 China is not our enemy, the webinar series we're doing. All right, so this is part of, like I said, the China is not our enemy campaign at Code Pink. We have a series of webinars trying to push out more information, dismantling the Western mainstream media and US government narratives about China, China bashing and generally a confrontational approach to China that is preventing cooperation. This webinar is called A Transnational Perspective from Dr. Jun Xu and we're honored to have Dr. Xu here today with us. Before we get started, I would love to introduce the co-sponsors that made this event possible today and give a warm thank you to them. This event was co-sponsored by Pivot to Peace, our coalition partners, United for Peace and Justice, UFPJ, and the University of Massachusetts Asian and Asian American Certificate Studies Program. So thank you so much to our co-sponsors. Please check out their work, Pivot to Peace, UFPJ and UMass AAACSP certificate studies program. Now I'm gonna introduce Dr. Jun Xu who is an associate professor of economics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY as well as Howard University. Previously, Dr. Xu has taught at People's University in Beijing. His main research interests include political economy of development, Chinese economy, economic history, and he is also on the editorial boards of Science and Society and the Journal of Labor and Society. His recent book from commune to capitalism, How China's Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty was published by Monthly Review Press. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much Madison and thanks for the invitation from Code Pink and all the work that you guys have been doing for such a long time. Thank you. You are so welcome. The work we're doing is for people across the globe, not only Chinese citizens, not only US citizens, but our entire planet really because what we're talking about combating right now is the potential for a US-led war on China which also opens up the potential for nuclear war, low-yield nuclear war, hot war, which could impact the entire planet in terms of environmental damage in nuclear winter, but also in terms of human rights and the murders of civilians through war. Throughout the webinar, you'll be seeing links in the chat so you can get more engaged in our campaign. You can always find us and follow us in our actions at codepink.org slash China. You can also follow us on Twitter at ChinaNotEnemy is the handle and we'll be talking about an action as well at the end of the webinar where you can, if you are a US citizen, contact your senator right now to urge them to vote no on the newest anti-China legislation in the Senate which is the Strategic Competition Act. So let's just get started with this conversation. So could you tell us a little bit about your history as a scholar, as a student and a teacher? What universities have you attended and taught at both in China and the US? Give us a little bit of background. Sure. I grew up in a province in the middle of China called Hubei province. I studied in college in Beijing and after college I came to the United States for graduate school. I got my doctorate degree from the University of Massachusetts, almost. After that, I returned to Beijing to work for a few years. I taught at People's University or Renmin University in China. I also taught some of the students from Beijing University and others. And after a few years, then I found another position at Howard University in DC. That's where I have been teaching for a number of years. And I recently joined the econ department at John Jay in New York City. So it's been from one bubble to another bubble basically. That's great. Congratulations. And you've talked about how one of the biggest material differences in attending school as a student between China and the US is, of course, the cost, right? I think you said there was like a difference in like 5,000 won a year to 70 US dollars a year for tuition, as well as free dorm, cafeteria, et cetera. So I didn't have to incur as much debt in China. Indeed. For those students who actually attended college, I think prior to 1998 or even earlier, going to college is not just a way of getting education. It was also your part of the workforce. So you get paid to go to college. And later on, you don't actually get paid. But even by the time that I went to college, it was considered to be relatively affordable. So the tuition, the annual tuition in Beijing University which I went to was around 5,000 Chinese yuan, R&B. That's about 700 US dollars. And it's a pretty regular price for across the nation. So you don't really see much differences among the public institutions. So there are private for-profit colleges. Those are generally less, much less respected and they charge a much higher price. But you would pay another $200 per year for a dorm. And the food price in the cafeteria at school are highly subsidized. So you really don't pay much. So it's a, compared to what the students have to pay in this country, it's a, students don't face that much difficulty in China. Yeah, that's amazing. That's really what we should have in the future. Yeah, that's amazing. That's really what we should have across the globe as much as possible because the student debt that's been incurred for mine and recent generations in the US has been very debilitating for many folks to the extent that they can't even go to graduate school or they have to change their life decisions as a result. I know many folks have advocated for getting rid of student debt and student loans in the US and how much that could change our debt-based economy in the US. I wanna also ask, so before you came to the US, did you have any expectations about how that would go? And then what did you actually experience when you got here first? Sure, I was, I didn't have, I