The TikTok deal announced on Thursday poses a fundamental threat to free and honest discourse about Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Under the reported deal, the Chinese company that owns the short-video social media app, ByteDance, will transfer control of TikTok’s algorithm and other U.S. operations to a new consortium of investors led by the U.S. technology company Oracle. The long-gestating deal will give Oracle’s billionaire pro-Trump board members Larry Ellison and Safra Catz the power to impose their anti-Palestinian agenda over the content that TikTok users see.

Most mainstream U.S. media coverage of the TikTok deal has completely ignored the explicitly anti-Palestinian agenda of its biggest Western investors. TikTok has played a critical role in helping hundreds of millions of users see the ugly reality of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. But the Trump-favored billionaires who will take over TikTok’s U.S. operations have a documented agenda of both suppressing voices critical of Israel and supporting the very Israeli military that has killed so many Palestinian civilians. Without safeguards in place, TikTok’s U.S. operations could soon become an exercise in blocking users from seeing and reacting to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by a major U.S. ally.

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Ellison and Catz have a documented record of supporting Israel and its military. Ellison is a major donor to the Israeli military — in 2017, he donated $16.6 million to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, what was at the time the nonprofit’s largest single donation ever — as well as a close confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Catz, who stepped down as Oracle’s CEO in September, has also been quite blunt about the company’s ideological agenda. The Israeli American billionaire said while unveiling a new Oracle data center in Jerusalem in 2021, “I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.” The Ellison family has also brought his pro-Israel agenda to CBS News, where Larry’s son, David Ellison, recently installed anti-Palestinian ideologue Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.

TikTok played an important role in the sea change of U.S. opinion about Israel, particularly among young people. It’s why the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the organization I work for, condemned the sale as a “desperate” attempt to silence young Americans.

What’s at stake is no less than whether or not U.S. voters will continue to be able to see what Israel’s military is doing to Palestinians. While many mainstream media outlets pushed coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza that was deferential to Israeli government talking points, TikTok users watched unfiltered videos of Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinian civilians.

The effects are undeniable: A March Pew Research poll found Israel’s unfavorable rating among Republicans aged 18 to 49 had risen from 35 to 50 percent (among the same age group of Democrats, the country’s unfavorability also climbed almost 10 percentage points to 71 percent). A September New York Times/Siena University survey found 54 percent of Democrats said they sympathized more with the Palestinians, while only 13 percent expressed greater empathy for Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that he understands the consequences of access to unfiltered social media. He recently described the sale of TikTok as “the most important purchase happening. … I hope it goes through because it can be consequential.” Netanyahu, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza, sees control of TikTok as a part of Israel’s military strategy. “You have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield, and one of the most important ones is social media,” he continued.

President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2024 mandating that ByteDance sell its U.S. operations. That law forced the sale of TikTok under threat of an outright ban, which briefly took effect in January 2025. The new “agreement,” which is reportedly set to close on January 22, will establish a new and separate TikTok joint venture that will control U.S. operations, U.S. user data, and the TikTok algorithm. Just over 80 percent of the new company, dubbed “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC,” will reportedly be owned by investors that include Oracle, private equity group Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. ByteDance will retain a 19.9 percent share.

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The official arguments for forcing the sale focused on preventing Chinese government surveillance of TikTok users, but some elected U.S. officials were more honest. At a McCain Institute forum in May 2024, then-Sen. Mitt Romney said, “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

That’s why advocates for human rights and a free press must work to challenge and reverse this government-sanctioned censorship effort. That means calling on both current and future members of Congress, as well as future White House administrations, to undo this dangerous media consolidation. The Ellison family’s control of TikTok, Paramount, and potentially other massive media properties in the future is a threat to free and open public discourse about U.S. foreign policy, particularly U.S. military support for Israel.

The work of chilling dissent has already been underway. Even before the 2024 law was passed, TikTok had begun taking steps to silence users who have criticized Israel. In July 2025, TikTok hired Erica Mindel, a former Israeli soldier with a documented record of anti-Palestinian politics, to police user speech on the platform. Given the Israeli military’s long record of propaganda, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, especially toward Palestinians, no former Israeli soldier should have been given the power to police TikTok users’ speech.

Even so, savvy social media users have long demonstrated an ability to organize and evade social media censorship, jumping from platform to platform regardless of what Western billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have tried to do. These challenges will continue in new forms, as demonstrated by the recently launched #TakeBackTikTok campaign. The campaign is pushing for a “user rebellion” in which American TikTok users challenge the Oracle takeover by flooding the platform with content in support of Palestinian liberation. Organizers began making their case last weekend with a massive projection onto Oracle’s U.K. offices.

This is a critical moment. The transfer of TikTok’s algorithm from ByteDance to Oracle would mean that TikTok’s content would move from being controlled by a company under the influence of a Chinese government committing genocide against Uyghurs to being controlled by U.S. investors who want to silence TikTok users’ opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Once billionaire anti-Palestinian investors and ideologues take control, TikTok users who are critical of Israel will need to fight even harder and more creatively to evade the suppression of free speech. Millions of U.S. citizens now support an end to unquestioned diplomatic and military support for Israel. Anti-Palestinian billionaires like Ellison and Catz know this full well, and it’s up to us to stand in the way of their efforts to subvert the will of the many.

Correction: December 21, 2025, 6:10 p.m. ET
This story previously stated that, under the deal, Oracle could now moderate the content that 2 billion users see, which is the number of TikTok users globally, rather than in the U.S. As the deal is not yet final, it remains to be seen how many users could be affected.

The post Anti-Palestinian Billionaires Can Now Control What TikTok Users See appeared first on The Intercept.

Mentions of democracy are noticeably absent, however, from Anduril’s recent announcement of a new joint venture with a state-run bomb maker from an authoritarian monarchy that is facilitating a genocide.

Anduril is partnering with EDGE Group, a weapons conglomerate controlled by the United Arab Emirates, a nation run entirely by the royal families of its seven emirates that permits virtually none of the activities typically associated with democratic societies. In the UAE, free expression and association are outlawed, and dissident speech is routinely and brutally punished without due process. A 2024 assessment of political rights and civil liberties by Freedom House, a U.S. State Department-backed think tank, gave the UAE a score of 18 out of 100.

The EDGE–Anduril Production Alliance, as it will be known, will focus on autonomous weapons systems, including the production of Anduril’s “Omen” drone. The UAE has agreed to purchase the first 50 Omen drones built through the partnership, according to a press release, “the first in a series of autonomous systems envisioned under the joint venture.” The Omen drone was described as a “personal project” of Anduril founder and CEO Palmer Luckey, a longtime Trump ally and fundraiser.

EDGE Chair Faisal Al Bannai explained in a 2019 interview that EDGE was working to develop weapons systems tailored to defeating low-tech “militia-style” militant groups.

The UAE has been eager to sell its weapons around the world, both to generate profit and to exert political influence. This most recently and brutally includes Sudan, where the Emirates supply the Rapid Support Forces, an anti-government militia. Weapons furnished by the UAE have been instrumental in the ongoing civil war, now widely described as having descended into an RSF-perpetrated genocide. In October, video imagery emerged from Sudan showing RSF soldiers indiscriminately slaughtering civilians in Darfur. Reports of rape, torture, and other atrocities at the hands of the RSF are now widespread, and a current “low estimate” of people murdered by the RSF during its recent takeover of the Sudanese city of El Fasher is 60,000, according to a recent report by The Guardian. The Trump administration determined in January that the RSF’s massacres constituted a genocide, echoing assessments by the Biden administration and human rights observers.

The RSF has been able to rapidly overtake the Sudanese army with the help of weapons from Anduril’s new partner. An April investigation by France 24 found EDGE subsidiary International Golden Group funneled tens of thousands of mortar rounds into Sudan for use by the RSF.

Nathaniel Raymonds, who leads the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, told The Intercept mortars were among “three weapons systems that went into the hands of RSF that changed the course of the war.”

Raymonds, whose office at Yale previously partnered with the State Department to monitor atrocities in the Sudanese civil war, described Anduril’s joint venture as “mind-boggling” given the role Emirati drones and other weapons have played in facilitating the RSF’s genocide. “You have a DIA and [State Department] assessment that in a just world will trigger Leahy Act and shut this thing down from day one,” Raymonds said, referring to legislation that nominally prohibits the provision of assistance to foreign militaries that have committed major human rights violations.

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Neither Anduril nor EDGE Group responded to a request for comment. A November press release from both companies noted “EDGE and Anduril will work closely with U.S. and UAE authorities to ensure full compliance with applicable laws and regulations including trade compliance rules and regulations.”

A 2024 report by Human Rights Watch noted the use of drone-delivered thermobaric bombs sold by EDGE. In October, The Guardian reported the RSF’s use of armored personnel carriers manufactured by an EDGE subsidiary. In 2024, a United Nations panel of experts deemed the UAE’s backing of the RSF as “credible,” and this year a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers issued a statement criticizing “[f]oreign backers of the RSF and SAF–including the United Arab Emirates.” The Wall Street Journal reported in October that both the State Department’s intelligence office and the Defense Intelligence Agency agreed the UAE was supplying the RSF with a wide array of weapons, vehicles, and ammunition. The UAE has repeatedly denied this support despite ample evidence.

Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who has tracked the flow of arms into Sudan, told The Intercept that EDGE Group’s products have exacerbated the horror of the ongoing war. “The rapid support forces, which we found responsible for crimes against humanity across Sudan, has made widespread use of armored vehicles made by Nimr, a subsidiary of Edge Group,” he said. “The name of Adasi, another subsidiary of Edge Group which specializes in drone technology, appeared on crates of Serbian-made 120mm munitions that the RSF has been using and which equip some of their quadcopter attack drones.” Nan Tian, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, added that the Nimr vehicles are armed with “a gun that is made by KNDS which is a French-German arms maker. KNDS has a military partnership with EDGE Group.”

Raymonds argued that “not since Operation Cyclone,” the CIA effort to arm the Afghan mujahideen, “has there been a covert action by any nation state to arm a paramilitary proxy group at this scale and sophistication and try to write it off as just a series of happy coincidences.”

EDGE was launched at a 2019 inauguration ceremony overseen by Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and consists of over 30 subsidiaries spanning bombs, drones, ammunition, and various military and intelligence software systems. EDGE’s chair of the board, Faisal Al Bannai, is a businessman and adviser to the prince.

EDGE isn’t the only Emirati weapons company, but the conglomerate represents the bulk of the country’s arms industry by volume and illustrates the amorality of its export policy, according to Sam Perlo-Freeman, a researcher with the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, which has advocated for an arms embargo against the UAE. “As a state-owned company, they will be used as an agent of Emirati state policy,” he said. “Arms supplies to allies and proxies across the Middle East, North, and East Africa has been for quite a while a major facet of Emirati state policy.” This has manifested beyond furnishing arms to the RSF, with the UAE arming militaries in Libya, Somalia, and the ongoing genocidal war in Tigray. “There’s very few conflicts in the in the wider region that the UAE haven’t had a hand in, and very often a rather malign hand.”

Reports of EDGE wares winding up in the hands of armed proxies stretches back over a decade.

A 2013 report by the United Nations Security Council found International Golden Group facilitated the import of hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition into Libya in violation of a global arms embargo.

In 2019, a report by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism found UAE-backed combatants in the ongoing Yemeni civil war armed with pistols manufactured by Caracal, an EDGE subsidiary.

As in Sudan, a nominal civil war waged within the Tigray region of Ethiopia was exacerbated by foreign entanglement and a flood of outside weaponry. In 2023, Gerjon’s Aircraft Finds, an aviation analysis Substack, published imagery indicating the import of guided bombs manufactured by Al Tariq, another EDGE subsidiary, for use by the Ethiopian Air Force, responsible for widespread civilian death during the Tigray war.

Anduril, most recently valued by private investors at over $30 billion, has a wide array of weapons in the U.S. and with its allies, including Australia and Taiwan. It works closely with the Department of Defense and has operated surveillance towers along the U.S.–Mexico border for nearly a decade. Its business has surged as it has cast its products as a vital tool in a tech arms race between the West and China, matching the company’s rhetoric positioning it as a lethal bulwark against autocracy.

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Luckey has long cast his company as a defender of democracy. “Soldiers who defend western values should all be superheroes with superpowers,” he tweeted in 2019. In an interview that year, Luckey explained backing democratic allies against “rogue nations” around the world: “I like working with the British,” he said. “Everyone’s a little bit different but more or less we all believe in western values and democracy and universal human rights.”

Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm similarly advanced the company’s moral case for an arms race on human rights grounds, describing China in a 2024 interview as the world’s “greatest evil,” denouncing the Chinese state’s “basic approach to human rights.” Grimm added that “I think they’re conducting an ongoing genocide with their Uyghur population, I think their approach to free speech, to political speech, to religious freedom, are fundamentally antithetical to how the West values human life and how we think about human rights.”

“The fact of Anduril saying they’re an arsenal of democracy and partnering with EDGE Group, it’s obviously ridiculous,” said Perlo-Freeman, “but it’s part of the broader picture of Western democracies treating the UAE as a valued partner and ally and shielding them from consequences.”

The post Anduril Partners With UAE Bomb Maker Accused of Arming Sudan’s Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

Hikvision’s cameras make up a large part of this system. But the world’s largest security camera manufacturer has always denied their complicity in the violation of human rights against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.

In 2019, facing increasing U.S. sanctions, Hikvison commissioned a human rights review of its five largest police projects in Xinjiang, which has a population of over 25 million. The company hired Pierre-Richard Prosper, the former ambassador-at-large for war crimes in the Bush administration State Department and a war crimes prosecutor at the United Nations in the late 1990s.

The full review remained secret, but Hikvision released one sentence saying the company did not knowingly engage in human rights abuses. A recent leaked recording, however, illustrated how much more Hikvision actually knew — and that these Hikvision projects were connected to companies that the U.S. just sanctioned.

The result makes for a potentially awkward scenario: A former U.S. official with a robust history of human rights work was being used to cleanse the image of a surveillance company now linked to violations so severe that they incurred U.S. sanctions. Prosper’s remarks in the leaked recording also make him the first person to publicly admit Hikvision’s complicity.

Last month, Hikvision convened a conference on environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, in Sydney, Australia. Prosper, now an attorney for legal and lobbying firm ArentFox Schiff, led an “introduction to human rights compliance” session.

“In the contracts, we saw some concerning language where it said Uyghurs, mosques, and this and that, which would appear that the contracts were looking at groups and not isolated to a criminal, let’s say,” Prosper said in the leaked recording obtained by IPVM and shared with The Intercept. “So it was very general.”

The Chinese government is the controlling stakeholder of Hikvision, with over 40 percent ownership, but the company still calls itself an “independent” corporation. Last month, the U.S. Department of Commerce added five Hikvision subsidiaries from Xinjiang to its trade blacklist, after Hikvision was added to the entity list in 2019. (The U.S. military previously bought Hikvision cameras in violation of the sanctions, according to prior reporting by The Intercept.)

In February, the company sued the U.S. government and the Federal Communications Commission over a ban restricting the sale of Hikvision products in the U.S. (Hikvision, ArentFox, and Prosper did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

And, what’s more, the locations of the Hikvision police projects in Xinjiang match up exactly with the names of the subsidiaries: Luopu, Moyu, Pishan, Urumqi, and Yutian.

For the review, Prosper and his team received approximately 15,000 pages of documents and read about 5,000 “line by line,” he said. The contracts were explicit about their use against Uyghur communities, for example, in Moyu County, with a population of over half a million in southwestern Xinjiang.

“Uyghurs account for about 97%, and most of them believe in Islam,” according to a Hikvision contract obtained by The Intercept. “Moyu County has a strong religious atmosphere since its history, and the enemy social situation is relatively complicated.”

At the conference, Prosper talked about the project in Moyu. “The most concerning on paper was the Moyu project,” he said. “It was most concerning because of the language in the contract. And the language identified terrorism, identified Uyghurs, and then basically explained that they want to look at various facilities and all that, religious facilities.”

Prosper failed to mention that the Moyu project included panoramic cameras for its “re-education” centers — internment camps that Amnesty International has decried as “places of brainwashing, torture and punishment” — as well as a camera at every entrance of Moyu’s nearly 1,000 mosques. Documents have also previously shown that over 300 citizens of Moyu were sent to detention centers.

Human rights groups have been sounding the alarm about the scale and intrusion of the surveillance schemes and data they collect.

“The surveillance systems have increased the speeds and empowered authorities in the ability to control a large population quickly,” said Maya Wang, associate director in the Asia division at Human Rights Watch. “It was really quite unprecedented I think in human history.”

At the conference, while trying to play down Hikvision’s knowledge of data collection, Prosper inadvertently confirmed the sheer scale of the surveillance. “The command centers were basically more a hub, data center,” he said, “where the confirmation will come in and then from there whatever government officials were working there, they will be responsible for disseminating.”

Yet at the ESG conference, Prosper drastically underplayed Hikvision’s role and shifted blame largely to “security issues” and cultural differences — despite large bodies of evidence that illustrate the genocidal nature of persecution against the Uyghur population.

“Chinese companies were not getting the second half of the story. They were given the first half that there was terrorism,” he said at the conference. “But they were not hearing about the international community’s complaints about potential abuses or whatever it may be. It was a blind spot.”

According to the company’s own reports, they were well aware of the concerns. The 2019 report announcing the hire of ArentFox, the firm where Prosper is a partner, said, “Over the past year, there have been numerous reports about ways that video surveillance products have been involved in human rights violations. We read every report seriously and are listening to voices from outside the company.”

While Hikvision has disclosed these five Xinjiang police projects in its annual reports for the last four years, they were not disclosed in the most recent 2022 report, published this month.

Prosper seemed more concerned with the company’s use of language than its role in persecution. “We want you to be sensitive to language that may cause you to raise an eyebrow,” Prosper said. “We, in the West, instinctively or initially, everything is human rights, individual rights. … If you want to be a globally respected company, you need to understand that.”

While Prosper’s recording reveals the extent of Hikvision’s complicity for the first time from the company itself, activists are frustrated that the evidence has already been extensively documented.

“A revelation like this should not be necessary for the entire private sector,” Louisa Greve, director of global advocacy for the Uyghur Human Rights Project, told The Intercept, citing the more than 60 reports the project has produced, as well as projects by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. “People are sent to prison for having a chat with their own mother in the Uyghur region. What more does it take?”

The post Leaked Tape Reveals How Spy Camera Firm Used Ex-U.S. Official to Cover Up Uyghur Abuses appeared first on The Intercept.

South Africa’s genocide charges against Israel were formally brought to The Hague today, with the post-apartheid nation facing off against Israel for two days of emergency hearings. South Africa’s immediate aim is to win a ruling later this month — perhaps as early as next week — ordering Israel to cease and desist its assault of Gaza. 

Today’s hearing at The Hague was South Africa’s opportunity to lay out its case; tomorrow Israel will respond. The case they made (watch it here), which played live on TVs set up outside the building for crowds to watch, was straightforward: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken in biblical terms about wiping out the Palestinians and followed up by urging them to flee to safe zones, and then flattening those safe zones with 2,000 bombs. South Africa also played clips of Israeli soldiers echoing Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric, vowing to wipe out “the seed of Amalek.” “What more evidence could be required?” one South African lawyer asked. My colleague Jeremy Scahill has more of the blow-by-blow.

A preliminary ruling to cease the assault, if it’s made, would then raise the question of how it would be enforced and who would be willing to stand up to the United States to enforce it. It would also give new global legitimacy to the Yemeni blockade of shipping in the Red Sea destined for or originating from Israeli ports.  

In the hours before the hearing, the number of countries backing the genocide charges exploded. In our hemisphere, Brazil, Colombia, and Nicaragua signed on; Malaysia, Turkey, Brazil, the Maldives, Namibia, Jordan, Iran, Bangladesh, Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen also joined. Many of these countries endorsed the charges through the Arab League, whose support is a body blow to the Abraham Accords.

South Africa needs to win over eight of the 15 ICJ judges hearing the case, and it’s hard to imagine many of them supporting a charge of genocide. The judges are from the United States, Russia, China, France, Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Jamaica, Japan, Lebanon, Morocco, Slovakia, Somalia, and Uganda. The U.S. judge, obviously, won’t be easy to win over, but neither will the Russian, as their country faces charges for its invasion of Ukraine, and China may tread lightly given its own treatment of Uyghurs in western China. China, however, is also poised to benefit geostrategically if the crisis can help displace American power in the Mideast.

The makeup gives South Africa at least a plausible path toward victory; judges are not necessarily under instructions from their home countries, though they are, of course, aware of the political pressures at work.

U.S. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is being sued in federal court for his failure to stop the genocide, a case now joined by 77 human rights and civil society organizations, my colleague Prem Thakker reports. On Wednesday, we covered the South African charges on “Counter Points.”

Netanyahu is clearly feeling the weight of the charges. He posted an English-language video to social media Wednesday afternoon that was markedly different from his bellicose rhetoric to date. “I want to make a few points absolutely clear: Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population,” Netanyahu said in the video, a break from his previous willingness to entertain the idea, which is regularly floated by ministers in his government. “Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population, and we are doing so in full compliance with international law.”

But the rest of his government continues to reiterate that mass displacement is their goal. Here is his minister of communications on Wednesday: “We certainly need to encourage emigration so that there’s as little pressure as possible inside the Gaza Strip from people who, yes, at the moment they’re uninvolved, but they’re not exactly lovers of Israel and they educate their children to [embrace] terror. And we’d like to see, and we’ve talked about this in government meetings, by the way, there aren’t any countries that want to take them in. No one wants them, even if we pay a lot of money. Voluntary emigration is important. It doesn’t in any way harm human rights,” he said. “We should encourage voluntary migration and we should compel them until they say they want it.”

“How?” he was asked by an Israeli presenter. 

“The war does what it does,” he explained. 

That the Israeli ministers are still speaking openly like this — talking about the war as one against an entire population — as the hearings are underway at The Hague only strengthens South Africa’s case. 

A new report from Save the Children has found that, on average, 10 children in Gaza have lost at least one limb on every day of Israel’s bombing campaign. For those who required amputations, many were performed without proper anesthesia, they note, as well as a lack of access to antibiotics, due to Israel’s blockade of the area. 

In the Senate yesterday, Bernie Sanders moved forward on a privileged resolution that will force a vote on whether to order the State Department to investigate whether Israel is committing human rights violations with U.S. weapons. After 30 days, Congress can then vote to block the weapons transfers. Sanders is relying on an obscure provision of the Foreign Assistance Act, Section 502(b), which, believe it or not, I floated back in November as a path available to Sanders after he told my colleague Dan Boguslaw in the Capitol hallway he was considering forcing a vote on the issue of arms sales to Israel. Unless I’m mistaken, this is the first time this has ever been tried.

The post South Africa Just Made Its Case at The Hague. What’s Next? appeared first on The Intercept.

When people shifted to working from home in 2020, many renovated their homes to add offices. Influencers showed viewers how to easily install vinyl flooring from stores around the U.S., and sales of such flooring surged. But what these influencers didn’t know is that much of the vinyl flooring sold in the U.S. is made with PVC or plastic produced with forced Uyghur labor. This week on Intercepted, Mara Hvistendahl, a senior reporter for The Intercept, breaks down the supply chain from the Chinese factories to U.S. stores. She is joined by researchers Laura Murphy and Nyrola Elimä, who recently wrote a report highlighting the working conditions in the factories, their grave environmental impact, and the human consequences for Uyghur people forced to work in the facilities.

MH: As the coronavirus pandemic spread through the world in 2020 and 2021, the shift to work-from-home ushered in a home renovation boom. Basement dens became offices, bathrooms got an overhaul, bedrooms were split in two. For their Covid home reboots, many Americans turned to a kind of cheap flooring that is commonly sold at DIY stores. And, as a Home Depot commercial explained, setting up vinyl flooring in your own home is very easy.

Home Depot commercial: [Upbeat music plays.] Vinyl flooring is a great option for just about every interior living space in your home. The flooring we’re installing today is Lifeproof Rigid Core vinyl plank flooring. Lifeproof is the latest innovation in vinyl flooring.

MH: Vinyl flooring is seeing a surge of growth, boosted in part by pandemic-era renovations. The industry calls it luxury vinyl tile. But, in reality, it is layer upon layer of thin plastic, a heavily polluting concoction made with fossil fuels. And very often that plastic is produced using forced labor.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted. 

[Upbeat music.]

MH: I’m Mara Hvistendahl, a senior reporter with The Intercept. I write about national security and technology. And, for the past few months, I’ve been investigating the connection between vinyl flooring in U.S. stores, these plastics’ devastating effect on the environment and the way these plastics are produced using forced labor practices in China. 

It all starts in the Xinjiang region of Northwestern China. For years, the Chinese state has persecuted the predominantly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group there.

Becky Anderson (CNN): Not one, not some, but every single provision in the United Nations Genocide Convention violated by the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.

Reporter (The Economist): These people are systematically oppressed by their own government.

Reporter: We’ve been waking up to horrific stories every day, heartbreaking images separating mothers from their children.

Reporter: They live in a police state where they’re monitored by one of the most advanced and intrusive surveillance systems in the world.

Samantha Simmonds (BBC): Documents seen by the BBC that are said to have been hacked from Chinese police computers show that Uyghur prisoners in the western region of Xinjiang are shot on site if they’re caught trying to escape.

MH: Uyghurs have been systematically targeted by the Chinese state, made to labor in factories with harsh chemicals that not just pollute the environment, but place the workers’ own health at risk.

The Xinjiang region is where the Zhongtai Chemical Company sits. That’s a Chinese government-owned petrochemical firm that is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. 

PVC is basically plastic. It’s a critical ingredient in the kind of vinyl flooring that is sold at Home Depot and other places you can buy home building products. A recent report from the nonprofit Center for Environmental Health found that in 2020 alone, the vinyl flooring that was shipped from China to the U.S. would cover over one million miles if laid out end to end. That’s long enough to stretch from Earth to the moon four times over.

And a lot of the PVC for those floors comes from Zhongtai. The state-owned conglomerate’s four factories churn out more than two million tons of PVC resin per year.

And still more flooring made with Zhongtai PVC arrives in the United States via countries like Vietnam. 

But here’s the problem: Zhongtai’s factories used forced Uyghur labor. By its account, Zhongtai has brought in thousands of Uyghur workers to toil in its facilities. And many of these workers were brought in during the pandemic when other factories in China were shut down. The workers toil in an environment saturated with coal, mercury, and PVC dust. They are exposed to respiratory hazards, neurological effects, and carcinogens.

This sort of forced labor in Xinjiang is actually part of an overt government program. The Chinese government euphemistically calls this program “the labor transfer scheme” and claims it is aimed at lifting people out of poverty. But that claim is broadly disputed by human rights experts, scholars, and Uyghur survivors themselves.

None of this dark backstory is on display in the flooring section of a DIY store, of course. Instead, flooring products at a high risk of using Xinjiang PVC have whimsical names that make it sound as if they originated in a serene forest: Sundance Canyon Hickory, Maligne Valley Oak. Both of those styles are offerings in Home Depot’s LifeProof in-house flooring line. 

So I should note that Home Depot sent us a letter from one of the companies that supplies it with flooring. The letter says that the supplier’s supplier had informed it that no PVC from Xinjiang was used to produce flooring for the Home Depot. 

The company also issued a statement that reads: “The Home Depot prohibits the use of forced or prison labor in its supply chain. This is an issue we take very seriously.”

[Low, droning music.]

MH: The toll taken by the flooring industry is detailed in a report recently released by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice in England and at the Maine-based, toxic chemical-investigative outfit Material Research. The report paints a devastating picture of oppression and pollution in the Uyghur region. 

The report names Home Depot, among a number of other companies. Home Depot had this to say about it: “We will work to review the information in the report and to take any additional steps necessary to ensure that the product we sell is free from forced labor and fully compliant with all applicable regulations.”

I’m joined today by two of the report’s authors: Laura Murphy is a professor studying forced labor at Sheffield Hallam. And Nyrola Elimä is a researcher at Sheffield Hallam who is also herself Uyghur and grew up in the region.

And one side note for our listeners: We at The Intercept have covered the Chinese government’s repression of Uyghurs and other indigenous groups in a number of articles. We have published stories about surveillance technologies, about a leaked police database, and about the role played by American companies in the region. We have pushed back against corporate executives who downplayed oppression of Uyghurs. And we have noted how China hitched its own campaign against Muslims onto to the War on Terror, and how there were Uyghurs who ended up detained at Guantanamo Bay. And we have discussed the topic on this podcast. But every time one of these articles or episodes comes out, we hear from people who ask why we’re covering this issue. They allege that the plight of Uyghurs is just a right-wing talking point. They say that it has become a tool of the American foreign policy elite amid rising tensions with China. 

So I began my conversation by asking Laura how she would respond to that critique:

Laura Murphy: I think that there are many different reasons that politicians and regular people come to this issue, not all of which are reasons I share with them. 

There are people who are anti-China, there are people who are xenophobic, and those are not the reasons that we come to this. But I do think that this is not just a concern for the right. This is a concern for everyone. And in particular, for progressive people and other people on the left, we have to realize that this is the most significant human rights violation that we’ve seen in our time. We’re talking about upwards of a million people who are in internment camps, a massive surveillance state that is spreading across China and across the world, questions about privacy and rights that are up for debate because of what China has been able to do to the Uyghur people that has expanded the rights of governments to control their everyday of behaviors of people, especially minority people, and so concerns about minority rights, Indigenous rights, right to land right to work — these things that we care about are at stake right now because China’s getting away with doing it in the Uyghur region. 

We care about it for the Uyghurs. And we care about it for the way it appears that China is looking to spread this across China and across the world. And I think that it’s right for us to think about genocide and other forms of exploitation, and abuse, and human rights violations that happen in the United States, or in Canada, or Australia to Indigenous people and the long legacy of slavery and its reach across generations in the United States, for instance, to think about how important it is that we don’t allow these things to happen in the world — in other places, or to encroach on other governments.

And so I think that it’s completely fair to think: Well, let’s look internally and let’s look at what we’re doing in the United States to immigrants or to immigrant children, for instance. Let’s look at how we’re policing black lives. Those things are critical discussions. And I think that we are allies in these fights across the world to ensure the rights of Indigenous people, and people of color, and workers. And that these things need to be allied struggles rather than ones that we pit against each other.

MH: Thanks. That was very well put.

And also there are often U.S. companies involved, right? Your team at Sheffield Hallam University has probably done more than any other group of researchers in the world to draw attention to this issue of forced labor in the Uyghur region. You’ve published reports on solar panels, on cotton, on the role of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation. And often U.S. companies or U.S. investors are named in or are complicit in what’s happening in Xinjiang.

