 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 36th annual Norris and Marjorie Benditson Epic International Symposium, China and the World. My name is Sophie Lasko. I am a first year student at Tufts and I am studying international relations. I will be moderating today's panel on rule of law, Chinese nationalism and human rights. On behalf of the Institute for Global Leadership, I would like to welcome the delegations of students from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Ireland, Israel, and the United States. Kenya, Russia, and Singapore, as well as from the US Air Force, Naval, and Military Academies. Before I begin, I want to explain how the panel will run. For the purposes of encouraging as much discussion as possible, each panelist has been asked to give opening remarks of five minutes and then we will open the panel to discussion among our speakers and then open it to the audience for questions and answers. Feel free to type your questions as they come in the Q&A function. To begin, as China's influence on the world and liberal world order increases, the international community has expressed growing concerns for China's domestic policies regarding human rights. In the Xinjiang region of western China, China has been criticized for the detention of Uyghur Muslims in what is claimed to be vocational camps and what others have called as re-education camps aimed at eliminating Uyghur culture. Tibet, another minority region in China, was recently ranked by Freedom House as the least free region of the world next to Syria. The complicated relationship between Tibetan semi-autonomous governance and the Chinese Communist Party, coupled with increasingly restrictive regulations on religious expression for Tibetan Buddhists, has begged many questions regarding the future of human rights and religious rights in China. In Hong Kong, encroaching Chinese laws that restrict the one nation to systems policy have sparked civil unrest and mass protest movements led particularly by the student youth. In democratically leaning Taiwan, the Chinese government approach to sovereignty and rule of law has pushed citizens to question the stability of their rights. Growing nationalist sentiment in China encourages us to question what is the Chinese identity and how have domestic policies shaped this identity. This panel will examine domestic policies regarding Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and their implications on human rights, including LGBTQ plus rights, women's rights, religious rights, and more. We have a distinguished group of panelists today, joining us are Ms. Laden-Tetong, Ms. Maggie Lewis, and Ms. Jiaqiu Wang. I will give a brief introduction about some of the work they have done in the context of our panel and in the chat you will find the link to the symposium program with our full bios. Our first panelist is Ms. Laden-Tetong. Laden-Tetong is the director of the Tibet Action Institute where she is one of the leading activists for nonviolent movement for Tibet's freedom. Welcome Ms. Tetong. Great. So before I begin, thank you so much for having me. I believe I was a last minute addition to the panel or in place of another Tibetan human rights advocate, and so I'm really glad to be here with you all. Before I begin, I just wanted to make a couple of notes about geography, population, and place names as they relate to my remarks. I'll speak of Tibet as I know it, as a Tibetan. That is an area of roughly 1.2 million square kilometers encompassing the entire Tibetan plateau with a population of at least 6.3 million, probably more like 7 million today, Tibetans over three historical provinces, Utsam, Amdo, and Kham. And as many of you will know, the Chinese government speaks only of 3 million roughly Tibetans in Tibet. This is because they're counting Tibet only as the Tibetan Autonomous Region, or what we call the TAR. This is the central Tibetan region they split from other historical Tibetan areas, and the majority of the Tibetan population actually lives outside of the TAR in what China designates as Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces. I'll also speak about the Uyghur people and their homeland of East Turkestan, which is what they call their homeland, and which China refers to as Xinjiang. So as you mentioned last month, Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World Report, one of the most widely respected rankings on the state of civil and political liberties in the world, ranked Tibet as the number one least free place on earth, tied with Syria, and even less free than North Korea. For the past several years, Tibet has held steady in the number two position, before that the number three position, but now here we are. Most people wouldn't know things are so bad because Tibet isn't in the news much these days, certainly not like it used to be. Political leaders, journalists, academics, people who have been concerned about the China-Tibet conflict over many years, and have taken action to help Tibetans in the past are unclear about what exactly is going on there. I'm asked this all of the time, what is happening in Tibet, we don't hear much about it these days, is the situation as bad there as it is in East Turkestan? This is all by design. China has locked Tibet down to the point that it's become a black hole for information. The vast majority of Tibetans can't get out, the international community can't get in, and sending out information by phone or on WeChat is often more dangerous and carries a stiffer prison sentence than engaging in protest. And where thousands of Tibetans once escaped each year on foot over the Himalayan mountains into Nepal and then to India, now only a trickle might make it through the increased Chinese patrols, even on the highest windswept passes, and because of the use of high-tech surveillance methods, including drones and facial recognition technology. Up until 2008, an average of 2,200 Tibetans escaped per year. I think in 2019, the number is 18, more recorded as having made it. This most recent clampdown started after the March 2008 uprising in Tibet, when waves of protests swept across all of historical Tibet and challenged the Chinese government at the moment it mattered most, in the lead up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, when the authorities wanted to ensure there was no sign of instability or dissent. At that moment, we saw a new generation of Tibetans raised entirely within the Chinese system, with no memory of an independent Tibet, risk everything to come into the streets and demand their freedom and an end to Chinese rule and to call for the return of the Dalai Lama. They appeared to be fearless and it rattled Chinese leaders and the nation to its core. This was one of the most open displays of defiance in years and it was playing out in a new age of the internet, with video and images coming out of Tibet, even from the most remote corners of the plateau and in real time. Beyond the ground security response to that was breathtaking in its scale and in its scope. Thousands of Tibetans were disappeared, detained, tortured, and imprisoned. More military moved in and stayed, people who had nothing to do with their protests were punished. But even still Tibetans resisted, with very little space to do so. Since 2009, at least 155 Tibetans have lit their bodies on fire in desperate self-immolation protests. These people come from every walk of life. They were nomads, students, farmers, teachers, monks, nuns, mothers, fathers, and even children. And then there was Chen Chuanguo, Party Secretary for the Tibetan Atomist Region. He came in 2011 and he took the repression to a whole new level. His Orwellian grid system of social management saw 700 convenience police stations placed at 500 meter intervals from each other, 12,000 new recruits for police-related activity, households made to spy on each other in the double-linked household management system. And in 2012, Chen oversaw the mass detention of Tibetans, mostly retired and elderly people, returning from his Holiness to Dalai Lama's Buddhist teachings in India. In an unprecedented move at that time, these people were held for months at hotels, schools, military training centers, and bases. They were interrogated, ordered to denounce the Dalai Lama, and forced to attend patriotic re-education classes. Many became ill from the