grew up in more like a working class family. I didn't have much experiences, I'd say traveling, not even in China. So I didn't know much about the United States. On the one hand, I know it's a very advanced society, a very advanced economy. On the other hand, it's a distant continent and I didn't know what I would actually see. So I still remember how many years ago when we decided to, let's say among the students where we decided to came to this country to study, a frequent topic is that, so what things we should bring from China to the United States, would we be able to find, let's say a rice cooker in the US so we can still make rice? Do American people all eat, let's say some bread, some typical, let's say fast food every day and a lot of those expectations definitely were not true. I mean, when I arrived in the United States, I felt like very welcomed. It's at least in the small town that I went to in Western Massive True Sets. It was a very nice place. The residents there are very kind, very generous with foreigners, with foreign students. So I felt immediately at ease when I actually came to this country. That's great to hear and that doesn't make sense being kind of in the academia bubble, the campus life. There's a certain flow to that life where it's like, there's some repetition and familiarity to seeing people. You did mention that there was like one particular incident where you felt like it kind of opened your eyes to the types of potential like profiling or racism that are unfortunately common in the United States. Would you be able to talk about that a little? Yes, so I learned about racism in all kinds of literature from the books. Most of the time I stay in a small town in Massive True Sets. I interacted with my fellow workers, my professors. Those are in general very progressive or radical. And I don't even see a single trace of racism from them. So I didn't know much. There's a few cases, let's say I was my friends, we went to Boston one time. And in the airport, we were stopped by a police. I think someone worked in the airport that he said, so what are you doing here? We said, we're just dropping off our friends. Did we park in a different, at the wrong location? And the police basically didn't answer that question but he said to us, so where are you from? I said, originally we were all from China but we studied in different places in the US. Then this police then very seriously asked us, so are you guys militarily related? It was so totally, I didn't even know where they come from. So we chuckled, we thought this guy was joking with us. This guy was joking with us. And then the police was definitely very offended, saying, why are you laughing? This is a very serious matter and this is... So he picked one, one of us who was, I guess, he didn't, you know, just laughing. So you should come out. And he interrogated our friend for quite a long time. Basically the questions that our friend later told us was, so which school are you going to and how you are from China, China is so poor. How can you afford the tuition that you're paying now since you're in this particular school? And we felt the questions were ridiculous but it was also a terrifying experience because he seems to have the authority of interrogating us or detaining us if possible. So we thought, let's get out of here when possible. Later after we get out of the airport then we reported to the airport. We complained that we think this is a racist attack. And we mentioned what this office sort of looked like and where we were. In a few months, I think the airport got back to me saying that we checked very carefully our records and we didn't find such a person on that day that was working in the airport. So what can we do? But throughout my graduate school years I didn't have much experiences dealing with racism but this was definitely one of the cases where I say, oh, okay, so, you know, outside the epidemic bubble there's all sorts of things going on and it's gave me a sense of what racism could look like. Thank you for sharing. I'm so sorry that you experienced that, you and your friends. And it seems pretty pointedly ridiculous that they wouldn't even acknowledge that a fairly common looking security guard officer was working that day just complete deflection and avoidance of accountability. And right now we are going to be probably seeing an uptick in a kind of suspicion, targeting, and repression of international Chinese students as well as other East Asian American citizens who folks do not differentiate between Chinese international students, especially STEM students. And this is definitely related to the Strategic Competition Act, which is in the Senate right now in which there's concerns related to accusations of foreign persons acquiring critical technology, foreign influence in academia, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of language that invokes kind of yellow-paralmongering, red-scare rhetoric just generally demonizes China and anyone related to China. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 55% of Americans support limits on Chinese students to the US, which is up from 40% in late 2019. So yeah, can you speak a little to your own understanding of how this academic suspicion and discrimination, like I know that you are not a STEM student. So there's some aspects that you're not as targeted for and you're able to kind of be in your own field. But to your knowledge, how is the US's approach to international students different from Chinese universities approach to international students who study there? Sure, well, I was working in Beijing in one of those universities. I remember the school leadership was very, I think, enthusiastic in recruiting international students. This is what they told us. This was back in 2012. The vice president of my school back then said, by 2020, we're gonna make sure 20% of our people on campus are foreigners. And so it was an ambitious plan because it was predominantly domestic, Chinese students on campus. And this was just one school, but across the nation, there's this, I think a big push for all kinds of schools to increase the presence of international scholars and students on campus. Part of this, I think, came from the, there was this pressure of increasing the degree of internationalization. It was part of the, I think, the evaluation of a school, how much, you know, how was your position on the ranking? Partly depends on how international you are, your student body and your faculty, et cetera. So they were very interested in this. The kind of suspicion that we often see in the United States against Chinese or against any other enemy state and say that the U.S. has, it's very, we don't really see or hear much in China. As long as you're willing to come to China, the attitude is generally very positive. And they give, I think, generous scholarships to foreign students as well. And actually, that has caused some grievances among the Chinese students, actually. They felt like you were getting generous scholarship to foreign students, but not to us. But in a way that tells how well, you know, the attitude, different attitudes that the Chinese institutions, the Chinese government had towards the foreigners or foreign students, it's a different experience. Very different, yeah. And you can see how Chinese universities and institutions are welcoming internationalization and more exchange with other nations and ideas. And in many ways, the U.S. is growing more isolationist, especially in terms of its universities with a lot of the repression and crackdown on things like Confucius Institutes that help with Chinese language learning exchange. That's very interesting, thank you for sharing. Let's see, I also wanted to ask kind of going back to when you first came here and you had that experience at the airport being profiled, being asked if you were here with the military, which is just clearly such a targeted question relating a Chinese student to the Chinese military and assuming there's aggression and confrontation involved and that the Chinese side of things is provoking and creating a malign influence. So has your positive experience as a student in the U.S. has that shifted or changed at all? The more that you've lived and worked in the U.S. and I know that now you're a father as well. And also if you could add to that in contrast to the ways in which you've learned to identify forms of racism that you experience, because you've spoken about how you had to like kind of learn to notice in the moment these like microaggressions and bigger aggressions and how if you don't grow up with a lot of heterogeneity like it can be hard to notice it right away and respond to it. So where have you witnessed or experienced forms of racial solidarity in the U.S.? So a couple of questions there. How has it changed as you've worked and where have you seen solidarity? Yeah, definitely. So as I mentioned, the experience when I was a graduate student in a small town in Massachusetts was mostly positive. On the other hand, I didn't really interact much with the American society. The one that I talked to, I worked with are already very politically conscious, very progressive people already. By the time that I started working in the U.S. in D.C. area and then now in New York, I was also still in a bubble, as I mentioned. But now I'm also a father, I have a small child. And by that I had an opportunity of experiencing what the bigger circle of life. I have to send kids to all kinds of daycare institutions and you talk to different kinds of people, or doctors, teachers, and I talk to other parents from different backgrounds. So that definitely started to, I think I started no more of the American society. On the other hand, since I work at Howard University, it's a leading historical black college. So in HBCU, I have wonderful colleagues and students and I learn greatly from them. And one thing they share with me over the years was what their experience was growing up in the United States. Or if they didn't grow up in the United States, what's their experience living in the United States as a black person. And those stories, those experiences, I think helped me tremendously in understanding what racism means in the U.S. and how to tell racism. Because as I mentioned earlier, I mean, in China, as someone growing up in China, the concept of racism is pretty abstract. There's not much experience with that. So I can still see this with many Chinese people living in the United States, especially the first generation coming here. They didn't grow up with that. So the way to perceive all those kinds of conversations or the actions can be different from how, let's say Chinese Americans or second or third generation, how they perceive those conversations and actions. And I feel that the more I learned about racism, the more I learned about the American politics, the more I can tell that, oh, this is racism. And previously I may thought, this is strange or maybe this guy is confused. But now I can see, ah, okay, I know where this comes from. This is, I mean, I can tell the origin of this from a hundred years ago. So I definitely, the understanding, the consciousness of regarding racism needs some learning. It's a learning experience for me. As I learned more, as I get to know the American society a bit more, I started to see racism more and more often. But the one thing I felt very fortunate is that while I was working at Howard University, I always felt there's, I'd never felt any kind of racism at Howard with all my colleagues and students there. It's a, I think it's a racism free campus. That's how I felt about it. It's different from the, let's say though, the wider part of