LM: Absolutely, some of the biggest name investment firms, and the biggest multinational corporations, are sourcing from the Uyghur region, either directly or indirectly — and with impunity, until now. There has been nothing stopping most of these companies from using Uyghur-forced labor to make prices cheap. And there’s just such an enormous drive to make prices cheaper and to buy things at the lowest possible price that we actually, we feed into a system that allows — that, in fact encourages — a government like China’s to exploit the Uyghur people and to move industry out to the Uyghur region where they can use free labor, practically, and also cheap coal to produce goods that we are buying in the United States and companies know that this is going on. And they have, for years, looked away.

MH: Right. Right. 

Well, if I were an executive at a company that sources from China, and an email from one of you, or from someone on your team, showed up in my inbox, I would be very worried. 

LM: [Laughs.]

MH: So you both have a personal connection to this issue. Can you talk a bit about how each of you got into this line of work?

LM: Nyrola, why don’t you start?

Nyrola Elimä: My cousin was in a concentration camp. And now she’s in a prison. 

Before they put her in a prison, I think it was around 2019. At that time, I [didn’t know what forced labor was]. But I do know, transferring people to another place or to a factory against their will is wrong. And I know, grabbing land from Uyghur people or Indigenous people is wrong. 

So I started to look at something online then I found something. So I sent it to Rian Thum. And I guess that’s how Laura Murphy knows that I have the knowledge of this and I started to look at this. 

So one day she approached me and she wants to see what we can do together. So that’s how we eventually ended up publishing three reports.

MH: And Rian Thum is Laura’s partner and a scholar of the region. 

NE: That’s correct. 

MH: And I probably should have prefaced this by asking: I mean, you grew up in the Uyghur region and you are yourself Uyghur, and then left in what year? 

NE: 2011. 

MH: And then, since then, have had this horrible experience of seeing your parents put under house arrest, your cousin sent to prison for basically spurious charges, right? And then the growing repression around them in the region.

NE: Yes, I left the region in 2011. And then, in 2017, after I obtained Swedish citizen[ship], I plan to go back to visit my parents with my, at-the-time, boyfriend. And then my mom wrote something on the paper that said: “Do not come back.”

So, yeah, I never had a chance to go back to Xinjiang since 2011. 

And since 2018, they detained my cousin, and then put my parents under house arrest in 2019. So basically, since 2017, or let’s say, basically since 2018, I’m living in hell.

MH: Yeah. I’m so sorry. 

Laura, could you talk about how you got into this issue, what your background is a bit?

LM: Sure. I lived in Xinjiang for a short time, about a year in the early 2000s, and I’ve been back several times since then. 

And when the crisis in the Uyghur region first started to become apparent to us, at least, in 2017, and we started to hear about people disappearing, we became very concerned. People we knew were disappearing, and were not being able to communicate with their families. And we started to hear from more and more people in the Uyghur region that they were losing touch with their families or being told not to come home, just like the kind of story that Nyrola was just saying. 

And so, for some time, I was concerned about this issue, and I was working however I could, putting things up on Twitter, helping to raise awareness. But then when it turned out that there was a massive system of forced labor, that’s where I kicked in. My research is on forced labor. And so I very quickly began to try to learn how to do the research methods that I have been employing for these, that my whole team has been employing for these projects, because my work has always been about worker voice and about survivor narratives and thinking about how people who are forced to work explain those situations themselves. 

And in this situation, we don’t have access to the workers, we have no capacity to get on the ground in Xinjiang and actually do worker voice interviews or talk to survivors of the camps or of the forced labor regime. And so we had to find other ways to understand what was going on. 

And so what we do — and what Nyrola is a genius at — is just searching the internet for traces that companies and governments leave online, themselves, of the work that they’re doing. They write up explanations of their celebration of how they transformed people from being farmers to being workers — from not wanting to work in a factory to wanting to work in a factory — how they go door-to-door, day after day, to coerce people into leaving their homes, and families, and land, behind to go to work against their will. And so we use those methods, because we can’t talk directly to Uyghur who are working on the ground. And it’s terrible, but this is what we have. And so it’s what we’re using to better understand the situation.

MH: Nyrola, could you talk a bit about the process of documenting those abuses? I mean, the Chinese government euphemistically calls this program the labor transfer scheme, when in fact, it is a mass forced labor effort. But where do workers in the scheme come from? And how are they transported to factories? And then what happens once they’re there?

NE: The Chinese government says — as you probably already see, or [have] heard — that all employment is voluntary, and how this poverty elevation program is doing good, how they lifted Uyghur people out of poverty, and the work transfer helps free rural families from poverty by giving them steady wages, skills, and how they train them in the Chinese language. But during my research, I have been seeing, like repeatedly, multiple times, that the Chinese media acknowledge that.

Workers repeatedly claimed they don’t want to go. They have sick parents [they] need to take care [of], they have a newborn baby, they just married, or they have a family, or some of them already had a job or have a farm they need to plant. 

And then when I document all of these government directives, companies, IPO documents or annual report or all of those state media, I saw that Uyghur workers usually they were standing at attention under the flag of China, and those new recruits/employees, they were undergo some training in management, sometimes Chinese culture or [that they are] antiquated — then train them how to love the party, love the country, and somehow, like weirdly, some loving the individual like Xi Jinping. And before this Uyghur worker [is] assigned to the work, they were giving some lectures on eradicating religious extremism, and trained them to become law-abiding workers, and who will embrace their Chinese nationhood. 

When I read this kind of news, or when I read the documents, you clearly see there is coercion behind this description. And you will see some of the really weird videos like Uyghur workers washing — let’s say their boss or their superiors — washing their feet. This is absolutely not an ordinary worker orientation. You do not ask someone else to wash your feet, right? And you do not force someone to love the country, love the party, then get a job. You do not force someone to leave their home, leave their wife, leave their husband, whatever, the kids — and coming here to work. 

So every time when I see these kinds of weird propaganda articles or government news or the annual report, I will just archive them and save them. And I know eventually I will use it.

MH: Yeah. I mean, you mentioned that many of these state media reports read as very weird. And I was also struck in the reports that you collected by the admission that workers often did not want to be at the factories, that they had left behind their ailing parents, their newborn baby, as you mentioned. And many listeners might find it odd that the state press would so carefully document what, to international observers, is clearly a gross violation of human rights. 

So why did they carefully document these abuses? What’s going on with those state press reports?

NE: They believe what they’re doing is good. They don’t even realize they’re exploiting Uyghur people, and they believe this kind of program is indeed what will change Uyghur people’s mindsets. They believe Uyghur people have [a] radical mindset and they’re backward, and they believe this kind of poverty alleviation program, labor transfer program, indeed will change their mindset and change their thinking, turn them to become a better citizen. That’s why they’re carefully documenting these kinds of things. Not only for celebrating, but also [for companies] willing to show their loyalty to the Chinese government. You have this kind of program: Look how we did it!

And everyone is [competing with] each other. And, in fact, by participating in this kind of labor transfer program, they will actually get a reward from the Chinese government. So this is how they will document it, ever since. 

But I also see there’s [been] a big transfer since last year, after the Chinese government, Chinese companies realized Western [countries] were taking very seriously this kind of human rights abuse issue. They start to wipe up this kind of document in their annual report or IPO report. And sometimes they will delete everything they have published before.

LM: I just want to put a fine point on what Nyrola is saying here. And what we’re looking at is a massive, rampant racism that pervades discourse about Uyghurs across China. And companies have, for a long time, been resistant to operating in the Uyghur region because corporate executives hold extraordinarily racist ideas about Uyghur people, about what they’re capable of, about their work ethics, about their values, about their religion, and their practices, and their culture — and about women and what women believe and what women should have to believe, and how many children they should have. 

I mean, it’s just extremely racist. And it has all of the contours of colonialism and colonial racism that we recognize from the rest of the world. It’s absolutely identifiable from everyday experience in the region. And it’s documented in academic studies, Chinese academic studies sponsored by the state that show that companies have resisted working in that region, or working with Uyghurs, or hiring Uyghurs. There are job descriptions that explicitly exclude ethnic minorities from anything that’s forward-facing, like customer-facing, like anything that’s administrative.

And so companies moving out to the Uyghur region hold these beliefs to be true, and have taken up the responsibility of changing Uyghurs, transforming every aspect of their lives: in their homes, in the way they pray, in the way they eat, the way they talk, who they talk to, what language they speak, how their children are raised, how they plant their own fields, what crops they plant, what books they read — everything! Every tiny little aspect of life is being controlled by these companies at the behest of the central government. 

And companies are sending their workers, their Han workers, into Uyghur homes to stay sometimes for weeks at a time even, to monitor, to surveil Uyghur people, and to ensure that they behave in a way that is deemed appropriate by the majority population that has colonized there. So these companies are part of a massive colonial enterprise that has infiltrated the entire life and culture of Uyghur life. Uyghurs are the dominant population of that region. But companies in collaboration with the government are doing the government’s work for the government, essentially — monitoring and controlling Uyghur people and Uyghur lives and Uyghur culture and Uyghur identities. 

And it’s all part of this bigger colonial project. And so when they celebrate, when they show that they’ve taken Muhammad away from his home, that they have put him into intensive labor, that they have made him a docile citizen who used to — in one story we saw, like say every single day that he wants to leave but now he’s working and is quiet and is no longer complaining. That’s a story that shows the government that they are playing their role in suppressing the Uyghur people. And that is what is happening in those documents. 

And Nyrola is right — you can see it in all these different little aspects of what they’re doing and what they’re claiming to be doing. But the overall mission is a colonial mission. And it’s a repressive mission. And it’s being enacted hand in hand between the government and companies. And, as you said before, U.S. companies, multinational corporations are complicit in this and they’re turning away.

MH: Let’s talk about the report that you just came out with on forced labor in the vinyl flooring industry. That’s a product that many Americans have in their homes or in their offices, but that most people haven’t thought twice about. And yet, it’s literally underneath our feet. 

Can you talk about how you came to this particular topic? And why did you look at this specific company, in your report, Zhonghai Chemical Group?

LM: Part of how we determine what we’re going to study is based on what the Chinese government has invested in the Uyghur region. They’ve invested in new energy development, they’ve invested in apparel manufacturing and cotton producing and processing in that region — in terms of cotton, that’s been for decades now. So we look at the things that the Chinese government has put the most emphasis on. 

But while we’re doing research, we are often just collecting other companies that we are not sure about, or that didn’t quite make it into the report, and we have profiles of tons of companies in our hard drives that we’re still trying to figure out what to do with. And so Nyrola, tell us about looking into Zhongtai before we even started thinking about PVC and then I’ll pick up how we ended up doing PVC.

NE: I know Zhongtai since 2019. But, at that time, I was not specifically looking at Zhongtai, I was looking at almost every company in Xinjiang. And then, at that time, I was looking at almost every industry, because I realized no matter which industry you look at in the Western world, somehow some Chinese company or Xinjiang company are involved.

So Zhongthai was always on my radar, because every time I searched on the state-sponsored labor transfer program or poverty elevation program, I see Zhongthai’s name. And Zhongtai is there. This company [is] always there. So I always archive, save it; archive it, save it. 

And then one day, after we finished this World Bank IFC report, and somehow Laura said: There’s a [indistinct word]. So she asked me to look at the PVC industry. Then I searched: Zhongtai. Yeah.

So I said: Hey, we already have tons of documents of Zhongtai. So that’s how we started. 

LM: Yeah. We had asked a group called Material Research to help us, just review our environmental analysis in the International Finance Corporation report that we did where we showed that International Finance Corporation, the development arm of the World Bank, had been investing in companies in the Uyghur region, and in fact, owned equity in one of them. And we were trying to understand their role there — not only in participating in forced labor, but also an environmental damage because we’re starting to see more and more that these companies are not just treating Uyghurs as a docile labor force; they’re treating Leaguers essentially as disposable in all aspects of their lives. So it doesn’t matter if they completely pollute the region or do horrible things to their farmland, or dispossess them of their land. The Uyghur people are essentially being treated as disposable. And so we wanted material research to review the environmental pieces because this was not our area of expertise. 

Well, when we did that, he said: Hey, OK, look, how about we trade? You help me understand Zhongtai, and I’ll help you understand this environmental stuff, because he’d been looking at PVC production and the environmental damage there, but he didn’t have access to information about forced labor. 

MH: This is your co-author, Jim Vallete. 

LM: So this is how Jim Valleet and Material Research teamed up with us, with me and Nyrola, to try to understand what’s going on in the flooring industry. And what we learned was that, in fact, Zhongthai and the seven total factories, four of which are owned by Zhongthai, that are creating PVC in the Uyghur region produced 10 percent of the world’s PVC. And so this was another industry that, in fact, the Chinese government had really invested in moving out to the Uyghur region, again to rely on all the labor there, and also to rely on the coal that’s so abundant in the Uyghur region. 

So we were like: OK, let’s do this. Let’s make this report happen. And let’s collaborate.

MH: So yeah, let’s talk about the pollution. I mean, to me, one of the most tragic findings of the report, and there are many of them, but one of them is the intersection of racism with pollution and environmental damage. 

And so I focused a bit on the consumer-facing end of the vinyl flooring industry. And the companies often promote it as environmentally friendly, which it is not, they even tout it as liberating for women. But in fact, it has this incredibly dirty production process. Can you talk about that process and how it intersects with the oppression of Uyghurs?

LM: So there are two primary ways that the production of PVC is harmful for the environment and harmful for workers. One is that it’s made using coal, which is extremely dirty, it has an enormous carbon footprint. And what material research and Jim Valett, our co-author, was able to do was to calculate the extraordinary carbon emissions that are produced in the production of PVC in the Uyghur region, because it’s one of the only places in the world where this one process is allowed to continue happening, a process that mixes coal and mercury to create PVC. 

And so it has an enormously high carbon footprint. And it consumes more mercury than any other industry — and, in fact, it consumes some huge percentage of the mercury that’s produced in the world each year. 

And why this is important is that one, that mercury leeches into the places where it’s being produced; a ton of it is emitted into the air. In other places in the world where this process used to be used, including in my home state of Louisiana. Those places have been declared Superfund sites, and the factories have been closed. But the Chinese government allows this industry and many other extraordinarily polluting industries to move out to the Uyghur region, even as they’re shutting it down in other parts of China. Because, again, the Uyghur region is being treated as a dumping ground for whatever horrible things that the Chinese government has to do, or whatever projects for social control that they want to test out — they do these things in the Uyghur region. 

And so we saw stories where people were saying that all of their crops were dying as a result of one of these PVC plants moving in; that they were dying. This is really dangerous stuff. And where did they put it? They put it in the middle of farmland. And it is the desert, but there are farms within a kilometer or two of these plants.

MH: Yeah. And my understanding is while this process is highly polluting wherever it happens, it’s even more polluting the way it’s happening in Xinjiang because of the use of mercury and so forth.

LM: That’s exactly right. And you’re right to say that this is a form of environmental racism. And, again, this goes back to why people on the left should care about this, because it really is a situation of environmental racism in a context of colonialism, where people are being treated as if their lives are not worth what everyone else’s lives are worth. And so I think it’s one of the most devastating things I’ve ever researched, honestly.

MH: Zhongthai makes PVC at its factories, and then that PVC eventually ends up in the flooring that appears on the shelves of, for example, Home Depot and other big box stores in America. Can you talk about how it gets there and where it goes along the way? 

LM: All of the PVC that Zhongthai manufacture, they manufacture in the Uyghur region. And then they ship it to two different places on the coast, at least — they probably ship it to many different places. But from our vantage point, we can only see what’s publicly documented. So we’re able to see them shipping it to their own subsidiaries in Hong Kong. They have an import-export business registered there. This is how a lot of companies are moving their goods from the Uyghur region out to the coast. 

And then they also sell it to another company unrelated to them called Zhejiang Tianzhen. Zhongtai is the second biggest supplier of PVC to Zhejiang Tianzhen. And then, from the coast, from those two companies, the PVC gets sent to a Chinese-owned company, a company owned by Zhejiang Tianzhen itself, called Jufeng New Materials in Vietnam.

So this company that is ostensibly a Vietnamese company where they manufacture the PVC into flooring tiles, that company is actually Chinese-owned, and it’s actually receiving tons of its PVC from Xinjiang, though not directly. And this is what we’re seeing more and more. 

It used to be that you could see a lot of shipments coming out of the Uyghur region. You could see it in shipping records. They would ship directly to the United States, in fact, from Xinjiang. In the last four years, that has declined precipitously as people have become more aware of the crisis in the Uyghur region.

And so what’s happening now is that Xinjiang companies like Zhongtai ship to other companies or their own subsidiaries on the coast, and then to a second country, like Vietnam, or Cambodia, or India, where they manufacture the finished product, so that the packaging says “Made in Vietnam” or “Made in Cambodia.” And so, in this way, the China inputs and the Xinjiang inputs are obscured for the final consumer. They end up on the shelves of companies like Home Depot, and many, many, many of the other major flooring companies in the United States, through this intermediary, this Chinese company that is an intermediary in Vietnam. 

This is happening more and more. We see companies setting up intermediary subsidiaries across Southeast Asia because this allows them to move things out of China and out to the rest of the world more easily.

MH: Yeah. And as you said, it’s not just Home Depot. I think your report named dozens of companies that receive flooring from this factory in Vietnam and from other intermediaries. 

And even if you go to a small contractor thinking: I’ll just get my flooring from an independent source — there’s a high likelihood that their flooring is also made with the PVC from the Uyghur region. So all of that shows how just very complex this issue is. 

Your team, Lauren and Nyrola, was able to trace the flow of PVC from Xinjiang to the United States by carefully analyzing shipping records, by looking at these company reports and by state press reports, as you explained. But companies, when they’re confronted with this evidence, often say: Look, it’s really hard for us to carefully vet our supply chains; vinyl flooring passes through multiple companies, and it’s become harder for us to audit our factories in China for a number of reasons. 

And, Laura, you’ve basically told me that you think this is a weak defense and that companies can do a lot more. 

LM: I do think that’s a really weak defense. And for two reasons: One, what we’re able to do is identify the risk of Xinjiang inputs going into the final piece of flooring. It’s possible that because not all of Jufeng’s PVC comes from Zhongtai as far as we can tell, that maybe this piece of flooring over here or this particular shipment over there was made with PVC that was not made in the Uyghur region. 

However, there’s a lot more PVC being made in the Uyghur region that we can’t trace because it’s being obscured. And we’re underestimating how much PVC is going into this flooring to start with. But companies should be able to identify that risk the same way we do; they can look at the same documents. In fact, they have more evidence that they can collect; they have more power to get information than we do. And so they should be asking their suppliers precisely where every ounce of PVC is coming from to ensure that the raw materials that go into their products are not being mined or manufactured in the Uyghur region. If you’re selling things in the United States, that is now the law. 

But the thing is that companies will say: Well, we’re getting stonewalled by our suppliers. They won’t tell us where they buy it from. And I say: Well, first of all, you can often find it in their own corporate annual reports. That’s how we do it. You can look at your customs records to see if they’re buying from that company. That’s how we do it. 

We’ve had tons of companies write to us and say: Oh, no, no, no, no. My supplier has told us that they stopped sourcing from x company two years ago. 

And I say: Well, here’s a spreadsheet of us customer records, that proves the opposite. 

And it takes me two minutes to find that information, right? And they’re just going on the word of their suppliers, written attestations saying: We abhor forced labor — which, of course, everyone says they abhor forced labor. The attestations that say: We have a policy — well, of course you have a policy. That doesn’t mean you actually even know what forced labor is. I think a lot of these companies in China don’t believe that what’s happening in the Uyghur region is forced labor, and have a completely different definition of that because again, of this racism and colonialism that I’ve been talking about. 

And then they get told by the companies: Oh, we can’t find out or we won’t find out for you where our goods are coming from. 

And they continue to source from those companies. And it seems to me that if a company goes to a supplier and the supplier says: I can’t or won’t tell you where the inputs come from, then you have to find a new supplier. And especially now that the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act went into effect last week, and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act bans any U.S. company from importing goods that were made in whole or in part in the Uyghur region. That’s raw materials, rocks, cotton, anything that can be mined or grown, anything that can be manufactured in that region, is banned from import. It’s critical that companies do that research. 

But they keep saying: Oh, well, we’re getting stonewalled — and their response is that the government should change the law, not that they should change their suppliers. 

They need to change their suppliers. And it is going to mean some slowing of supply chains, it is going to mean some pretty radical shifts. But it also means the increase in productivity and capacity of companies around the world to produce things outside of a place where there’s the most egregious human rights violations going on, and where most of the manufacturing is being based on coal. 

So this is good in general anyway, for the expanded capacity for manufacturing to happen across the world. This is a way of getting out of being held captive when China decides they’re going to do something horrible to people or they’re going to capitalize on exploitation.

LM: Right. I mean, so you mentioned that companies will often say: Well, we’ve gone to our suppliers and they say everything’s fine. I mean, in the process of writing about your report, and doing my own research, I went to Home Depot to ask them about a flooring line called Lifeproof in which some of the styles, some of the Lifeproof styles have a high likelihood of being made with PVC from Zhongtai, as your report showed. And they sent me a letter from their immediate supplier, claiming that the parent company of the Vietnamese factory you talked about had assured them that it was not using PVC from Xinjiang to produce flooring for Home Depot, and so: case closed. [Laughs.] But that is clearly not sufficient, you’re saying. 

LM: It’s not only not sufficient. It’s just untrue. 

I mean we saw Home Depot say: Well, we got attestations that they were not sourcing from Zhongthai since June 24. And it took me two minutes to look at customs records to see that that was not true.

NE: As a supply chain analyst, I acknowledge it is a bit tricky to trace this stuff, because the biggest problem is the complicity and opacity of the supply chains that run through China. But it’s tricky for us! It is not tricky for the companies.

You purchase stuff; you’re sourcing stuff; you should know where your stuff [is] coming from, and you have much more resources than us, because you are the one who talked to the supplier. Right? Not us. And I also understand that the products can pass through [many] layers, sometimes [many] layers of the companies, sometimes maybe in inland China or outside China. But again, company, you have the responsibility and you have the resources. You can ask your supplier. You can ask where they’re sourcing from.

The thing that amazes me is every single time after we publish a report, you always have some companies — big, big, big companies, big ones — come to us to ask: Could you please tell us what we can do? [Laughs.] I have to be honest. I always feel very amazed, like: I don’t have your resources, but we found it. 

MH: [Laughs.]

NE: You have the resources. What are you doing? 

MH: We found it using our internet connection. And some careful research skills.

NE: Yes! They will pay tons of money to [a] consulting company to tell them: Oh, your supply chain is fine. But what they actually should [be] doing is paying the money to those who actually really focus on human rights issues, or those who actually do their job to find our problem in their supply chains. 

But, no, companies [are] just [like]: As long as I hide, good! As long as the law doesn’t come to me; as long as there is no report [to] expose us, we’re fine. And then when we greenwash or when we do PR, we always say: Oh, forced labor is a horrible issue! 

But it’s just driving me crazy when I see how hypocritic[al] they are.

MH: And what about the role of consumers in all of this? What about people who are listening to this podcast, for example. It’s not sustainable to go rip up your vinyl floors, obviously. And people who are planning to install new floors can look for better alternatives. But what about the rest of us? What can consumers do about forced labor in the Uyghur region?

LM: I think companies need to know that consumers care. I think they believe that we don’t care and that all we care about is that we get goods that are as cheap as humanly possible. And I guess we should put it as: As cheap as inhumanely possible, right? [Laughs.] 

So I do think that we should be looking for more sustainable companies. We shouldn’t be just believing when they say: Oh, well, we have this certification or that certification. These things have pretty much all been debunked as legitimate ways of determining if there’s forced labor in your supply chain. And most of them don’t even say that they’re identifying forced labor, most certifications aren’t doing that work. But we’ve come to believe that they are; that they’re protecting us. And they’re not protecting us from everything. 

But I think for me, and for a lot of people who are really invested in this issue and really invested in rights — and invested in the planet’s future — I think that buying more things used actually is a big thing that we can do, like really dedicate ourselves to being engaged in recycling and reusing. 

But when it comes down to it, consumers can’t trace everything that they buy, right? They can’t do what we do. It takes us a really long time to figure out what’s going on. And it takes some skills. And they shouldn’t be expected to. Government should be protecting consumers from being exposed to complicity enforced labor. Our governments need to be taking action to identify those goods and keep them from coming into the country. 

The United States and Canada are the only countries that actually have laws on the books to say that we can’t import these kinds of goods — goods known to be made with forced labor! The EU is looking at a bill for it; I think EU citizens need to step up and say: Look, we want this bill. We expect that our government protects us from buying goods made with forced labor. 

Because we can buy all the used things we want, but we do have to buy some things. If I want paprika, for instance, it’s likely coming from the Uyghur region. And yet, I can’t get used paprika. It’s hard to buy even a pair of headphones!

MH: You can’t get used tomatoes. 

LM: Right. You can’t get used tomato paste. And even headphones, like it’s hard to buy a pair of cheap used headphones, and it’s very difficult to find a pair that’s not made in China, and that you can really trace the provenance of. 

And, again, consumers shouldn’t be responsible for this; companies should be responsible for this, for ensuring that they’re not using forced labor. And companies won’t do it voluntarily. We need government to tell companies that they must trace their supply chains all the way to the raw materials. I think most people believe that companies know that information. And they simply don’t. And it’s convenient for them not to know it. And it’s dangerous for us.

MH: Then you mentioned the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which a key provision of that just came into effect last week, and that essentially requires that customs officers assume that goods originating from Xinjiang are made with forced labor, which is a great step forward. But that doesn’t cover all goods whose supply chains are tainted by forced labor by any means, right? So there’s a lot more to be done, even policy-wise in the United States. Is that right?

LM: I think that’s right. I mean, we do have a thing called the Tariff Act that was passed in 1930, it’s basically unprecedented globally, that bans the import of forced-labor made goods from anywhere. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act puts a very fine point on it and says that we’re absolutely going to be scrutinizing and looking for products that are made in the Uyghur region. We’ve decided that’s a whole region-wide ban on goods made there because the presumption is that all of the goods made there are made with forced labor. 

But the Tariff Act and its ability to monitor goods made with forced labor, it’s only been really put into effect for the last few years. And quite difficult, and it’s unusual. Like I said, it doesn’t exist in other parts of the world. 

And I think what we’re doing here with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, I think, it’s a really good step, because it’s going to require companies to trace their supply chains. And due diligence mandatory human rights laws that are coming into effect in Europe, we hope soon, will also make them trace their supply chains. And that is important not just for the Uyghur region, but for addressing forced labor globally, and for holding corporations responsible and accountable for their use of these exploitative systems to make products cheap.

MH: Well, thank you both so much for joining us on Intercepted. This was great.

NE: Thanks for having us. 

LM: Yeah, it was a great conversation. Yeah. And thanks for doing the incredible work you did to do the research on this piece as well. 

MH: Well, likewise. It’s a great report. And you can find it on Sheffield Hallam University’s site; it’s called “Built On Repression.” 

[End credits music.]

MH: And that’s it for this episode of Intercepted. Follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast.

Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. José Olivares is lead producer. Supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. And Rick Kwan mixed our show. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join — your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted. And definitely do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find us. If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to also check out Deconstructed, as well as Murderville, which is now in its second season.

If you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks so much.

Until next time, I’m Mara Hvistendahl.

The post Your Kitchen Floor May Have Been Made With Uyghur Forced Labor appeared first on The Intercept.

Merth was pleased with the result, and she wrote a follow-up post a year later, as the coronavirus pandemic was spreading throughout the world and professionals with spare cash were overhauling their homes. Middle-class Americans were entering an era of immense choice in the workplace; at many companies, it was possible for the first time ever to work from practically anywhere. They just had to figure out where to put the home office.

In two blog posts on her flooring project, Merth linked to Home Depot’s Lifeproof page over a dozen times. But she didn’t realize at the time that the simplicity promised by Home Depot comes at an immense environmental and human cost. Vinyl flooring is seeing a surge of growth, boosted in part by pandemic-era renovations. The industry calls it “luxury vinyl tile.” In reality, it is layer upon layer of thin plastic, a heavily polluting concoction made with fossil fuels. Very often, a new report shows, that plastic is produced using forced labor.

The story of vinyl flooring begins 6,600 miles away in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, where it is intertwined with the persecution of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs. The same month that Merth wrote her 2020 blog post, in a village in southern Xinjiang, 30-year-old Abdurahman Matturdi was herded onto a bus emblazoned with the words “Zhongtai Chemical.” That’s short for Xinjiang Zhongtai Chemical Company, a Chinese government-owned petrochemical firm that is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a type of plastic that is a critical ingredient in vinyl flooring. The World Health Organization had just declared Covid-19 a pandemic, and factories across China were shutting down to protect workers and prevent the coronavirus’s spread, but Zhongtai’s PVC plants were humming. Matturdi, whose story is detailed in a post on the company’s WeChat account, left behind his wife, newborn baby, and ailing mother. Hours later, he arrived in the regional capital of Ürümqi, where people in his group were assigned dormitory beds and given military fatigues to wear. Instead of watching his baby learn to walk or caring for his mother, he would spend his days laboring in Zhongtai’s facilities, exposed to both toxic chemicals and a frightening new virus.

Zhongtai did not respond to a detailed list of questions from The Intercept.

Merth and Matturdi are connected by a troubling supply chain. At one end is Zhongtai, a mammoth state-owned enterprise with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party that is among the top users of forced labor in Xinjiang. By its own account, Zhongtai has brought in more than 5,500 Uyghurs like Matturdi to work at its factories under a government program that human rights advocates say amounts to a grave injustice. To make the plastic resins that go into the flooring under Americans’ feet, Zhongtai belches greenhouse gases and mercury into the air. Its executives uproot lives, tear families apart, and expose workers to coal dust and vinyl chloride monomer, which has been linked to liver tumors.

At the other end of the chain are many major flooring companies, small contractors, and Home Depot. “The Home Depot prohibits the use of forced or prison labor in its supply chain,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “This is an issue we take very seriously, and we will work to review the information in the report and to take any additional steps necessary to ensure that the product we sell is free from forced labor and fully compliant with all applicable regulations.”

The new report, by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice in England and at the Maine-based toxic chemical investigative outfit Material Research, details the toll taken by the flooring industry, painting a devastating picture of oppression and pollution in the Uyghur region, all to help consumers in the United States and other wealthy countries cheaply renovate their homes. The report calls on the industry “to identify its risk and extract themselves from complicity in Uyghur forced labor.” It also asks all companies that source from China — including Home Depot — to scrutinize their supply chains.

The report is “very significant,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor monitoring group that was not involved with the research. “It has major implications for the retailers and marketers of flooring. And there are a lot of people walking around their homes right now on floors that are virtually certain to be made in part with forced labor.”

Fully 10 percent of global PVC comes from the Uyghur region, the majority of it from Zhongtai. From Xinjiang, Zhongtai’s PVC resin is transported to eastern China, India, and Vietnam, where it is turned into flooring before being exported to the U.S. and other parts of the world. PVC is also used to make everyday products like shower curtains and credit cards; the Sheffield Hallam and Material Research team says it is likely that Zhongtai plastics are used to make PVC piping for global buyers.