stress of the experience. Some never recovered, others died when they were released. And then in 2016, Chen Chuanguo moved to East Turkestan. And the system of surveillance and repression, it took him five years to roll out into that now tried and tested, took only two there. And he escalated so dramatically that the world is now finally recognizing the atrocities being carried out under his watch as genocide. And sadly, back in Tibet today, the repression continues. And the Chinese government's assault on Tibetans has reached a breaking point. In an effort to wipe out Tibetan resistance, or as President Xi Jinping calls it, safeguard national unity and strengthen ethnic solidarity, Chinese authorities are targeting the three foundational pillars of Tibetan identity, religion, language, and the nomadic way of life for elimination. And this elimination project is being carried out in every space, in the monasteries, in the workplace, in primary and nursery schools, on the grasslands, in towns, neighborhoods, and private homes. Chinese authorities have forced and coerced millions of nomads off the grasslands and into reservation style housing projects, often in the middle of nowhere with little access to jobs or services and so no future for the young people. And the monasteries and the nunneries are being slowly strangled with rules and regulations that push monks and nuns out, block new and younger ones from joining. And for those that remain, there is little time for religious studies in Buddhist practice because they're forced to spend endless hours studying up on the latest propaganda from Beijing. The current Chinese Communist Party Secretary in the TAR, Yuen Che, has stated that the Dalai Lama must be removed from religion. His stated objective, as of a recent high-level meeting on Tibet, is to break lineages, break connections, and break origins. Anyone who knows Tibetan Buddhism knows this means it's destruction. And perhaps one of the most disturbing and alarming abuses happening in Tibet as part of this final assault on Tibetan-ness is the attack on Tibetan's mother tongue, and therefore the attack on Tibet's children. China's ongoing campaign to eradicate Tibetan language has two major components, changing the medium of instruction in all Tibetan schools from Tibetan to Chinese under the guise of a push for bilingual education, and removing Tibetan children from their home communities by forcing or coursing the parents to send them away to boarding schools or what we are calling residential schools. One Tibetan researcher estimates 80% of all children in all of historical Tibet are now in residential schools. This means an estimate of 900,000 Tibetan children, in some cases as young as three, having essentially been taken away from their parents by the state and put in residential schools where they're forced to speak and study in Chinese and face political indoctrination and even physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their captors. Residential schools have long been used as a colonial tool to assimilate children, and these practices are now widely discredited and actually looked on as important, such as the residential schools now, such as those residential schools meant to assimilate indigenous peoples in First Nations and Canada and Australia. Tibetans in Tibet have expressed widespread concern about the increase crackdown on Tibetan language rights and the resulting loss of fluency and the disconnection of the younger generations from their parents and grandparents. A decade ago when the Chinese government enacted plans to wipe out Tibetan language education in schools, a wave of massive protests took place. Thousands of students and teachers marched in the streets of eastern Tibet shouting slogans like, we want freedom for Tibetan language. These brave students faced down armed security forces while their supporters sent letters and petitions to the Chinese authorities in an effort to protect Tibetan culture and identity. They were able to halt the policies in some areas at that time, but their hard-won victory is now being undone as China forces Tibetans into this model of education. Despite the well-known internationally recognized fact that children learn best and will achieve the most when taught in their own language. There are legal protections and laws that uphold Tibetan's right to live, work, speak, teach their language. The Chinese Communist Party itself claims to be the China's a multi-nation state and the Constitution itself includes protections for Tibetans to speak, learn, work in their own language, but many language protection laws have been systematically dismantled especially over the past two to three years and at this point it's clear the Chinese government is held bent on eliminating Tibetan identity because just being Tibetan, the very existence of this distinct cultural, religious and linguistic identity is a threat to the state because Tibetans are different and their loyalty obviously does not lie with the Chinese Communist Party or even with China. But over the past seven decades we've also witnessed wave after wave of Tibetans resisting China's rule in myriad ways despite the violence and excruciating suffering they surely know will come when they take these actions and even when the stakes were highest, our highest and the repression is most severe like in the lead-up to 2000 Beijing 2008 Tibetans still resist and this is the beautiful truth that is the paradox of repression. The more the authorities try to suppress and control people through intimidation, coercion and violence the more the people will resist and the stronger their desire for freedom will grow. We've seen this to be true time and time again in Tibet and even today in spite of the wave of violence and repression that's come since 2008 Tibetans continue to challenge Chinese rule whether promoting traditional livelihoods, defending language and land rights, working to stop destructive resource extraction projects Tibetans are carving out space wherever they can to advance their struggle for rights and freedom through creative and organized nonviolent action and as much as Tibet has been a laboratory for repression all these years it's also been a laboratory for resistance. I apologize for interrupting but in the interest of having more time for discussion I would love to ask you to conclude your remarks shortly. Sure I can conclude right now actually. Sorry about that. So in Tibetans are constantly testing strategies new strategies and tactics of defiance and resistance and in seeking answers and not seeking answers to hold China accountable I think the international community needs to take its lead from Tibetans use more creative strategies and work together not let Beijing mute criticism of its human rights record not that let them derail attention and support on these important issues and in the end collective action is what we need it's time for governments and indeed all of us to do what Tibetans have to have done for many years use new strategies new tactics and work together thank you. Thank you very much for your remarks laden and our next panelist is Professor Maggie Lewis. Maggie Lewis is a professor of law at Seton Hall Law School her research focuses on law in China and Taiwan with an emphasis on criminal justice and human rights she is a co-author of the book Challenge to China how Taiwan abolished its version of reeducation through labor with Jerome A. Cohen welcome Professor Lewis. Thanks so much and I'm delighted to be at this event thanks to Sophie and to the organizers and into my co-panelists and I'm particularly happy because this is a student focused panel and I'm always happy to talk to everyone else and maybe even my parents got up or early in Oregon but I was thinking back to when I was the age of most of the audience which was the 1990s also I saw a Nirvana Nevermind t-shirt go by me on the streets today of Taipei so I'm glad to see the the 90s are coming back but I first went to China in a very different time and that was a time where I mean the Tiananmen massacre was not too far in the rear view mirror but there's a real sense of opening up and of course the you know the Communist Party was very much in charge that was not up for discussion that there might be any sort of real challenge to that power but there was the internet coming in pretty