the city of Washington, DC or, you know, surrounding Virginia or Maryland. And so it's a very, definitely a very positive experience for me and learned a lot from those people. And the kind of solidarity that I've experienced with the colleagues and students at Howard is also, I think it's also great. One of the things that several colleagues including me, we organize this conference on Africa. West, the West and China's role in African development. And there is what, you know, people, when some people mentioned, let's say China as a new colonial or imperialist force in Africa, one of my students and some of my colleagues at Howard, they actually, you know, they were stood up and said, you know, this is not how they view the situation in Africa. They perceive the relationship between China and Africa in a different way. So there is, again, there are different, it's couldn't be different conversation disagreements on exactly how do we evaluate different kind of relationship, but they were careful. I think they were very careful in not falling into the trap and the kind of narrative that the US government was trying to promote that China is, I guess, the worst even a colonizing force in Africa. And it's something that African people should just simply, you know, fight against. I think they were very clear that this is not the political stance that they're taking. They realized that there is the anti imperialist force that's going on. And the China's relationship with Africa went far back to the socialists with early periods, which was quite different from the colonial relationship. So there's lots of conversations that I've had with my colleagues, and I felt like we definitely had a good mutual understanding, which was very different from, let's say, the mainstream, the US politics. Thank you. That's amazing to hear. And hearing that the one place you didn't feel racism was an HBCU. To me, that makes perfect sense. And I'm just glad that you had that experience and were able to work there and kind of see the solidarity between histories of oppression from the American context in real time. And it makes sense to me that it would take a bit of time to understand racism in the context of the colorist structure of the United States having to experience it firsthand kind of versus the theorizing of critical race theory. And I think even diasporic Chinese Americans second, third and later generations, they might grow up hearing about that, hearing about racism and be on their guard for it. But even in context of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia for those generations, sometimes it even takes time in those contexts to kind of not gaslight yourself, not downplay or minimize microaggressions that have kind of connotations around stereotypes that a lot of other minorities or white people might not notice or might not connect to the deeper stereotypes around things like yellow peril. And it's great to hear about that conference because yes, we do have this pervasive myth right now, especially in the West that China is this neocolonial force. It's a term being used a lot, especially in Africa. So it's amazing that there's a space where there's pushback and there's a space for complexity of dialogue and then just like extreme statements that are shutting down a conversation around nuance and complexity. Because as you stated, there's a lot of positive infrastructure development that China is helping with in Africa right now at very low cost loans. Thank you so much. So I also want to talk about a couple of things happening in China right now and the ways that you have researched that yourself as well as some of the connections you have because I know you still have many connections and may return to China. So right now we've been hearing a lot of information about Xinjiang China and allegations of human rights abuses primarily by the singular source Adrian Zenz about accusations of genocide, forced sterilization, forced labor, pretty extreme accusations that even the U.N. cannot corroborate. So we're hearing that in the West from the U.S. State Department, from politicians, from mainstream media in really just the past three years. If you look before the past three years, before the Zenz report, I don't think the average Westerner even knew where that city was or what region of China it was in. And I also want to note that the study by Adrian Zenz is funded by the Jamestown Foundation, the Washington DC based conservative defense policy think tank. So he is funded by the U.S. as he's doing this research. So you yourself have mentioned, Dr. Xu, how you have friends who live and work in Xinjiang and have done your own analysis to an extent on the conditions there. What is your stance on all of this information that is coming out of Xinjiang right now from the Western Zenz perspective? I agree totally with your evaluation of the situation that all the conversation, all the reports on Xinjiang only became something that everybody knows in the last two or three years. Before that was a topic only for small group of people. There's definitely some exile groups that have been lobbying in Washington DC for years. They got funded obviously by the U.S. government and all kinds of donors and they have been repeating the story for a long time. Didn't get much audience. But since a few years ago, the U.S. mainstream media and the State Department started to endorse the kind of narrative, the kind of story, then it started to became more or less a mainstream understanding of what's going on in Xinjiang, which in my mind is very far from what has actually happened in Xinjiang. I think that when you repeat the same kind of things a hundred times, a thousand times, I guess in New York times, it becomes difficult for people to say no because then you run the risk of being a genocide denier and that is a pretty