michael barbaro

From the New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today, the story of one man whose family has been detained in Chinese government camps — what his efforts to free them are revealing about the global reach of China’s surveillance. Paul Mozur with part two of our series. It’s Tuesday, May 7th. So, Paul, yesterday you told us about how China is using its surveillance technology in this Northwest region of China to control the minority population who lives there — the Uighurs. Give us again a picture of what life is like there for the Uighurs.

paul mozur

So, first thing to kind of realize about China and this region called Xinjiang is that most of the 1.4 billion people who live in China are ethnically Chinese, but there are a number of small minorities. And one of the larger minorities is this group called the Uighurs. There’s about 11, 12 million of them. They’re a Muslim minority — they’re much closer to sort of Central Asia in a lot of ways culturally than they are to Chinese culturally. And, so, there has naturally been some cultural clashes around that and frictions over the years. And, in particular, one of the things that’s happened is the Chinese have sort of systematically moved a large number of Han Chinese into this region, trying to sort of turn what is a Muslim minority into something that’s closer to the Chinese — so, to kind of eradicate, in a way, the sort of markers of Uighur cultural identity. And that’s created a lot of tension — more pitched, violent clashes. And, so, today over the past few years what we’ve seen installed is just this incredibly sophisticated set of personal and technical surveillance. So, you walk down a street in city of Kashgar, where we were, you’ll hit a checkpoint maybe every 200 yards. And they’ll stop people, they’ll scan their IDs, they’ll force them to take a photo for facial recognition, and then they’ll move on. But then 200 yards later, you run into another one, and then there’s police everywhere. And then you have cameras hanging from every corner. And then within communities themselves, you have informants that have been developed by the police as well — people who are sort of encouraged to rat out their neighbors or inform on them. And, so, all of that just creates a real sense of paranoia and an almost unprecedented combination of technological and human surveillance that sort of cows the population to follow what the government wants it to do.

michael barbaro

And when you’re reporting there, are you able to actually talk to Uighurs? Because it’s hard to imagine from what you’re saying with every aspect of their life being surveilled that they could safely or wisely speak to someone like you from the West.

paul mozur

Right. And the answer’s no. We were in the city of Kashgar, and we were followed by a secret police team of about seven. And, so, every time you leave the hotel — there’s only one way out of the hotel, because the rest of it is surrounded by barbed wire — you have seven secret police following you. And if you talk to anybody, they take down their ID information. So, if you buy a vegetable from a vendor, they take down their information. I could probably have gone for a jog and lost these guys, but even if you lose them, there are so many cameras around that you can’t be certain that you’re away from the gaze of the state. And, so, it’s just too risky to talk to a single person in a meaningful way there. So, all you can kind of do is just watch and observe and wander about the city.

michael barbaro

Because, to talk to someone is to pretty much guarantee that you will ensure they’re in trouble.

paul mozur

Yes.

michael barbaro

So, how do you go about really understanding what’s happening here? There’s only so much that can be known when you’re walking around being trailed by seven members of a secret police force.

paul mozur

Right. So, we read a lot of documents — the police write studies about how to control populations. There’s all kinds of procurement documents about buying up technology to put into these places. And then one of the other things we do is there’s an increasingly large amount of people have fled to other countries because of what’s been going on — or people who were outside the country can’t return. And, so, what you end up with is these large populations of Uighurs living in Istanbul and Kazakhstan and in the Persian Gulf — and in the United States — who can give us some sense of what’s going on there through their own family networks and networks of friends. And, so, I found one man in northern Virginia, his name is Ferkat Jawdat and we sat down kind of in a strip mall outside a Starbucks. He’s sort of in his late 20s, smoking quite a lot — kind of chain smoking — and you can tell that the sort of traumas of what’s gone on to his family have really affected him. He said he wants to take a stand, and somebody needs to stand up and say this, and, so, he spoke with us and told us his story.

michael barbaro

And what’s the story that Ferkat told you?

ferkat jawdat So, 2006 January, my dad came to U.S.

paul mozur

So, basically, his father applied for asylum in the United States.