vibrant discussions in universities WTO and we're in a very very different stage right now and I think that makes it almost all the more important that we have people studying China in the United States and hopefully going there soon not just the restrictions because of COVID but there's going to be a lot of political challenges and I was gutted when the Fulbright was stopped in China and Hong Kong because I really believe in the people to people exchanges and even if you don't believe in that you know I've never seen a strategy that says no less about the person you're competing with so I hope that we'll have more opportunities to get people back there because it is important to have that in-country experience so in my few minutes I want to speak just briefly about a few different issues Xinjiang Hong Kong I'll say something about Taiwan but I want to start with Alaska because that was something right I hope people have had a chance to see some of the footage of the conversation the diplomats having a conversation that was really quite theatrical and and the discussions right now or how much were they really trying to send messages to each other when the messages were things they've both heard before when actually it seems like a lot of that was geared towards domestic audiences and if you watched Yang Jiechi on the Chinese side yes he was facing Secretary of State Blinken but he was really speaking for the cameras that were that were showing that back in China and that connects to the nationalism which is in the title of this panel and that we are at a point where China is feeling very strong and and there have been you know COVID is pretty much under control occasional flare-ups the economy is doing quite well militarily building up and we're seeing a lot more pushback and that is in the human rights vein that there's even more bristling and less willingness to listen to outside criticism and I one example of that was just the other day Michael Spavor one of the two Canadians who's been held for over 800 days went on trial so the two Michaels were taken into custody in December of 2018 it was actually in Beijing at the time and I remember it quite well because it was it was jarring and it was very shortly after Meng Wanzhou was taken into custody in Vancouver at the request of the Americans for extradition she is still of course in Vancouver and restrained to Vancouver and where she lives but leading quite a free lifestyle within those confines and having had multiple court appearances to contest her her arrest and and the extradition itself meanwhile Michael Spavor and Michael Covrain have been held basically in Communicado in China with some limited consular visits now when the trial was held in Dandong no one was allowed into the courthouse even the Canadian officials who were supposed to be allowed in because they were there's actual treaty they were not allowed in and I think that shows some of the confidence and even bravado of the Chinese government that this is a fortress and we're not going to even let you see this two hour trial proceeding which is exceedingly fast we don't have a verdict yet but it was an indication of where things are now speaking of Xinjiang you know East Turkestan the the scale of human rights abuses that are occurring there and into that are just it you start to lose the ability to fathom you know these a million plus people being arbitrarily detained and we have gotten wave of after wave of of credible stories about sterilizations forced removal of children you know real physical abuse and and now we're finally I think having this conversation about what do we call this is a genocide crimes against humanity and that's an important legal conversation to have but I don't want the technical legal conversations of what label do we put on these atrocities to take away from just recognizing how serious how devastating this is to the people who are still in there physically as well as the international community of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities who have family who are there we've also seen of course recently the massive deterioration of civil civil and political rights in Hong Kong this has been going on for a few years but the national security law that came in last summer was a clear juncture of saying that there was going to be even less tolerance and having very expansive definitions for crimes like succession terrorism collusion with foreign forces and just in the last couple weeks we've started to see some of these cases come into the court and the bail hearings and it is not only of course devastating for the people who are being charged under these very serious criminal charges but also the chilling effect that it is sending through Hong Kong and the international covenant on civil and political rights is supposed to apply in Hong Kong that's in the Hong Kong laws but it's been gutted and and that's extremely worrisome about you know what is the future of Hong Kong and just last I do want to say something about Taiwan but I want to be clear that I generally don't like speaking about Taiwan as a Tibet comma Xinjiang comma Hong Kong comma Taiwan because Taiwan is in a different place vis-à-vis Beijing than those other locations even though autonomous regions though not really autonomous or Hong Kong which is a special area it's got its own laws that are supposed to apply under the basic law but those are recognized generally as part of the People's Republic of China even if they are supposed to have some different laws and setups than if I was just in Hunan or another province now Taiwan where I am right now there's nearly 24 million people it is a full democracy according to the economist in fact by moving my family back here we left a flawed democracy in the United States for a full democracy which is all the more amazing because Taiwan was under martial law until 1987 had its first direct presidential election in 1996 not that long ago and today it's it really is a beacon for democracy and human rights and it is increasingly under pressure economically from China's gray zone tactics the flights and that is something that's very real here it's palpable but but most of our lives here are having you know there's daily protests people are constantly criticizing the government and they go home to their families and don't get asked to tea and so with all the the terrible news that we get and all the tensions right now in strain and human rights abuses I do want the students to realize that there are points of light and that you don't know what's going to happen in the future I don't expect China to follow Taiwan's path it's not where goes Taiwan so will China but just to recognize that we need to keep working to improve human rights and that it is a worthwhile fight and you have losses but you also have wins and so with that I'll pass the panel on to the next next speaker thank you for remarks professor with us and our third and last panelist is miss yahoo wang miss yahoo wang is a china researcher at the human rights watch working on issues including internet censorship freedom of expression protection of civil society and human rights defenders and women's rights wang was born and grew up in china and prior to joining the human rights watch she worked for the committee to protect journalists welcome miss wang thank you so so much for having me and it's really a pleasure to talk to students and this is a topic that is related to students and I really would like to hear your experience if you're chinese your experience with the chinese internet and if you're not chinese like your interaction with your fellow chinese students and yeah I would look forward to the discussion so my topic is internet censorship and propaganda and how that has given rise to the online nationalism I just wanted to make clear that given the political environment in china it's very hard to do public opinion survey so there are debates in terms of whether actually the nationalism in china is rising so but my talk my talk will be based on what I have observed online because that's what I can do for being in New York it's unfortunate I wish I could be in china but given the political environment it's harder to do human rights work by physically being in china so I would include some of my own experience of observing internet using the internet in china I graduated