serious charge. I think that without getting more information many people that I respect they rather choose to be silent on this because there's very limited information that we know that in the West about Xinjiang and many of those were produced by people like Adrian Zenz and his associates. So if that's the only available information here there's very little that we can say. I think one of the things that I encourage everybody to do is this has to wait until after the pandemic is that they should organize all kinds of research and study a fieldwork in Xinjiang. I don't think there is really actually much restriction on academic research. There's some, I think there's some bad experience that the Xinjiang people had with media like BBC. I think they really distorted what they were actually seeing in Xinjiang that had a bad impact on how people perceive foreign or foreign media. But overall I think even for the people in Xinjiang themselves they definitely needed a more conversation with people living outside China to know what's really going on in Xinjiang. And without that it's hard to, we cannot provide a point-by-point debunk of all those reports produced by Jane's Town Foundation or Adrian Zenz. This takes, you know, maybe takes days to do it. But I want to mention is that the all sorts of the allegation that Xinjiang is experiencing a genocide or a forced labor, coercive labor of all those kind of things, they were based on very, I think, very limited information and data. And they read small questions rather than provide a conclusive answer. And there are many evidence that you can see from all kinds of sources, from academic research, from official documents, that they portray a very different kind of story in Xinjiang. For example, the genocide story, that there's, I mean, first of all, the population increase in all the minority groups in Xinjiang have been relatively fast. And that has been, you know, even, I guess, even Adrian Zenz wouldn't say no to that. They, it's, but they also like to point out that, okay, so what happened after 2018? Because after 2018 it seems that the, there is a decline in population increase rates among all the minorities. Again, it's, we only have two years of data after 2017 or 2018, but there is a, there is a positive change starting from 2018 that the government started to implement first control more rigorously. For example, when China started to implement a very strict version of birth control starting from the early 1980s, it was meant to be nationwide because there was a fear, I think it's a mafia fear that China would just have too many people and it will be a burden to China and also the world. I think it's the wrong understanding, but the policy at the time was tend to be very strict, extreme version of birth control. That every family can only have one child. And, but the policy in practice, the policy was implemented most rigorously with the majority of Han population, not so much with minorities. In theory, the minority families can have a bit more two children, sometimes three children, depending where you live, but in practice, the government didn't really put much restriction on how many children that the minority families can have. So they can have a lot more than that actually. And that it actually has, as you can imagine, has generated grievances from the Han families because that we only get to have one child, but you're not doing this fairly. And starting from 2018, I think what the government implemented was that, okay, let's really do what the regulation, the law says. For urban family, you can have two, for the people living in the countryside, you can have three or four, depending on the specifics. So it's finally doing what they said they're gonna do from a number of decades ago, but it can decrease the number of children that minority families can have in practice. So that's what I understood, that what could happen, could have happened. Well, it might have happened in Xinjiang. But as I said, without further information, without further research on this, we don't know exactly what happened. Is that really such a decrease in population growth rates? I think we need more information. Well, obviously for US propaganda, for people like Adrian Sands, they don't actually need much research. What they do is they try to find all kinds of things and say, well, we need to produce this story and they try to fit the data to the story. It's the worst kind of research that any scholars would do, but they're not interested in doing scholarly research in any sense. So they're just trying to produce a story, a moral story that China has been doing such terrible things to the people in Xinjiang and that might warrant further actions from the United States, such as sanctions, which they already did. And it hurts the actual producers, cotton producers in Xinjiang and tomatoes. And they didn't really care about what happened to those producers. The farmers that they were trying to, I guess, in the story, they were victims, but they were really victims of the US sanctions. So yeah, I think they were just trying to create all kinds of excuses for, I think, abusive, those imperialist policies from the US. Thank you. Yeah, it is ironic that concerned citizens in the US claim to want to be advocating for human rights and advocating on the behalf of Uyghur ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang. But these sanctions, as well as boycotts, companies like H&M and Zara, they're getting a lot of their cotton materials from Xinjiang. It's actually going to harm the very people that they're aiming to ostensibly protect because they're going to be blocking the production and their right to make a living. I think the idea that we could also just increase the price that we pay, you had mentioned that to me at one point, that could be even more helpful