The researchers focus in part on a flooring factory in Vietnam called Jufeng New Materials that supplies Lifeproof tiles to Home Depot, via a Georgia-based company called Home Legend. Over one-third of Jufeng’s imports of PVC resins come from Zhongtai, shipping records show. Another half come from Jufeng’s parent company in eastern China, which itself sources heavily from Zhongtai. All of this leads the researchers to conclude that the Lifeproof line is at “high risk of being made with Xinjiang Zhongtai PVC.”

The Home Depot spokesperson sent The Intercept a letter from Home Legend, dated June 10, claiming that Jufeng’s parent company had assured it that Xinjiang PVC was not used to produce flooring for the big box retailer. The spokesperson also directed The Intercept to a Home Depot report stating that it audits suppliers to ensure compliance with “human rights, safety and environmentally sound practices,” including a ban on forced labor. Home Depot did not answer questions about when it last audited Home Legend or its downstream factories. Home Legend did not respond to requests to comment.

Researchers, customs officials, and journalists have previously documented a disturbing array of products linked to Uyghur forced labor, including surgical masks, laptops, cotton, solar panels, and wigs. But PVC flooring adds another dimension: severe health and environmental effects. The report details how workers involved in its production breathe in several toxic substances, including carcinogens, and how massive amounts of climate pollutants are released in the process of creating plastic resin for flooring.

Tainted Supply Chain

PVC production occurs in countries around the world, including the U.S., and creates pollution wherever it happens. But in Xinjiang, the process uses mercury, which has been phased out of PVC production in the U.S., and generates more waste than in many other parts of the world, the report notes. Uyghur workers living in dormitories near the plants bear the costs. “In those conditions, at that scale, where the state is in control of production and there’s no accounting for the impacts, it’s almost unimaginable what’s happening,” said Jim Vallette of Material Research, one of the report’s authors. “There’s nothing like it on Earth in the combination of climate and toxic pollution. And workers are living there 24/7.”

Lifeproof is Home Depot’s in-house flooring line. But the problem extends far beyond Home Depot. The researchers trace PVC from Zhongtai to over two dozen other flooring brands. They also highlight Zhongtai’s long list of investors in the U.S. and Europe, among them the Norwegian Government Pension Fund, Dimensional Fund Advisors, and Vanguard. None of the funds responded to questions from The Intercept about their investments in Zhongtai; in an email to the researchers, Vanguard confirmed an investment of $7 million in Zhongtai.

“There’s nothing like it on Earth in the combination of climate and toxic pollution.”

Consumers in the U.S. are shielded from vinyl flooring’s dark backstory. Flooring companies promote vinyl flooring as ideal for families and environmentally friendly because it doesn’t rely on lumber and, manufacturers claim, lasts longer than wood flooring. Some brands even portray their products as liberating for women because they are easy to install and clean — and enlist female influencers to promote their floors. (Merth said Home Depot did not compensate her for her posts in any way and that she hasn’t made significant money from the affiliate links in them.)

Merth said she carefully researched vinyl flooring before settling on the Lifeproof brand. She said she ran across people online who warned against the general use of plastics in the home, but she wasn’t sure whether to trust them. Otherwise, she said, she did not find any information that concerned her.

Home Depot uses multiple manufacturers for Lifeproof floors, and the particular Lifeproof style that Merth installed does not appear to have a direct tie to Xinjiang. But several other Lifeproof styles that she recommended to her followers are sourced from Jufeng, the Vietnamese factory that imports large amounts of PVC from Zhongtai. The researchers identified these tiles by comparing the product codes and flooring thickness listed on Home Depot’s site with those in shipping records. The products have whimsical names, like Sundance Canyon Hickory and Maligne Valley Oak, making it sound as if the tiles originated in a serene forest.

“It’s certainly shocking to hear that,” said Merth of Lifeproof’s supply chain, adding that she would consider appending a note to her posts. She said that the findings raise questions about Home Depot. “It’s something that I would be very concerned about, if they knew and still were selling it.”

Next week, U.S. customs officials will start enforcing a key provision of a new law, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which requires companies to vet their supply chains for any use of labor in Xinjiang. President Joe Biden signed the act into law last December following a campaign by workers’ rights and Uyghur activist groups; it allows Customs and Border Protection to assume that all goods from Xinjiang are made with forced labor, putting the onus on the importer to prove otherwise. But because PVC products often pass through multiple countries before arriving in the U.S., many vinyl floors wouldn’t automatically face scrutiny. The Sheffield Hallam and Material Research investigators hope to change that. “A lot of businesses have resisted looking beyond the veil that they put up in their supply chains,” said lead author Laura Murphy, who studies forced labor at Sheffield Hallam. “From my desk and from the desks of my research team, we figure this out every day.” Increasingly, she said, there is no excuse for such myopia.

A Coal-Blackened Wasteland

Around a decade ago, factories in eastern China introduced the tiles that had so entranced Merth, the DIY influencer. Water-resistant, cheap, and lightweight, the innovation revolutionized the flooring industry. Laying down a floor became as simple as building with Legos; suddenly anyone could do it, no contractor required. American companies soon brought the Chinese-made flooring planks to market as luxury vinyl tile, calling the new assembly method “click and lock.” HGTV gushed that the new tiles were “Not Your Father’s Vinyl Floor.” Guests plugged them on the “Today” show and on “This Old House.” Between 2010 and 2020, according to shipping figures compiled by Material Research, U.S. imports of vinyl floors from China quintupled.

The combination of cheap fossil fuels and forced labor in the production of Chinese PVC proved impossible for American flooring companies to match.

American flooring factories couldn’t compete. Vallette, who has tracked the environmental effects of plastic flooring for years, has counted 18 factories that closed as manufacturing shifted overseas. The combination of cheap fossil fuels and forced labor in the production of Chinese PVC proved impossible for American flooring companies to match. More than 2,500 American workers lost their jobs. The U.S. brands remained, but only because they reinvented themselves as distributors in a complex global supply chain.

Into this upturned market came Zhongtai. Like many state-owned enterprises in China, Zhongtai has a web of subsidiaries. It produces chemicals used in polyester, spandex, and polyurethane, and it grows tomatoes, grapes, peppers, and cotton. But its main business is plastics. Zhongtai’s four factories in Xinjiang churn out more than two million tons of PVC resin per year.

In 2017, Zhongtai began bringing in Uyghurs to work at its factories. Many of these laborers were, like Matturdi, from poor villages in southern Xinjiang. Their journeys start when Zhongtai representatives show up at their door. “Companies like Zhongtai recruit workers through state-sponsored programs, and people are not allowed to refuse,” said Murphy, the forced labor scholar. In one instance reported by Chinese state news agency Xinhua, Zhongtai representatives repeatedly visited the home of a young woman named Maynur on the edge of Xinjiang’s Taklamakan Desert. Her parents balked at the thought of her leaving, but their protests were ultimately ignored. Before long, Maynur was operating packaging machines at a Zhongtai PVC factory.

The Chinese government euphemistically calls this a “labor transfer” program and claims that it is aimed at alleviating poverty in the region. But it has been rolled out against a backdrop of escalating repression. Since 2016, the Chinese government has interned more than 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in inhumane camps. The government has separated Uyghur children from their parents, carting them away to boarding schools reminiscent of institutions in the U.S. and Canada to which Native American kids were taken beginning in the mid-19th century. It has locked up Uyghurs for imagined transgressions and seized their land. One of the report’s authors, Nyrola Elimä, has a cousin in prison and parents under house arrest. “They don’t like us,” she said of the Chinese government. “In their eyes, we don’t look like them. We’re different, so we’re the enemy.” Human Rights Watch says that the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghurs amounts to crimes against humanity, making it a violation of international law.

Zhongtai’s executives are active participants in broader government repression in the Uyghur region, according to the report. In 2017, the company held an event devoted to “social stability” in which representatives encouraged Uyghurs to bring their thinking in line with that of the Communist Party. Zhongtai’s employees have helped the Chinese government surveil Uyghur villagers by collecting their personal details and entering them into a widely criticized policing app, according to a WeChat post by a local propaganda department. And Zhongtai executives often publicize their participation in the labor transfer program, allowing state news reporters to film Uyghurs as they arrive by bus or join in military drills. Such workers have reason to fear anyone affiliated with the company, which, as a state-owned enterprise, implicitly represents the Chinese government. When Uyghurs arrive at Zhongtai’s facilities, the company’s corporate communications show, Communist Party officials are often there to receive them.

After undergoing training at Zhongtai, Uyghurs are put to work feeding furnaces, mixing and crushing materials for PVC production, and handling caustic soda, a byproduct of the production process. They face respiratory hazards from coal and PVC dust in the air, neurological effects from mercury, and carcinogens from coal reacting with chlorine.

Forced study is another part of the program, both at Zhongtai and at other plants in the region that use Uyghur labor. Elimä collected state press news clips about Zhongtai that show Uyghurs in military garb, studying Chinese. Some talk woodenly about how happy they are, as if reading from a script. “Thanks to the Party and Zhongtai for giving us this good opportunity!” says one.

“Zhongtai sees it as a corporate success because they’ve managed to turn Uyghurs away from being farmers, away from their homogenous culture, away from their Islamic piety and toward a culture that is more industrialized, urbanized, and ideologically appropriate in the government’s view,” said Murphy.

“First-person testimony tells us that people are typically not paid or are even in debt to the companies they work for.”

State media reports claim that the workers are paid enough that they can send money home to their families. According to Xinhua, Maynur earned 4,000 yuan a month, equivalent to around $580 at the time of the article. But the Xinjiang Victims Database, an independent project that compiles accounts from victims of persecution in the region, has collected many stories from former Uyghur laborers and their relatives who paint a very different picture of working conditions in the region. “First-person testimony tells us that people are typically not paid or are even in debt to the companies they work for,” said Murphy. Companies often deduct money for food and housing — or they promise to pay salaries and don’t deliver. The article featuring Matturdi’s case says that each worker in his group had 1,000 yuan ($145 at the time) of their first monthly paycheck applied toward meals.

The workers suffered anew as a novel coronavirus spread through the world in 2020. Over a two-week period in March, as factories in other parts of China remained closed, Zhongtai boasted that it had brought in over 1,000 Uyghurs from poor villages to work on its assembly lines. Some, like Matturdi, were bused in. Others arrived by train, flooding into halls where it was impossible to maintain social distance, wearing only surgical masks for protection from the virus.

Zhongtai profited by keeping its factories open. As home decorating supply sales surged in the U.S., the company was poised to rake in further gains.

From Vietnam to America

In America, meanwhile, middle-class workers had more flexibility than ever before. Even after companies started reopening their offices, many chose to continue to work from home. The change ushered in a renovation boom. Basement dens became offices. Bathrooms got an overhaul. Bedrooms were split in two. As labor costs rose, people often made these alterations themselves, rather than shell out money for a contractor. In 2020 and 2021, Home Depot broke records, adding $40 billion to its overall sales.

Merth, the DIY influencer, was not alone in turning to vinyl flooring for her Covid home reboot. Pandemic-related concerns about hygiene drove a shift toward hard-surface flooring, particularly vinyl. A recent report from the nonprofit Center for Environmental Health found that in 2020 alone, the vinyl flooring that was shipped from China to the U.S. would cover over 1 million miles if laid out end to end. That’s long enough to stretch from Earth to the moon four times over.

And that’s not even the full picture. Other flooring very likely made with Chinese raw materials — including some of Home Depot’s Lifeproof floors — was arriving in the U.S. via Vietnam. Much of it came from a single factory: Jufeng New Materials.

The industry’s solution was to ship PVC from China to a third country and manufacture the flooring there before exporting it to the U.S.

In 2018, as part of his trade war with China, President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on Chinese-made floors, making it costly for U.S. flooring companies to import directly from China. The industry’s solution was to ship PVC from China to a third country and manufacture the flooring there before exporting it to the U.S. In 2020, an executive at Zhongtai told Chinese state media that the company was turning to Southeast Asia because “conditions there are more stable.” That same year, Zhongtai began working with a company in eastern China called Zhejiang Tianzhen, according to a prospectus that Zhejiang Tianzhen recently released in a bid to go public on the Shenzhen stock exchange.

Zhejiang Tianzhen had just set up Jufeng as a subsidiary, building a series of warehouses in an industrial park north of a bend in the Cau river. The sprawling complex resembled a series of airplane hangars with blue roofs. A sign outside featured Chinese characters, and three flags flew overhead: Vietnamese, American, and Chinese. Jufeng held regular job fairs, eventually employing around 1,000 workers, according to Vietnamese media.

Jufeng became a critical destination for Zhongtai’s plastics. From March 2020 to February 2022, the Vietnamese factory received enough PVC resins from Zhongtai to make over 16.3 million square meters of vinyl flooring, according to Vallette of Material Research.

In an email, Zhejiang Tianzhen said it bans the use of forced labor by its suppliers and places “great emphasis on supply chain compliance,” requiring suppliers to adhere to a code of conduct on labor rights. “We haven’t found any forced labor in our suppliers during regular visits,” the manufacturer wrote. “Our company will continue to keep an eye on the situation. If any evidence of forced labor is found, we will take quick action.”

From Vietnam, Jufeng exports finished floors all over the world, including to Home Legend, the Georgia-based company. Home Legend markets its flooring as “earth minded” and claims on its website to manage forests in China and to source wood and bamboo from sustainable sources. It outlines a commitment to social responsibility and to protecting people at every stage of the floor’s life cycle. The website says nothing about the pollutants released during the creation of its vinyl floors or about how the workers who make components of those floors are treated.

Home Legend, in turn, supplies Home Depot with flooring for its Lifeproof line. It was Home Depot that sent The Intercept a letter from a vice president at the Georgia floormaker stating Zhejiang Tianzhen had assured the company that “no PVC from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has been used in any Home Legend products sold to the Home Depot.”

The letter further claimed that on January 24, Jufeng’s parent company had instructed all of its PVC sourcing agents to stop buying PVC from Xinjiang.

The researchers say that’s a weak defense. Vallette noted that shipping records show that Jufeng received at least 12 shipments of PVC from Zhongtai after January 24, most recently on February 21. “The easiest way to protect consumers and these companies’ reputations would be to get all floors that are potentially containing resins produced by forced labor out of the country and return them to sender,” he said.

A Zhejiang Tianzhen representative declined to answer questions about why Jufeng had continued to import PVC from Xinjiang. “We apologize for not being able to answer your inquiry because it involves business secrets and confidentiality agreements between the company and the customer,” the representative wrote.

Staggering Toxicity

The fire that broke out in November spread quickly. Black smoke billowed into the night sky. Loud booms echoed through the air. Hundreds of soldiers and firefighters rushed to the scene. Within minutes, flames had consumed a Jufeng warehouse in Vietnam that stored PVC resins. Videos captured by witnesses show the structure burning to the ground.

The next day, the site was still smoldering. Exhausted firefighters stood by, wearing gas masks, weakly spraying the remains.

There is no evidence that workers were harmed in the fire, but the blaze released cancer-causing dioxins into the air and put firefighters and bystanders at risk. It could also have long-term effects. After a 1995 fire at a plastics warehouse in Binghamton, New York, dioxin levels in the soil were over 100 times higher than at other locations in the same community. In general, the disaster shows just how dangerous working with PVC can be. The chemicals involved are highly flammable. In this case, according to the Zhejiang Tianzhen prospectus, the fire was caused by an electrical problem. A Vietnamese government report subsequently found that Jufeng had not taken proper precautions, like conducting fire drills.

Workers and the people who live in surrounding neighborhoods are at risk even when factories aren’t burning. “All plastics carry significant toxic risks of one kind or another,” said Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, who is not affiliated with the organizations that produced the report. “But PVC is remarkable in the staggering toxicity that occurs at every stage of its lifecycle. We see massive quantities of hazardous air pollutants being released into surrounding communities, which are disproportionately poor and marginalized.”

The fire at Jufeng’s Vietnamese plant slashed $11.5 million off Zhejiang Tianzhen’s profits, according to the IPO prospectus. But satellite images show that Jufeng’s other warehouses remained untouched. Zhejiang Tianzhen claimed that its Vietnamese plants were humming again the next day. In the months following the fire, the company’s shipments to the U.S. actually increased.

In the first quarter of 2022, the Sheffield Hallam and Material Research report says, Jufeng sent 5,200 shipments of PVC flooring to the U.S., worth a total of $80 million. Nearly one quarter of that flooring — $17.2 million worth — went to Home Legend and bore product codes matching those sold by Home Depot.

Once the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act comes into full effect next week, the researchers worry that manufacturers will find other workarounds. Last month, four members of Congress asked the House and Senate appropriations committees for expanded funding to enforce the law.

But on Home Depot’s responsibility, Murphy is resolute. Consumers, she said, have a right to know. “We need to know that the things we’re buying aren’t cheap simply because someone else is being forced to work.”

Zhongtai, for its part, recently announced plans to build a fifth, even bigger plant in Xinjiang. When the new facility is complete and running at full capacity, Zhongtai’s PVC factories will spew an estimated 49 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. More difficult to measure is the human toll: the children separated from their parents, the workers who contract cancer decades later, the Uyghurs who lose the most productive years of their lives, all so that Americans can cheaply redo their home offices.

Additional reporting by Myf Ma

The post How Vinyl Flooring Made With Uyghur Forced Labor Ends Up at Big Box Stores appeared first on The Intercept.

Today, Rufo is credited as the main architect of conservatives’ weaponization of critical race theory, using his skills as a director and investigative researcher to stoke panic in the GOP base, while simultaneously using critical race theory as a catalyst to introduce curriculum-altering bills in state legislatures across the country. 

Early this year, Rufo was appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to serve on the board of the New College of Florida, and he appeared at the Republican governor’s signing of the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees — or WOKE — Act, which bans discussions about certain forms of discrimination in work spaces and schools. He is a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and regularly appears on cable and independent media to attack Disney for its queer and multiracial excesses, stoke fears about LGBTQ “groomers,” and attack gender affirming health care. 

As Rufo’s efforts to fuel the culture war tearing America’s society at the seams grew, so too did the money pouring into the organization that produced “Diamond in the Dunes.” The Documentary Foundation, a tax-exempt nonprofit, received millions of dollars, including hundreds of thousands in untraceable cash, at the same time that it propped up a new right-wing media venture.

The organization brought in just under $2 million in 2021, and it paid Rufo a salary of over $300,000, according to its tax filing. At least one-third of that money came from donor-advised funds, or DAFs, according to The Intercept’s review of records filed with the IRS. DAFs are investment accounts that receive and distribute charitable donations and are common sources of funding for nonprofits, including for The Intercept. But they are not required to disclose the connection between donors who pay into the fund and the final destination of their charitable gift, which can make it almost impossible to trace. 

Leonard Leo, the conservative legal activist who has played a key role in pushing the federal judiciary to the right, has similarly employed DAFs in his political project, as the New York Times reported last month.

In an email, Rufo told The Intercept that he “wound down operations for the Documentary Foundation last year,” and pointed to a recent article in which he wrote that he “founded a new nonprofit corporation in Washington State.” 

The Documentary Foundation had not released a feature-length documentary since 2019, the PBS film “America Lost,” though it continued to pay him a salary. 

Additionally, tax records show, the Documentary Foundation is the primary funder of National Progress Alliance, a right-wing media nonprofit with the declared mission of restoring “free speech and open inquiry as non-partisan values” and revealing “the implications of a far-left ideological takeover.” Like the videos Rufo now posts to YouTube every month, the content produced by the National Progress Alliance tends to focus on race, transgender health care, and education.

Rufo confirmed that the Documentary Foundation served as a fiscal sponsor for the National Progress Alliance, which did not respond to a request for comment. 

Rufo’s salary and donations to the National Progress Alliance comprised the overwhelming majority of the Documentary Foundation’s $1.3 million in spending in 2021. The Documentary Foundation was administratively dissolved and became inactive in February of this year, according to a filing with the Washington Secretary of State’s office, and its 2022 tax filings are not yet available. 

For the past few years, Rufo has elevated critical race theory: an academic discipline that studies how racism shapes public policy. In 2020, he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight and declared that critical race theory had “become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.” Rufo’s appearance prompted President Donald Trump to issue an executive order banning racial sensitivity training for federal employees. 

Rufo has said that he seeks to maximize voters’ anxieties around gender issues and is forward with his intentions to manipulate public perception for political gain. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” Rufo wrote on Twitter in 2021. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

He is credited with catalyzing bills banning the discussion of sexual orientation in Florida and Texas, and his attacks on public school curriculum are laying the groundwork for widespread educational privatization.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote in Time magazine last year that Rufo’s endgame “is to destabilize public education and replace it with a universal, unregulated voucher system which would increase segregation and exacerbate already wide gaps between the rich and the rest of us.”

The National Progress Alliance is overseen by Executive Director Peter Boghossian, a former Portland State University professor who resigned in 2021 over what he described as a prolonged harassment campaign against him and his research projects, and the transformation of the school into a “Social Justice factory.” Boghossian’s recent work is a far cry from his position on the Republican Party just a few years ago: In 2016, Boghossian penned an article decrying Donald Trump as an existential threat over his climate denialism and disregard for environmental issues. “Trump and [the] Republican Party literally threaten the existence of our species. While this statement may sound alarming, it’s not in the least alarmist.” 

Since its founding, the National Progress Alliance has produced videos by “Author and 5th-degree jiu-jitsu black belt Matt Thornton” on “Violence, Antifa, and BLM” in addition to man-on-the-street interviews in socially conservative Romania and Hungary. The organization has also featured “powerful testimony from a molecular geneticist” attacking the rights of transgender people to exist.

Rufo’s rise in conservative media and politics has coincided with increased donations to his nonprofit: In 2020, the Documentary Foundation’s total revenue was $155,353, according to tax filings. In 2021, the year after he broke into the mainstream, that number increased by more than a factor of 10 to $1,991,274. Before that, the organization’s peak revenue was $425,121 in 2013, with a low of $36,735 in 2018, according to tax records.

Asked about the organization’s 2021 revenue, Rufo said, “Much of this was for a fiscal sponsorship, not fundraising by or for the Documentary Foundation. In addition, I was working for Discovery Institute for much of 2020, which accounts for the lower amount of fundraising relative to the following year, when I was actively working on Documentary Foundation initiatives.” He described that work as “a range of research, publication, production, and distribution work across 2020 and 2021, including the PBS documentary America Lost and work on homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, and critical race theory.”

The funding has poured in from a variety of conservative foundations. The aforementioned Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit advocating for the anti-evolution concept of “intelligent design,” donated $225,000 in 2021. In 2020 and 2021, the Conru Foundation, backed by Adult FriendFinder founder Andrew Conru, donated a total of $50,000, while other individual linked charities including the McCarthy Family Charitable Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation donated a combined sum of over $100,000. 

The Documentary Foundation’s largest donors, however, are donor-advised funds. In 2021, the single largest donor identifiable in public IRS records was the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which contributed $496,995. In total, DAFs funneled at least $670,000 to Rufo’s nonprofit that year. The Documentary Foundation went on to donate almost that same exact amount — $690,000 — to the National Progress Alliance in 2021, the year it was founded, according to a tax filing. That’s almost all of the organization’s total revenue of $704,150 that year. 

Asked about who advised on its half-million-dollar donation, Fidelity spokesperson Yakub Mohamed said that the fund does not comment on individual donors for privacy reasons.

The other DAFs that contributed to the Documentary Foundation are Schwab Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, the American Endowment Foundation, the Greater Houston Community Foundation, and the American Online Giving Foundation.

Schwab, one of the DAFs that received and distributed money to and from organizations tied to Leonard Leo, has lobbied the IRS to maintain the practice of shielding investors from scrutiny. “Schwab Charitable is cause neutral and does not interfere with a donor’s recommendation to a charity that is deemed eligible by the IRS and state regulators,” a spokesperson for Schwab Charitable told The Intercept. “Grants recommended by donors do not reflect the values or beliefs of Schwab Charitable or its management. We encourage anyone with concerns about a charitable organization to contact the IRS.” 

Spokespeople from Vanguard and the Greater Houston Community Foundation also cited cause neutrality in their responses to The Intercept. The other DAFs that donated to Rufo did not respond to requests for comment. 

“All donations made through donor-advised funds are reported in detail to the IRS,” Rufo wrote to The Intercept. “The idea that they are ‘untraceable’ is simply not true.”

Under U.S. tax code, charities must collect donations from a diverse set of donors to maintain tax-exempt status, though DAFs are a way for a single donor to provide most of an organization’s funding without causing it to forfeit its charitable status, said Roger Colinvaux, a professor of tax law at Catholic University. 

“Some people use DAFs as a dark-money facilitator, but there are other ways to anonymize, so it’s not like DAFs are the only way to make large anonymous donations,” Colinvaux said. “One thing that could be happening with Leonard Leo or Chris Rufo, if they receive money through a DAF, and the DAF gives money to a charity, then that can help the charity to qualify as a public charity instead of as a private foundation.”

The post Funded by Dark Money, Chris Rufo’s Nonprofit Stokes the Far Right’s Culture War appeared first on The Intercept.

The Chinese government forcibly collects biometric markers like fingerprints, facial images, and DNA of Xinjiang residents, where 12 million Uyghurs live. In recent years, the country has expanded and improved its surveillance capabilities. This week on Intercepted: investigative reporter Mara Hvistendahl speaks with Josh Chin and Liza Lin, reporters for the Wall Street Journal, about their new book, “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control.” In their book, Chin and Lin break down the international implications of the Chinese government’s adoption of surveillance technology. Hvistendahl, Chin, and Lin discuss techno-dystopia in the pandemic era, what happens when there are no checks on algorithms, and how Western companies helped the Chinese government build the surveillance state from day one.

Transcript coming soon.

The post Inside the Chinese Government’s Growing Surveillance State appeared first on The Intercept.

“The deployment of DNA databases across the whole of China lacks elementary fundamental rights safeguards,” said Yves Moreau, a bioinformatician at Belgium’s University of Leuven who uncovered the procurement documents through the Chinese search engine Baidu. “Western suppliers should not aid and abet those abuses.”

In October 2021, a second tender announcement shows, police in Lhasa spent $173,000 upgrading a “3500 sequencer,” a product name and price range matching Thermo Fisher’s 3500 Genetic Analyzer line. Other documents hosted on a third-party government tender site suggest that Tibetan police also bought Thermo Fisher equipment in August of last year.

The news comes amid two reports from human rights groups describing a vast Chinese government drive to collect DNA from ethnic Tibetans. In a report published Tuesday by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, author Emile Dirks estimates that since 2016 authorities have taken DNA from 919,000 to 1.2 million Tibetans — a fourth to a third of the region’s population. A second report, released by Human Rights Watch last week, finds that authorities have collected blood samples from children in Tibet and surrounding regions.

In at least one county in Tibet, according to the Citizen Lab report, authorities combined DNA testing with what they termed Covid-19 prevention efforts. Dirks, a postdoctoral fellow at Citizen Lab, said that may just be a matter of timing and that more information is needed before drawing firm conclusions. In general, DNA is collected in China through blood samples, while Covid testing is done through swabbing.

“When the police want to engage in mass DNA collection, they’re actually very open about it,” said Dirks. Often, he added, police in China will combine projects to save time. “They may be informing the public about pandemic prevention measures, and then alongside that they’ll say, ‘OK, while you’re here, we’re going to collect some DNA.’”

Amid stringent pandemic control measures in 2020, Dirks found, government and local media posts mentioning mass DNA collection in the region tripled.

Thermo Fisher has been criticized in the past for selling DNA equipment to police in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China where authorities have interned an estimated 1 million Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in inhumane camps and forced others into labor. Citing what it called “fact-specific assessments,” the company said in 2019 that it would no longer sell or service DNA equipment in Xinjiang. Later that year, the Trump administration blacklisted several of the region’s police agencies.

But there are no such restrictions in place for Tibet, where DNA collection enables research on high-altitude tolerance valued by the Chinese military, or for the rest of China, where authorities are building a massive DNA database with blood samples taken from men and boys.

“We design our products with great care, follow rigorous trade export policies, and work with governments to contribute to good global policy overall,” Thermo Fisher spokesperson Ron O’Brien wrote in an email to The Intercept. “As the world leader in serving science, we recognize the importance of considering how our products and services are used — or may be used — by our customers.”

The new sale documents show “that the abuses that led to the export controls against Xinjiang public security are not at all confined to Xinjiang,” Moreau told The Intercept. O’Brien said that Thermo Fisher would review the transactions The Intercept had flagged.

For its recent report, Human Rights Watch found records of police going into Tibetan schools to collect DNA. In one case, a local police department from neighboring Qinghai province, where much of the population is ethnically Tibetan, posted on its WeChat account a photo of boys getting their fingers pricked while officers stood by. In addition to children, the report says, police are sweeping up DNA from people in Tibet’s rural areas.

“What’s happening in Tibet is part of the authorities deepening intrusive surveillance and policing, extending all the way to local village levels in rural areas,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch.

The sale of Thermo Fisher testing kits in Tibet was made by a Chinese broker, a third-party company that bundles surveillance technology and security equipment for police and other buyers. Such transactions can obscure responsibility for the flow of fraught technologies. In 2021, two years after Thermo Fisher said it would stop selling in Xinjiang, the New York Times reported that the company’s DNA equipment continued to be sold by brokers in the region. Thermo Fisher claimed at the time that it had no record of the transactions in its system.

Last year, The Intercept reported that cellphone crackers made by the Israeli surveillance tech outfit Cellebrite continued to be sold by brokers in China, despite the company saying it had pulled out of the country. The Intercept also revealed that software and databases from the Austin-based software giant Oracle were bundled and sold to Chinese authorities as surveillance tools by brokers with close ties to Beijing.

Thermo Fisher is not the only entity outside China implicated in the Tibetan DNA drive. At Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, published by the New Jersey-based Wiley, eight editorial board members resigned last year after the journal published papers detailing genetic differences among Chinese ethnic groups, including Tibetans. One of the flagged papers listed an author from the Tibetan Public Security Bureau, the region’s major police agency.

At the time, the board members called for an investigation and said they were dismayed at the journal’s failure to react promptly. The journal still has not retracted the papers.

Partial DNA sequences from Tibetan men, without names attached, are also stored in a German database called the Y-Chromosome Haplotype Reference Database, which focuses on so-called Y-STR data, the unique sequences that occur on the Y chromosome. Last December, the highly regarded scientific journal Human Genetics retracted a paper based on Tibetan, Uyghur, and other partial genetic profiles in the German database.

“You can imagine YHRD as a Google search without providing actual search results,” Sascha Willuweit, an administrator of the database, wrote in an email to The Intercept in February. YHRD recently removed ancestry information from the public database and tightened its standards for ensuring that subjects give informed consent, he added.