from high school in 2005 and if you know anything about the chinese education system you do not have free time when you're in high school so I had a lot of free time after I graduated from high school when I was in college and formal school in class was not important to me it was all about being on the internet reading articles and talking to people and I talked to so many people formed all those friendships with people I never met and I didn't ever meet them but there was this the school system has always been very sensitive what do you have you know you read what are you being taught in a school is very restricted but at that time from when I was in college in 2005 until I was graduate I graduated in 2009 there was just so much stuff going on on the internet and people are there was censorship but censorship wasn't that bad so for example I had no idea that Tiananmen massacre happened when I was in high school I accidentally found all the pictures of the blood or the tanks online after I graduated from high school and then I asked people online that I had never met like what happened and those people had a real experience so that was part of the intimacy I was when I was in high school and that really opened my eyes challenged what I have learned in school and this my experience was not unique at all that it was the experience of a lot of young people during that time they were discussing about liberal democracy and they were talking about government corruption and how about political system how China should be governed there were a lot of criticism of nationalism and the intimacy fear at the least that you know the the forums and the websites that go to a very pro-west and then a lot of people were talking to I wanted to go to school in the west which you know I became part of that movement of going to school in the west so in 2009 I came to to study in the United States for graduate school then when I was in graduate school and the Arab Spring happened and and you know it has nothing to do with China but a lot of people were saying on the Chinese internet that you know we should do the same we should go on the street to protest and there was a huge crackdown on the people online talking about that just randomly the people I knew disappeared they were walking on the street then they got grabbed by the police and put it in the van and disappeared for three months and they got tortured and those are the people I knew they and that was like such a shock and it's like shock to the system then in 2012 late 2012 Xi Jinping became a party secretary of the Communist Party since just got worse I think it became visibly worse after that in 2013 the Communist Party had an internal document called a document in nine which warns its members against several perils which include the rule of law the civil society of free press and that document set the tone and following that document there was a period of unrelenting crackdown on the internet known the media and civil society then in 2013 there was also a huge round of crackdown on people on the Chinese social media platform mostly on Weibo and later on WeChat basically people who had millions of followers who are very well known they all got detained or got imprisoned so that just continued only one hand it was the censorship that it's harder and harder to post anything on the Chinese internet if even if you successfully post a thing then it got taken down very quickly then on the other hand it's the physical removal of people who are who are you know espoused like political liberalization espoused liberal democratic ideas so they were either silenced or they are in jail um you know you guys probably know the earliest Ai Weiwei he was very well known on the Chinese internet then he got you know disappeared for 80 some days during the ever spring then eventually you know after all this rounds of persecution now he he he's in exile he is just an example of numerous such activists so this is the one side of a story which is the censorship so then the other side of the story which is the propaganda that the Chinese government is also getting better and better of propagating its own messages um you you know if you study Chinese internet you probably know the concept of umau which is the online commentators paid by the Chinese government to post comments that are pro-government um you know you know I feel you know after observing the internet all the year all these years it would easier to see what who are those umaus earlier because they were so pro the the message was very easy to detect that that you know they are very likely or messages posted by government people but now I feel it's harder to detect who are the bots who are the government paid commentators and who are actually the genuine expression of pro-government sentiment because I feel in recent years there's this rise of people who genuinely pro-government so sometimes you know I suspect this person is a commentate this comment is paid by the government because of the line then then I go to this person's weibo page then I feel you know this person is a genuine person who's having a life so you know her comments could be genuine pro-government sentiment and that says you know how successful the government has become on this I mean as you know a young person I would have still considered myself young so um a lot of Chinese people like animations especially the you know Japanese style animation I think I'm part of this and you know the Chinese government has utilized that part of um culture and they have uh you know their own animation cartoons uh uh like to propagate their messages through that kind of uh medium that people actually like um a very well-known uh like series called a year hair affair that centers on a rapid um which was became very popular uh and it's all very like a pro-Beijing nationalistic uh message uh so I think you know this uh the two sides the government have been doing very well one is they are getting better at censorship on the other hand they're getting better at the propaganda so to the you know for me I grew up experience the worst in the worst censorship I witnessed the censorship of twitter of google of facebook uh so I knew how it felt to have a freer internet then I knew how to feel to have those things taken away from me but for people who are 10 years younger than me they having grew up never hearing or using platforms such as twitter and google and they don't have the experience of my experience which is to have experienced something freer so they feel actually you know they I think people are aware of the existence of the great file or the censorship but they feel you know I am protected from this forced information that is rampant in the United States which is act two and they feel you know the kind of censorship protected them from social instability and also they feel you know this this war created any conditions that is necessary for the rise of Chinese own tech giants like you know Alibaba like Tencent so they don't resist the great file or the way I did so I think this is quite new and very you know sad to me the last message I want to say that all that had been said about government censorship about propaganda this is only what I observed on the Chinese internet I do see a rise of online nationalism but at the same time I know this is something that is on the surface because oftentimes like people would contact me saying you know saying you know I am reading what you wrote on human rights and I'm very like sad about the situation in Xinjiang but because I'm a mainland Chinese I have families in China so I can't say what I actually say so so there are those messages so they're absolutely are you know another story going on but needs to our surface so you know I would say that I observed the rise of nationalism online but there are a lot of stuff that I don't know because of the political strains thank you thank you very much for your remarks Ms Wang and I would like to thank all of our panelists today for joining us their opening remarks were incredibly enlightening and I hope informative for the audience as well and before we engage with questions from the audience I would like to invite the panelists to pose questions to each other and engage in conversation with one another I am curious Yacho in the last day or two what have you been seeing about how