than just sanctioning and boycotting. Right, right. Yeah, if the big corporations, they're really so concerned about human rights, they really wanted to help the people of hardworking people in Xinjiang or anywhere else. I mean, why don't they just decrease the profits and give more revenues to those people producing those cotton or tomatoes or any raw materials? That would have a much bigger impact, a positive impact on people's lives in Xinjiang. A lot of those tyranny, this coercive aspect, they don't really come from whatever government or state policies in Xinjiang or any other places. They really come from the market. It's the tyranny of markets, the tyranny of capital that has been dictating people to move out of their hometown to work for a long time on the factory in the field. That's what the market economy has been doing. In some places, while even in the United States, that people know how terrible the market can be, how dictated the market can be to every one of us. But if you consider the US, it's an advanced economy and people can still get by in many other parts of the world, including in China, that people are already on the immersion of all kinds of things. And the US is trying to put a sanction. That's just trying to destroy whatever livelihood that the working people have up until now in Xinjiang. So that's, I think there's a very reactionary way of dealing with all kinds of social problems in China, in any other country. And I think also what you've been mentioning about Xinjiang and the discourse around there, especially the mainstream narrative, is similar to what we were talking about with China's investment in Africa, where these dogmatic mainstream narratives with a conclusion already developed and these narratives demonizing China as a malign influence in order to instigate and provoke war and other political prerogatives. This really all just prevents a more nuanced or complex discussion on these issues within places like Xinjiang, like population management, because overpopulation is a real issue that does need to be addressed. Or some of the surveillance strategies that the police in Xinjiang have been using. These are questions that we could be discussing in a more reasonable, balanced and complex way because these are interesting and urgent things that we should be thinking about in all societies, not just Chinese society. I'm going to ask just one more question because we're getting close to the hour. So a lot of Western nations have compared the Hong Kong protests to other popular uprisings in the world, comparisons to Chile, other working people who are rising up against often neoliberal military governments, et cetera. Do you think outsiders have a clear understanding of the context and the manifestations of the protests in Hong Kong? What do you think is missing from their analysis? And what have you heard from your friends who have lived through those protests and had to endure how long they went on and how violent in many ways they were? Right, yeah. Like Xinjiang, Hong Kong is also one of the issues that recently became somehow important in the American politics. There has been, I think, the conversations and collaborations between, let's say, different U.S. politicians and the different activists or leaders from Hong Kong. I think that to a large extent it's not just insider or outsider. People living in Hong Kong also may not have the best kind of understanding of what has happened in Hong Kong. This is definitely the case for major social events, social change in history, that when some individual living through a turbulent era, may not have the best idea of what's actually happening. In major social change, it could be a positive change, it could be a reactive change. An individual can feel very differently depending where they are or where they are. But my friends who lived and worked in Hong Kong for some time, I think throughout the so-called protests or this movement, they mostly felt worried, terrified, because they know, like many other Chinese who originally grew up in the mainland and then work in Hong Kong, they can be the next target. There is a very strong xenophobic nativist element in the Hong Kong movement that unfortunately has, I think, largely dominated the whole thing, the whole movement. So it's a right-wing movement overall. And even before this whole thing became something that some US politicians like to talk about, they already became some kind of nightmare for mainlanders in Hong Kong. There are cases that the local, let's say activist groups or local militias, they would chase ordinary workers, sex workers, traders, petty traders, who came from the mainland. And it was definitely, this kind of sentiment was definitely not a very progressive one. And in the US, obviously, there are several layers on this issue. The one layer that the US politicians like to look at, okay, this might create this and that or another disruption in China. In normal times, I think the US elites are pretty collaborative with the Chinese government or Chinese elites. They have all kinds of projects together. But in a time when the US elites, I think, felt uncertain, quite uncertain about their own status, either uncertain about China. I think they were more supportive of some kind of disruption, maybe not major change, but some disruption in China, including Hong Kong. And so that's more like a geopolitical diplomatic way of thinking things. But there is another layer, let's say some activists, liberals, let's say in the US, they also feel sympathetic to the Hong Kong movement because they also, I think they are influenced, they were affected by such a long time of demonization of China. They felt like, okay, China is, the Chinese government is such a bad one. It's creating all kinds of troubles everywhere within China itself, in the South China Sea, in Africa