strange because the argument, it's, it's almost like one side is saying, they're trying to say, well, you don't care about China. So Black Lives Matter doesn't, doesn't count. And then other people are saying, how can you be mad about police abuses here in the United States? And then check, you know, cashing enormous checks from a government built explicitly on that kind of, of authoritarian abuses.
43:36 Speaker 00 So it's like, it's almost as if, instead of saying, hey, injustices matter. It matters how we treat the vulnerable. We have to stand up even when it doesn't feel like it affects us directly. Instead of kind of insisting on general rules, we're trying to just like, we're, we're just engaging in what, you know, what they call what aboutism? We're just going like, well, what about that? And then it's like they cancel each other out and then we're not morally obligated to do anything.
44:03 Speaker 01 Exactly. So, yeah, like, NBA is a really great example because in the US, they benefit from free speech. So they can. Say anything they want or stand up on the either side that they want against their own government or the political system. But when it comes to China, China, especially the Communist Party itself is a big bully. So if you listen to him, it will bully you until you stand up for your own rights. And then if one NBA stands up, they will just shut down all the NBA services, the shows, and then the selling of their products in China.
44:44 Speaker 01 But if you have the NBA and then the other, like the Nike, the Apple, like all the big corporations like around the globe, they stand up on the same time, the China will feel the pain of losing everything in one shot. So they will back down.
44:59 Speaker 00 That's maybe a good place to sort of wind down. And I'm curious, so the Stoics, I don't know how familiar you are with Stoicism, but I think you would enjoy it and get a lot out of it because it's all about these sort of really complex, difficult situations that require courage and emphasis on justice, but also wisdom. But you know, the idea for the Stoics, they're sort of like, we've got to focus on what you control, where you can have impact, and you can't get too beaten down by the hopelessness of a large, you know, complex situation. And so a lot of people maybe think that that means that the Stoic is sort of just inwardly focused or just thinks really small, like how, it's sort of the question of, well, how
45:43 Speaker 00 do people come to get, like, what can one person do? And then also, if we're only thinking about what one person can do, it maybe prevents us from coming together as a collective whole. And sometimes that's what you need to solve a problem. So I'm just like, what do you think about, like, I get your point about sort of boycotting and speaking to representatives and stuff like that, but you know, maybe the NBA is thinking like, well, what are we just supposed to take a multi-billion dollar hit and then it not make a single ounce of difference? I think people think this too. They're like, well, should I just speak out and then lose my career over it? And you must have thought this too. You're like, well, I'm going to speak out and really the major effect is it's going
46:28 Speaker 00 to negatively impact my mother's situation. How do you think about how this all integrates as part of a larger movement?
46:39 Speaker 01 So I I have that feeling as well. And then many other people around myself, like especially from my own community. The people especially, the ones that were staying silent, like what can I do by speaking out or like tweeting about? Or just talking about my mom? I'm just one person. And then that's the mentality that Chinese government, they wanted you to have as well. That's the exactly word that a Chinese agent who reached out to me on WeChat last year, who told me, like, you are just one person who is going against the superpower Chinese government. You can't do nothing.
47:19 Speaker 01 But in fact, yes, if I'm just myself, I'm just nobody. But with the people like you and your listeners and then other like media organizations, like I become stronger, my become, my voice becomes louder. And then that was the exact reason that after being sentenced for seven years in prison, my mom was being released. So if only one NBA stands up, yes, they will lose maybe billions. And then if Volkswagen stands up to say, hey, we're gonna shut down our factories and then we're gonna lay off all the workers and we're gonna stop selling cars or like we're gonna stop doing business with you because you are forced laboring or they're using the forced labor in the factories or you have concentration camps.
48:04 Speaker 01 And then they might not lose billions. But if five companies or the 10 companies or 50 companies, they voice together, it will make the Chinese government to change their policies.
48:18 Speaker 00 I I think I think that's beautifully beautifully said. And and look, the and I'll talk about this in the intro or I already I will have already done that. But sort of this, the history of Stoicism is about, and and I think history too is is about people who took a stand and they were alone. But eventually that was no longer the case. And I mean, uh, case in point, you've begun speaking about this and now you and I are talking. And I hope that the people who are listening, they begin to talk to someone. And this is how movements come start with one person deciding, as you said, to to just not.
49:00 Speaker 00 To be able to look your mother in the face and say, I did something, that can have an enormous ripple effect and one person can change history.
49:09 Speaker 01 Exactly.
49:10 Speaker 00 Farqad, thank you so much. You're a true inspiration. And where would you point people to if they wanted to donate money? If they wanted to, if there was a specific petition or agency they should, they should reach out to, what would you, where would you leave us?
49:27 Speaker 01 I'll suggest the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the UHRP.org, that they are organization based in Washington DC, who are doing tremendous amount of job for advocating the Uyghur rights in the US government and around the globe as well. Also, the Uyghur American Association. And then there is a bill, I forget the exact name. I think it's HR, HR is for the House, HR 6 to 10.
49:56 Speaker 00 That's the bill about Uyghur rights, right?
49:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, I guess. We just passed from the House of Representatives this week. So it is on its way to the Senate. So if the people can just call their own senators and then ask them to be sponsor or add their voice to the bill. So it can be sent to the president as soon as possible. So we can prevent those, the items from coming to the US in the first place.
50:30 Speaker 00 Now, thank you so much. And look, we, we have this weird trend in America right now. It's sort of in somewhat, it's enormously hypocritical, but it's somewhat anti-immigrant bent in our society. You know, despite the fact that like my own grandparents came here as refugees from totalitarianism in Europe. But I just wanted to say, I'm, I'm proud to hear that you're an American. I'm proud and inspired by the work you're doing. I'm glad you're here and it's truly wonderful to talk and be, we could use many more people like you. And frankly, you are holding truer to what it means to be an American with life you're leading and the actions you're taking
51:13 Speaker 00 than, than people who have been here for many, many generations. So thank you for that.
51:17 Speaker 01 Thank you, Ryan.
51:19 Speaker 00 If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps. It really helps. And tell a friend.
Previous MLB’s Eric Byrnes - How to Keep Going When Your Body Wants to Quit Next If You Want to Feel Better, Do This Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