the Alaska meeting is is playing in social media in China and what the response has been? Well I think first of all it's like how the government portrayed this meeting so there are you know stories on the side of so basically I think both sides are pretty theory so but the government only showed a side of what the Chinese said the Chinese officials said so they eliminated the parts about the you know Blinken's criticism toward Oshin Jiang or Hong Kong and stuff so you always get to the one side and then the narrative has always been very controlled by the Chinese government so I think at this point the government is pretty good in terms of having people believe what the government wants people to believe so I do see you know people were in favor of the government's very like strong remarks this kind of very aggressive stance yeah that's what I have observed on the internet like people are happy what the government what you know what yeah I just did what the one you said yeah because I don't know how many people know that there was this you know kind of the clubhouse moment as it's called so earlier this year the clubhouse drop an audio app there was it ended up being just like a week or so where it wasn't yet banned in China and there was all these discussions going on and of course you needed to have an iPhone and so it wasn't a random sampling of the population of China but there were some you know really robust and open conversations and then the app got shut down and you still have people getting in through VPNs but I felt like you know we perhaps latched on to that too much to try to get a sense of what people were thinking but and now it's back to we're trying to you know read very limited in a lot of times information but I mean I don't know if you if you found that that time on clubhouse was helpful or was it basically just what you've been hearing louder because people were all tweeting in to hear it at once well uh yeah I think I agree with you that first of all it's iPhone iPhone is expensive in China so you know represents you know it already had few to the a lot of people who are not in that socioeconomic set circle uh so I mean I wouldn't say I'm surprised because I knew those people exist because they come to me and write me like message without saying who they are and they say I'm reading what you're saying so like even twitter like a lot of people send me like DM saying you know they have they are anonymous but they would say that I read what you write and good work or a lot of people ask how are you doing like is it okay like you're saying this how is your family doing so they're very curious about that because they want to gauge whether they can do the same because I'm from I have had the same background like my family is in China and they you know they are interested to see somebody who have this background are speaking publicly so there are a lot of messages so I always know those people exist so I don't think you know I'm surprised to see that I mean if that always gave me hope because there are those messages coming to me they would just tell me something that they wouldn't say publicly and I know those people exist but to what extent you know how much how you know the percentage of people how are they representative of how people real feel I just don't know like this is very very hard to know what people really think just giving them political constraint but I the only message I have is that there are a lot of messed up people who think but they don't speak publicly and you don't see them but they exist. I'm curious about the this discussion to boycott the Olympic Games or you know the controversy that's swirling around the Games for good reason right now because of the genocide in East Turkestan because of all of the abuses what are people what's your sense of people's awareness inside of the controversy and the real risk to the Games do you is it part of I don't think so I think this is not part of the discussion people are you know aware or I think the message has been so twisted about Xinjiang like you know just the censorship is so bad even I knew people who who have families who are officials in Xinjiang they were you know they complained about the work but they say they think you know it's not it's necessary so I think just the environment is being very twisted and the boycott of the Olympic is not part of you know a wider discussion they're just such disparity between what's being talked on Twitter and what's being talked on Weibo yeah what do you think Maggie yeah I mean certainly the the discussion about the boycott is not making it into much in the news obviously within China and I think this is a very important question to ask particularly because I mean we all know what those opening ceremonies or they are going to look like it's going to be happy dancing ethnic minorities and it's going to be a display of nationalism and it should be a display of patriotism but it's going to be a platform that Xi Jinping can use to put this into the guise of we are doing this to make everyone's economic well well being better on one of my big concerns this is push for example like the right to development and saying that this is the supreme human right when anyone who studies international human rights knows that there's an interdependence and an indivisibility of civil and political rights with economic social and cultural rights and that's getting thrown out the window so I think the people other countries really need to figure out how they're going to grapple with this because otherwise it's going to be really really disturbing to watch all these international delegations sit through a display of a lot of these policies put into song and dance and as far as just sort of you generally the news I mean I when I was in I was last in Beijing in December 2018 I was last in China on the summer of 2019 and of course you know now I don't know when I'll be going back but there's you know there's just not much sympathy for the Uyghur population or you know for a lot of the ethnic minorities there's a lot of a lot of stereotypes and there is a fear of the terrorism narrative I think really did take hold and I had people who I are well educated and I had known for a long time one of them showed me the phone of the of I went I went out and I saw some of these facilities and they're learning new skills and I don't think it was just performative I think some people have really internalized that as this is not repression but rather that this is a way to economically advance those regions but again it's hard to tell it's just you know what people are either because they don't want to really grapple with what's really going on or they or they actually don't understand or they haven't been exposed to the facts but regardless I don't see much of any movement within China to push back on what's occurring in in in Xinjiang and other western regions so maybe a question to you so you're in Taiwan right now so what are people in Taiwan people we're talking about nationalism whether there's a surgery of Taiwan identity in response to what's going on in China or in response to what's going on in Hong Kong like what's your observation well it's hard to know how much of it is in response okay so there's no doubt that there is a surge in Taiwanese identity for now decades there's been the same questions asked periodically so from a polling perspective you know you can question well some people might say well what it means to be Taiwanese that you say it means to be Taiwanese but they've been asking people here for a long time do you consider yourself Chinese do you consider yourself Taiwanese or do you consider yourself both and and the Taiwanese only identity hit its highest point within the last year certainly what's happened in Hong Kong is part of that because when Tsai Ing-wen ran for reelection and won by several million votes one of her messages was look at what's happening in Hong Kong don't kid yourselves you know this one country two systems is not holding up and that resonated but also the absolutely phenomenal response to COVID here that's a point of pride and that's nothing to do with China so I think people are just also very proud and who they are and and this place that is their home so I don't want to just have the Taiwanese identity growth be in response to something that's outside