and here in this formerly British colony in Hong Kong. And they felt like it's something that they felt they could support this protest, this movement. And there is also writers, I think more progressive writers, liberal writers, who try to highlight the potentially more progressive element in the Hong Kong movement. But overall, let's say the anti-Xenophobic, the more progressive part of the Hong Kong movement is very marginal. There's not much space for a leftist movement in Hong Kong. We don't have to go into the details, but the Hong Kong history, the Hong Kong politics has not left much room for a leftist movement, at least not for the last two or three decades. So it has been dominated by the right wing forces, right wing narratives. And so I think a better way of doing this is definitely to critically evaluate what has happened in Hong Kong by not siding with this right wing movement or protests. But I understand that many people feel hesitant because, like, well, this is happening. This is social movement. Shouldn't we just join it? Maybe when we join it, we can change it. But that, I think it's, you can't join the Nazi party to change the Nazi party. The whole, the base, the social base, the whole platform is given. You join it, you're going to become part of that. So I don't think that that effort has been helpful at all. And after the passing of National Security Act, I just want to mention that even though for many people in the U.S., it's like, oh, this is the end of Hong Kong. But for my friends who were actually working in Hong Kong, they felt so relieved. They felt okay. Eventually, you know, we're going to get some safety. We won't have to worry about, you know, being chased, being beaten. Our kids don't have to worry that much, being singled out or being bullied by, you know, some from the right-wing people. So it's a different kind of understanding of what's going on in Hong Kong. And again, I mean, it's a general question of how do we look at the existing social conflicts or social movement, protests in the country that is in the global south and also has a and that the U.S. also considers as part of the part of its, I guess, potential enemies, not enemies, but potential enemies or competitors. I think it's people left as progressives here in the U.S. I think the thing that we can do is that we can read more. We're going to do more research about China and definitely read more than New York Times or Washington Post or any of those mainstream news media in the U.S. They can be excellent news sources regarding domestic politics. But our international politics, they do tend to side with very imperialist tendencies. And you should definitely read more. You can read more news from China itself that, you know, it's different. It has a different style from the U.S. news, but it's good for information purposes. And you can read analysis of news reports from other countries, not U.S. or not China, but from global south perspectives. They can also give you some different understanding of all the kinds of things that has been happening. So if you are interested in, again, in Xinjiang issues, you probably could plan for a trip to Xinjiang to really to study, to talk to local people. Yes, there are surveillances everywhere, including Washington DC. But it's, you know, I don't think it would be much trouble that if you were a tourist talking with local people in Xinjiang or any part of it in China, you can get more of your own understanding of this rather than simply following what the U.S. State Department has been, whatever they have been saying. So I think that's the first step towards a better understanding of all the questions in China. And one place you can find more information is dongshannews.org. There are partners at Code Pink and they put out a roundup of news on China, as well as China and Africa relations once a week. Just this week they were mentioning how the Chinese arrived in Africa and before the Portuguese European colonialists and you had mentioned that it's at Howard how that connection between Africa and China goes back way further before European colonization. So you can check that out at dongshannews.com. Thank you so much, Dr. Xu, for being here today for this conversation. Thank you for bringing in how nativist and xenophobic the right-wing protest in Hong Kong are and I'm very glad to hear that your friends were mostly safe from any targeted violence. But yes, we do know that in Hong Kong the protests have been funded by the National Endowment for Democracy to the tune of $29 million since 2014. So there is a direct influence and we know that the leaders of the Hong Kong protests have aligned with Pompeo, Trump, Rubio, Cruz, lots of right-wing American politicians. So thank you so much for bringing that often untold context to those protests. And we are here at the China is not our enemy campaign to continue to dismantle the propaganda and anti-China rhetoric led by the U.S. and mainstream media. We're here to say that war is not the answer. U.S. intervention and provocation of a new cold war is not the way to solve and address the crises facing the planet right now. We need cooperation between the two biggest economies in the world right now, the U.S. and China. More than anything, that's what working people across the world need. And you can follow us at codepink.org slash China or on our Twitter at China not enemy. You can also check out our most recent action to urge your senator to vote no on the anti-China Strategic Competition Act, which would increase funding for the military, the U.S. military in the Pacific against Asia or against China, excuse me. Thank you so much to everyone for taking time out of your Friday to be here. You can always reach out to me at Madison at codepink.org. Thanks again, Dr. Xu. Thank you so much, Madison. Thanks for all the work.