The new evidence of mass testing in Tibet will likely lead to renewed pressure on Thermo Fisher, YHRD, and international journals that publish fraught genetic studies from China.

In recent years, DNA collection has expanded globally. In Orange County, California, prosecutors were caught prying DNA samples from people accused of low-level misdemeanors, like walking a dog without a leash. Kuwait required that all citizens give DNA samples before a court struck down the law in 2017. But China has the largest collection program in the world.

Moreau said that DNA collection in Tibet can veer into “biocolonialism,” a global problem. Because some DNA is shared across families and populations, he said, “If I start collecting DNA from members of a population, then I’m getting information about the entire population.” As a result, he added, “The notion of community needs to be made center to the notion of group harm.”

Genetic studies of Indigenous people around the world — including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, San people in Southern Africa, and several Native American groups in the United States — used either inadequate consent measures or none at all. In Europe, forensic geneticists have for decades collected DNA from the Roma, a persecuted minority. In Pakistan, the CIA organized a fake hepatitis B vaccination drive in an attempt to recover DNA from locals, hoping it would help lead them to Osama Bin Laden.

Last year, the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black cancer patient whose cells were taken in 1951 without her knowledge, sued Thermo Fisher in federal court for selling product lines derived from her cells.

In Tibet, some see DNA collection as part of a larger campaign of erasure. “China’s mass DNA collection of Tibetans is outrageous, but it is not entirely surprising,” said Bhuchung K. Tsering, interim president of the International Campaign for Tibet. “The end goal is not simply to bring Tibetans to heel but to undermine their unique identity altogether so that their right to determine their own destiny will no longer matter.”

The post Tibetan Police Bought Thermo Fisher DNA Equipment, Chinese Government Documents Show appeared first on The Intercept.

In March, the Commerce Department announced that it would be investigating Chinese solar firms suspected of illegally dumping low-cost panels onto the international market. Some of the same companies are also suspected of employing Uyghur forced labor in making their products. That announcement has gotten pushback from even President Joe Biden’s close allies, who worry that new tariffs on Chinese solar imports will harm the U.S. solar industry. Ryan gets Senator Elizabeth Warren’s thoughts on the trade war, then talks with Lori Wallach, director of Rethink Trade at the American Economic Liberties Project.

Ryan Grim: There’s something of a solar power boom underway in the United States: 2022 will likely be a record year for new solar projects, and tax credits and state renewable energy requirements have been big reasons for that expansion.

Newscaster: The industry is booming. Solar jobs increased 167 percent over the last decade, and now employs more than one-quarter million American workers.

RG: And what could really unleash the clean energy boom are the subsidies included in the bill that was known as Build Back Better.

Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of private capital are sitting on the sidelines looking for a return on clean energy investments. But, for now, they need public subsidies to make the numbers work, given that they’re taking on a heavily subsidized and entrenched fossil fuel industry.

Democrats in the Senate, though, have recently begun to express optimism that a new deal might actually be pretty close. A few weeks ago, we closely analyzed Senator Joe Manchin’s comments about a looming energy bargain at an oil industry conference, and this week he appeared on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos. I wanna play his entire answer to a key question here, because, in between the lines, you can see where this might wind up.

Zanny Minton Beddoes: Sen. Manchin, I’m going to turn to you, because you are, for obvious reasons, absolutely central to any progress being made on President Biden’s domestic agenda.

Question one: Do you think any other legislation, meaningful legislation, will get passed before the midterms?

Sen. Joe Manchin: First of all, we oughta look at what we’ve been able to accomplish so far, which has been tremendous — and in a bipartisan way. Everyone overlooks that, thinking we haven’t done anything. President Biden has had more success than most any president in the first term. We should agree to that.

Next of all: Yes, I do. I believe there’s an opportunity, there’s a responsibility and opportunity, that we can do something. First of all, inflation is harming every person in America. So we should be looking at getting our financial house in order, paying down our debt, we should be looking at, also, our drug pricing. There’s no reason in the world why we can’t negotiate for Medicare having better pricing, and also for different types of medicines, especially whether it be for diabetes and things of this sort that they need for insulin, that that should be something that’s life-saving and very affordable.

ZMB: And —

JM: Next of all, the third thing is going to be energy and climate. The United States of America has an abundant supply of natural gas and oil. And we can use our fossil [fuels], and the cleanest technology humanly possible, to make sure that we are reliable, and we have security. If you have that, then we’re going to be able to replace some of the more polluting energy in the world and help backfill all of EU. We have the ability to go down two paths: a passive investing in something, a technology that’s going to be needed for the transition that will happen, but eliminating one. And, for the other one, that’s the European model that Germany followed, it wasn’t successful. We should not repeat that.

The United States has the ability to be an energy leader and also a supporter of our allies around the world that are having problems right now.

ZMB: So just to be clear: To those people outside the United States who worry that the ambitious climate agenda of the President hasn’t really gone very far, you’re saying that there will be progress?

JM: We have done an awful lot and that’s not cracked, what we have done already in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. That’s more than it’s ever been done. And we have so much more that we can do. But you can’t do it by abandoning the fossil industry that gives us the ability to have reliability, and security — not just for our nation, but what the world is needing today, all of our allies and friends. You can’t abandon that.

And right now we have a little bit of a discussion going on —

ZMB: [Laughs.]

JM: — of which way this is going to go. But if we’re going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars investing in the new technology that’s going to be needed for the transition of a carbon-free or carbonless environment and an energy sector, then you have to be able to make sure that can intersect and take care of this. You can’t replace one until you have something to replace it with.

RG: Also, can we linger for a moment on the fact that Manchin doesn’t just hold the future of American clean energy development in his hands, but since what America does influences everyone else, the entire world has to ask this senator from West Virginia for permission to move forward?

And speaking of tiny state senators, Chris Coons, from Delaware, who’s a close ally of Biden’s, followed Manchin up by talking about the need to think strategically when it comes to energy independence.

Now, that phrase has long been code for drilling for more oil and drilling more natural gas, but as the world transitions to clean energy, the term is taking on new meaning.

Today, it also means having access to the raw materials needed to make solar panels, and batteries, and wind turbines, and so on, as well as the manufacturing capacity to make all of that — neither of which the U.S. currently has at scale.

Manchin responded this way:

JM: Putin has weaponized energy. And I’m concerned that China could do the same with critical elements of minerals.

The North American continent has the ability to be the energy juggernaut of the world. If we have Canada, the United States, and Mexico, with the amount of critical minerals that we have deposits in those three countries on one continent working together seamlessly, we will absolutely reduce our dependency on Asia, on China, right now, who does 80 percent of the processing, has a total control — almost a monopoly, if you will — on the critical elements that we need.

We can’t move into electric vehicles being dependent on foreign supply chains. The United States, that’s not who we are. That’s not how we became who we are.

RG: In other words, saving the planet from a climate apocalypse might not be enough to get American political elites to deal with the crisis. But put it in terms they understand: great power, competition, geopolitics, empire, and all of a sudden it starts to seem like it’s worth doing.

Of course, the U.S. doesn’t do its global strategy without input from multinational corporations, and if you live in the Washington, D.C. area you’ve noticed that our city has been plastered with ads from a coalition saying that it represents the American solar industry pressuring the Biden administration.

The campaign is in reference to a Commerce Department announcement back in March announced that it would be investigating Asian solar firms to determine whether they were in violation of rules against “dumping” — that is, dropping huge amounts of illegally subsidized, low-cost solar equipment into the international market in a way that could harm domestic solar production in the U.S.

They’re also investigating whether Chinese companies are circumventing duties by pretending that they are being produced somewhere else, which is an issue for a number of reasons, but one of them is the use of Uyghur forced labor — Western China, with its large Uyghur population, is a hub for solar panel production.

The investigation has exposed a tension between the clean energy installation boom on one hand, and the longterm question on the other of whether China will be able to lock in its monopoly on the critical components of the clean energy industry. That’s the point Manchin was making, and he’s not wrong.

And not for nothing: China has built this monopoly by burning cheap, dirty coal to produce the components for the clean energy industry, which is nobody’s idea of actually doing something about climate change.

The lobbying campaign is having an impact. Here’s Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, another close Biden ally:

Sen. Tom Carper: The Commerce Department’s investigation threatens to hamstring one of the strongest weapons in our fight: clean, renewable energy. The prospect of as much as a 250 percent — 250 percent — tariff on solar products will have an immediate, disastrous impact on a leading renewable energy source for our nation. Effectively, we would be punishing the very green industry that’s helping to lead the charge to curb emissions and further reduce our nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.

Now, earlier this week I spoke with Sen. Elizabeth Warren about the Commerce Department probe, and her view was 180 degrees from Sen. Tom Carper’s.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren: We need to have a solar industry here at home. If the pandemic showed us nothing else, it demonstrated how fragile supply chains and offshoring basic manufacturing threatens our security. Tariffs are a part of making certain that we have a manufacturing base here in America. It needs to be done carefully and with the right targets.

But the point of American trade policy should not simply be to maximize the profits of a handful of giant corporations. It should be to produce goods that we need here in the U.S. so that we have more resilient supply chains and good union jobs in this country.

RG: When it comes to trade policy, arguably the most influential voice among progressives belongs to Lori Wallach, who spent years at Public Citizen doing trade policy and is now the director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project.

Lori, welcome to the show.

Lori Wallach: Thank you very much for inviting me.

RG: So, to start, the U.S., as I understand it, actually kind of invented solar panels back in like the 1950s and was making progress over the next couple of decades in developing actual manufacturing capacity here in the United States. So what happened?

LW: So you’re spot on. The United States, not only did, but currently leads the world in solar technology innovation. But, as with so many things that we create, the production of them ended up shifted offshore.

And today, 80 percent of the world’s solar panels are made in China, an even larger share of this silicon wafer, which is the building block for the panels, but also for microchips, are made in China and actually in the part of China where there’s a lot of Uyghur forced labor, which is very problematic.

How it happened is a combination of targeted subsidies on all aspects of production, the building of new coal-fired — irony — plants to create free energy, to melt the sand and make the silicon, and various predatory trade practices like dumping, selling stuff below the actual cost to produce even with the subsidies. And there’s also some knocking off of U.S. technology along the way.

So, at this point, China has kind of cornered the market through a lot of trade cheating, and the U.S. production is almost totally wiped out.

RG: And so right now, there’s this big public fight that has been characterized as kind of between the solar industry and the Biden administration. But how would you frame it? How would you describe who the different players are that are fighting here?

LW: So, back in 2012, during the Obama administration, there was a trade case where various struggling U.S. producers —because there still are some — filed what’s called a trade law case. And under these U.S. laws, you get an investigation, that is basically an independent agency, the United States International Trade Commission, does a study to try and figure out if the reason the U.S. industry is getting clobbered is because of various forms of trade cheating, like those subsidies and other tricks.

And in 2012, tariffs were imposed to basically counteract the trade cheating and the subsidies in China. And there was some hope that that would bring the U.S. industry back to life, because as we’ve learned the hard way during this pandemic, we need lots of different supply chains. We can’t have just one source. We need redundancy, otherwise, we end up with shortages, price hikes, etc.

But, a bunch of these Chinese companies that were subject to these penalties for trade cheating, which basically takes the thumb off the scale, it just makes it equal to what the actual real cost of production would be, so that the U.S. firms could compete, those firms picked up and move their production largely to four other Asian countries: Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. And so now, this fight is about companies, largely Chinese firms, that are operating in those countries who are trying to, it’s called, circumvent the trade cheating order by dumping the stuff that is still with lots of Chinese company imports into the United States. And it’s basically a fight between whether we will have a domestic solar green energy manufacturing sector, which we need for climate goals, we need for our own reliability of the supply chain, we want for working people to have good, clean, green energy jobs, who are going to be coming out of coal and other kinds of employment. And the fight is basically whether the U.S. trade cheating laws are going to be applied so that we can actually grow that domestic industry.

And the odd thing is the actual fight — all of this press, all of this public relations — is coming over thing called the Solar Energy Industries Association, SEIA, and that is actually the companies that install the great big utility-sized installations of solar — it’s not the folks who are up on your roof deck — and it’s the financiers. Because when they do these huge projects — they are billion-dollar projects. So it’s not your local neighborhood solar installation company, its mass project installers and then, ironically, it’s a bunch of the Chinese manufacturers for our in this company that is claiming somehow it is not in the U.S.’s interest to start making it here.

RG: And so these installers are now saying: Hey, we have these gigantic projects that are basically financed, they’re permitted, they are ready to go, and now we can’t get parts coming in from China or through Southeast Asia from China, wherever they’re actually originating from or going through. And so we can’t build.

So what is actually going on here? Because I’ve seen some reporting that yes, this is true, that these companies are — and perhaps for political reasons — holding back shipments. But I also have seen some reporting that actually Europe is just outbidding the United States because, for obvious reasons, Europe is now moving with great haste towards a clean energy economy, because they’re basically trying to get off of Russian gas as quickly as possible.

So what is going on? Is it true that there are solar projects that were about to get ribbon-cut, and now they’re not happening?

LW: So both things are true, which is to say because we have such a monopoly problem, where 80 percent of the supply is coming from Chinese companies in those four other Asian countries, when the U.S. government accepted, agreed to do an investigation, to actually find out if this circumvention business was happening, basically Chinese firms who are evading the original trade fairness ruling, the companies basically cut off the U.S. suppliers. And because we don’t make enough here, because it’s not made enough anyplace else in the world, they have that monopoly power to be able to do that.

And then the second thing that happened is maybe it was all political, but also it became much more lucrative to be able to ship that stuff to Europe, where the price being paid for the same equipment is almost double what it was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because the Europeans are very keen to become less reliant on Russian energy. So it is super-profitable, politically possible because of the monopoly that we need this trade investigation to bus stop so we can have domestic production, and the underlying result is: yes, there probably are some big installations for utilities, that is now hard to get this supply.

The problem is, unless we actually break that monopoly and end the trade-cheating so we can actually have a robust industry here — and, by the way, other countries are doing the same thing. We’re not the only ones who’ve been slammed by this. Unless that happens, we will be perpetually in this situation at the mercy of a handful of companies, which, by the way, just for my friends who are very worried about what this means for solar, we don’t want to be reliant on a situation where not only is there a handful of sources, but the stuff is being made with forced labor out of Uyghur, effectively concentration camps, and the silicon is being made in coal fired plants. So that when you actually get the solar panel, you’d have to be using it for longer than it’s going to last to get even with the fact that you’ve got this energy source that’s coal-fired high carbon. So it is, sort of in every ground, a situation we have to break.

RG: So how often have Chinese industries done this before?

LW: This has been a pattern that has repeated over, and over, and over, where unless the U.S. actually rigorously enforces its trade laws to stop — it’s called countervailing. You add the price that is being cheated on in the country that is dumping stuff below the cost of production, or you make up the difference in the subsidy, so that the price of the good coming into the U.S. actually reflects what it would cost to make it there, if all this cheating wasn’t done. It’s not based on what it cost to make it here, by the way. But what it would cost to make it there without cheating.

And what’s interesting is, despite all the hysteria and hype from the Solar Energy Industries Association, it turns out that actually the companies are sort of the best players. So there’s one called Canadian Solar. It is operating in China, even though it’s called Canadian Solar. That company’s penalty is only a 13 percent penalty. Because if you listen to the Solar Energy Industries Association, listen to the big installers and financiers, they say, oh my god, there’ll be 250 percent tariffs, everything will shut down. Uh uh.

If you’re not actually doing outrageous stuff, which Canadian Solar was not, it’s 13 percent. And that’s basically countervailing against the subsidies. Now if you are a company, like one that’s called All China Solar, which has 200 percent penalty from 2012, that is because you are are cheating in every possible way; you are basically owned by the Chinese government, you are not paying for energy, for real estate, you have your workers subsidized, you have your silicon subsidized, you’re getting free sand, which is the component that goes into actually making the wafer, the base ingredient. And you basically have to break every dang rule, and then some — you’re using Uyghur slave labor in the production, so you’re not paying, because people are in forced labor in concentration camps. That’s what it takes to get the 200 percent that they’re now running around saying it’s gonna happen.

In fact, 13 percent for Canadian Solar, this is the real, actual government decision that is in place now; a bunch of other companies 20 percent, you really have to break the rules to get the crazy rates. But 13 percent or 20 percent? That just makes it fair, so that a U.S. company just doesn’t get literally cheated out of potential competition.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: It sounds like the premium that Europe is paying now is much higher than those, let’s say it’s 13 percent or 20 percent, that you get a duty slapped onto these Chinese panels coming in. Seems like that’s actually less than you’re gonna pay over what you were paying last year anyway, because of Europe. Is that right? Or would it be on top of that?

LW: Well, here’s the other thing that folks should know if they’re as worried about climate as I am: The circumvention penalty, if there is circumvention that’s found, because, let’s be clear, this whole tempest in a teacup is about a government study. There are no tariffs about to be imposed. The hysteria has gotten caused by a government investigation being started. [Laughs.] So if the investigation finds, again, technically it gets called “circumvention,” sneaking around basically using these other countries to bring in stuff that is under penalty, then if that is found, then the way they do the actual tariff is not on the entire good, it’s only on the percentage of the value of the input that’s been circumvented.

So, let’s just say, in Malaysia or in Vietnam, 50 percent of the value is created by the assembly, by the metal frames, by whatever, and 50 percent of the value is coming from the silicon chips or the wafers or whatever is the particular piece that’s actually being shipped in from China, then the penalty is only on that percentage. So it is a windfall profit for these companies to break their contracts with the U.S. firms and go sell in Europe right now. Because the penalty is not necessarily going to end up being prohibited.

But there is no penalty! This is literally an investigation. So at this moment, there is no reason but to make a bigger profit to stop selling this stuff here and ship it to Europe.

RG: And so there was recently an announcement from a, correct me if I’m wrong, South Korean solar manufacturing company that operates out of Georgia, that they’re going to be heavily investing in expanding production in the United States. Do you have any sense of whether that was in response to these trade moves being made by the Biden administration?

LW: I think it is exactly the instance of showing how it works when trade law is properly enforced. So the Korean firm already had a plant in Georgia, and they announced a huge investment to expand it enormously. And they, in their announcement, basically said given various developments in the supply chain, they were going to make a lot more solar equipment here.

And so what are those developments? Number one: This investigation. But the other thing that’s going on is at the end of June, all products made with Uyghur forced labor, all products coming from the part of China where these concentration camps are located, will be banned from entering the U.S. unless a company can prove that there is no forced labor involved. So this is the Uyghur Forced Labor Act. It was passed by Congress last year. It goes into effect in a month. And under that law, the presumption is if a good is coming from that part of China where all of the solar equipment is made, then you have to prove it’s not forced labor.

So, already, these companies who would be subject to the circumvention investigation, the Chinese companies who are a part of this: U.S. solar energy industries, installers, financiers, and the Chinese Manufacturers’ Association. Those guys already know, come June, they could be in trouble because they know where their sourcing is; they could be bringing in goods that will now be banned.

Because the argument the Industry Association is making is: There’s so much uncertainty, that’s what’s causing this disruption. Well, there’s no uncertainty. Number one: The companies know if they’re circumventing or not, because they know where their stuff is coming from. And if they’re bringing in stuff that’s subject to trade cheating rules, and they are then assembling it in another country, they know they’re circumventing and they can know what the penalty is, because they know what the underlying penalty is, which will be the penalty charged on whatever percentage of their good is comprised of the stuff that’s under tariff. [Laughs.] Number two: They know, come the end of June, they either need to have a clean supply chain, or their stuff is going to get impounded. So it is both an attack on this investigation of trade cheating, and it’s an attack on enforcement of our trade laws. But also, it’s basically a sideways protest of what will be a ban on Uyghur forced labor goods. And this is all to pressurize the Biden administration to basically not enforce our trade laws, not enforce labor rights, not enforce human rights. And it’s a false paradigm. It’s a false choice. It’s not an either/or. We need to have this domestic manufacturing for our climate goals.

RG: And, speaking of China’s strategy, have you read Rush Doshi’s book from last year, “The Long Game”?

LW: I have not read it in detail. I have looked at it. Honestly, it scared me so desperately in the first several chapters, I have to take it in small doses.

RG: [Laughs.] It is frightening in a lot of ways. But in the book, the full title is “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order.” And Doshi now, I think, works in the Biden administration. But what I really took away from this book was China’s unique ability, compared to us, to actually kind of set strategy and then implement it, [and] that may end up being an advantage — it may be a disadvantage if they set the wrong strategy and execute the wrong strategy. But we don’t seem to have a kind of parallel ability to do that: either to kind of set a strategy because the whipsawing of elections, but also, we can’t really implement it, because private interest groups in our country have played such a bigger role in our public policymaking than they do in China, for instance.

And this is an interesting example that this trade policy might end up being the right one, but the way it’s come about — I’m hoping you can explain a little bit about how it came about — is just so kind of perfectly like American in the way that our system works now. It’s like: One of these solar companies went into bankruptcy and a creditor came in, backed by a vulture fund, that basically took it over and then used the company to start threatening Chinese companies that they would file one of these petitions, one of these trade petitions, unless they got paid a $55 million fee. Basically a ransom: You pay us and we won’t go forward with this petition anymore, because that didn’t get paid, and so now they’re going forward with this petition. The petition might be great. But the way it came about, it just seems like this is just no way to run a country.

So what’s your understanding of how this all even came about?

LW: Yeah. I’m not 100 percent clear that is the story behind this petition. So there was a petition by six companies last year. Again, the same thing, circumvention, and the core theme of it was that they all [knew] that they would get attacked if they filed a petition. So they basically did it anonymously. And the Commerce Department ended up dismissing that case, because the companies wouldn’t reveal, basically, their names and they all thought they would be attacked.

So one company named Oxen has now refiled. They were among those six. And that company is the company that is the name holder. And now they’re getting attacked left and right for all kinds of things with basically the Solar Energy Industries Association doing a very big dollar public relations and lobbying campaign, with few people understanding that this is ostensibly in the New York Times. It’s called the U.S. Solar Energy Industries Association, but it’s Chinese manufacturers in its membership. So Jinko Solar, JA Solar, Trina Solar, BYD, Long Ge Solar, Canadian Solar, these Chinese manufacturing firms are all members, with the industrial installers, with the financiers of the industrial solar installations business. And so it’s that sort of collective of Chinese manufacturers, financiers, and installers who are protesting one of the beleaguered U..S manufacturers actually trying to get labor law enforced.

RG: So what would it take? And you could tell in Washington when these coalitions come together, because they start advertising in places like Politico Playbook and Axios and going for these, like real insider publications, this extremely expensive kind of real estate, getting right in front of members of Congress, but let’s say that the Biden administration pushes ahead with this, what what would it actually take, in reality, to actually launch solar manufacturing again in the United States?

LW: So we can take, basically, the lesson from the Korean firm now announcing they’re going to invest in a lot more production domestically. We need to enforce our trade laws. So we stop imports that are made by cheating — so made with subsidies from governments; made using forced labor; made with very high carbon costs — we don’t want to have solar panels made from dirty coal-fired energy.

And we also have to have, domestically, the tax policies that create incentives to invest in manufacturing here. There were incentives. They have run out, those incentives are now jammed up in a part of the package that is stuck in the Senate. So stopping imports that would destroy, crush, U.S. companies operating fairly, in the tax policies, right?

And then part of the Biden administration’s supply-chain review is in advanced material. So we need to be making this polysilicon wafer to be able to have domestic microchip production, not just domestic solar production. And doing the tax policies properly is obviously a key part of it, as well as enforcing the trade laws. But also there are ways in which developed countries, for instance, Germany’s great at it, have actually coordinated industrial policies, which is what this supply chain review is talking about, to get the money behind domestic research, to coordinate different government agencies, to actually facilitate the creation of the resilience we need. I mean, we need this as a climate outcome. And we need this as an economic outcome.

RG: So where does this go from here? Like how does this fight resolve?

LW: It would be a disaster for climate, for human rights and labor rights, for the future of U.S. manufacturing resilience, for our own clean energy equipment, if the Biden administration reacted to this big corporate lobbying campaign and, as a result, allowed a flood of Uyghur forced labor, coal-fired, plant-made solar panels from China. That would continue to crush domestic manufacturing.

So hopefully, they are going to do the independent investigation as U.S. law requires since 1930, they are going to get the findings about whether or not these violations have occurred, and if they are, they are going to impose the penalties to equalize the playing field while also prioritizing the U.S. tax and industrial policies to make sure that while we’re making sure that imports aren’t crushing domestic production, we are also incentivizing — affirmatively — investment, in both makings the polysilicon which we need to have our domestic microchip industry as well as solar industry, but also making the actual solar equipment here.

And not just for here. We need around the world, different regions, different countries, being able to get into this business so that we can have the green energy revolution we need to save the planet. It’s not just for us; this has to happen worldwide. But we have to start here by simply enforcing our labor and trade rules.

RG: Well, Lori, thank you so much for joining me.

LW: Thank you guys. I am sorry that I have to hop.

[End credits theme.]

RG: That was Lori Wallach, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. The show was mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

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The post Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Lori Wallach on the Solar War With China appeared first on The Intercept.

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, a Russian defense ministry spokesperson resuscitated debunked claims about a U.S.-funded bioweapons program in the region, accusing Ukrainian labs of experimenting with bat coronaviruses in an attempt to spark “the covert spread of deadliest pathogens.”

Disinformation is an old Russian government tactic. But this time Russia had help. Within days, Chinese officials and media outlets had picked up the lies and were amplifying and expanding on the biolabs yarn. The Chinese Communist Party tabloid Global Times created two splashy spreads, one sourced in part to Sputnik News, the other featuring a quote from Russian President Vladimir Putin. “What is the U.S. hiding in the biolabs discovered in Ukraine?” it screamed. 

“China jumped on the biolabs conspiracy theory,” said Katja Drinhausen, an analyst with the Mercator Institute of China Studies in Berlin. Chinese officials and media outlets had spent the preceding months pushing the notion that the pandemic might have originated in a lab accident outside China. “It was like, here’s the perfect conspiracy theory coming out of Russia to support our ‘everywhere but China’ main talking point of the last year,” she said.

Since the war broke out in February, experts have been struck by a convergence in Russian and Chinese media narratives. While some of the convergence was likely happenstance, occurring when storylines aided both governments’ goals, documents found in a trove of hacked emails from Russia state broadcaster VGTRK show that China and Russia have pledged to join forces in media content by inking cooperation agreements at the ministerial level.

A bilateral agreement signed July 2021 makes clear that cooperating on news coverage and narratives is a big goal for both governments. At a virtual summit that month, leading Russian and Chinese government and media figures discussed dozens of news products and cooperative ventures, including exchanging news content, trading digital media strategies, and co-producing television shows. The effort was led by Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Communication and Mass Media, and by China’s National Radio and Television Administration.

In the propaganda agreement, the two sides pledged to “further cooperate in the field of information exchange, promoting objective, comprehensive and accurate coverage of the most important world events.” They also laid out plans to cooperate on online and social media, a space that both countries have used to seed disinformation, pledging to strengthen “mutually beneficial cooperation in such issues as integration, the application of new technologies, and industry regulation.” 

A bilateral agreement signed July 2021 makes clear that cooperating on news coverage and narratives is a big goal for both Russian and Chinese governments.

“This is a master document of cooperation on media between the countries,” said David Bandurski, director of China Media Project, an independent organization that researches Chinese-language media. “The document allows us to see the process behind the scenes of how cooperation is planned and discussed by these particular ministries.”

In 2020, the independent Russian-language news outlet Meduza reported the existence of such propaganda agreements, which have resulted in a proliferation of pro-Beijing stories in Russian media. But this is the first time that the text of an agreement has been published. The Ministry of Digital Development did not respond to a request for comment, and the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment.

VGTRK’s email system was hacked earlier this year when, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hackers targeted more than 50 Russian companies and government agencies. The transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets has published more than 13 terabytes of documents from the hacks on its website. The Intercept and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project formed a consortium of news organizations to examine the files; previous stories that emerged from the documents include articles on Putin associate Evgeny Prigozhin, who founded and runs the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary organization that is fighting in Ukraine.

The agreement lists 64 joint media projects that had either been launched or were in development. Some of these are lighthearted. In early 2021, CCTV and Riki Group launched a saccharine cartoon called “Panda and Krash,” about a panda and a rabbit in a toy store who zip off on adventures with a robot and an elephant in tow. “I encourage you and you help me,” they sing. 

Other projects were more substantial. State news agencies TASS and Xinhua pledged to exchange reporting, and other state outlets agreed to publish supplements promoting the other country. 

Chinese and Russian news reports suggest that the two countries have held annual media cooperation meetings since 2008. The partnership appears largely aimed at domestic audiences. But both China and Russia have massively expanded their overseas media presence in the past decade, and the agreement names outlets with a large international presence, including BRICS TV, RT, and Sputnik (all headquartered in Moscow), and the state-run Chinese outlets China Daily, Global Times, and CGTN. “The ambition is certainly global,” said Drinhausen, who added that despite notable differences in their foreign policies, both countries share a common cause. “In terms of an ideological pushback against the U.S. as the joint enemy, they are brothers in arms.” 

Sources say that such agreements are inked partly for show, and that China has the upper hand in the partnership. “The Chinese control all the big projects,” said a Russian source with knowledge of the meetings, who declined to be named because of possible repercussions from their employer. “So far, they haven’t even figured out some basic issues like broadcasting our channels on Chinese cable.” 

Indeed, some of the products discussed appear to be mainly of interest to China. TASS agreed to run interviews with Chinese leaders Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang and to organize events commemorating the 100th year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party.  “What possible real interest can Russian audiences have in a photography exhibition to celebrate the CCP’s centennial?” said Bandurski. “What the Chinese government seems to be doing here is throwing a bunch of external propaganda products onto a giant wish list, hoping that Russia will help it tell its story.”

Meduza earlier reported that Russian state media, including the government paper of record Rossiyskaya Gazeta, was publishing more than 100 articles a month sourced from China Media Group, a state-owned media conglomerate whose coverage is mentioned several times in the agreement. 

“In terms of an ideological pushback against the U.S. as the joint enemy, they are brothers in arms.”

Some of those articles, such as a rote defense of the Chinese government’s actions in Xinjiang, appear out of place in the Russian media landscape. Russian state media coverage is generally less censored and more sophisticated than its Chinese counterpart, said Maria Repnikova, director of the Center for Global Information Studies at Georgia State University. “The propaganda genre is more dynamic in Russian state media, especially on TV, with a sophisticated play on emotions and disinformation appealing to many average Russian viewers,” she wrote in an email.

A month after the 2021 agreement was signed, a journalist from China Media Group wrote VGTRK’s general email address to pitch a partnership. “We can conduct corresponding interviews or reports according to your needs,” the journalist wrote in English, in one of the hacked documents. “At the same time, we can also transform your content accordingly and spread it widely in China.”