ferkat jawdat So, once his case was approved, he applied for the visa for the whole family.

paul mozur

And they’re granted the ability to come over by the United States government.

ferkat jawdat So, I was in [INAUDIBLE], and I came in 2011 January, and then my sisters came and then my brother, he came.

paul mozur

His whole family is able to come over except for his mother. His mother, for some reason, the Chinese authorities won’t give her her passport.

ferkat jawdat We tried all the legal ways — all different legal ways to get my mom a Chinese passport. And then my mom, she talked to all different levels of government offices. [INAUDIBLE]

michael barbaro

So, she can’t leave?

paul mozur

She cannot leave, and they keep changing the reasoning. They’ll say, well, you need to do this and this. She hasn’t filed this piece of paper so if you file this, then she can get it.

ferkat jawdat Like whenever they had some documents, we just sent them. We never did ask something, we just give them.

paul mozur

They file and then they say, oh, but you also failed to do this. This is sort of one of the ways they sort of — you can get killed by bureaucracy in China, and so it became clear they weren’t going to give her one. And so the mother is separated from her children and from her husband.

ferkat jawdat It’s really hard. She wakes up by herself. She cooks, she eats, she sleeps by herself. So, she was really depressed.

paul mozur

So, she then begins this 10 years of living a more solitary life. The only way they can talk to her — and they talk to her very regularly every day — is over electronic communications.

ferkat jawdat I used to call her sometimes twice a day in the morning and at night. It’s just normal conversation like between a mom and a son — how we miss each other, and then especially on those special days like her birthday or my birthday or new year or some holidays. We just wish that the next holiday, or the next special day, next birthday, we’re going to celebrate together in the U.S.

paul mozur

But this is also at the time when the crackdown really picks up and checkpoints double and then triple and the cameras start to appear and there’s more and more informants going on, there’s more sort of prohibition of Uighur culture. And then in 2017, they get a message.

ferkat jawdat 2017 in November — I think it’s mid-November — she told me one time on the vidchat that she was going to school.

paul mozur

She basically says, I have to go study.

michael barbaro

I have to go study.

paul mozur

I have to go study. It means that she is going away to a camp. The Chinese say that these camps are about reeducation, about teaching people to learn new trades. But in reality from what we hear and what human rights groups say, they’re much closer to almost concentration camps. You know about 10 percent of the Uighur population has been disappeared into these camps from what we know — about a million people. You have people spirited away to these places, often at night. When they get there, they’re made to sing patriotic songs and hear lectures about Chinese Communist Party ideology, write self-criticism, sometimes do compulsory exercise; other stories about abuse from prison guards and guards yelling at people. So, if you act out of line, maybe you’ll get sent to a camp or maybe your mother will get sent to a camp.

ferkat jawdat So, she went. And we were scared.

paul mozur

It’s not clear why she’s been taken away, but she has been.

ferkat jawdat We were worried, but we weren’t able to tell anyone.

paul mozur

But then, a few weeks later, she comes back out of the camps. And when he gets her on the phone —

ferkat jawdat Many times, she doesn’t say a word. She just opens a video and then cries there.

paul mozur

All she can kind of do is cry.

ferkat jawdat I can see the fear in her eyes, and then I can feel that there is something that she wanted to tell me, but she wasn’t able to.

michael barbaro

And why can’t she tell him anything?

paul mozur

We don’t know for sure, but one of the things we’ve heard about these camps is that when you get out, you’re either made to promise that you won’t talk or you’re made to sign something saying you won’t talk. And I think the people are aware that their connections to any family that might be overseas could get them in further trouble. And, so, you know it’s one thing to be locked away in one of these places, but then it’s a whole other thing to then realize that once you’re out, if you talk to your family, that could put you back. And, you know even worse, you can’t process this stuff by telling them. It’s a sort of level of control that almost boggles the mind, because it’s not just physical, it’s emotional and it’s about your relationships themselves. And I think that’s one of the real scary things about this. So, this goes on for a few months. He has this more strained, distant relationship with his mother. But —

ferkat jawdat February 6, she sent me the last message saying that she is going to the school again.