Taiwan this is also I mean for people who spent time in Taiwan and spent time in China they're so very different and and I know more about China than most the people I meet here because I've spent more time there and and I think that you're only going to see a growing sense of Taiwanese only identity which you know of course presents challenges from Beijing's perspective because this sort of old they used to think kind of win the hearts and minds and come over and get a good job in Shanghai and we'll get closer and that thinking is just it's not sustainable the more people here really do consider themselves distinct in a way that they don't see some kind of unification as in the cards. Thank you all and in the interest of time I think it would be appropriate for us to move on to take questions from the audience and just a reminder that the audience feel free to post your questions in the Q&A function and I will be reading them and posing them to the panelists. So for our first question I would like to ask the panelists a question from Brett Zakeem who is a epic colloquium member for this year's epic class and she asks how far will the CCP go to suppress people in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong? It is clear that the CCP does not abide by international standards regarding human rights but in the interest of garnering self-power and challenging the United States to be the next global hegemon is there a line that the CCP will not cross for the sake of their reputation? I mean I think in part that's up to the international community at this point I do feel like the there has to be there have to be real consequences for what's happening in East Turkestan I mean just the idea that you could have crimes against humanity or genocide taking place up to you know maybe two more than two million people in camps in in these internment camps and have the games going on as a legitimizing force in in Beijing at the same time have heads of state coming I mean even you know Mitt Romney suggested a partial boycott but just having the games move ahead that that that genocide or this level of repression and these atrocities wouldn't be considered a red line even for the Olympic Games I just think it you know it's the Olympics okay it's not the be all end all there are other things governments should do but at least this should be possible in order to you know make a strong statement to the Chinese Communist Party that there you know are places you cannot go in terms of repression that we know about so I just I guess I just feel like it is a bit of an open question because Tibetans have had some protection and people ask me why this isn't happening in Tibet in this way and I just feel like you know there are a bunch of different answers but one is of course that Tibetans have had we've had the Dalai Lama high profile you know public figure and a lot of international attention and support for many years that hasn't fundamentally changed things on the ground in Tibet but it has I think at least in the modern times saved us from this kind of horror but you know if if China gets the green light and the big you know stamp of approval with these this this the winter of 2022 Olympics just at that level what does it what does it mean where do we go next 2008 was was a Tibetan moment but there was certainly no push for international boycott there was you know it was a different time and place with everything we've seen now and a genocide I just wonder what what message I think the message Beijing will get will just be you know anything's possible go for you know go and and and I say that knowing that of course they Chinese leadership cares about what the world thinks which is precisely why we should do something because they're also taking cues from you know international leaders about governments about how much people are willing to stomach and tolerate right now it makes me think of the classic movie I hope people have seen the princess bride where there's a character who keeps saying inconceivable and then what he says is inconceivable happens and finally someone says to him I do not think that word means what you think it means right and and so I feel like in China with he's Turkestan and other it just I remember when it was news when a handful of lawyers didn't get their licenses renewed and then that seems like wow that made it to like the front page of the New York Times a decade ago and now we would just kind of blink and and I worry about that desensitizing about that you know you just get used to the news so I it needs to be international pushback and it needs to be multilateral it needs to be done in concert and this is where I really want to see if Blinken and Sullivan you know if the Biden administration can you know very quickly bring together their friends and allies and work through the multilateral institutions and and actually bring to bear pressure because yeah Beijing in the leap year see leadership does care to a certain extent at least what their reputation is but it's going to take concerted really coordinated pushback I think to to even move the needle I totally agree I don't have more to say I mean it depends on what how the world responds to the government's violations and as a follow-up question to that I think that you know this is one of the most pressing questions for this panel coming from Daniel Mandel who is actually an epic alumni he asks what can we do about this you know what specific actions can states take what can the international community do what role does the international community play in addressing ongoing offenses against human rights um oh I mean there have been actions taken there have been laws passed and there have been sanctions against uh Chinese government officials Hong Kong government officials who are complicit in this human rights violations so I think this is a good step and there are also actions again as Chinese big companies who are complicit or providing Chinese government with the equipment to survey the population Xinjiang then there are also sanctions against companies who are you know engage non-Chinese companies are engaged in like doing business with companies who are in Xinjiang who are engaged in forced labor so those are the the actions that have been taken and should be doubled down then there are other you know things like Landa was mentioning about the boycotting the the olympic so those are ongoing and we should push actions both on the side of you know concrete things like sanctions they only are the other side which is to uh you know to send the message that you should not engage with the regime that is doing all those horrible things in China so like boycotting the the olympics also like sending a message to business that you know you're if you're doing business with those companies and with the Chinese government you should stop doing that in addition to these you know economic lovers which we need to get more creative about how we make them both targeted and and have more teeth to them I also think you know something that we can do that is real is to make it so the people who are able to leave and are able to go someplace and be safe to make sure that they're passed to citizenship or at least long-term residency help in getting jobs and also that are you know these are university students that are universities are supporting Tibetan studies and and the Uyghur languages and and making sure that if we have this diaspora you know this diaspora community that their cultures to the best we can can also have at least some hope of having refuges outside of China and and I I wish we weren't at that point but that has to be part of the plan and then as a lawyer I think we need to also go at this as a legal issue and we need to have the international community taking seriously that it's not just NGOs asking you know is this genocide but make that something that's happening in the UN I have written a paper that I think that you know Beijing signed the international covenant and civil and political rights in 1998 has not ratified it and is further away from ratifying it now than it was back you know a decade ago I think we should tell them to unsign it you know you're not serious about this take away the legitimacy of this pretense that oh we're we're working towards ratification they're not they're moving further away so also don't let