Hacked emails show that some journalists working for Russian state media helped amplify Chinese narratives. In March 2021, Alexander Balitskiy, Beijing bureau chief for RTR, VGTRK’s international service, sent a script for an upcoming segment on how people in China were boycotting foreign brands that had taken stances on forced labor in Xinjiang. “Global companies played on the same team with Western politicians, accusing China of the genocide of Uyghurs,” the script reads. Then, in parentheses, is a production note: “ZOOM OUT TO BEAUTIFUL VIEWS OF COTTON FIELDS BEING HARVESTED.” The script also outlines plans to include a quote from an earlier interview with Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, who has denied Russian atrocities in Ukraine and defended Chinese state repression in Xinjiang; a quote from him did not make to the final cut of the news item available on VGTRK’s flagship news site Vesti.ru.

In an email, Balitskiy said he could not comment on the news segment because he doesn’t control how segments are edited when they are broadcast in different regions.

The payoff for Russia may have come after the invasion of Ukraine, when Chinese media echoed Russian government talking points on the war. “The coverage oftentimes didn’t even mention that it was Russia carrying out the attacks,” said Repnikova. Chinese outlets, she added, “adapted slogans directly from the Russian discourse.”

The hacked emails end in the spring of 2022. But over the past few months, the Russian government repeatedly brought the biolabs conspiracy theory to the United Nations Security Council, asking it to establish a commission to investigate. Amplifying its efforts was the Chinese press. 

That may have been merely because the biolabs story aided China’s goals. The agreement does not chart detailed plans for sophisticated information operations. Such documents “are signed to publicly bolster the partnership, but the actual particulars are not worked out,” said Repnikova. “The vague wording might be deliberate, as it makes it harder to track the projects and to hold anyone accountable.” 

The post Hacked Russian Files Reveal Propaganda Agreement With China appeared first on The Intercept.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day that should inspire reflection on the importance of universal human rights, billionaire investor and part-owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors Chamath Palihapitiya went viral with his own eyebrow-raising take on the subject.

On his podcast, Palihapitiya leapt with both feet into a debate about corporate responses to human rights violations in countries where they do business, specifically about China, where human rights advocates have documented atrocities against Uyghurs, a minority ethnic group in the Xinjiang region.

Palihapitiya said he did not care about the Uyghurs’ predicament — and that this sentiment was broadly shared by elites who were simply unwilling to be as bold as him and just say it. “Let’s be honest, nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, OK?” he told his visibly surprised co-host, Jason Calacanis, on their podcast over the weekend.

“Let’s be honest, nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, OK?”

Palihapitiya proudly expressed his indifference at reports of rape and forced sterilization of Uyghur women. He dismissed Calacanis’s concern as moral “virtue signaling.”

“You bring it up because you really care, and I think that’s nice that you care. The rest of us don’t care,” Palihapitiya said. “I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth. Of all the things that I care about, it is below my line.”

To defend his posture of uncaring, Palihapitiya turned his sights on Western countries’ own track record of human rights abuses, including wars of aggression and torture at domestic prisons. Concerns about foreign atrocities, like the furor over China and the Uyghurs, he said, have at times even served as a cover for military interventionist policies that have done even more harm.

It’s all true, as far as it goes: The West has its atrocities, many don’t care about China’s abuses, and those who do care risk having their concerns twisted into new rights violations of their own against the same populations they expressed concern about.

However, it’s worth stating plainly what Palihapitiya is talking about: creating a formal conspiracy of silence between countries, including in the corporate world, over atrocities like those taking place in Xinjiang. Is that a responsible position, let alone an admirable one?

The biggest defense Palihapitiya might be able to mount is that at least he’s not a hypocrite: Americans commit human rights abuses, so perhaps they have no right to shame others over them.

Yet even hypocritical criticisms exchanged by superpowers can do good. Over the last century, history shows that they have.

During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in serious ideological and public relations campaigns to shame each other over human rights abuses. In both cases, there were rewards to be reaped by ordinary people through the shaming.

The need to respond to Communist criticism of the treatment of Black Americans helped give more political heft to the fight to end Jim Crow laws — if for no other reason than that the racist system provided strong talking points to the U.S.’s Soviet rivals.

“Early on in the Cold War, there was a recognition that the U.S. couldn’t lead the world if it was seen as repressing people of color,” historian Mary Dudziak has said. President Harry Truman argued that civil rights would help the U.S. win global support during the Cold War and, accordingly, integrated the military.

Moving the other way, American pressure over the Soviet Union’s attacks on individual freedoms were also eventually felt in the Kremlin, where Soviet leaders, realizing global public opinion wouldn’t give domestic repression a pass, eventually had to defend themselves. Five years after the U.S. passed the Jackson–Vanik amendment, for instance, the Soviet Union had eased up restrictions on the emigration of Jews such that numbers began to hit record highs; the issue was far from resolved, but continuing progress was widely attributed to the U.S.’s public stances.

In that sense, the Cold War competition arguably had a positive side effect, even if it was a marginal one. Both superpowers were forced to compete at least in part on their human rights records. This was not because of any Damascene moral conversation by either government but because of the urgent need to dull the sting of their enemies’ criticism. Even if this shaming saved only a few people from lynching or the Gulag, it made a difference.

When it comes to the rivalry between the U.S. and China, Palihapitiya suggested embracing the “hard, ugly truth” that it is a frivolous “luxury belief” to say anything about human rights. Doing so, though, would take the heat off leaders in both countries.

In his podcast appearance, Palihapitiya claimed that, since corporations and foreign nations have not actually divested from China, their rhetorical stances account for nothing. That clearly is not how the Chinese Communist Party has interpreted such criticism: Officials have devoted considerable resources to trying to change public opinion over Xinjiang and repair their reputation amid a constant stream of negative press.

The global pressure also may have helped make a difference on the ground.

There are signs that China might be susceptible to international pressure. One recent report attributing a relatively lighter grip by Chinese security services over Xinjiang attributed the minor shift in part to foreign pressure, though that interpretation has been disputed. In another case, China most definitely took note of the pressure, though not by taking the desired actions: After a group of companies like Nike and H&M that manufacture apparel in China joined a coalition to denounce the treatment of Uyghurs, China made life difficult for the coalition members.

China has also recently gone on the offensive against the U.S.’s abysmal human rights record in the Middle East, signaling that the old Cold War dynamic of mutual human rights criticism, at least some of it constructive, may yet carry over to the U.S.-China competition.

After his unfortunate episode, Palihapitiya issued a terse statement on social media expressing apparent regret for the tone of his comments: “To be clear, my belief is that human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere,” he said. “Full stop.”

It would be a tragic mistake if other corporate leaders and political figures embraced something similar to Palihapitiya’s callous initial position.

The reconsideration was welcome: It would be a tragic mistake if other corporate leaders and political figures embraced something similar to his callous initial position.

Contrary to what Palihapitiya claimed in his podcast, a lot of people around the world have shown that they do in fact care about foreigners living in dire circumstances, such as the Uyghurs. They have raised their voices on the subject and made it an issue that the Chinese government feels it must respond to. If that helps even some innocent people escape oppression or defend their rights, that’s a good thing.

Criticism over human rights abuses can often be cynical or hypocritical, sure, but they are far preferable to a world in which even the concept of universal dignity is simply abandoned.

The post Contra a Billionaire Bro: Why We Should Care About China’s Rights Violations in Xinjiang appeared first on The Intercept.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan on Tuesday, ending speculation about whether she would visit the island during her tour of east Asia. Political reactions in the U.S. have been divided, particularly among progressives. Tobita Chow of Justice is Global and Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, join Intercept reporter Mara Hvistendahl to discuss.

[Deconstructed theme song.]

Mara Hvistendahl: Welcome to Deconstructed.

I’m Mara Hvistendahl, filling in for Ryan Grim this week.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed yesterday in Taiwan, where she was scheduled to meet with President Tsai Ing-Wen on Wednesday. She is the first Speaker of the House to visit the island since 1997 when Newt Gingrich spent a few hours there, and her visit has been mired in controversy since the news leaked last week.

Newscaster: U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has landed in Taiwan after weeks of speculation over her potential visit. Beijing has called the move a major political provocation, and the Chinese defense ministry said it will launch targeted military operations to counter the visit.

Newscaster: If Speaker Pelosi visits Taiwan, said the Chinese Foreign Affairs spokesman, it would grossly interfere in China’s internal affairs. He warned the Chinese military would never sit idly by.

Newscaster: Biden administration officials had warned the House Speaker against it. This is the highest-level visit to Taiwan by a U.S. official in 25 years.

MH: Despite Taiwan having its own government, culture, and history, the Chinese government claims that it is part of China, and Beijing has threatened to launch “targeted military actions” in response to Pelosi’s visit. Already the People’s Liberation Army has conducted live-fire drills in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

Pelosi’s Taiwan trip has divided Democrats and the left, so this seemed like a good time to reach out to two leading progressive foreign policy strategists for their thoughts on the U.S.-China relationship.

I spoke with Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders, and with Tobita Chow, director of Justice Is Global, which is a project of the group People’s Action.

Along with Pelosi’s visit, we discussed the pitfalls in mixing human rights with national security concerns, how the repression of the predominantly-Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang connects to the U.S.-led War on Terror, and what they think of Biden’s approach to China.

Over conversation happened last week, before Pelosi’s visit was confirmed. And to begin with, I asked about her expected trip and whether she should go.

Tobita started us off:

Tobita Chow: My overall view is that the trip would be a bad idea, that it would further inflame tensions between the United States and China at a time when I think that’s the last thing that we need, and would predictably lead to escalated threats from China against Taiwan — and, meanwhile, contributing nothing that anyone can name in terms of improving security for Taiwan. I think we should be prioritizing in our foreign policy supporting Taiwan’s security and self-defense. But it is unclear how this trip would make any material contribution towards that goal, while potentially making Taiwan less secure overall.

On the other hand, I’m concerned that some of the criticisms and arguments against the trip that end up at the same conclusion, that she should not make this trip, have engaged in what I see is just like rampant threat-inflation, talk about how China’s response could include a no-fly zone or a naval blockade. And I think those kinds of concerns are not well grounded, and engaging in a pattern of overall threat inflation regarding Taiwan, that I think is counterproductive and actually functions to make Taiwan less secure in the long run.

MH: Right. So I mean, there has been a fair amount of rhetoric coming from the Chinese government. Biden talked with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping on July 27 and a description of the call issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry afterward warned: “those who play with fire will perish by it.” It’s a quote.

And I mean, so Matt, what do you think?

Matt Duss: I mean, first off, I mean, Sen. Sanders hasn’t commented on the speaker’s trip. I’m not going to get out in front of him on this.

I would just say, generally, I do think it’s important to show solidarity with other democracies and other populations in democracies and not in democracies. But I think the question to be asked is, you know, whether that cause is advanced or not. And I also would echo the second thing that Toby said about when people are issuing these dire warnings about the Chinese government’s response, I mean, I think there’s a problem in that, too.

I think the goal here, as I see it for progressives and for Democrats, is to not be drawn into this kind of hawkish discourse that just inevitably, and always, I think benefits conservatives and national security hawks and really undermines, I think, progressive goals.

And I think that’s kind of a broader issue that Sen. Sanders has certainly addressed with regard to the shift in U.S.-China relations and this kind of broader idea of great power competition or conflict, whatever term one wants to use, and some of the dangers that poses — just looking at very recent history, and the way that could crowd out avenues for for cooperation, and ultimately undermine, I think, a lot of important human security goals.

MH: I mean, you talked about concerns about being overly hawkish. And that was a cornerstone of Trump’s approach to China. And I’m just curious what both of you think of the Biden administration’s approach to China so far? On the one hand, after the period of [indistinct phrase] stances and sanctions and overtly racist comments of the Trump administration, and if anything seems more rational, but there have also been a number of critiques of Biden’s policy. So I’m curious where you stand?

MD: Yeah. I can take that one first. My view, and just a caveat here, I’m here expressing my own views, not representing the senator, although obviously a lot of what I say will echo things he has said. In general, I think the Biden administration has been careful in a way that I think it’s certainly refreshing after the Trump administration, with all the really just straight-up racist rhetoric around China’s government policy, and obviously around the pandemic, stuff that had a real physical impacts for our communities here in the United States, our Chinese and Asian fellow citizens, in similar ways that we saw impacting our Muslim-American communities around the war on terror. And that’s, unfortunately, something that’s been repeated throughout history, and yet another reason why I’m glad that they tended to avoid this kind of inflammatory rhetoric.

Now, having said that, I think the danger is — I mean it’s good to avoid that kind of rhetoric that demonizes any people, or really any country, but at the same time, I think if you are arranging your foreign policy around this idea that China represents the biggest threat to American security and prosperity of any country in the world, that policy sort of speaks for itself.

I’m not going to make an equation between the Biden administration and the Bush administration, but I would say in the weeks after 9/11, George W. Bush went to a Muslim center, right? I mean, I think his rhetoric showed — he said, at least, — that we are not at war with Islam, we are not at war with Muslims. But his policy spoke very much for itself. I mean, these policies that he pursued: the military interventions, the wars, the assassinations, torture, detention, all kind of painted a very, very different picture that suggested that maybe we were, in fact at war with a religious faith. And I think that’s something to be very, very careful about.

MH: Yeah, I guess the counterpoint that I hear often is that progressives frame the U.S.-China relationship as being primarily about us actions when there has been increasing authoritarianism in China, the slide toward fewer freedoms, and life has gotten worse for many people, not least ethnic minorities under Xi Jinping.

So, Toby, I wonder how you respond to that, or what you think generally of Biden’s approach to China?

TC: Yeah, I think the growing authoritarianism and nationalism and repression that we’re seeing from the Chinese government is extremely worrying. And I have friends and people that I’ve worked with in both mainland China and Hong Kong that have directly suffered from that. So I take that stuff very seriously.

I think my concern though, and my critique of how these issues have been approached by the administration and the foreign policy establishment overall, is that this approach of intensifying competition, zero-sum competition between the U.S. and China is an approach that is not well designed to actually encourage better behavior from the Chinese government. And I think I have a pretty different analysis of where those really bad policies in the Chinese government are coming from.

I see the growing and intensifying nationalism and authoritarianism within Chinese politics as part of a much larger global trend that we’re seeing around the world with authoritarian and nationalist movements and governments in, yes, in China; also here in the U.S. and the Trump administration; in Brazil, India, Poland, Hungary, like we could go on. And I think it is important to understand the root causes of this global trend, which I think have to do with severe and growing dysfunctions in the neoliberal global economy since the 2008 crisis, that the global economy has not fully recovered, global economic growth has been very weak, that encourages a sense of zero-sum competition, which becomes, then, a breeding ground for this kind of nationalist and authoritarian politics. So I think that it is very important to have those root causes in mind. And we need a strategy that can attack this problem at that root, which has to do with the global system.

And the problem with seeing how these issues of authoritarianism and nationalism are taking shape in China, and then turning that into a reason to engage in more severe competition and more aggressive actions against China, is that I think that can just end up feeding into the dysfunctions of the system that makes the whole system worse, that does not actually create incentives for the Chinese government to behave better, and actually creates lots of excuses within Chinese politics for the most extreme forms of nationalism, which then get used to justify further repressive and authoritarian policies within China.

MD: Yeah, I think — if I could just for a minute.

MH: Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

MD: I think that’s such an important point, is just understanding not just the sources of nationalism, but the purposes that nationalism serves for governments. And one doesn’t have to equate the Chinese government and its policies and practices with the U.S. government to recognize that there are real similarities with regard to the way that nationalism and fear and suspicion of other countries is deployed to achieve certain goals for certain elites. I mean, whether it’s the U.S.-China relationship, or the U.S.-Russia relationship, or the U.S.-Iran relationship [laughs], it’s always a mutually reinforcing a kind of relationship between, I would say, nationalist hardliners in all of these countries, that their rhetoric, in some ways, mirrors each other because it is performing very similar functions at a basic level, even though I think that these systems are in many ways different,

MH: Right. Yeah, I know that historians of the Cold War period often talk about this cycle of mirroring and escalation. And that definitely was a factor then.

To get into history a little bit, in the time that I’ve been reporting on China as a journalist, and certainly in the time that you have worked on China, there’s been a dramatic shift in how centrist politicians and corporate America perceived China and spoke about China. Think back not not that long ago, Mark Zuckerberg was displaying Xi Jinping’s book on a visit by the Chinese leader — it is not even a book that anyone would read — and went for a run in Tiananmen Square, which is also not somewhere you would run. And Google is building a censored search engine for China.

And today, you have some of the same big tech executives arguing that America needs A.I. weapons to counter China. So just this same trend has played out, of course, across multiple sectors, not just in tech. So the consensus in Washington has dramatically shifted, and that’s something that Sen. Sanders has pointed out in his writings.

Can you talk about what has driven that beyond the 2008 economic crisis, as Toby mentioned?

MD: Yeah. I mean, as you mentioned, Sen. Sanders kind of laid out this argument in a piece he wrote for Foreign Affairs, I think it was April of 2021, just noting, as you said, the 180-degree shift with regard to the kind of consensus position on what China wanted, what the Chinese government wanted, and what the nature of the U.S.-China relationship should be.

I will note, as many and he has also noted, despite this completely different perception of China, the answer for Congress remains the same, and that is that big corporations should receive tens of billions of dollars in American taxpayer money. That’s just really interesting.

But, yeah, back around 2000, as he noted, the sense was: Well, China is growing, we’re going to give it a most-favored-nation trading status, talk about bringing it to the WTO — the idea being China’s economy is going to grow and it’s going to help a lot of people, going to lift a lot of people out of poverty, which it did, I mean, as he has recognized many times. I think that the transformation of large parts of China has been pretty amazing in that respect. But the idea was like, as the Chinese people become richer, then they will become more liberal and China will become less repressive. And obviously, that has not worked out.

Now, I would say, that often does not work out. But it’s one of those arguments that involved giving enormous tax incentives to companies, that enabled them to offshore and see cheaper labor with fewer labor standards. And here we are 20 years later, where China is now perceived as a much bigger competitor, if not an outright threat to American security and prosperity. And yet again, the answer is to provide enormous tax incentives to bring [laughs] essentially the same corporations back onshore and rebuild our supply chains and our manufacturing capacity — all important things to do. We should not need a threat of a foreign country to do these things, to build American industry, to build American supply chains and help Americans generally. Unfortunately, that’s the way this stuff often works.

So yeah, I think the point that the senator was making in that piece was just: There was an unassailable consensus about what China wants 20 years ago, there now appears to be a fast-forming, unassailable consensus about what China wants now, and we should be a bit more careful about making these assumptions given that it was apparently so wrong then and might well be now.

TC: I think this shift in the position of corporate America is really essential to the emergence of this new consensus in D.C. Professor Ho-Fung Hung, from Johns Hopkins, has written about this based on a study of the position of corporate lobbyists in D.C. on various bills regarding China. And what he argues is that since the 2008 crash, because of economic policies in China, in response to that economic crisis, we’ve seen a radical transformation in the relationship between China and U.S. multinational corporations. And there was a rapid shift from China acting as a source of low-wage factory labor to U.S.-based multinational corporations occupying a subordinate position in their supply chains to the rise of Chinese companies, as rivals and competitors, to U.S. multinational corporations. And these rising Chinese companies first started to out-compete U.S. companies in the Chinese market, or in some cases, the Chinese government pushed out U.S. companies — for example, this happened with social media companies. And then increasingly, we see Chinese companies competing or out-competing U.S. companies in the global market. So for example, we’ve seen that with Huawei.

And seeing these shifts, U.S. multinational corporations, which used to play a key role in defending the U.S.-China relationship, because that was profitable for them, now, increasingly, a number of these companies would like to see the U.S. government help them fight back against the rise of these Chinese rivals. And professor Hung looks at the record of corporate lobbies in D.C. And there’s a discernible shift in their position from being staunch champions of the U.S.-China relationship and fighting against any anti-China bills in D.C., to either remaining silent on those bills or actually advocating for them. And so I think this shift in the attitude of corporate America to the U.S.-China relationship is really essential to understanding the emergence of this new anti-China consensus in D.C.

MH: Right, so the multinationals have largely been kept out of the Chinese market or have not been able to break in for various reasons. And so we see, for example, the push against industrial espionage.

Maybe this is a good time to talk about the CHIPS and Science Act, which passed Congress yesterday. And that’s a bill that has been promoted as boosting U.S. technological and manufacturing capacity in order to make the U.S. more competitive with China. The previous version was called The Endless Frontier Act, which kind of brings to mind the 1980s computer game Oregon Trail, kind of like the Manifest Destiny notion.

MD: [Laughs.] To me, it reminds me of Star Trek. I was hoping there would be some kind of —

MH: Oh! OK. [Laughs.]

MD: — warp drive development plan, but no, but yeah, sorry. You can cut that out!

MH: [Laughs.] Maybe that’s the follow-up!

MD: I’m working on it. I’m working on it. But it’s hard to get my boss to go for that.

MH: Right. But maybe if you frame it as making the U.S. more competitive against China —?

MD: List, warp drive by 2025 — I’ve been trying to sell this for so long and I just can’t get anyone to bite.

MH: But that’s been very much the framing. What’s your stance and Sen. Sanders’ stance on the bill and how it has been framed?

MD: I mean, Sen. Sanders has spoken about this multiple times, including on the floor of the Senate. He recognizes the need to rebuild American manufacturing, specifically relating to semiconductors. But his question on this as on so many things is: Do we need to be providing enormous taxpayer subsidies and incentives that essentially transfer American tax dollars to already enormously wealthy companies and CEOs? And the answer that Congress, unfortunately, always seems to give is, yes. There are supporters of the bill who will say: Well, there are safeguards with regard to stock buybacks and other things like that. But we can point to many examples of how those guardrails were written into these bills — or even look at the American Rescue Plan or money that was given to the airlines with the understanding that American taxpayers are going to bail you out, so you don’t have to lay people off. And they said: Thank you very much — and went ahead and pushed people into retirement, which is why people are having flights delayed and canceled all over the place now.

Going back even to the 2008 financial crisis, American corporations bailed out, their CEO says: Thanks so much — and took enormous bonuses. And so whatever rules might be written in, these companies are very good at skirting those rules, and just taking the cash.

So that’s been his position. And again, it’s in some ways tough because, as I said, we recognize the need to rebuild American industry and create jobs, and the security aspect of having an onshore semiconductor industry, but he has had very serious questions about whether this is the way to do it.

MH: Toby, do you have thoughts on CHIPS?

TC: Yeah. So one is that the CHIPS Act that has passed is significantly stripped down from earlier versions, so it comes out of the U.S. innovation and competitive Act that was passed in the Senate, and then there’s a TJ Competes Act that passed in the House. Those early versions of this bill were much more comprehensive and included a lot of foreign policy provisions, mostly geared towards a competition with China, many of which I saw as quite dangerous. So I’m quite gratified that what ended up passing was this CHIPS bill, which stripped out a lot of what I think were very often dangerous foreign policy provisions.

But I think it is important to keep track of how anti-China politics is playing out in Congress and in D.C. This CHIPS bill was one of the premier products of anti-China politics under the Biden administration. So much of the politics regarding China isn’t really about China. It’s really about us, and internal U.S. dynamics, and how China gets used to sort of displace internal tensions or gets used as a way to sort of project our internal tensions and anxieties outwards. And one of the key pieces of discourse regarding China across the political spectrum has been this idea of U.S.-China, competition is going to save U.S. politics, that in the face of growing polarization, in particular, the growing radicalization of the right in the Republican Party, that we can bring the country together through competition with China that this can be something that can unite the country and allow us to govern again. And there was this dream of rebuilding bipartisanship, even given the radicalization of the right, rebuilding bipartisanship around competition with China. And there were even arguments that this could be used to pass bold, progressive legislation.

And I think that is not what we are seeing. We’ve been trying this for a while now. And that’s not what we are seeing. What we’re seeing is that what anti-China politics is good for is bills that amount to enormous corporate giveaways, and the two major beneficiaries of that have been the military and industrial complex. And now the certain elements of the tech industry and companies that are already highly profitable. And that’s what this politics looks like in practice.

[Musical interlude.]

MH: Toby, your group Justice Is Global released a report last summer on anti-Asian racism. And when you talk about what an anti-China policy is good for, the report really made the argument that these sorts of policies have promoted the idea that China is an existential threat to every American — not just a threat to U.S. global domination or to U.S. national security, but actually to every person in the country, and that notion that in turn feeds racism and has driven some of the hate crimes that we’ve seen over over the past few years. I should disclose that I offered feedback on an early draft of that report. But can you talk about specifically how you recommend counteracting those narratives? I mean, what are alternatives to what you describe as an anti-China approach?

TC: Yeah. So one major alternative is to stop using China as a scapegoat for problems in U.S. society, problems like the threat of authoritarianism, problems of growing inequality and the loss of good jobs. And I think that we, as progressives, need to clarify, and promote narratives, and promote policies that put the blame where it belongs: problems of corporate power and unaccountable elites within U.S. politics, politicians that have worked to support corporate power and undermine the power of working people, undermine labor unions, and so on. And that is the most important thing to clarify, who is actually responsible for the problems facing the vast majority of people in this country and to promote real solutions that can actually make people’s lives better.

The other thing is we argue that we need to make a careful distinction between these inflated threat narratives, which we see as unjustified and dangerous, versus what we see as like legitimate criticism of the Chinese government — the policies of repression, and so on — and criticisms of the Chinese government grounded in principles of democracy and human rights. And also understand that those principles of human rights and democracy are not going to be served through a politics of increasing rivalry that is driven by these inflated threatened narratives.

MH: Right. So when you talk about human rights concerns, I would like to ask you both about Xinjiang. And you know, the situation there, which is that you have estimates of over a million Uyghurs that have been detained in internment camps over the past few years, many others that have been forced into labor, a kind of cultural annihilation at work. And you both pushed back against the tendency to tether human rights issues to national security priorities. And the plight of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang has largely been taken up by conservative Republicans, who in the past have fanned Islamophobia in other parts of the world.

And, and so I’m just wondering: How do you counter that? And what does a leftist approach to Xinjiang look like?

MD: Yeah, no, I think that’s a great question. And my first response without being too glib is just to note that conservatives always seem to identify human rights problems in countries they want to fight with. But I think the progressive response is to take a consistent position with regard to human rights obviously here at home, but around the world, and having a realistic understanding of the actual tools we have to improve human rights and press governments to stop abuses of human rights.

Now, I think, with Xinjiang, one of the things we can do, and I think the United States has been doing, is simply raising the issue, which is important. There’s something valuable in that. I think, ultimately, it’s going to work better if it’s not just the United States pointing this finger, if it’s as large as possible, a coalition, a set of multilateral institutions like the U.N. and others who are calling this out. I mean, there are sanctions tools that the U.S. can use on specific officials, I would make a distinction between kind of broad-based sectoral sanctions — I mean, if that were even possible with China [laughs], given its own economic power and the kind of interrelationship between our economies, it’s not possible to do that in the way that’s being done with Russia, for example.

But I would also add that U.S. credibility on human rights now is not great. And here, I would say, just for example, look a couple of weeks ago to the President’s trip to the Middle East. How much credibility do we imagine that the United States might have to note these abuses in China while he is bumping fists with Mohammed bin Salman, or inviting Egypt’s President el-Sisi to the White House? I think ultimately, if we want the words “international, rules-based order” to have any meaning whatsoever, I think we need to understand that that applies to us and our friends as well, and not insist upon a special dispensation or special rules for us and our friends, and that’s exactly what we do right now.

Last thing I would add to this is one of the justifications that the administration gave for that trip to the Middle East was precisely because of China. Their argument is that we need to stay engaged and be a presence in this region, or else it will be filled by bad actors like the Chinese government and the Russian government, and it just shows how this kind of approach can be used to excuse a whole number of things, not only on human rights, but my question is what kind of double standard couldn’t you smuggle in under that kind of framework?

MH: Right. You mentioned the U.N., but the U.N. has largely been silent on the issue of Xinjiang. You had the recent visit by the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights to the region, in which she declined to call out the abuses that were going on. And there is the perception that other arms of the U.N. are kind of compromised, you’ve had massive bribery cases involving U.N. officials in China. And so with international bodies failing on those issues, what can progressives do?

TC: Yeah, I think part of the paralysis at the U.N. is that there have been repeated attempts within the United Nations by the U.S. and U.S. allies to condemn the human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and this has happened a number of times, where countries always line up in the same way, the countries signing up to condemn China are the U.S. and mainly U.S. allies, mainly among the wealthier countries of the world. And then China, on its part, organizes countries to oppose these statements of condemnation, and it is disproportionately developing countries of the Global South that sign on on China’s side. And it is notable that majority-Muslim countries, to my recollection, have yet to join the U.S. and U.S. allies in condemning the oppression in Xinjiang, even though it is justified in terms of Islamophobia.

And to the question of credibility, I think that a part of the problem here is the U.S. and its advocacy internationally around Xinjiang has yet to really face up to its role in the problem. There are a lot of aspects to the system of repression in Xinjiang, but one core way that it gets justified in legitimated within China is through Islamophobic narratives and Islamophobic counterterrorism narratives: the idea that Islam is a source of terrorism, and the narratives that Chinese leaders use to justify these policies, that Islam is a source of terrorism, and the only way to deal with that is by intensely, surveilling the Muslim population and engaging in a program of coercion and repression. And these Islamophobic narratives that are used to justify [it], these are War on Terror narratives that the Chinese leadership explicitly borrowed from the U.S.-led War on Terror and Islamophobic ideas that were used to justify the U.S. approach to the War on Terror. And in order to attack that form of legitimation in the way that the Chinese government uses that to perpetuate his program of repression in Xinjiang, we need to confront and repudiate our government’s own record of engaging in Islamophobic, War on Terror policies, and to do that in front of the whole world.

MH: You even had Uyghurs who were detained at Guantanamo.

TC: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

MH: Right.

TC: And early on in the War on Terror, China was a solid partner — a solid and valued partner — of the United States in the U.S.-led War on Terror.

MD: Right. As was Vladimir Putin. [Laughs.]

TC: Yes, yes, yes.

MH: Mhmm.

TC: Just one other aspect of this that scholars and researchers that look at this stuff have have have pointed out repeatedly is that the repression in Xinjiang, one of the grotesque parts of it, is the integration of these state of the art tech systems, surveillance technology tech systems designed to aid in ethnic profiling and how those have been integrated into policing practices in Xinjiang. That has to stop.

A problem is that those very systems are also developed and used here in the United States, and are embraced by police agencies and are used as part of policing strategies here in the U.S. If we want to stop their use in China, then we need to stop their use and development here and create global standards to stop U.S. practices and curtail these systems internationally. And, in effect, the current approach is to say that we’re going to stop these systems in China, while here in the U.S., we’re going to engage in research and development, we’re going to invest in these systems in the U.S., and we’re going to use these systems in U.S. policing. And, of course, that’s not going to work.