paul mozur

She disappears a second time.

ferkat jawdat She was crying. And at the end, she said that she doesn’t know when she can come back or if she can come back. That’s the last time I heard her voice. So, on March 5, 2018, a month after my mother is arrested, five people from my father’s side — like five people they round up in one day and then sent to camps.

paul mozur

And, at this point, his family in the United States huddles together and says, well, what are we going to do? And they decide to wait because they don’t know. It’s been now more than a year. You get occasional hints of what’s happening. In one case, he got a message from a police officer.

ferkat jawdat On April, I got that video from my aunt, which was sent to me by a Chinese police on WeChat. And then my aunt is saying how much she missed all of us and that my mom is doing O.K. in the school. She is studying, but my mom, she needs medicines.

paul mozur

Saying to send money to support his mother, because his mother has no family network.

ferkat jawdat And then because her two younger brothers, they were all in the camp already, so there was no one that can provide that financial support. So, I sent the money to my aunt using Western Union. I sent the transaction ID to the Chinese guy that sent me the video and asked him to tell my aunt that I sent the money so she can pick it up. I didn’t hear anything. So, after three months, I had to take the money back.

paul mozur

In another case — and this just shows you how wild this situation is — he got on a dating app, jumped to the local area — because the dating app you can go wherever you want geographically — so, he plopped himself into his home town on the dating app and found somebody he knew and asked that person, like, hey, do you know what happened to my family?

michael barbaro

Did it work?

paul mozur

I think he got a little bit of an indication of what was happening, but not a ton of information.

michael barbaro

But, presumably, even that kind of interaction might put the person he contacted at risk.

paul mozur

Exactly. And I think he was desperate enough that he was just willing to try anything.

ferkat jawdat So, I couldn’t take it anymore. I said, I got to do something. So, I started meeting with local government officials.

paul mozur

In the United States.

ferkat jawdat Yes.

paul mozur

He’s an American.

michael barbaro

My family is literally being taken from me.

paul mozur

Right, right. What can I do here as an American?

ferkat jawdat So, I met with the former congresswoman from Virginia, Barbara Comstock’s, office. She sent a letter to the Chinese ambassador here in the U.S. and she sent a letter to the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the U.S. ambassador in China asking about my mom and then asked the Chinese government to release her as well as other Uighurs. We haven’t got any response from the Chinese embassy yet.

paul mozur

And then he starts talking to media, too. So he reaches out — he talks to The Atlantic, he talks to BuzzFeed.

ferkat jawdat I gave talks, I gave speeches at rallies or university panel discussions.

paul mozur

And, eventually, he talks to some French press who actually go to Xinjiang and try to track down some of his family.

ferkat jawdat I heard from some other people in the same city that my grandmother and my aunt, they were harassed by the Chinese government as well too.

paul mozur

His family is being threatened each time he speaks out. When he talks, the police sort of go and threaten the family members.

ferkat jawdat And my other relatives from my father’s side, they were brought to the police station, and even showed my pictures to them and asked if they know me, if they still contacted me.

paul mozur

The police officer is flashing a picture of him — his photo in Xinjiang and telling his family members if this guy talks again — if he keeps talking, well, there’s going to be more problems. So, he needs to stop.

ferkat jawdat After I became so public, some of them asked me to delete their pictures from my social accounts — Facebook, Instagram.

paul mozur

People are unfriending him on Facebook, within social media.

ferkat jawdat I’m a kind of a social guy. I have lots of friends. Many of them are really close. I’m kind of becoming alone, but what’s my choice?

paul mozur

And, so, then.

ferkat jawdat Last month, we met with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in D.C.

paul mozur

He gets a meeting with Secretary of State Pompeo, and this is a real high profile moment. I mean, this is real news.

michael barbaro

Wow.

ferkat jawdat So, we met, and then we explained that it’s really destroying our lives here in the U.S. and how we asked the U.S. government since they got the upper hand on the trade talks to ask China’s government to shut down the camps and let them release our family members and let them come to U.S.

paul mozur

And this meeting with Pompeo should be a triumph politically, but guess what happens just after that?