the UN be this veneer of legitimacy to human rights practices that actually are are sapping the the force out of some of the most important international immigrants yeah and I think they we need to see new initiatives you know that's one of the like multilateral initiatives I think are key Beijing does not want to see our governments coordinating on their strategies for Tibet East Turkestan Southern Mongolia they don't want to see a contact group on Tibet that could develop into anything in the future you know they so what all of that is taken so incredibly seriously by the Chinese government and there have been in recent years you know more joint initiatives embassies in Beijing doing something together or UN you know missions to the UN releasing the letter together at an important time but I think this kind of moment calls for governments you know publicly and privately coordinating their strategies together and creating new groups or new bodies you know formally or informally to to to say we're going to look at how to address these issues together because then you can't Beijing can't isolate so easily and pick off and and punish the countries that take action and it sends them a telegraphs a very serious message about a new phase in global cooperation on these issues China considers its core issues that no one's allowed to you know touch or talk about thank you yeah and and as a follow-up question to that from our student Carlos Udy Sari who is one of the epic students in this year's colloquium do you believe that the recent addition of China to the United Nations human rights council diminishes the legitimacy of the United Nations human rights council and what are the consequences of this for human rights discourse globally the human rights councils had problems for a while with that a number of the countries that have sat on it are are not the poster children for great human rights practices and this is one of the challenges of international human rights is there has it's generally trying to get a big tent approach that if we can bring in more players we can socialize states and hopefully improve their human rights practices through that process of of interacting with other states and learning about best practices I think China is really really putting that theory to the test and there are scholars that are looking at that and saying that you know emerging democracies that that could be more true for if it's a country that's saying we want to show we're leaving behind for example an authoritarian past and that they might socialize in a way that improves practices but you can also drag down those practices and again that's something I worry about that you have China saying we have democracy they just said this in Alaska but like very different definition of democracy if you're studying Mao and his theory of democracy that we're really representing the people they just don't vote to show that we are representing them right so you worry that these words like democracy and freedom of expression are going to lose their normative force and so that means that I don't you know I think that the US has to get back in there and has to own I say this is American own our problems but also needs to push back against this both sideism or false equivalence it's yes there are huge human rights abuses in the US I teach criminal justice I teach about you know the systemic racism but we don't have to there is a difference between that and crimes against humanity and genocide right and so I think this finger pointing and saying we all have problems all states have their issues to deal with is China's way sometimes of excusing away atrocities. All right moving on to the next question from Atree Bargava also an epic student is there a direct relationship between the nationalization efforts of the Chinese state and the desire to accommodate all parts of the Chinese population to a certain degree of chineseness and is this responsible for Chinese actions against ethnic minorities moreover is Xi Jinping's push to nationalism the causal length that is responsible for cultural genocide in China today and how have these relationships of accommodations been in the past history between Chinese dynasties and peripheral regions. I would just say that the you know if you look at Tibetan history for the past seven decades at least you know we see more or less this you know there have there has been a level of lip service paid to the idea that Tibetans other so-called ethnic minorities of China have the right to you know practice their culture speak their language be distinct nationalities that has been you know sometimes just on paper in policy and practice it's you know it's gone up and down through the years there have been periods of more or less freedom certainly the language laws I was speaking of earlier a lot of those were actually regionally sort of pushed by Tibetans in the system to try to work region by region to find make protections for this teaching speaking of Tibetan language in the school system but yeah under Xi Jinping now there's no it's just it's all changed I mean as bad as it's been it's that much worse and to the point where there was language recently I think it's draft legislative language in January that's talking about just doing away with the whole idea of separate nationalities rights to language you know to speak to teach language that it would almost be criminalized seems to be what the draft language was saying which is crazy and has to be pushed back on and but you know I think this this they've identified you know it's clear Xi Jinping has identified or is is clear about the problems and not identifying as Chinese as a problem being something else first doesn't work and that's why you know it's not just Tibetans it's uh as we know it's Uyghurs it's southern Mongolians I mean we're all you we're all targeted these communities now are all targeted for for you know I hate the word assimilation because it just is so sounds kind of like something that might happen here but this is nothing like that you know we're not talking about we're talking about a very repressive course of forced elimination of identity and yeah so I don't everything is changed under Xi Jinping it's also not that you know it's for Tibetans and Uyghurs like the Uyghurs we work a lot in solidarity with different Uyghur groups and they'll be the first to say I mean just if the camps get closed and if this moment you know is made better of course that's like critical but Uyghurs have been suffering persecution and their national identity has been under attack for decades this is not new it's just gone to a whole new level and if people are interested in the history of Xinjiang East Turkestan and China and the idea of China more generally I highly recommend just read anything by Jim Millward James Millward he's a historian and he is does a great job he also writes a lot of shorter pieces op-eds but he is a historian at heart and and I think would give you some really good context to look at some of his work just want to add on that you know when I was in China as a college student there was a lot of like learning about the west learning from the west I mean study English is a huge thing everybody is studying English but now recently I've observed the reinforcement of the Chinese identity like a very good example is somebody here living in the United States Chinese students email the Chinese embassy about going back to China during the coronavirus then the embassy I think the consulate the New York consulate emailed her back saying that I've berated her for sending the email in English saying if you want to have my answer then send me the email again in Chinese so like you know speak less English and within the Chinese education system there's a de-emphasized overlearning English so just you know one side is the repression of minority identities and cultures and language the other side is to reinforce so the Chinese Han identity among the Chinese population thank you yeah and speaking of the coronavirus pandemic which of course is very timely it is seriously limited the ability of various social movements to mobilize around the world and one of the questions from our audience members is to what extent do you believe it is responsible for hampering popular movements in China notably in Hong Kong and when the pandemic ends do you