MH: Right.

TC: We need some consistent standards that will apply to us in China and everywhere.

MH: And there’s been a lot of exchange [weird cut here] of information and technology. I mean, early on some of the major predictive policing scholars go to China to lecture, and you get companies pushing their technologies there as well. So it’s a good point.

TC: Yeah. Close collaboration. Yeah.

MH: Matt, you wanted to say something?

MD: Yeah, if I could just say a bit more on your question about the U.N.

MH: Yeah. Yeah.

MD: Because that’s a really important one, because I think as a progressive, I believe that building a system of international institutions that can facilitate cooperation and establish a set of norms related to human security, human dignity, and human rights is really important. And we’ve seen just over the past 10 or more years — I mean, obviously the U.N. has never worked perfectly, ever. [Laughs.] It’s an organization built by humans; it’s always going to have its problems. But especially over the past 10 years around things like Syria, we’ve seen how the Security Council has been used — and, let’s be clear, the United States has always kind of abused its role on the Security Council to advance its own interests and stop others from pushing back when it wanted — but I think it’s just been clear on Syria, the way that Russia has used its veto, and on Xinjiang, obviously, as China has. And I’m thinking here of a comment, this was over 10 years ago at an international conference where the question was asked to [a] panel of representatives from countries from the Global South. And the question was asked: What does your country want from the international system? And one of the responses was: Well, what we would like to do is rescue the international system from the victors of World War II. [Laughs.] And I thought that was an interesting way to put it, because this system was designed precisely in that era, for that reason, to empower a very small set of actors. And I think thinking about how we go about really trying to strengthen, and affirm, and build legitimacy for a set of norms requires broadening the circle and empowering frankly, a much, much larger circle of countries with populations that are very young, very dynamic, and want to be engaged in writing the rules. They don’t want to just be following the rules that are written for them, but they want to be very engaged in developing, I think, that consensus and ultimately, hopefully, that legitimacy.

MH: So you mean, sort of building a global Progressive Alliance? Is that what you mean?

MD: Not specifically that, though obviously that’s something that Sen. Sanders strongly supports, I strongly support, I think Toby does, too. I think progressives have a particular role to play in building international solidarity and cooperation. But I’m here specifically, thinking about something like the U.N., or multilateral international institutions, just need to be much, much more representative of the member states within them.

MH: Right. Right.

TC: Yeah, and what we see in the idea of that kind of approach is a very different way that we could approach the idea of the role that the U.S. can play in the world and what U.S. leadership could look like. Because there is a lot of anxiety about like the future of U.S. leadership, and the way that often plays out is in trying to desperately hold on to that form of U.S. hegemony that this country has enjoyed for a number of decades, in spite of the fact that the world is changing, and that is increasingly unrealistic.

And I think that there is an alternative form of leadership that the U.S. could play in the world that could significantly increase the sense of U.S. legitimacy in the eyes of other countries that would involve reforming global multilateral institutions, and reforming the overall global system in a way that is more equitable and more representative and that deals with these severe and persistent problems of inequality between Global North and Global South, both economically and in terms of just to say — the amount of voice — that different countries have in how the global system works and how these multilateral systems work. And I think there could be a very powerful and progressive role for the U.S. to play in creating more equitable systems. And that would be an approach that would make the world more equal, make things better for a lot of people and also reestablish a sense of productive U.S. leadership on a different basis.

MH: So when we talk about the left in China, I think it’s important to acknowledge a group that exists primarily online, but that has increasing influence in some circles. Earlier this year, you were both interviewed for an article by David Klion in The Nation on the left and China. And that article got into some groups that are ostensibly leftist that push what many people would say is misinformation on China. These are groups like Qiao collective, which has a lot of influence online, doesn’t have a lot of political power as far as I know, but is a group that many on the left have had to contend with. And so these are groups that are largely seen as friendly to the Chinese government, that deny that there is significant repression in Xinjiang, that have pushed back against critiques of repression in Hong Kong, and have really become a thorn in the side of some progressives who work in China. And so I wonder how you push back against that sort of misinformation? I mean, do you just ignore it? What’s the best way to address it? Because these groups do have growing influence online.

TC: So I think an important piece of perspective for me is that they do have growing influence online. But in the grand scheme of things, they are still addressing a fairly small audience, really a portion, and I think a minority, small portion, of the U.S. left. And if you look at debates within Congress or in D.C., I think their influence is fairly marginal on these questions. They are, however, a significant problem within left organizations. So for me, as someone who operates within the left ecosystem, this does become an issue.

And I think the main solution is to build as much power and infrastructure as we can around what I see as a principled, progressive and internationalist politics that both opposes anti-China nationalism in the U.S. and works towards a building an alternative to a great power conflict between the U.S. and China, and holds firm on what I see as core progressive principles around human rights and democracy, and clarifies how we can maintain those principles in a consistent way while opposing hawkish policies in U.S. foreign policy. And I think that we can organize much more power in U.S. politics, around this approach to the U.S.-China relationship, rather than this other approach, which is engaging in what I see as apologetics on behalf of authoritarianism and nationalism within China.

I think that approach is not just a violation of our principles, but also deeply flawed from a perspective of political strategy. One way to look at that question is one of the key fights within U.S. politics is against authoritarianism, and in that fight against authoritarianism, I think progressives have both the opportunity and maybe the historic calling and duty to lead in the struggle against authoritarianism within U.S. politics, and it hurts the credibility of any forces on the left within that overall struggle, if they are simultaneously excusing authoritarianism and nationalism in other countries.

MD: Yeah, I mean, if I could just add quickly?

MH: Yeah.

MD: I mean, I think we’ve seen similar dynamics like this; again, to go back to recent history in Syria, elements of the left that pushed disinformation, misinformation, whether it’s questioning the Assad regime’s atrocities, misinformation and conspiracy theories about the White Helmets, for example. And obviously, now with regard to Russia’s more in Ukraine. I wrote a piece in the New Republic a few weeks ago that addressed specifically the issue of Ukraine and the conversation on the left, in an attempt to try and kind of make my argument for why I thought the position of supporting Ukraine’s defense is the right one for the left, but I was also, I think, trying to foster a discussion on the left, because I recognize there’s a diversity of views. Suspicions of American military power are very well founded; suspicions of the way that human rights is used as cover for imperialism are very well founded. We have very recent examples of the way that human rights has been instrumentalized to advance goals, which have nothing to do with human rights.

So I think the challenge in all of these places, but with China certainly, is to continue to have a strong and consistent position on human rights, while at the same time working to reform the kind of national security approach and foreign policy approach that has really undermined human rights everywhere, including in the United States. And that’s challenging, but that’s the work we have to do on the left.

MH: Yeah. And, anecdotally, I’ve reported a number of pieces on human rights in China, and again and again encounter sources who are frustrated that by the fact that it seems like the most receptive people in Congress are people like Sen. Rubio and people who don’t otherwise share their values, and there’s this view that there’s a kind of appropriation of human rights causes when it comes to China.

So, Matt, you mentioned an essay that Sen. Sanders wrote in Foreign Affairs last year. It was called “Don’t Start a New Cold War With China”. And in that essay he pointed out that while there is a lot of talk in Washington about rising authoritarianism in China, we are facing a very real democratic crisis in the United States. Are there parallels between what’s happening in the United States and what’s happening in China? Or how do you conceive of January 6, for example, when it comes to foreign policy?

MD: Mmm. Right. Yeah, no, it’s a great question. I’m glad you cited that part of the piece, because I think that is really one of the most important points that he made in that, which is: Sen. Sanders is someone who has been sounding the alarm on rising authoritarianism for a long time. But he wants to be clear on the sources of it: inequality, corruption, among other things; racism, ethnic hatred, kind of this horrible stew. But I think even while he believes that we need to do everything we can to support democracy in the battle against authoritarianism, I think one of the key points there was understanding that the battle between democracy and authoritarianism is happening within states as much as it is happening between them. And if we are going to buy into this framing that well, it’s team democracy over here and team authoritarianism over there, not only is that a false framing, it will ultimately benefit authoritarians, both abroad and here at home, because as we were saying earlier, let’s understand the impact and the uses of this kind of nationalist framing, it benefits a very specific kind of politics, and that is not a Democratic politics.

MH: Toby, do you want to expand on that?

TC: Yeah. Here in the U.S., and in countries around the world, one of the most important tools in the authoritarian toolkit is this kind of nationalism, the promotion of narratives of foreign threats, and political strategies that are based on convincing the populace of a country to blame all of their problems on some supposed foreign rival that is undermining our nation. So here in the U.S., there’s an explicit strategy in the Republican Party, in particular, the most extremist, anti-China parts of the Republican Party, to use anti-China scapegoating, to build their power and legitimacy by telling American voters that all the problems they face, including a lack of good jobs and economic inequality, are really the fault of China, and that the future of the U.S. working class depends most of all, on combating China, and so therefore you should vote for Republicans, authoritarian Republicans, because they are the anti-China champions, and they use that narrative to cover up their record on issues of corporate power, and defending corporate power, and attacking, again and again, any measures that would improve wages or improve the ability of workers to organize and form unions, and so on. And they use China as a distraction from their pro-corporate, anti-worker record that continues to today. And so that is a major part of the authoritarian strategy and a threat to democracy. And if everyone who is committed to defending multiracial democracy against this racist, authoritarian threat needs to form alternatives to that anti-China strategy.

MH: Great. Well, thank you both for taking the time to come on the show. I really appreciate it. And I wish you the best.

MD: My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Great to see you, Toby.

TC: Yeah. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Mara.

[End credits music.]

MH: That was Tobita Chow and Matt Duss.

And that’s our show. Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. The show was mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. And Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Mara Hvistendahl. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. And if you enjoy this podcast, be sure to also check out Intercepted, as well as Murderville, which is now in its second season.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks for listening.

And I’ll see you soon.

The post Progressives on U.S.-China Policy and Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan Visit appeared first on The Intercept.

The rare retraction by the journal, Human Genetics, follows a two-year crusade by a Belgian scientist to push publishers to investigate research that he and others say is complicit in human rights violations.

The paper’s authors used DNA samples from across China to assess genetic variation among and within ethnic groups. The journal’s editors retracted the paper because of doubts about the informed consent process. According to a retraction notice published December 11, three authors, including the two lead authors, agreed to withdraw the paper. Human Genetics is published by Springer Nature, which retracted two other papers for similar reasons in August and September.

The scientist who spearheaded the retraction campaign, Yves Moreau, said he was thankful that Springer Nature had investigated but that there was more work to be done, noting that the paper’s findings had been used in over two dozen other papers. “This is not only a matter of informed consent, but also a matter of retracting and not publishing research clearly linked to serious harm,” said Moreau, who is a bioinformatician at the University of Leuven in Belgium. “It raises the question of what will happen to those almost 40,000 DNA profiles.” The anonymized profiles remain in an online database in Germany that can be freely queried by anyone.

At least nine of the paper’s 30 co-authors are affiliated with Chinese police departments or police academies, and several others are affiliated with forensic science departments at Chinese universities. Researchers are often given co-author slots in exchange for collecting samples and data, said Moreau, making it likely that at least some of the Chinese samples were collected by police. China’s Ministry of Public Security, which oversees police across China, has been building out a national DNA database, over the objections of human rights activists.

One of the lead authors on the retracted paper, Lutz Roewer, oversees the German database, which is housed at the Charité research hospital in Berlin. Called the Y-Chromosome Haplotype Reference Database, or YHRD, it is often used by police around the world who are seeking more information about specific DNA samples. It has recently come under scrutiny for including DNA from the persecuted Roma ethnic group as well as Uyghur and Chinese DNA that ethicists presume was collected without informed consent.

Roewer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

An explosion in accessible DNA technologies has also sparked police misuse in the United States. In China, said Emile Dirks, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto who studies Y-STR data collection, “you have a nationwide, multiyear campaign to target individuals for genealogical or genomic collection, none of whom are targets in an investigation, nor are they known to be or suspected of being related to someone who is a target of a criminal investigation.”

YHRD, the German database, is the largest collection of Y-STR samples in the world, containing 300,000 profiles. The profiles do not have names attached, but police often use them to zero in on a likely geographic origin for a suspect, then use that marker to make assumptions about the suspect’s ethnicity.

“If our community is perceived to be condoning or even tolerating human rights abuses, public trust in genetics will rapidly crumble.”

Moreau first raised concerns about the paper with Springer Nature editors in June 2020. This past July, he wrote to the journal’s editorial board to ask for help, appealing to the Hippocratic oath that many took when they became doctors. “Public trust in human genetics depends on our community’s ability to transparently abide by its moral duties,” he wrote. “If our community is perceived to be condoning or even tolerating human rights abuses, public trust in genetics will rapidly crumble.”

In a later email to the editorial board, he worried that his inquiries were “being stonewalled because of strategic and business considerations by publishers, who are afraid of poking a mighty bear,” referring to the financial interests of journals operating in China.

Springer Nature did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Moreau’s email to the editorial board sparked a heated discussion. One scientist responded to his comment about business interests, observing that science was “‘slipping’ from the hands of actual practicing scientists — and not just in human and medical genetics.”

“The work included DNA probes of sources that did not respect ethical obligations, thereby violating contemporary ethical norms and regulations,” Gudrun Rappold, a geneticist at the University of Heidelberg and a member of the editorial board, wrote to The Intercept. She said that she had previously used Y chromosome data in her own work but that she saw the retraction as “a warning sign for the future.”

In August, Moreau’s emails to the editorial board of another journal that had published fraught research, Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, prompted eight scientists to resign in protest.

“China is the best and the clearest example that one can think of because we all agree that human rights violations in China are so severe,” said Veronika Lipphardt, a science historian at the University of Freiburg in Germany who, along with Rappold, recently authored a comment article in Nature on abuses involving Roma DNA. “But we should not forget to look elsewhere. A lot of data from marginalized populations around the world, in nondemocratic regimes as well as in democratic countries, has been collected in similar ways by police forces.”

Correction: December 14, 2021
This article has been updated to clarify that the database containing the anonymized DNA profiles on which the retracted Human Genetics paper was based does not require registration and can be queried by anyone with access to the internet.

The post Journal Retracts Paper Based on DNA of Vulnerable Chinese Minorities appeared first on The Intercept.

Prigozhin wasn’t admitting anything the Department of Justice didn’t already know. Special counsel Robert Mueller had detailed his meddling efforts as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the election. In 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Prigozhin for engaging in “information warfare against the U.S.,” and he was placed on a list of individuals wanted by the FBI, with a $250,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. U.S. officials also obtained a “red notice” from Interpol, requesting that the international police organization’s members arrest him if he came into their jurisdiction.

In 2020, Interpol quietly withdrew the notice. The only announcement of the move came from one of Prigozhin’s companies, though without an explanation of why it happened. Interpol and the Department of Justice remained silent. But now a hacked Interpol document reviewed by The Intercept reveals that the organization’s oversight body determined that the red notice requested by the U.S. was of a “predominantly political character” — and a violation of Interpol’s principle of political neutrality.

The emergence of the Interpol document — and Prigozhin’s admission to election interference, which he repeated in even stronger words in a statement to The Intercept — are likely to prove controversial. Mueller’s investigation continues to be a lightning rod in American politics, with former President Donald Trump still insisting it was a “witch hunt” aimed at unjustly connecting him to Russian involvement in the election he won against Hillary Clinton. Interpol’s determination that the red notice request was politically motivated might be seen as bolstering the claims of the former president and his supporters. But Prigozhin’s admission that he did in fact seek to interfere in U.S. elections is also likely to renew questions about Interpol at a time when the agency is already facing intense criticism that it is vulnerable to political exploitation.

The document reviewed by The Intercept is a partially redacted, 12-page decision from the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files, an independent body that reviews appeals against Interpol notices. It is marked “not for public dissemination” and includes “restricted” notations where material has been redacted. The CCF document was found in the correspondence of a Russian law firm representing Prigozhin, Capital Legal Services, or CLS. Earlier this year, in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hackers targeted more than 50 Russian companies and government agencies; at least 360,000 emails were hacked from CLS. In total, more than 13 terabytes of Russian documents were provided to Distributed Denial of Secrets, a transparency collective that has published the raw documents on its website. The Intercept and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project formed a consortium of news organizations to investigate the documents.

Interpol, the CCF, and Prigozhin did not dispute the authenticity of the document, and The Intercept found no digital evidence that it had been tampered with. The document appears to have been redacted by the commission before being shared with Prigozhin’s legal team.

U.S. vs. Prigozhin

In addition to his alleged role in election interference, Prigozhin has long been known as the founder of the Wagner Group, a notorious mercenary outfit doing the Kremlin’s bidding in half a dozen conflicts around the world. He was originally connected to Putin’s orbit through his catering business, which is why the Western media dubbed him “Putin’s chef.” Prigozhin’s global and domestic profile was significantly raised following his mercenaries’ involvement in conflicts in Syria and multiple African countries, as well as after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine this year. Prigozhin is currently under sanctions both in the U.S. and Europe for his alleged election interference and his mercenaries’ actions in Libya and Ukraine.

For years, Prigozhin denied any involvement with Wagner, but he recently embraced his role as the group’s founder after it began playing an increasingly public and important role in Ukraine. In an investigation published last month, The Intercept detailed the lengths to which Prigozhin went to dispute earlier reports tying him to Wagner, relying on a network of U.S. and Europe-based attorneys in an effort to contest his worsening reputation as a global warlord.

The U.S. case against Prigozhin was one of the highest-profile prosecutions to emerge from the two-year Mueller investigation. Prigozhin was indicted along with 12 other individuals; two companies he controls, Concord Management and Consulting, and Concord Catering; and a troll factory he funded, the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency. At a press conference announcing the charges, including “conspiracy to defraud the United States,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein accused Prigozhin and his co-defendants of seeking to spread “distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”

The case proceeded slowly, with only the two Concord entities showing up in court, via their U.S. attorneys. For two years the process was marred by judicial rebukes, a leak of documents shared in discovery, and growing concern by U.S. prosecutors that Concord’s team was exploiting the discovery process to obtain sensitive national security information, even as there was no real prospect that the company’s leadership would present itself to be held accountable in the U.S.

Prosecutors ultimately dropped the case against Concord Management and Concord Catering in March 2020, weeks before it was supposed to go to trial. “The calculation of whether a substantial federal interest is served by this prosecution … has changed since the indictment was returned,” Justice Department officials wrote in court filings. But the indictments against the Internet Research Agency and Prigozhin himself remained in force, as did the Interpol red notice.

Prigozhin’s attorneys had lodged a complaint against the red notice in late 2019, arguing, among other things, that the legal proceedings in the U.S. were of a political nature. According to the CLS emails, attorneys representing Prigozhin followed up with Interpol just days before the U.S. abruptly dropped the charges against the two Concord companies. Prigozhin’s attorneys told Interpol that they were sending a “memorandum with recent developments and other relevant information for further consideration by the Commission.”

It’s unclear whether the dropped charges against the two Prigozhin companies had an impact on Interpol’s red notice review. Because the document is partially redacted, the full scope of the CCF’s deliberations remains unknown. The document notes that the U.S. National Central Bureau, or USNCB — the U.S. representative body at Interpol — responded to the commission’s requests for information as it reviewed the case. The USNCB, according to the document, confirmed that “the United States remains interested in requesting the Applicant’s extradition on the charge should he be apprehended in a country from which his extradition is legally possible.” Feedback from Russia’s National Central Bureau was redacted.

The document also indicates that the CCF sought the input of Interpol’s General Secretariat as part of its review — a somewhat unusual step, according to Bruno Min, who has worked with political activists targeted by red notices and leads a campaign by Fair Trials, a human rights group, to reform Interpol. “It’s not in all cases that the General Secretariat is brought in to make representations regarding a complaint, so this might suggest that this was a red notice that they were quite keen to defend,” Min said.

The point of the CCF’s review was not to examine the underlying evidence in any criminal case, the document notes, but to ensure that red notices are compliant with Interpol guidelines. The CCF concluded that “there is a predominant political dimension to this case and that the information provided by the USNCB does not satisfy the requirements of Article 3 of INTERPOL’s constitution.”

The CCF’s decision appears to have hinged on the commission’s concern that the case against Prigozhin might be perceived as political — rather than on a conclusive determination that it was.

Keeping the red notice in place, the CCF concluded, “would have significant adverse implications for the neutrality” of Interpol.

Keeping the red notice in place, the CCF concluded, “would have significant adverse implications for the neutrality” of Interpol, causing the organization to be “perceived as siding with one country against another or facilitating politically motivated activities.” The conclusion is not a determination that “U.S. charges should not be borne out in national judicial proceedings or that they are not lawful,” the CCF adds, but that the red notice doesn’t meet Interpol’s “legal requirements.”

CCF’s wording is important, Min noted. “It’s worth noting that the CCF does not seem to be saying emphatically that the U.S. is using its criminal legal system for political purposes,” he said. “Instead, it’s saying that it’s concerned about it being ‘perceived’ as though it’s siding with one country over another over a political issue, and that’s the reason why the Red Notice doesn’t meet the necessary requirements under Interpol’s rules.”

In an explanation of its reasoning, the committee cited the “numerous declarations of U.S. government officials, and extensive media reports, as well as the information provided by the USNCB concerning this case,” along with the very mandate of the Mueller investigation, to “ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”

“This reveals that the scope of the inquiry is linked to possible electoral crimes but also specifically target [sic] a foreign government, namely Russia,” the commission concluded.

Interpol issues thousands of red notices and other kinds of alerts every year. According to the organization, there were 23,716 red notices and wanted individuals alerts in 2021. Some 1,270 alerts were denied or withdrawn that same year for various reasons, including 353 for violating Interpol’s principle of political neutrality — although those figures do not include notices that were rescinded after review by the CCF. In 2019-2020, the CCF processed 1,333 complaints and deleted 524 notices it found to be out of compliance with Interpol rules.

Interpol has become particularly sensitive to accusations that it is vulnerable to political pressure. Criticism of the agency has intensified in recent years as a number of authoritarian countries — from China to the United Arab Emirates — have sought greater influence within the agency and exploited the red notice system to target activists and political dissidents abroad. Last year, The Intercept reported on efforts by Chinese and Emirati officials to seek powerful positions at the agency. A previous Russian bid to install a senior official in Interpol’s presidency had failed earlier after Western officials and human rights groups raised fears that the candidate would use the position to track and target critics of the Kremlin.

Asked about the CCF document and the withdrawal of the red notice, a spokesperson for Interpol wrote in a statement to The Intercept that “[t]he General Secretariat does not comment on individual cases unless there are exceptional circumstances.” The statement added: “The principles of neutrality and independence are enshrined in INTERPOL’s Constitution and have been reaffirmed by the General Assembly on a number of occasions.”

A spokesperson for CCF wrote in a statement to The Intercept that “requests considered by the CCF are confidential and the CCF cannot comment on specific cases with third parties.”

The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment.

Pavel Karpunin, a partner at Capital Legal Services, the Russian law firm representing Prigozhin declined to comment on “pending, ongoing or past cases” and on his client’s recent statements. “Based on publicly available information, in reviewing Mr. Prigozhin’s case, INTERPOL found that it is subject to a predominant political dimension and does not satisfy the requirements of Article 3 of INTERPOL’s Constitution,” he wrote.

“Now about why we did it. We did it only because the U.S. boorishly interfered in Russian elections in 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2012. … 50 young guys, whom I personally organized, kicked the entire American government in the ass.”

In an email to The Intercept sent through one of his companies, Prigozhin denied that CLS emails had been hacked, and he accused “the FBI or the CIA” of disseminating the documents instead. He also wrote that “not only the inclusion on the wanted list, but, in fact, the so-called U.S. election interference trial itself was absolutely politically motivated.” But he confirmed overseeing a few dozen people who “were running blogs and social networks that ordinary Americans read” and “exposed problems that have existed in the United States for years and decades.”

He added, “Now about why we did it. We did it only because the U.S. boorishly interfered in Russian elections in 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2012. … 50 young guys, whom I personally organized, kicked the entire American government in the ass. And we will continue to do so as many times as needed.”

Chasing Dissidents

The CCF is intended to provide a system of checks and balances, enforcing a principle of neutrality that forbids Interpol from “engaging in matters of political, military, religious and racial character,” according to the organization’s constitution. While the commission reverses Interpol’s inclusion of certain individuals in its databases, the reasoning behind those reversals is not usually made public. The hacked document offers a rare look at that reasoning‚ and sheds light on Interpol’s delicate balancing act when addressing accusations of politicization.

Interpol’s General Secretariat assessed the U.S. request for a red notice and found it to be valid; the CCF reversed that decision.

As criticism of Interpol’s vulnerability to political influence intensified, the agency seems to have grown more sensitive to those accusations, and more eager to address them. After the arrests abroad of a number of prominent political activists, Interpol has undertaken a series of reforms, including instituting a policy meant to protect refugees from being targeted with alerts from their country of origin. The agency also pledged to change how it vets alerts, for instance by ensuring that its administrators review requests for red notices before they’re made available to member countries. In Prigozhin’s case, according to the document, Interpol’s General Secretariat assessed the U.S. request for a red notice and found it to be valid; the CCF reversed that decision.

According to the statement from Interpol’s spokesperson, “if the CCF concludes that the data concerned — a Red Notice for example — does not comply with INTERPOL’s rules, the CCF’s decision is final and binding on the Organization and the General Secretariat would promptly delete the Red Notice in question.”

But determining whether a red notice is political is not always so straightforward, Min noted. “They generally err on the side of caution,” he said, stressing that the CCF does not seek to make factual findings about the charges leveled against an individual. “I understand why they might have difficulties, because quite often it’s not abundantly clear whether something is an abusive red notice request. But then again, there are certain cases in which it should be bloody damn obvious, and they don’t seem to get that right.”

Min noted that while the CCF is less frequently accused of politicization than other bodies within Interpol, and while the agency as a whole has made significant efforts in recent years to increase its transparency, critics have at times raised concerns about the makeup of the commission. In 2020, when Prigozhin’s notice was lifted, a Russian prosecutor who sat on the commission at the time, Petr Gorodov, recused himself from the Prigozhin review, as required by Interpol rules; so did a U.S. representative on the commission at the time, Theresa McHenry. The remaining members of the commission who reviewed Prigozhin’s appeal were Sanna Palo, of Finland; Isaias Trindade, of Angola; and chairperson Vitalie Pirlog, a former Moldovan intelligence officer whose appointment to the position had raised concern.

“Just because you are a democratic state, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can never fall foul of the rules.”

While Min’s organization mostly works with activists who were clearly targeted by authoritarian governments, accusations of politicization can be leveled against governments that are not regarded as authoritarian, he said. “Political motivation or political character, that can happen in lots of different contexts,” he added. “Just because you are a democratic state, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can never fall foul of the rules.”

Still, Bill Browder, a British businessman and fierce Putin critic who successfully appealed for the removal of an Interpol notice requested by Russian officials, said that Interpol continues to be weaponized by authoritarian regimes. “Everybody accuses them of political motivation all the time, but they’re busy chasing Uyghurs all over the world and they don’t drop those cases,” Browder said, referring to an oft-cited abuse of Interpol’s notice system by Chinese authorities. “It’s something more sinister … that Russia somehow has its claws into Interpol.” 

Free to Travel

While it was in effect, the red notice significantly restricted Prigozhin’s ability to travel to countries that have extradition agreements with the U.S. But its withdrawal was useful for more than arrest-free travel.

Prigozhin’s attorneys attempted to use the withdrawal in their attempt to contest European sanctions against him, according to other hacked CLS documents reviewed by The Intercept. In a draft appeal against European sanctions, Prigozhin’s attorneys noted that “on 30 June 2020, the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files declared the U.S. prosecution of the Applicant to be of a ‘predominantly political dimension’ and ordered the Red Notice issued against the Applicant to be terminated.”

Their arguments ultimately failed. Earlier this year, the General Court, the EU’s second highest court, upheld the sanctions.

Still, the red notice’s withdrawal provided some relief to Prigozhin. In a public statement issued through Concord at the time, Prigozhin welcomed Interpol’s decision and advertised his plans to travel to the Baltic states, Turkey, and Germany, where he might have been subject to arrest.

“Due to the fact that his plane is under sanctions,” his representatives wrote at the time, “he plans to fly on regular flights.”

Correction: November 18, 2022
This story has been updated to clarify a description of an Interpol notice about Bill Browder.

The post Leaked Document Reveals Why Interpol Overturned U.S. “Red Notice” Against Putin Associate Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared first on The Intercept.

Months later, back in her native Finland, Jauhiainen applied for a visa to Australia, where she wanted to visit a friend. Australia rejected her application, stating that she was the target of a criminal investigation. She later learned that she was named in a “red notice” requested by the UAE and issued by international policing agency Interpol — and only after a lawyer intervened did she get the notice rescinded. “It just shows how easily they can abuse the system,” Jauhiainen told The Intercept.

Now Jauhiainen and others who have been detained in the UAE are watching Interpol’s upcoming election with concern. Ahmed Naser al-Raisi, a senior official with the UAE’s Interior Ministry who oversees security forces and detentions, is running for president of the organization. Al-Raisi’s fate will be decided at a meeting of Interpol’s General Assembly in Istanbul next week, and human rights advocates have been waging a campaign to stop him and a Chinese official who is also running for office.

Interpol, which is headquartered in Lyon, France, and brings together police forces from 194 countries, has long faced questions about its vulnerability to politicization, in part because its members include governments that are notorious for human rights abuses and the repression of dissent. While the agency maintains that it is politically neutral and its constitution stipulates that it must operate “in the spirit” of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Interpol has come under increased scrutiny in recent years as authoritarian regimes around the world have exploited its systems — particularly the red notices the agency distributes to alert countries about wanted individuals — as a way to target activists, dissenters, and political opponents. Many abuses of the red-notice system date to after September 11, when a U.S. secretary-general, Ronald Noble, oversaw an expansion of Interpol’s reach, rolling out a digitization effort that led to an abrupt spike in alerts.

An unusually large number of seats are up for grabs at Interpol’s November 23-25 General Assembly, which was canceled last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Members will elect a new president and replace most of the agency’s executive committee, which runs its day-to-day operations, as well as all members of the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files, which handles complaints about red notices.

While member countries are not obligated to act on an Interpol red notice, individuals targeted by them often face arrest and detention, sometimes for prolonged periods, as well as extradition. People named in red notices can also lose access to financial services or have their visas or passports canceled.

“It’s a policing organization: It’s an organization that’s run by police, for the benefit of the police, and the police don’t necessarily like to be very open about everything that they do.”

Calls for greater transparency about the agency’s safeguard mechanisms and warnings about abuse of its systems have intensified in the lead-up to the election. While the presidency has traditionally been a ceremonial position, China recently tried to use the role to expand its influence. The lack of transparency and standards for who can run for office, critics warn, is symptomatic of much deeper problems within Interpol.