michael barbaro

What happens?

ferkat jawdat My uncle and aunt were transferred to another city to the prison for seven or eight years interns.

paul mozur

The family members are transferred from a camp to a prison where conditions are probably far worse.

michael barbaro

So, his efforts to draw attention to this, which are succeeding, they’re actually resulting in his family being punished in the worst way possible.

paul mozur

Exactly. And, in fact, in some ways by engaging with it, he’s causing that to happen to his family.

michael barbaro

And, yet, Paul, you spoke to him after all this happened, which suggests that he is still speaking out about this.

paul mozur

Exactly. And it’s —

michael barbaro

Why?

paul mozur

He was clearly very torn up about it. I mean, this is a man who is clearly beset by a lot of anxiety. He smoked six or seven cigarettes in the course of the hour that we were talking. The thing he told me that I thought was really powerful is he said, you know —

ferkat jawdat I don’t think I can see my mom alive in this world. But, as a Muslim, I believe that next life, so the next life, I want to be able to say that I did something to protect her, to save her, my people.

paul mozur

Talking is what’s right here. We need to get this out to the world.

ferkat jawdat I started my campaign, my activities because of my mom. In the beginning, I used to ask about my mom, but the more I went this way, it’s more becoming towards a general Uighur.

paul mozur

And, so, we finished up. He sort of demonstrated a bit of this sort of Uighur kindness that the region’s famous for. He offered to drive me to my next meeting which was like 45 minutes away and totally unnecessary. So, I sort of politely told him, no, no, no, I was fine. And then we parted ways — back to his life in the suburbs of Virginia.

michael barbaro

How many people like Ferkat do you think there are at this point, given the immense pressure that China is exerting on these members of the Uighur community — even abroad?

paul mozur

I mean, thousands. Every Uighur who’s living abroad most likely has some relative or connection to somebody who’s in a camp at this point. For all intents and purposes for these people, they’ve disappeared from their lives. It’s funny that when you talk to people, sometimes they sort of talk about, well, I’m not sure if they’re still alive or not. It’s the equivalent of death if you just no longer hear from them. And, so, oftentimes, they wonder — well, has my family member died or not? And then you have whole cities that aren’t really sure about the fate of the people around them. In that context, waiting in line at a checkpoint, not knowing if an alarm is going to go off, watching a policeman kind of eyeing him not sure if he’s going to come and stop you, going under a camera, talking to a neighbor who could be an informant — all of these things become fraught and things that are sort of stressful. I mean, it’s an exertion of control at just such a fundamental level I think it’s hard to comprehend until you really think through the consequences of, if I tell my kid something and they repeat it in class, it’s possible I will disappear and they will go to an orphanage. And we have examples of that happening where a parent talks about the Quran to their kid and then the kid brings it up in school and then the family disappears. These are the kinds of things that have been just fundamentally altered by these tactics. And it’s just kind of mind boggling.

michael barbaro

I guess what I meant is of those thousands of Uighurs living overseas like Ferkat, how many are still speaking out, given the consequences of speaking out?

paul mozur

Some — not a ton, but I would say more are worried about talking than are talking. I mean, Ferkat is absolutely in the minority here.

michael barbaro

But when we spoke yesterday, it was all about the surveillance state inside China and how it so effectively suppresses the Uighurs there. But this system, as you’re describing it now, also seems very effective at suppressing the Uighurs who have left China, which is a very strange achievement to be able to accomplish that in both of those worlds.

paul mozur

Yeah, and I think about those connections going overseas — that gives you a new lever that you can use within populations outside of your country. And Chinese authorities have been very effective at using that and knowing that, yeah, you can use a Skype call to say hi to your grandmother, but you can also use a Skype call to threaten the life of somebody’s grandmother. And it’s the same technology with a very different use — the sort of staggering power that it allows you to have and the way that it sort of just plows through borders and gives you that ability to reach outside of your country and extend what is effectively sort of a prison state to —

michael barbaro

Those outside the prison.