believe that there is a chance for reorganization of these movements I'm not a Hong Kong specialist but I don't think that the coronavirus is really what's hampering it's the government cracking down and and arresting key people and you know people who are law professors and these are not and really just expansive definitions of crimes about you know what is foreign collusion and what is subversion so and I I don't think that when the coronavirus is really brought under control and and it's you know much better in Hong Kong than certainly in the US that that's going to let flourish social movements the the PRC party state is very good at stamping out social movements I mean it is it has really learned a lot of lessons I was in Beijing when the Falun Gong sit-in occurred in the late 90s outside of Zhongnan High outside of where the leadership compound is and they were really caught off guard and you know suddenly it was everyone from like college students to grandma sitting outside on the pavement and and and fortunately I think the the the party state learned a lot from that and has gotten much better at stamping out movements when they're small so I I hope that maybe there'll be some space and vibrancy after a coronavirus but I certainly I don't I don't I'm not optimistic that that's going to move you know make real make really a difference I mean within China I think the Chinese population generally are proud of how China has handled the coronavirus except at the region that were on the lockdowns those people are really suffered from the draconian measures first in Wuhan then in several other parts of China but I think the vast majority of people who I mean the people who suffer those terrible lockdowns are still I know a small percentage so other people are happy with the government's response so they're less you know they're pretty content so I don't think you know after the coronavirus first of all China is it controls so well that I mean people are basically largely more live a normal life it's hard for me to understand in the United States like you know I for a year I've been in this apartment forever so so I don't think you know this would actually the effect would be opposite that people are happy with the government's response and and then they're you know more proud of that as our final question from Leah Westgard who is another epic student he says he's curious to hear about what the panelists think about what dictates news coverage in the United States and specifically what explains the lack of human rights the lack of coverage for human rights abuses particularly those in Tibet as we have seen expanding press coverage on issues in East Turkestan Xinjiang um yeah I think it's you know it's so clear to me that the you know we went through this incredible time this around 2008 and beyond where Tibet was suddenly connected to the world in a way like never before and we can't you know the the geography just you know obviously cuts the people off and then um the the repression is the next piece but the every Tibetan having a cell phone nomadic people you know all the monks if in in some cases you know whole family sharing a cell phone that just changed everything and the the information just it still flows it doesn't flow like it used to and the the consequences have been so incredibly harsh for people who pass information um 19 year old Tibetan monk was just beaten essentially to death he died when they released him from prison he he was guilty of going into the streets and calling for um Afri Tibet an independent Tibetan I think the long life of the Dalai Lama and in that case there were four young monks involved in that protest and um he the the the one monk who passed the information but didn't get involved in the protest uh he got the longest sentence in terms of years um so the media doesn't have what it needs they want pictures they want video they want you know I I mean they people want to see in this age day and age people want to see what is happening in a place they don't want to hear it really from someone else it just doesn't it doesn't have the same impact and at the same time and I think we have to be clear about this too there are a lot of Tibetans who live in the free world in countries you know where they have rights and freedom but their families are back home in Tibet and this um is really become bad in recent years they are really reticent these days to to pass information that they're hearing or to put people in journalists or anyone in touch with people inside Tibet because the consequences are so bad and so we've seen this very effective clamping down on Tibetans in in exile like even in New York City you know where you would think that people feel far away from the repression of the Chinese state not at all and in fact there another level to this is the I don't know if anybody saw this story about a New York police department officer who was actually spying in coordination with the Chinese consulate New York on Tibetans in the Tibetan community and in New York and so he was in you know he was Tibetan at least most people believe he's Tibetan and he was invited into the community center he was a part of meetings he was everywhere and then next thing we knew he was charged as a as a spy for the Chinese government and that also sends a massive chilling effect has a massive chilling effect on on Tibetans who might otherwise be passing information coordinating talking to journalists talking to human rights researchers you name it I really have to commend the international media and they did so much to try to try to get information about what's happening within China to continue to do so but of course a number of them have been kicked out um it's I enjoy having them here in Taiwan with me but I wish we didn't have so many journalists here it's because they can't be in China um there's still some really you know great international media working within China just thinking off the top of my head like Emily Feng for NPR Alice Su for the LA Times Sophia Yen who basically walked she works for the telegraph walked how many miles on foot when the taxi driver wouldn't take them any closer to where they wanted to go in Xinjiang but we if you look at the foreign correspondence club of China they recently put out their annual report and it talks about the increase in harassment of journalists and and that's for the foreign journalists who at least have their names out there and some protection and they rely of course heavily on their their local staff and local researchers who are even more exposed and and this is really really worrisome that it is increasingly becoming a black box and we have a harder and harder time getting information and oftentimes this is now coming at personal costs to people that are that are really severe just that that I guess what I would say too sorry I didn't even go there because of course that for Tibet has been the reality for so long so what I would say about the Tibetan situation and then we see in East Turkestan and now we're looking at China and Hong Kong I mean the the the Chinese government has been testing and pushing and testing the limits of the international community's willingness to tolerate and still engage with China in this way nor a normal way for a long time and and Tibet has been a pretty much a no-go zone for journalists for you know at least the last decade and more but what is amazing to me is to see that happening in Beijing like like Maggie was just saying to see the hollowing out of the international press corps that used to be you know reliably in Beijing and able to go run and risk risk for sure but run and get somewhere and tell a story and with that this will conclude all of our discussion thank you so much to all of our panelists for such an enlightening discussion this morning and on behalf of the Institute for Global Leadership the 2021 epic colloquium and all of our audience members I truly appreciate you sharing your time experience and insights with us and our next panel will begin at 10 30 a.m eastern daylight time in approximately 10 to 15 minutes the panel is covering buckling the belt environment development and the belt and road initiative analyzing the belt and road initiative and environmental implications information on this panel is in the chat and we look forward to seeing you at 10 30 thank you so much