“It’s not just the idea that Interpol’s president might come from one of the worst abusers of human rights,” said Bruno Min, who leads the campaign to reform Interpol at the equal justice group Fair Trials, “but the fact that the whole process is so opaque.”

“It’s a policing organization: It’s an organization that’s run by police, for the benefit of the police, and the police don’t necessarily like to be very open about everything that they do,” he added, noting that Interpol is careful not to openly rebuke its members. “They don’t like doing things that might embarrass or undermine certain countries. … They’re very careful not to be too critical, they’re very diplomatic.”

Interpol did not respond to a request for comment.

A Tool for Autocrats

Interpol’s work began in 1914, when police from 24 countries got together to coordinate fugitive hunts. After World War I, the group came under the control of the Nazis, and many countries stopped participating. The agency later regrouped, evolving into Interpol in 1956 and expanding beyond Europe and North America.

In the aftermath of 9/11, as the U.S.-led “war on terror” ramped up, Interpol’s work grew exponentially. A technological upgrade removed bureaucratic obstacles and made it much easier, and faster, for countries to issue red notices. The number of notices issued increased tenfold over the last two decades, with 11,000 going out last year. According to Interpol, there are currently more than 66,000 active red notices, though less than 8,000 are visible to the public.

As the number of alerts surged, reports of them running afoul of the organization’s commitment to human rights also multiplied. Critics have pushed for Interpol to better protect its systems from abuse. Some have also called on member countries to prevent the agency from becoming a tool for autocrats, including by forming voting blocks to oppose candidates from authoritarian regimes.

Much of the most recent criticism has focused on al-Raisi, the UAE official. Al-Raisi has actively campaigned for the presidency on a platform that includes expanding the agency’s use of technology, pointing to the UAE, which engages in extensive surveillance, as a model.

Several human rights groups have raised alarm about al-Raisi’s candidacy, with a coalition of 19 organizations pointing, in a joint letter, to the UAE’s “poor human rights record, including the systematic use of torture and ill-treatment in state security facilities,” and warning that his appointment would “damage Interpol’s reputation and stand in great contradiction to the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the organisation’s mission.” Al-Raisi, the group added, “is part of a security apparatus that continues to systematically target peaceful critics, rendering civic space virtually non-existent.” Some European officials have also opposed al-Raisi’s candidacy.

Critics have also noted the UAE’s record of using Interpol red notices to target individuals over bounced checks, a controversial practice common in several Gulf countries that “makes Interpol into some sort of international debt collection agency,” said Min. UAE officials did not respond to a request for comment.

The UAE has sought a greater role in the agency’s operations in recent years. In 2017, it made an unprecedented $50 million pledge to the Interpol Foundation for a Safer World, a Swiss-based, independent nonprofit that supports Interpol’s activities. Despite its high profile, Interpol itself is a rather small organization, with an annual budget of just over $150 million. Member countries are required to contribute in proportion to their economies. The UAE’s donation to the foundation — far larger than its required $260,000 contribution to the Interpol budget — “represents one of the largest single donations ever made to Interpol,” according to a report published earlier this year by the U.K.’s former director of public prosecutions, David Calvert-Smith. The report questioned whether the UAE is exercising “undue influence” over Interpol.

“I actually cannot believe that … I have to travel to the headquarters of Interpol to ask them not to make one of the men responsible for my torture their next president.”

The UAE also hosted Interpol’s General Assembly in 2018 and was scheduled to do so again in 2020 before the meeting was called off. (This year’s host, Turkey, has also drawn criticism for its history of targeting political dissenters.)

Jauhiainen is joined in her campaign against al-Raisi by two British citizens: Matthew Hedges, who was detained for nine months in 2018 while writing a dissertation on the UAE’s security strategy, and Ali Issa Ahmad, who was detained in Dubai in 2019 after wearing a Qatari T-shirt to a soccer game amid a feud between Qatar and the UAE. Both men were released following diplomatic pressure.

Hedges and Ahmad have filed legal complaints against al-Raisi in the U.K., France, Sweden, and Norway. “I actually cannot believe that almost three years after I was finally released, I have to travel to the headquarters of Interpol to ask them not to make one of the men responsible for my torture their next president,” Hedges said in a speech in Lyon in September.

Influencing Interpol

Human rights groups have also raised concerns about other governments’ potential involvement in Interpol’s operations. In 2016, China’s then-vice minister for public security, Meng Hongwei, was elected president of the organization. He immediately sought to transform what had traditionally been a ceremonial role at Interpol into a position of greater influence and power, most notably by moving into Interpol’s Lyon headquarters with four Chinese assistants, while his predecessors had only visited a couple times a year. His contentious term was cut short in 2018, when he was arrested in China amid leader Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crusade and was sentenced to 13 years in prison for bribery.

A Russian bid to install a senior official to Interpol’s presidency failed in 2018 after Western officials and human rights groups raised fears that the candidate would use the position to track and target critics of the Kremlin.

Now another Chinese public security official, Hu Binchen, is running for a seat on Interpol’s executive committee — reigniting fears that China could expand its control over the agency’s operations to target individuals wanted for political reasons.

“I think there is, in general, a quite strategic move from China and other authoritarian regimes to take control of these organizations while Western governments are distracted or losing interest.”

Last week, a coalition of legislators from across the world launched a campaign opposing Hu’s candidacy. The group, the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, pointed to the recent arrest of Uyghur activist Idris Hasan in Morocco after Chinese authorities issued a red notice. While Interpol has since canceled the notice, Hasan remains detained in Morocco and fears extradition to China, where he faces detention and torture. Dolkun Isa, another Uyghur activist and president of the World Uyghur Congress, was briefly arrested in Italy in 2017 while traveling to address the Italian Senate. A red notice naming him was finally rescinded in 2018. (China joined Interpol in the mid-1980s and has issued red notices with increasing frequency since Xi came into power in 2012.)

As the Chinese government has continued to intensify its crackdown on minorities and critics, it has also sought to “bolster its legal mechanisms to extend its policing abroad,” Luke de Pulford, executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, told The Intercept.

“I think there is, in general, a quite strategic move from China and other authoritarian regimes to take control of these organizations while Western governments are distracted or losing interest,” de Pulford added. “Our concern is obviously in individual cases where activists and exiles are arrested and threatened for deportation or extradition but more broadly, the chilling effect that that has on these communities, on anyone seeking to criticize the Chinese Communist Party globally.”

Hu’s election to the executive committee, the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China members wrote in an open letter, “would be giving a green light to the PRC government to continue their misuse of Interpol and would place the tens of thousands of Hong Konger, Uyghur, Tibetan, Taiwanese and Chinese dissidents living abroad at even greater risk.”

In a separate statement published by the World Uyghur Congress, nearly two dozen human rights advocates wrote, “As activists in exile who are particularly vulnerable to the Chinese Government’s attempts to persecute dissidents abroad, we fear the potential election of Hu Binchen would have grave consequences.”

Critics of both the UAE and Chinese bids have warned that those countries can exert economic pressure to influence the votes of other countries.

In response to a question about Hu’s candidacy, the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., pointed The Intercept to comments foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian made in a press conference Wednesday: “Chinese police have long maintained a practical and friendly cooperative relationship with Interpol and law enforcement departments of its members.”

No Transparency

Facing growing criticism, Interpol has undertaken a series of reforms in recent years. The agency adopted a policy meant to protect refugees from being targeted with alerts from their country of origin and calling on countries to notify Interpol before denying asylum claims following an agency notice. The agency also pledged to change how it vets alerts, for instance by ensuring that Interpol administrators review requests for red notices before they’re made available to member countries.

But while critics welcomed the changes, they warned that observers are not able to monitor whether the reforms are working. “Interpol says that is has very clear regulations around ensuring that political arrests don’t take place through Interpol systems, and what we would argue is that clearly their vetting process is not stringent enough,” said de Pulford, citing the cases of the Uyghur activists targeted by red notices.

Interpol does not publish data about how many red notices it rejects, making it hard to establish how well its vetting process is working. Countries can also bypass the vetting process by issuing “diffusions,” informal alerts to specific countries that theoretically carry less weight than red notices but often include many of the same details.

“We don’t have any information about how they’re able to tell whether a red notice is abusive or not.”

“We don’t have any information about how they’re able to tell whether a red notice is abusive or not,” said Min, of Fair Trials, which has worked with individuals targeted by illegitimate notices, including refugees and activists. “That really makes us question whether they’re actually capable of doing the checks that they say that they’re doing. … They won’t go into any further detail about how exactly it’s done.”

The lack of transparency was on stark display earlier this fall, when Interpol announced, in a statement scant on explanations, that it had reinstated Syria’s access to the agency’s databases nearly a decade after having restricted it early in the country’s war. Syrian activists and critics of President Bashar al-Assad have denounced the move as part of a broader international trend toward the normalization of relationships with Assad’s regime. They warned that Interpol’s decision is “handing Assad new powers to hunt down dissidents beyond Syria’s borders.”

“If I am in any country, I might be arrested, or kidnapped, or taken by anyone, because I am on the blacklist of the Syrian regime,” Kholoud Helmi, a journalist and activist with Families for Freedom, a group that advocates on behalf of Syrians detained or disappeared by the regime, told The Intercept. “Especially for those of us who are everywhere, speaking to the international community, attending events in different countries, all over the world, is this going to silence us in the future? Are we going to jeopardize our safety and security? Am I going to be arrested?”

The post Interpol’s Upcoming Election Raises Fears About Authoritarian Influence appeared first on The Intercept.

The post Video: How Vinyl Flooring Made With Uyghur Forced Labor Ends Up at Big Box Stores appeared first on The Intercept.

The journal, Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, is the latest to be caught up in controversy involving ethically fraught research. Emails obtained by The Intercept show that the journal’s editor-in-chief has been slow to respond to queries about the papers, which involve research on Tibetans and Uyghurs, among other ethnic groups, and were first brought to her attention in March. The journal is published by Wiley, a multinational company based in New Jersey that is one of the world’s premier scientific publishers.

Studies involving DNA profiling, facial recognition, and organ transplantation have sparked controversy at other journals, but this is the first time that so many members of a journal’s editorial board — eight of 25 — have resigned in response to such issues.

The papers were flagged by Yves Moreau, a bioinformatician at the University of Leuven in Belgium who over the past few years has waged a tireless campaign to get journals to retract troubling or unethical papers.

Moreau’s quest began in 2015, when Kuwait announced plans for compulsory collection of DNA from all citizens, residents, and visitors. He helped spearhead an international campaign against the law and won an early victory when it was overturned the following year. He became convinced that if left unchecked, science and artificial intelligence would be used to further authoritarianism. “In technology, we have this nice, comfortable geek image,” he said. “But when you really look at the history of technology, you see that it has been a nexus of power forever — for at least 2,000 years.” While many geneticists have worked for decades to overturn the idea that race is a scientific concept, Moreau saw that authorities around the world could exploit new technologies like readily available DNA testing for political gain.

Moreau later turned his attention to DNA profiling in China, particularly in Xinjiang, where an estimated 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have been interned in camps or forced into labor. Authorities there have also collected DNA samples from residents. Moreau periodically runs an automated search for papers on ethically charged topics. Earlier this year, that search turned up 18 papers at Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine.

Some of the papers describe genetic differences between ethnic groups. Police can use such research for DNA profiling, to better match crime suspects with DNA samples from the broader population. Other papers relied on samples that Moreau suspected were taken without proper consent. The Chinese government has been collecting DNA from men of all ethnicities, with the aim of building out genetic information for all 700 million males in China. Chinese police also forcibly collect DNA from certain groups, including migrant workers and political dissidents.

While Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine isn’t a leading outlet for genetic research, it has an impact factor of 2.183, meaning that its papers are cited and read by other scientists. The Wiley name lends it an imprimatur of respectability.

As its title suggests, the journal was founded to focus on genetics research with medical applications. Many of the editorial board members study how genetics can help doctors treat patients or help scientists cure disease. But in 2019, the journal started publishing papers by authors in China on forensic genetics, a field that involves close collaboration with police. Forensic genetics has long been controversial in the United States. It is even more problematic in China, where DNA collection is part of a sustained effort to persecute ethnic minorities and other groups.

The title of one paper published by the journal is “Forensic characteristics and genetic affinity analyses of Xinjiang Mongolian group using a novel six fluorescent dye-labeled typing system including 41-Y-STRs and 3 Y-InDels.” Another maps genetic differences between branches of China’s majority ethnic group, Han Chinese, and other groups, including Tibetans and Hui Muslims. Several of the papers list co-authors or funding from institutions affiliated with Chinese police. One lists a co-author from the Public Security Bureau in Tibet, the police agency in the region.

Hart replied the next day. “I am looking into this matter and will respond shortly,” she wrote. Moreau sent several follow-up emails. But months passed without an update, he told The Intercept.

On Tuesday, in response to questions from The Intercept, the Wiley public affairs office emailed a statement from Hart. “We are actively investigating and driving toward a timely, transparent resolution,” Hart said. “We take the concerns expressed extremely seriously and regret that delayed communications may have indicated otherwise.”

In June, Moreau took the issue to the entire editorial board. In a lengthy email, he listed the suspect papers and explained how police in China use forensic genetics.

Other board members echoed his calls for an investigation. Several said they were not actively involved in the journal’s work and had no idea that the papers had even been published. The journal’s editorial board positions are honorary; scientists often sit on multiple boards at once.

In emails obtained by The Intercept, Hart wrote to the board that same day, explaining that she had experienced a death in her family and had drafted a message to Moreau that ended up trapped in her outbox. “I will send a message soon outlining our decision on how to address this issue,” she wrote.

A few weeks later, when she had not provided any further explanation to the board or to Moreau, board members started resigning.

“I would have wanted to hear much more quickly from the editorial staff,” said Ophir Klein, a pediatric medical geneticist at the University of California San Francisco and one of the board members who quit. The lack of communication “made me really concerned,” he added.

The lack of communication “made me really concerned.”

Another board member, Joris Veltman, told The Intercept that he has remained on the board so that he can push for scrutiny of the papers. On July 7, Veltman, who is the dean of the Biosciences Institute at Newcastle University Medical School in the United Kingdom, escalated the issue by emailing Wiley’s management. The publisher’s director of research integrity, Chris Graf, responded that Wiley would begin an investigation immediately. Veltman asked why Wiley had waited so long.

In a statement, a Wiley spokesperson wrote that the company’s Integrity in Publishing Group was overseeing the matter. “We have completed the first step of the investigation, which is to assess concerns vis-à-vis our publishing standards,” the statement read. “We are now proceeding to connect with the authors and the institutional review boards associated with the papers to clarify the consent procedures for the research undertaken.” The spokesperson said that the company could not provide a timeline for the investigation, beyond to say that it would likely continue into September.

Moreau said the focus on consent is too narrow. The larger question, he said, is whether the journal should be publishing research on vulnerable minorities, some of which directly involves the authorities persecuting them. Klein, the board member, said that if the research is determined to be unethical, “at a minimum it should be retracted.”

Moreau is not holding his breath. He has previously secured retractions from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, known as IEEE, and Springer Nature, two other major scientific publishers, but Wiley has declined to retract a paper on ethnicity and facial recognition that he and others flagged in 2019. In September 2020, the journal, WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, issued an expression of concern. The note focuses only on possible misrepresentation of a data set and figure in the article, not broader ethical issues.

Last month, The Guardian reported that the editor of another Wiley journal, Annals of Human Genetics, resigned in September 2020 after Wiley declined to publish a letter he co-authored with Moreau and others proposing that his and other journals boycott papers from China. In turning down the letter, Wiley senior managers said that publishing it could cause problems for its China office, he told the paper.

Moreau said he will persist. “At this point, you cannot stay silent,” he told the Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine editorial board in one email. “This situation is creating a shameful embarrassment that reflects poorly on all medical genetics journals and on the entire medical genetics community. Public trust in human genetics depends on our community’s ability to transparently abide by its moral duty.”

The post Mass Resignations at Scientific Journal Over Ethically Fraught China Genetics Papers appeared first on The Intercept.

“I want you all to know that among progressives, it has become clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel’s apartheid government.” Those words, spoken by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., at a Palestine Advocacy Day event, created a firestorm within the Democratic Party last month. When journalist Katie Halper decided to discuss the comments in one of her regular editorials for Hill TV’s “Rising,” she had no idea that she was about to ignite a firestorm of her own. Ryan Grim and Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic join Halper to discuss.

[Deconstructed theme song.]

Ryan Grim: I’m Ryan Grim. And welcome back to another episode of Deconstructed.

So, as I think I’ve mentioned on this show before, about a year and a half ago, I started doing some guest-hosting over at Hill TV’s show called “Rising,” which has one right-wing co-host and one-left wing co-host — and they don’t so much as argue and yell at each other like CNN’s “Crossfire” used to do, but instead, they sort of present the news of the day and each kind of give their sides of it; probe the other person’s views; ask some questions of them; and then they move on to the next segment. I really like the format, actually, and it’s helped me get a better understanding of today’s right. And I hope I’ve been able to persuade some people in the audience my way.

Now, in May of 2021, I started co-hosting every day. And this May, I moved to hosting only on Fridays, along with my conservative co-host Emily Jashinsky, an editor over at The Federalist.

Now, I’m still doing that. But I’m over at the YouTube channel Breaking Points, still with Emily. Back at “Rising,” one of the left wing co-hosts they’ve been bringing on is Katie Halper, an independent journalist and podcaster. But last week, she planned to make her daily monologue a response to these remarks by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, which had caused a stir inside the Democratic Party.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib: This past year, you all, Amnesty International and the U.N. joined Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem come out with the same conclusion that many Palestinians have long known for decades — that Israel is an apartheid state that, systematically, through laws and actions, privileges one group over the other hand, and doesn’t value all human life equally.

I want you all to know that among progressives is become clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values, yet back Israel’s apartheid government. And we will continue to push back and not accept this idea that you are progressive, except for Palestine, any longer.

RG: Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt picked up on the comments, and he slammed Tlaib, saying on Twitter: “In one sentence, @RepRashida simultaneously tells American Jews that they need to pass an anti-Zionist litmus test to participate in progressive spaces even as she doubles down on her #antisemitism by slandering Israel as an apartheid state. It’s absolutely reprehensible and does nothing to advance the cause of peace. We call on people of good will and leaders across the political spectrum to make clear that such #antisemitism will not be tolerated.”

Jake Tapper picked up on the story over at CNN:

Jake Tapper: Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan facing criticism today from what several of her Jewish colleagues have deemed antisemitic comments.

Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, called her comments “outrageous” and “nothing short of antisemitic.”

New York Democratic Congressman Jerry Nadler, sometimes called “the dean” of the informal House Jewish Caucus tweeted: “I fundamentally reject the notion that one cannot support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state and be a progressive.”

RG: So the monologues at “Rising” are called “Radars,” and I recorded more than 170 of them while I was there. And the process is simple: You write the thing, it gets loaded into the teleprompter, you read it and record it in the studio, and it gets posted along with the show — except on this day, that’s not how it went for Katie Halper, as I reported earlier for The Intercept.

So joining me to tell this story is Katie Halper herself.

Katie, as an independent journalist, you wear a bunch of different hats. Can you tell us about your variety of different affiliations so people can find your stuff?

Katie Halper: Sure, yeah. So I host “The Katie Halper Show” on YouTube youtube.com/thekatiehalpershow. It’s also a podcast. It’s a livestream.

And I also co-host Useful Idiots, which is also a podcast and livestream.

What else? I’ve written for a bunch of places, although I’ve been focusing more on the podcast, but I have written for The Nation, and The Guardian, and New York Magazine. Did a lot of stuff on media coverage at FAIR. Also Jacobin. Full disclosure, I should say that I’ve written for Jacobin.

And I also made a movie called “Commie Camp,” which I’m releasing soon — which is, yeah.

RG: Well, great!

And the Jacobin disclosure is important, because we’re also joined here by Branko Marcteic of Jacobin magazine, who also covered this controversy this week. Welcome, Branko!

Branko Marcetic: Hey, thanks for having me.

RG: And so — Katie, start us out at the beginning here. So you’re guest-hosting in the studio, you record your monologue; after the monologues, there’s always a back-and-forth, it’s never just a straight: This-is-my-opinion and then you cut. The co-host on the other side argues back and forth, and then you move on to the next segment.

KH: Right.

RG: So after that, what happened?

KH: I should also say, so that people get a sense of my relationship with The Hill, I’ve been a weekly contributor for three years. So, I started with Krystal and Saagar, and then started up again during the new iteration of The Hill which you were part of, Ryan.

RG: Mhmm.

KH: So I would go on there every week, for three years. And then, as you said, I was doing some guest-hosting. And so I hosted a bunch of segments that day. Then I also did deliver that monologue.

A couple of segments after that monologue, the producers asked us to record what’s called a pickup. And basically, that meant that Robby, the right-wing co-host, reiterated what Jonathan Greenblatt had said — which, I was like: OK, that’s somewhat weird! I don’t know, because I haven’t hosted that many times, but it seemed a little weird. And it kind of tipped me off to maybe there was some discussion about my “Radar,” about my monologue.

RG: Right. Because that’s not normal. Like normally: it’s done, it’s done.

KH: Yeah.

RG: But if you need to add a little comment in, it’s not terribly unusual. It’s like, OK, let’s get a little extra balance in there.

KH: Yeah.

RG: Fine. OK.

KH: So Jonathan Greenblatt, they repeated what he had said, which Jake Tapper had already said, and then they added in something from him where he said Amnesty International’s antisemitic, or something.

And I, once again, maybe I shouldn’t have, but I was like: Well, he can call Amnesty International antisemitic, but I don’t know how he’s gonna explain away a bunch of Israeli prime ministers and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, which has also declared Israel to be an apartheid state.

But if they had said: Katie, we’re gonna cut that part out, that would have been fine. I wasn’t trying to be a bomb thrower.

RG: Right. And so, to back up, and we’ll play, at the end of this episode, your full “Radar” so people can hear it for themselves.

KH: Yep.

RG: But give us a basic rundown of what point you were trying to make.

KH: Sure. Yeah.

So the point I was trying to make was that Rep. Rashida Tlaib was being smeared. And Jake Tapper — who, by the way, I mean, there’s an interesting backstory, Jake Tapper has gone after Rep. Rashida Tlaib in the past. This is not his first time insinuating that she’s an antisemite. In fact, his coverage of her and of Palestine prompted Jewish Voices for Peace to launch a cancel Jake Tapper hashtag [?#?canceltapper?] and they had a protest outside of CNN.

But anyway, I responded to that clip. I played that clip, which quoted Debbie Wasserman Schultz, saying this is “outrageous.” And then my follow up was like: Yeah, it is outrageous! It’s outrageous that Rep. Rashida Tlaib is being smeared.

And then I went through how people may not like the idea that Israel is an apartheid state, but, unfortunately, apartheid is not about feelings; it’s about facts. And then I went through all the reasons that Israel is an apartheid state. And I was very thorough and careful because there are so many organizations out there that would love nothing more than to be able to discredit someone who’s criticizing Israel.

So I quoted the U.N.; I quoted the International Criminal Court; I quoted what makes apartheid a crime, because it actually is a crime according to international law. I quoted Israeli law that makes it clear that it is apartheid. I cited all these human rights organizations. I quoted B’Tselem, which is an Israeli human rights organization. Then I quoted a bunch of Israeli officials, including prime ministers, who either said that Israel was an apartheid state or warned it was going to be an apartheid state if the two-state solution didn’t work, which obviously, it’s not been working. And then I quoted South Africans — certain South African luminaries — because, of course, they lived under apartheid.

So Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and then a Foreign Affairs Minister in South Africa, who had just spoken at the United Nations General Assembly. And I pointed out also that I, as a Jew who comes from New York City, I’m like fourth generation New York City, or third generation New York City, I guess — and then my family before that was from Eastern Europe — and I could move to Israel today and get a job; I could build a home; I could move around, and so could Jonathan Greenblatt, and so could Jake Tapper and someone like Rep. Rashida Tlaib couldn’t even go to her family home in what’s now Israel.

RG: Right. And so before we get to the several-day-long saga that ended with your shock firing, Branko, can you tell us a little bit about Nexstar, the company that bought The Hill last summer? And in particular, I was surprised to read in your reporting, there’s a particular executive there who has a history that kind of directly bears on this question.

BM: Yeah. Nexstar is one of these massive media conglomerates, similar to Sinclair Broadcast Group that is buying up local media outlets, particularly local TV news all over the country, basically to try and get as much of their market share as possible.

One thing that I found was that, I think a month before this happened, there was an investment firm that invested, I think they bought 6,100 shares in Nexstar to the tune of about $1 million, and they’re based in Tel Aviv. Now, whether that means that this has to do with what happened to Katie, I don’t know.

But another concerning thing, as you mentioned, Ryan, was this hiring of a guy called Jake Novak, to be the deputy editor of its cable news arm. And Jake Novak, he was a very long-serving journalist, he’s worked for a whole host of outlets, including CNBC as a columnist. He also, just before joining the Nexstar family, happened to have spent about a year and a half at the Israeli consulate general in New York, doing media communications.

Now, I’m not sure exactly what he was doing, but given some of his other activities, I can guess, because six days before he was hired by Nexstar, in August, he did this seminar — and you can find this seminar, it’s up on Vimeo — which is all about combating kind of negative media coverage and perceptions of Israel. And strategies for doing so.

And apparently this had been based on a talk that he had done back in 2016, where during the war then, he sort of was telling people this is how you sort of combat some of the unhelpful messaging in the press and otherwise, about what Israel is doing. And this was sort of an updating of it.

And besides that, I mean, he’s quite a colorful character. Number one, he’s written a piece during the Trump administration, basically saying it’s great that the Trump administration has given up on the two-state solution; it’s actually great that Israel is building these illegal settlements on what should be the land that would make up the Palestinian state in the two-state solution — and, in fact, this is great because it will lead to more peace and more prosperity for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Now, I mean, even if you take away the perversity of arguing that it’s actually good for a country to basically steal another people’s land, can anyone with a straight face really say, having seen some of the events of the past few years, these clashes between Palestinians and Israelis erupt into these horrific bombings of the Palestinian territories, that it has led to peace and stability? I mean, it’s absurd. But I think it shows you the kind of worldview that underwrites a lot of what Novak does.

Another part of the Novak story — and this is one of the more bizarre aspects of this whole thing — is that during the Matt Gaetz underage sex controversy, where he was alleged to have slept with an underage girl, and then there were people using that to extort money out of his wealthy father. In the middle of all this, Novak messages the creator of Dilbert, and he says — and there’s no real explanation in the public record why, he [the creator of Dilbert] himself says: I’ve no idea why he got into contact with me — but he says, basically: This is all too bad, because it’s undermining my efforts to get money so that I can pay this commando team, they’re just standing on standby, waiting to get the money so they can go rescue this U.S. hostage in Iran.

So this is a tapestry of pretty wild stuff. But to me, what it suggests is that: I can’t say that that is the reason that what happened to Katie happened, but it does suggest some sort of editorial tilt among Nexstar that may be pushing the more pro-Israel direction, which wouldn’t be surprising. I mean in the U.S. political system, this is pretty rife.

RG: I was going to say, it suggests a tilt in a way that you just couldn’t imagine if you tried to mirror it and imagine a Palestinian-American in that same position, who has some of the same ties, who, say, gets caught messaging somebody saying: Oh, this is too bad, because I was trying to shake down money for a Hamas commando operation. [Laughs.]

It’s so absurd — it’s so far out of what’s even within the realm of possibility — but in our current political ecosystem, there is a place for people with views like his.

And Katie, you’ve talked about — before we get back into the narrative here — one of the disturbing elements of this to you was that you felt like it was playing directly into some of the most insidious antisemitic tropes.

KH: Yeah, it’s really frustrating as a Jew, and I have to admit, I always go back and forth between how much to say as a Jew, because I think it’s useful to show that people who are Jewish are critical of Israel for a couple of reasons: It’s useful because we need to show that Jews are not a monolith, and Jews are not represented by AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League. But it also is like: You should be able to criticize Israel even if you’re not Jewish.

But I do get frustrated because, first of all, there’s so much antisemitism out there. And focusing — kind of exclusively, as the ADL seems to do — on criticism of Israel, conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism is, ironically enough, an antisemitic trope in itself, because it kind of conflates being a Jew with being a Zionist. There’s a long history of Jews taking various positions on Zionism. They’re anti-Zionist Jews; there was a big split within the Jewish community over this. There still is! Some Jews are for two states, some are for one state.

It exposes how Israel still is a third rail, but I’m very uncomfortable with the idea — it kind of lends itself to this idea that Jews run the media — which is not —

RG: [Laughs.] Right. Right.

KH: — the way you get out of that, and you look at it and say: Well, no, that’s not true. The truth is that places like AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League, which represent certain interests, have a lot of sway, but once you break apart being Jewish from being a member of or supporter of the ADL or AIPAC, then you realize that we’re not a monolith. So it’s not antisemitic to point out that there is an Israel lobby.

Another thing about the Israel lobby is that it’s not all Jewish.

RG: Mhmm.

KH: If you look at the numbers, the most Israel zealots are the ones who want us Jews to go back there. And like, I guess, 400 of us will be saved, the rest will burn in eternal damnation, according to the rapture prediction, I believe.

RG: [Laughs.] Right.

KH: But it is really frustrating. And it’s uncomfortable to talk about — like even right now I’m worried about people taking my words out of context. And I’m Jewish, so that gives me somewhat more license, but not a lot, as we saw.

RG: Mhmm.

KH: And if you are not Jewish, and especially if you’re Arab or Arab-American; Palestinian or Palestinian-American — you’re so quickly labeled as an antisemite. I, at least, get “self-loathing Jew,” although some people are just calling me an antisemite anyway.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: I think it’s interesting how this stuff unfolds. So later that day, you realize that your post isn’t up?

KH: Yeah, so I’m kind of warned by the producers. And I want to say — and I hope that doesn’t get them in trouble — but they were on the right side of history and the right side of this issue.

RG: [Laughs,]

KH: They were trying to come up with a way, I think, to get the “Radar” out there.

I mean, I shouldn’t say that. I don’t wanna get them in trouble. Not behind anyone’s back, but I think they were advocating —

RG: Well, that’s their job. Their job is to produce content.

KH: Yeah. They were advocating for releasing the “Radar.”

So I get a call on my way out, and I was told — and the producer was like: I wanted you to hear it from me — that the higher-ups saw your “Radar,” and we’re not releasing it. They don’t want us to release it.

And then she explained that there was a new policy of which she had not been aware that was basically that The Hill was not doing op-eds — written or video op-eds — on Israel. But she did tell me, she did distinguish between op-eds and segments, meaning like segments are when the hosts have conversations with each other.

RG: Right. You’re just some news.

KH: Yeah. Like, when I’m on as a guest —

RG: Right.

KH: — that’s a segment also, right?

So that was my understanding, that it was something that could be talked about by guests but could not make up the “Radar,” the straight-to-cam, op-eds that are done.