paul mozur

Yeah, to America. You have people living in suburbs of Washington, D.C. who are, in some ways, being controlled by choices being made 6,000 miles away in Xinjiang.

michael barbaro

As I listen to this, I have been astonished that this story isn’t more widely known and talked about in the United States. And I wonder if you think that’s in part because of what a successful job China has done in making the telling of this story so dangerous.

paul mozur

Yeah, I think absolutely. I think if you had more people who could speak out, if you had more protesters, if we were able to go in and do more reporting where we could talk to people on the ground, where we could go see these camps.

michael barbaro

Profile them, make them real.

paul mozur

Anything. And they have brought people in, but they do it as a propaganda exercise. So, they bring people into a camp that’s been set up in a kind of Potemkin way to make it seem like everything is O.K. And then they have their own media which they used to send out videos of camps to make them seem like lovely places to learn a new profession, and that gets spread around, because that’s the only images anybody has. And that is part of what I think is creating the muted effect here. But I don’t think we should neglect the other side of this, which is the money and the diplomatic power and influence that China has created and developed over the past decade or two decades. In general, we’ve seen is that countries like Saudi Arabia, countries like Malaysia, countries like Kazakhstan — the places that would be the natural advocates for this just have not come out in a forceful way —

michael barbaro

Because of their financial relationships to China.

paul mozur

Financial relationships, diplomatic relationships.

michael barbaro

You’re saying the parts of the Muslim world that you would expect to be absolutely horrified by this, part of the reason that they are not speaking out is because they have deals, perhaps including deals for surveillance equipment with China.

paul mozur

Absolutely. And I think it even goes further than that, because it’s the way that China structures its diplomatic relationships. China basically will tolerate no dissent. If somebody protests an American action, you’re not going to cut them off from the international world or immediately pull all American loans and American aid necessarily. But, in China, we see that kind of thing happening over and over again. And, so, I think countries have learned, and they know that you are not to go against them on these sorts of topics. And you just have to stay quiet.

michael barbaro

Paul, how does this end in your mind? Does it end with the Chinese government succeeding in the idea that seems to be behind all this — to make the Uighurs more or less indistinguishable from the ethnic Chinese?

paul mozur

It’s hard to see how they achieve that goal in any kind of short or medium-term. I mean, I think we know pretty obviously that if you pull people into camps and berate them about their culture and shove propaganda down their throats and have them write criticisms of themselves, they’re going to sort of retreat to an even deeper set of convictions about who they are and what they stand for. But, at the same time, if you cannot read a Quran, you can’t grow out a beard, you can’t go to a mosque — if you can’t be yourself in your own homeland, then does it matter? Haven’t they already won anyway even if, inside, people do kind of still carry their Uighur identity with them? And, if you do that long enough, maybe you have two generations that are angry at you, but if you can keep it up long enough, then maybe people just forget. Then maybe it stops existing.

michael barbaro

Thank you, Paul.

paul mozur

Thank you. What is your favorite Uighur instrument?

ferkat jawdat Dutar.

paul mozur

Dutar?

ferkat jawdat I don’t know how to play it.

paul mozur

Do you like Abdurehim Heyit?

ferkat jawdat Yes.

paul mozur

Beautiful, right?

ferkat jawdat It is beautiful. archived recording [SINGING NON-ENGLISH]

michael barbaro

Despite the Trump administration’s decision not to confront China over its detention of Uighurs, a few days ago, a senior official in the U.S. Department of Defense accused China of operating what he called concentration camps. Asked by a reporter why he chose that phrase, the official, Randall Schriver, said, quote, “What we understand to be the magnitude of the detention and what the goals are of the Chinese government and their own public comments make that a very, I think, appropriate description.” We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording You can see this hole in the ground where one of the Palestinian rockets hit right next to a house, completely destroying the wall here and pushing shrapnel.

michael barbaro

On Monday, Israel and Gaza reached a tentative cease-fire after days of combat that killed 22 Palestinians, including militants and children and four Israeli civilians.

archived recording Rocket here killed the owner of this house. So, when rockets come into neighborhoods like this, it certainly, absolutely rattles the nerves.

michael barbaro