RG: Did you ever speak to, then, any higher-ups at The Hill?

KH: No. So we were going back and forth — and then I did speak to higher-ups at The Hill — one of them called me, told me — I also want to add that The Hill did not dislike me. I pitched them a show, a lefty version of The View — no one steal that, guys, out there.

RG: [Laughs.]

KH: That’s my show. But I pitched them a lefty version of The View with Briahna Joy Gray, also. So we had shot a pilot for that. It was me, Bri, Rania Khalek, and Abby Martin. We even released one segment from it, and it did really well, numbers-wise.

So Bob Cusack calls me [and] says he’s not going to release it.

RG: He’s the editor in chief of The Hill.

KH: The editor in chief of The Hill, yeah — makes it look like: Them’s the breaks, like we don’t accept all pitches, but the thing is, as you pointed out in your piece, Ryan — this isn’t like a pitch process. Hosts are just given full license to deliver a monologue. And as you’ve pointed out, and you would know this better than I would, because you’ve done so many, you just send the monologue, they put it into the teleprompter, and you’re off to the races.

So after I spoke to him, I asked the producers again, I was like: OK, so can I do this for my segment tomorrow? In other words, when I come on as a guest, not as a host, but when I come on as a guest, can I talk about this?

And they were like: This Nexstar person should have emailed you. And I checked my email. And that’s when I got a message that was like: Hi, Katie. Just wanted to let you know, we won’t be needing you to do your “Radar” tomorrow morning, please send us all unpaid invoices, and best of luck.

And I was really shocked. Like, some people are saying like: Oh, Katie did this to get attention. Or: She knew she’d get fired over this.

No! I’m not an idiot who just out of the gates thought that my first thing was going to be about Israel-Palestine, and saying Israel is an apartheid state. Now, it is an apartheid state and it also shouldn’t be controversial to say that, but it is, because the world in which we live. But I had done so many segments on Israel. They did one where I think the headline was like Israel Lied, because I was talking about how they tried to cover up the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, and how they submitted footage of some Palestinian guy shooting in an alley. And then of course, B’Tselem, among others, proved how that would have been physically impossible from that alley, to shoot a bullet that kills Shireen Abu Akleh.

This was not some attention-getting stunt! This was not like: I’m gonna go out with a bang. I’m gonna become that journalist who refuses to be silent over the Israeli-Palestine conflict. I mean, that’s what happened, but that wasn’t my intention. This was not a PR stunt. I mean, I thought it would raise eyebrows. I thought maybe people would complain because I done another segment that some right-wing, pro-Israel group wrote a really catchy headline like “What The Hill?” And it was critical of me for a segment that I had done at The Hill. So I thought that would happen, because that always happens when you talk about Israel.

But I was shocked when I got that email. And I do think that some people were like: Oh, well, of course, you were gonna get fired over that. I was not trying to martyr myself or make a statement. I wanted to do that “Radar,” that monologue. And, again, I had, as a guest, been given total freedom to talk about whatever I want. I mean, I would suggest things, sometimes they would say: No, we’d rather do this. But, in general, no one had ever been like: We don’t want to do Israel.

RG: Right.

KH: And I’d done it on a number of occasions.

RG: Branko, I got a “decline to comment” from Nexstar when I reached out to them for their side on this. Have you gotten any reaction from Nexstar?

BM: No, none. None from The Hill, either.

RG: None from The Hill. Right.

BM: But, to me, one of the things that struck me about Katie’s story is that it’s completely contrary to the whole spirit of the show. I used to watch the show when it was Krystal and Saagar; I watched the show in the iteration that you were on, Ryan; I watch it still, every now and then, in its current iteration. The whole point, as you guys know, is that people on that show talk about topics and take positions on topics that are taboo in the rest of the media. This is the one place where you can sort of get away from the stifling straitjacket of establishment thinking and hear alternative viewpoints and hear different perspectives on things. But apparently not for Israel.

And I found the claims by Cusack just not very convincing. The idea that The Hill doesn’t cover foreign policy, and that it’s only domestic politics. I mean, number one, as Katie pointed out, that’s just not true. But even in the past week, there’s been segments covering the Brazilian election, the Italian election, the hot-mic comment that was caught by the South Korean president, and a host of other stuff. So it’s not particularly convincing.

But also, on top of that, I mean, this does have a domestic political angle.

KH: Right.

BM: Because it’s very much part of this kind of intra-party warfare in the Democratic party where you have the more establishment-friendly and more Israel-friendly parts of the party who periodically use this as a wedge issue to attack some of the progressive, insurgent parts of the party.

And one of the things that’s been forgotten in all of this, and I think really has to be stressed, is the reason why Tlaib got this pushback, the reason that this furor began over what she said is not just the stuff she said about Israel being an apartheid state, but she was specifically calling out the fact that the U.S. government hadn’t done anything about the fact that a Palestinian-American journalist had been killed by a state that is meant to be an ally of the United States and the government was doing absolutely nothing — which is unbelievable, and would be completely unacceptable if it was any other government other than Israel. And I think what we saw was a very clever and very successful way to kind of divert attention from that issue — and to turn it into: Well, now the controversy is going to be about is Rashida Tlaib antisemitic? And does Israel have a right to exist? Which, of course, is not —

KH: Right.

BM: — what the original point that she was even talking about was.

RG: Yeah. And on the point of the show being a place where you can kind of push the boundaries, I was thinking back. In the year and a half that I was there, there was only one other “Radar” that actually did get held up, and it got held up for a couple of hours, and some executives — I think this was before Nexstar bought The Hill, so back when it was an independent media outlet. And that was on Uyghur genocide. And it was my former colleague Kim Iversen was making the argument that yes, there were abuses, there are abuses, and it’s OK to be concerned about abuses, but it’s kind of State Department propaganda to call it genocide or call it even a cultural genocide.

And it led to a really heated debate — actually it pitted Emily Jashinsky and I on the same side, rarely, because she’s usually on the right, and I’m on the left. But both her and I were arguing — and argued with her for a long time over her points. And they ultimately decided to post it, which I thought was the right decision.

KH: Yeah.

RG: Because there was pushback, it was an argument that was hashed out. And I think it’s good to just hash these out. I don’t have to agree with every single word that’s said on the show.

So to think that that’s OK, but this is not, I think is kind of revealing about where these lines are drawn, Katie.

KH: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s true. I think that the fact that they would be open to airing a debate on Uighur genocide, but not one that’s about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — or I should say the Israeli occupation — is telling. Because obviously, this is a third rail.

RG: Yeah, you’d have the same human rights organizations, in general, lining up but on opposite sides. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch —

KH: Right.

RG: — have been extraordinarily critical of Chinese policy in Western China, and also extraordinary critical of Israeli policy. But while they’re consistent, the show — and not to pick on the show, in particular, I think it represents a kind of a broader tightening of the discourse.

And Branko, on that point, I’m curious what the response has been to your story, because it slots into, in a perpendicular way, into the discussions that we’re always having around cancel culture and free speech and censorship. If Katie had been talking about anything else, and had been censored in this way, I think we probably have a three- or four-day national conversation going on on social media. And not to say that there wasn’t a significant amount of attention to this, but it wasn’t the kind of story that it would have been if somebody else had been canceled for something else.

But as an author of one of these pieces, what was your sense of the kind of attention that was paid to it, compared to what could have been?

BM: I have to say, it was mostly positive. And that might just be like: Jacobin is a socialist magazine; the people who read it are most likely going to be people who are on the left in some way. And so they probably agree with the premise.

But yeah, I mean, you’re right. I have not — and I don’t think Katie has either, she said in a Daily Beast piece that she has written — gotten any sort of outrage from the people who, in the political and media landscape, use cancel culture and censorship as a kind of wedge issue for driving their own politics. And I think that shows how cynical this whole thing is.

In the same way, it wasn’t that long ago, when the Queen died, I wrote this piece just doing a little overview of some of the arrests that were happening in the UK, over Republican and anti-monarchist protesters and language being used. And again, very little pushback from the usual kind of corners that are obsessed with cancel culture and yet seem to give a free pass to censorship and cancellation, when it comes to certain topics that they agree with.

My position has always been, and I think the sensible position for anyone is, that whatever your political beliefs are, wherever you are on the political spectrum, the best thing for everyone is to uphold norms of free speech, opposing censorship, and to oppose any sort of measure that would foreclose on our ability to speak freely and to have open conversations about topics, because that’s the best way to guarantee that everyone is able to speak and isn’t censored. And I think that’s the position we should take.

Unfortunately, I think the way that this discourse happens in the United States particularly, but not just in the United States, this issue of free speech is used by people when it’s convenient for them, but then they’re very happy to support censorship. And just one example, I mean, Bari Weiss —

KH: Yep.

BM: — for instance, she was a columnist for The New York Times, I believe, and she’s a general kind of figure in the media. She signed the Harper’s letter; she is someone who has really taken up this torch of cancel culture, and made it almost part of her personal brand. And of course, during her college days, she was most famous for trying to get professors —

KH: Joseph Massad.

BM: — who were considered too critical of Israel, too positive towards the Palestinian cause, fired. And I think that is just a perfect encapsulation of the double standard and the way that this issue is, I think, cynically used by people who don’t really care about freedom of speech.

RG: And Katie, what kind of reaction have you gotten?

KH: Positive. A lot of people are speaking out, supporting me, which is great.

And then I guess the other silver lining is that I really wanted to make sure that the video got out there. So I made it with an actually independent media organization, BreakThrough News.

So you can find the video at youtube.com/thekatiehalpershow, you can also find it at youtube.com/breakthroughnews. So we still made the op-ed, and there’s been a lot of really positive response to both the video and also the position that I took — which was getting fired, I guess. But I mean for criticizing Israel. Yeah.

RG: Right. Right. And we’ll also play it for folks now.

But Katie and Branko, I really appreciate you guys both joining us.

KH: Thanks. And, yeah, Branko’s piece is really good.

RG: Yeah, well done.

KH: It’s really good.

BM: Well, so is Ryan’s. [Laughs.] Thanks for having us on.

KH: Thanks!

RG: You got it.

[End credits music.]

RG: Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. The show was mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor in chief. And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. And if you enjoy this podcast, be sure to also check out Intercepted, as well as Murderville, which is now in its second season.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks so much.

And now, as I mentioned earlier, here’s Katie Halper’s “Radar” editorial in its entirety.

KH: The following monologue is something that I wrote, delivered and recorded at The Hill. It was then censored, and I was then canceled and fired.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib has been condemned by some over comments she made about Israel. Here’s CNN’s Jake Tapper reporting on what the Michigan Democrat said and the response it prompted.

JT: Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan facing criticism today from what several of her Jewish colleagues have deemed antisemitic comments. Here’s what Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman to serve in Congress, said at a virtual event yesterday.

RT: I want you all to know that among progressives, it’s become clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel’s apartheid government. And we will continue to push back and not accept this idea that you are progressive, except for Palestine, any longer.

JT: The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, slammed the comments saying that Israel does not have an apartheid government and said that she should not be imposing a “litmus test” in a tweet saying Tlaib “tells American Jews that they need to pass an anti-Zionist litmus test to participate in progressive spaces.”

Some of Tlaib’s Jewish colleagues in Congress agreed. Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, called her comments “outrageous” and “nothing short of antisemitic.”

KH: Debbie Wasserman Schultz is right. It is outrageous. It’s outrageous that Rashida Tlaib is getting attacked. Tlaib is merely stating that Israel is an apartheid state and that people who claim to have progressive values cannot support an apartheid state.

No matter how loose a definition of progressive we use, it certainly excludes supporting a racist apartheid system. What’s outrageous is attacking Tlaib for pointing out that progressive-except-for-Palestine is an intrinsically contradictory position.

What’s also outrageous is that the Anti-Defamation League League’s Jonathan Greenblatt would claim that Israel is not an apartheid government. What’s outrageous is that Jake Tapper would accept Greenblatt’s judgment as the truth and not propaganda that needed to be pushed back against.

I understand that Greenblatt and perhaps Tapper feel like Israel is not an apartheid state. But, unfortunately for them, apartheid isn’t about your feelings. It’s about facts.

In 1973, the U.N. define the crime of apartheid as any “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

In 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defined apartheid as “inhumane acts of a character [… that are] committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime” […]

These inhuman acts include, among others, infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, by arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups, any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country, and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups — in particular, by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including: the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement, and residence, the right to freedom of opinion, and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

I’d encourage Jake Tapper to look this up sometime.

Here are just a few examples of Israel’s apartheid policies: The Law of Return of 1950 allows any Jew — which means anyone with one Jewish grandparent — the right to return to Israel; the right to move to Israel and automatically become citizens of Israel. It gives their spouses that right, too, even if they’re not Jewish — though, if they’re Palestinian, that’s another issue entirely. Palestinians, of course, lack that right.

The Israeli citizenship law of 1950 to deprive Palestinian refugees and their descendants have legal status, the right to return, and all other rights in their homeland. It also defined Palestinians present in Israel as Israeli citizens without a nationality and group rights.

These laws together obviously fit into the International Criminal Court’s apartheid criteria.

More recently, the nation-state law established that the fulfillment of the right of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people. It demoted Arabic from an official language to a language with special status. It also stipulated the state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development. These are just some of the reasons that human rights organizations have declared Israel an apartheid state.

Al-Haq; Al Mezan Center For Human Rights; Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel; Addameer, Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association; Human Rights Watch; and Amnesty International have all documented Israeli apartheid policies.

Israel’s own human rights organization B’Tselem has declared: “the Israeli regime enacts […] an apartheid regime.” B’Tselem divides the way Israeli apartheid works into four areas:

Land: Israel works to Judaize the entire area, treating land as a resource chiefly meant to benefit the Jewish population. Since 1948, Israel has taken over 90 percent of the land within the green line and built hundreds of communities for the Jewish population.

Citizenship: Jews living anywhere in the world, their children and grandchildren, and their spouses are entitled to Israeli citizenship. In contrast, Palestinians cannot immigrate to Israeli-controlled areas, even if their parents or their grandparents were born and lived there. Israel makes it difficult for Palestinians who live in one of the units it controls to obtain status in another, and has enacted legislation that prohibits granting Palestinians who marry Israeli status within the green line.

Freedom of movement: Israeli citizens enjoy freedom of movement in the entire area controlled by Israel and may enter and leave the country freely. Palestinian subjects, on the other hand, require a special Israeli-issued permit to travel between the units and sometimes inside them, and exit abroad also requires Israeli approval.

Political participation: Palestinian citizens of Israel may vote and run for officem but leading politicians consistently undermine the legitimacy of Palestinian political representatives. The roughly 5 million Palestinians who live in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, cannot participate in a political system that governs their lives and determines their future.

I was born in New York City, My great-grandparents and the family before them were from Eastern Europe. I could move to Israel today, buy a house, get a job, travel around with no problem. So could Jake Tapper and Jonathan Greenblatt. But a Palestinian like Rashida Tlaib can’t even visit her family home in what is now Israel.

This demographic tension is recognized by Israeli officials and politicians who have described their own country as an apartheid state. Former Attorney General Michael BenYa’ir wrote in 2002: “we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.”

Zehava Galon, former chair of Israel’s Meretz party said, in 2006, Israel was “relegated” to “the level of an apartheid state.”

In 2007, Israel’s former education minister Shulamit Aloni wrote, “the state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of apartheid with the native Palestinian population.”

In 2008, former environment minister Yossi Sarid said, “what acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck — it is apartheid.”

In 2015, Former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan said President Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies are leading to either a binational state or an apartheid state.

Even Israel’s Prime Ministers have used the a-word. In a recently published 1976 interview, assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said: “if we don’t want to get to apartheid … I don’t think it’s possible to contain over the long term, a million and a half [more] Arabs inside a Jewish state.”

In 2007 yet another prime minister, Ehud Olmert, warned, “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.”

Prime Minister Ehud Barak said in 2010, “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

But there is no other standard more universally respected in defining apartheid — not the U.N., not the International Criminal Court’s, not human rights organizations, not Israeli prime ministers — than the people of South Africa who lived under the system of apartheid. After all, apartheid is an Afrikaans word. It means “apartness.” It was the official policy in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, allowing white South Africans in the minority to rule over and discriminate against the vast majority of Black South Africans. The definitions from the United Nations and the International Criminal Court come out of their experiences.

In 1997, Nelson Mandela said: “The U.N. took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

In 2013, Desmond Tutu recalled being struck by the similarities between what he experienced in apartheid South Africa and what he observed in Israel.

Desmond Tutu: I visited the occupied Palestinian territories, and have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinians at Israeli military checkpoints. The inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured, farmers tend their land, or children attend school. This treatment is familiar to me and the many Black South Africans who were corralled and harassed by the security forces of the apartheid government.

KH: Listen to South Africa’s Minister for International Relations, Naledi Pandor, addressing the United States’ [sic] General Assembly just last week:

Naledi Pandor: While we work to address contemporary conflicts, we should not ignore long-standing conflicts, such as that of the people of Palestine, which has been on the United Nations’ agenda throughout the seven decades of existence of this organization.

We cannot ignore the words of the former Israeli negotiator at the Oslo talks, Daniel Levy, who addressed the U.N. Security Council recently and referred to the increasingly weighty body of scholarly, legal, and public opinion that has designated Israel to be perpetrating apartheid in the territories under its control.

KH: To my fellow Jews, to my friends in the Democratic Party who wants to support Israel and think of themselves as progressive, it’s important to look at what Israeli law today does, what the lived experiences of Palestinians today means as defined under international law, and what our friends from South Africa have long pointed out — but we should not stop there. South Africans didn’t just define apartheid, they dismantled it. Instead of attacking Rashida Tlaib for her candor, her critics should ask themselves how Israeli apartheid can be dismantled. What would a post-apartheid country look like?

L’Shana Tova.

The post The Journalist Censored for Defending Rashida Tlaib appeared first on The Intercept.

A massive police database obtained by The Intercept provides groundbreaking insight into the pervasive surveillance state operated by the Chinese government to repress Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. This week on Intercepted: A new report from The Intercept provides a raw glimpse into the persecution and sweeping internment of Muslims in the city of Ürümqi, the largest city in northwest China’s Xinjiang region.

The report also confirms many of the anti-democratic systems already in place: child separation and carceral re-education, installation of surveillance cameras inside private homes and mosques, immense detention centers, frequent police stops, widespread collection of electronic and biometric data, demolition of Uyghur cemeteries, and the forced abortion and sterilization of women.

Although the United States has surveilled, abused, rendered, and imprisoned Muslims for decades, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that China is committing “ongoing” genocide. His successor, Antony Blinken, agreed with that characterization during his confirmation hearing in January.

The Intercept’s Ryan Tate, technology reporter Yael Grauer, and anthropologist Darren Byler analyze the unprecedented scale and sophistication of the surveillance campaign detailed in the database. We also hear Uyghur linguist and poet Abduweli Ayup tell the story of his 15-month detainment for operating a Uyghur-language kindergarten in Xinjiang.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted. 

Ryan Tate: Really, I feel like we were able to bring some context around the many, many small ways that repression happens in China. 

[Musical interlude]

I’m Ryan Tate. I’m the technology editor at The Intercept. We obtained a large cache of government documents from a region of China, Xinjiang, where the Muslim minorities, including Uyghurs, have been systematically imprisoned and repressed. What this trove shows that we think hasn’t been reported before out of Xinjiang is the day-to-day impact on the lives of ordinary citizens — what it’s like living day-to-day with government minders stopping you in the streets routinely at checkpoints three or four times a day, visiting your house, policing you at the mosque, searching you on the way into a mosque, watching how you pray, what style you pray in. 

You know, I think we were also able to really show the way digital tools are stitched together in a way that’s sort of hauntingly innovative. That they’re able to police these people and put them under a microscope by using technology that’s widely available around the world and that they West has just started to use for surveillance in a day-to-day way but could happen here. 

Even as someone who’s been really alarmed at what’s happened in the United States, and seeing some of the parallels, I still felt like it wasn’t something that I could even really wrap my head around, even having been horrified at a lot of the things I’ve seen my own country do in the last 20 years. It was just really hard to imagine what it would be like having that multiplied by 10 or 100. 

[Musical interlude]

Yael Grauer: The order came through a police automation system in Ürümqi, the largest city in China’s northwest Xinjiang region. The system had distributed a report — an “intelligence information judgment” — that the female relative of a purported extremist had been offered free travel to Yunnan, a picturesque province to the south. The woman found the offer on the smartphone app WeChat, in a group known simply as “Travelers.” Authorities homed in on the group because of ethnic and family ties; its members included Muslim minorities like Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz, who speak languages beside China’s predominant one, Mandarin. 

“This group has over 200 ethnic-language people,” the order stated, referring to such persons. “Many of them are relatives of incarcerated people. This situation needs major attention. Please investigate immediately. Find out the backgrounds of the people who organize ‘free travel,’ their motivation, and the inner details of their activities.”

One person rounded up as a result of the order, a Uyghur, had no previous criminal record, had never heard of the WeChat group, nor even traveled within China as a tourist. Still, his phone was confiscated and sent to a police “internet safety unit,” and the community was to “control and monitor” him. A record about him was entered into the police automation system. 

Police appear to have investigated the man and assigned the cadre members to “control and monitor” him entirely because of religious activities of his eldest sister five months earlier. She and her husband invited another Uyghur couple in Ürümqi to join a religious discussion group on the messaging app Tencent QQ, according to police records. The husband stopped smoking and drinking, and the wife began wearing longer clothes. They began listening to “religious extremism information” on their laptop, the report said. Between the two couples, police recovered 168 religious audio files deemed illegal, likely because they were connected to an Islamic movement, Tablighi Jamaat, that advocates practicing Islam as it was practiced when the Prophet Muhammad was alive. The fate of the eldest sister and her husband is unknown. The other couple was sent to a re-education camp.

My name is Yael Grauer and I’m an investigative tech reporter. It’s just one of the stories that we found in this database that has a ton of information on the extensive policing and surveillance of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. It’s about 52 gigabytes and there’s 250 million rows of data. But a lot of it is about just like repression and persecution and large scale internment of Muslims in the area. There’s been other reports of cameras being installed in people’s homes. There’s cameras outside of mosques. There’s these massive detention camps. There’s been reports of children forcibly separated from their families and put in pre-school camps. Destruction of Uyghur cemeteries, forced abortion and sterilization of Uyghurs.

You have to have your phone on in case the police call you. Every chat app you use is monitored. You know, you’re getting your face scanned, your voice signature analyzed, your DNA taken, you’re scanning your phone over and over again, like, you’re just being so heavily surveilled that it’s like you can’t be free, like you can never feel private, even for a moment. It’s pretty crazy.

[Musical interlude]

Darren Byler: This database is really unprecedented in terms of its scale and its detail. I’m Darren Byler, anthropologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I study surveillance systems, policing. You know, we have tens of thousands of unique police files from the city of Ürümqi between 2017 up into 2019. And so its really a first look at a granular level of how policing works in this city. 

To enter your housing area, you need to have your face scanned and match your ID. It’s sort of like a keyless entry, but in this case the keyless entry is controlled by the police. They’re also at many of the checkpoints checking people’s phones, so you have to carry your smartphone with you and that’s an additional way that they’re tracking your movement. 

The “counterterrorism sword” or “anti-terrorism sword” is a device that’s something you can plug into your phone and then it will scan through the files that are on your phone or computer. It will look for things that you’ve deleted in the past or thought you deleted. In some cases it will access your social media as well, looking for around 50,000 different markers of Islamic activity or political activity. So it’s a way of scanning someone’s digital history really quickly. And there’s always a traumatic experience because you never know what this device is going to find. 

So, the database is really sort of corresponding with a dramatic increase in a larger campaign called the People’s War on Terror, or sometimes it’s called the “hard strike against Islamic terrorism.” That was also the same time there was this massive build-out of internment camps for people that they deemed to be untrustworthy or extremist. And so what the data set is showing is dramatic increase in detentions, of people being cleared out of entire sections of the city, and really the stopping of religious practice.

[Musical interlude]

So the government at first denied that these camps even existed. They said that it’s just being made up, but they said that they were vocational training schools, a kind of reform school for people that had these sort of pre-terrorist or pre-criminal tendencies. There they’re really picking up on U.S. and European discourse around countering violent extremism. And so what the Chinese government was saying is that these are reform schools and this is actually a benefit for the Uyghurs, it’s sort of saving them from themselves. 

What you find, though, is that these are actually, you know, medium security prisons that have surveillance systems throughout them. The guards carry non-lethal weapons everywhere. People are locked in cells. The cells are often overcrowded. Most people said that the education aspects of the camps were really secondary. It was mostly a carceral space, and a space where they learned to really fear the government and to submit. 

[TV anchor]: People are said to be staying off the streets this morning. The government now saying more than 1,400 people have been arrested as police quelled the violence over the last couple of days. The latest death toll: 156 dead. More than 800 injured. State television has aired plenty of footage of bodies, bloodied people, smoke billowing from overturned cars and what you’re seeing right here, this is footage from CCTV, which is the state media …

DB: So, to be clear, there have been violent incidents that have been carried out by Uyghurs. And the people that were actually involved with them probably number in the hundreds, maybe 1,000 or more — not 12 million people, which is the Uyghur population. The response to those violent incidents is really disproportionate to the crime and that begs the question, why are they doing this? 

I think, to understand that, we need to go farther back in time and understand that the Uyghur area is very large. It’s the size of Alaska. And it has around 20 percent of Chinese oil, 20 percent of Chinese natural gas reserves and around 84 percent of Chinese cotton, around a quarter of the world’s tomatoes come from this region. So it’s economically strategic that the government — Chinese government — is able to control and access those resources.

At the end of the day, what we’re looking at is a settler colonial project of Han settlers moving into the Uyghur region, taking the resources and then beginning, eventually, a process of eliminating and replacing Uyghur identity — trying to sort of assimilate them into the body politic of China. This settler colonialism in this case is, at least so far, less violent, in some ways, than American settler colonialism, you know, which produced a genocide. We haven’t seen a genocide in terms of mass killing of Uyghurs yet, but it is a similar dynamic that’s going on at this time. The technology, I think, is helping that project by sort of extending the scale and the intensity of the project to make it happen more quickly. It’s a marriage of global war on terror and settler colonialism brought together to produce this new kind of contemporary colonization.

Abduweli Ayup: I’m Abduweli. I’m a Uyghur who faced genocide now in northwest part of China and I got my Masters degree in linguistics. I got married in 2005 and I have a baby, and then I decided to move back to my hometown, Uyghur region. 

I think about where should I send my daughter to go to kindergarten, and I found out that there’s no Uyghur kindergarten in Ürümqi. Like, all of them are Chinese kindergarten. It’s shocking for me because capital of Uyghur autonomous region — so-called autonomy — but we don’t have Uyghur kindergarten. And then I found out that in Ürümqi, like, a Uyghur is being eliminated and the Uyghur is in danger.

[Musical interlude]

I feel that Uyghur is me. Uyghur language is me. It means that I’m in danger. So it gives me strong feeling that, “What am I doing here? What should I do?” And then I decided to do something to protect language, to protect Uyghur alive. So I thought that I should have a Uyghur kindergarten, mother language kindergarten in Ürümqi. Someone should do it, even if it’s dangerous! 

The first we recruited 15 students, 15 kids. The next semester it increased to 57. The local authority began to bother me. Like three guys came and two asked questions and the one record, “What are you doing? And why are you doing? Like who are you talking with? We are watching you and you should be careful.” But at the time they didn’t say to stop. I was very happy.

2013 August 19th, at that day I was at my kindergarten. The police came about 2 o’clock in the afternoon. So I go directly and told them, “So let’s talk in your car.” Get in the car and then two police put black hood on my face and they paste my mouth with the bandage, put the handcuff on my hand and they drove me to a detention center. They put me in the office. Inside the office there’s a cage and inside the cage there’s a chair. In Chinese it’s a laohu, like a tiger chair. In Chinese, if you call something “tiger” it’s horrible. Like “tiger chair” it means horrible chair. They bind my feet, arms and the neck with special equipment. You cannot even move. I felt nervous and afraid. 

They started interrogation. They accused me of separatism. I have nothing to do with separatism. I was abused — sexually, physically — and tortured and got electric stick. But I told them that, “You can kill me. It’s ok, but I will never tell something I have never done.” They released me because during this 15 months I have never compromised, I have never admitted anything I have never done. And then I feel there is no way to protect my language and there’s no way to protect even myself. So I have to leave. And then I left in 2015. 

I feel that somebody’s watching, something will happen in next hour and my every action and my every word recorded, the camera all the time looking at me and every moment the camera just take picture of me. And that feeling is horrible. And because of that people cannot even speak what they want to speak. They cannot be as a normal human being.

My niece, her father arrested in 2017 and she went back to China because she wants to see her father. Last year, 2020 December 20th, I received a message that she died. I know she got arrested after she went and I know she was in the camp. She died. I don’t know what happened to her and I cannot even call her. And I don’t know the reason. And I know she was living in Japan and she said she missed her father very much and she wants to see. I said that, “You cannot see your father. Believe me, it’s impossible to see your father. You father is in concentration camp. It’s not possible.” And she went back and she died. She even didn’t get married, she’s just 30 years old, just 30. Yeah. I, like, I wrote poetry for her. Let me read it in Uyghur first and then translate into English.

I wish I would be your country. 

I wish I would be your safe place. 

[reading Uyghur]

I know you would not be disappeared if I was …

You can smell, you can smell inside me. 

And if I, if I’m your father, you’ll not go back. You will not leave me. You would stay with me. 

If I’m your country, if I’m your free land, if I’m your promised dream, you will never leave. 

You will never disappear — as a star, as a drop of rain, as a kite without thread. 

If I’m a wind in your hot, stifled summer. 

If I’m a water in your endless desert, you will not wither. You will not die as a flower. 

If I was a garden for you. 

If I was her father.  

Thank you. We have an endless desert without a drop of rain, without water, it’s just a flower there. She disappeared because there is no water. There is no rain. It’s too sad. She is the most successful one in our family. She got the scholarship from the Tokyo University and she left message to her friend that she’s going to have a school in Kashgar and she’s going to teach science. She’s going to teach love. She’s going to teach about the world to the kids. Like, somehow I think that she was following my dream to have a school, to have kids, to hold their future. Like, I sacrificed 15 months. It’s enough for me. But my niece sacrificed her life for my dream. So I feel very mad, very sad about that. 

What’s happening is horrible to Uyghur and horrible to me and to my family, but it’s the future of other people. And if we allow this atrocity continuously happening, it will happen to millions of people. So we should stand up and we should say “no” and we should stop this. Even one interview — we should keep doing this until we stop this genocide and we stop this atrocity. Thank you for giving me this chance.

JS: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted. You can follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast. Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our lead producer is Jack D’Isidoro. Supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. Until next time, I’m Jeremy Scahill. 

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