TRIPP is more than a photo-op or a vanity project. The South Caucasus, particularly since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has become an area of critical strategic value as a corridor between East and West and a new arena of superpower competition. “Vance is not well known for flying around the world just for fun,” said Svante Cornell, Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Stockholm. “The U.S. is serious about the TRIPP Corridor and they want everybody in the region to know that.” 

Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars over disputed Nagorno-Karabakh since the late-1980s, as the Soviet Union collapsed. It has been a brutal, society-shaping conflict, followed in 2023 by Azerbaijan’s rapid takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh and the flight of nearly the entire ethnic Armenian population.

Russia, though formally cast as a mediator, spent years manipulating the conflict: arming both sides, managing ceasefires and preventing resolution in a familiar imperial tactic later perfected in Ukraine: manufacturing and freezing instability until it could be turned into full-scale war on Moscow’s terms. But Trump changed the narrative by brokering a peace that has continued to hold. In December, officials from both countries discussed “lasting peace” and a “joint future” at a summit in the Qatari capital Doha. Armenia and Azerbaijan are also deep in discussion about integrating their energy systems. And Washington is now trying to lock that peace into concrete: rails, roads, and fiber that physically re-route the region away from Russian and Iranian gatekeeping.

This, wrote Trump on Truth Social recently, “was a nasty War… but now we have peace and prosperity.” For once, the self-congratulation isn’t entirely empty. Trump – who has confused Armenia for Albania and talked about settling its war with “Aber-baijan” in Davos just weeks ago – can legitimately take credit for making geopolitical gains in what Russia considered its backyard. 

The US president has repeatedly quoted Vladimir Putin as telling him: “‘I cannot believe you got this war settled’... cause it’s his territory.” That line matters because the South Caucasus is to Russia what the Caribbean Basin and the Panama “backyard” once was to the United States: a strategic near-abroad where outside powers aren’t supposed to build permanent leverage. 

Hemispheric defense, the Trump administration has made clear when it comes to Latin America, is at the heart of its defense strategy and that it expects other superpowers to be similarly focused on their spheres of influence. Thus, Russia’s inability to be a reliable ally to Armenia will be seen as weakness to be preyed upon by rival powers. Armenia is now even talking to Turkey, a historical adversary, about opening their shared border and establishing diplomatic relations.

Still, Armenia remains a member of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union and has its railway networks handled by Russia’s RZhD national rail operator — a factor Russia tried to use in an attempt to get involved with TRIPP. “Regarding the 'Trump Road' project, as it's being called, we confirm our readiness to explore possible options for our involvement,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova said in January. Armenia’s Parliament Speaker shot down the possibility as “absurd.”

As for Azerbaijan, Trump said on Truth Social that part of Vance’s visit to Baku would be dedicated to “the sale of Made in the U.S.A. Defense Equipment,” a prospect that won’t please Moscow.

Georgia, once considered Washington's closest partner in the South Caucasus, is notably absent from JD Vance’s itinerary and being left behind is as consequential as being included.

For two decades, Georgia’s power and growing prosperity came from being the corridor: the place where pipelines, highways, and rail lines had to pass if Europe wanted Caspian energy without Russian control. The Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline was the signature project of that era, an “East–West energy corridor” literally running through Georgia. TRIPP threatens to redraw that map. A corridor through southern Armenia that becomes the new headline route doesn’t just “leave Georgia behind” — it means Georgia loses its most significant geopolitical bargaining chip because transit was the card it could play with Washington, Brussels, Ankara and Baku.

Now, as Washington invests in a new flagship corridor, countries like Georgia that fall outside it are forced to hedge. Over the past decade, Georgia has deepened ties with China through trade deals, cultural exchanges, and visa-free travel, while simultaneously sliding back toward Russia despite Moscow’s 2008 invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Under the Georgian Dream government, repressive legislation and violent crackdowns on protest have widened the gap with the EU and the U.S. Georgian prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze has appealed directly to Trump for a reset, but TRIPP makes clear where Washington’s priorities now lie. With Azerbaijan and Armenia at the heart of a new U.S.-backed route, influence in the South Caucasus is reorganizing around infrastructure — and power is flowing along it.

TRIPP, even if it exists just on paper for now, indirectly challenges the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, a network of railways, ports, pipelines, and trade corridors aimed at boosting international trade under Beijing’s leadership. It enables the moving of goods while bypassing Russia and, where possible, Iran — an approach that became more urgent after 2022. And it undermines China, which has been busy paving routes to Iran. Both countries have been in intense contact with Central Asian countries and last summer inaugurated a railway route that connects China and Iran through Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. 

The South Caucasus is just a small piece in a puzzle that fits together over 140 Belt and Road countries — and Cornell is skeptical about the scale of China’s ambition versus its actual investment. “Belt and Road maps include a lot of infrastructure in this part of the world that has nothing to do with China,” he told me. “Most everything that's been built in the region has been built as a result of the funding from the countries in the region, not by Chinese funds.“  In keeping with this strategy, a fully operational TRIPP might be seen by China as a benefit, a way to trade while avoiding unreliable maritime routes. But researchers in China say that the problem will be if TRIPP “becomes securitized or if Washington leverages its control for geopolitical influence.” And with U.S. foreign policy increasingly waged as a battle with China for resources and global influence, TRIPP could become a threat to Chinese influence in the region. 

Vice President Vance’s visit is a sign of sustained U.S. engagement in the region and a sign that Trump’s attention has not waned after a ceremonial peace agreement in Washington.

The simplest way to read TRIPP is as a 27-mile project with an outsized consequence: it reorders who controls the “land bridge” between Europe and Central Asia and it tells every capital nearby who Washington thinks matters. 

And China will have to prepare for an economic standoff in terrain it once assumed was ripe for Chinese dominance. Russia, meanwhile, finds itself on slippery ground, no longer the indispensable broker it once was in its immediate neighborhood. TRIPP also adds an unexpected edge to the Ukraine-shaped narrative of a Trump administration willing to accommodate Moscow at every turn, suggesting instead a relationship that is less uniform and more selectively disruptive than it first appears.

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The post A Trump corridor through the Caucasus appeared first on Coda Story.

The first two rounds, which began last month, have seen the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the party of the military junta, grab a substantial lead, putting it on course to form the next, notionally civilian, government. Only 131 of the country’s 330 townships are holding the elections in full, a further 118 townships are holding partial polls in areas the military controls, while polls in 65 townships have been canceled or suspended because of fighting. Opposition parties, including Aung Saan Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, which won the last election in a landslide, have been forcibly dissolved. Criticism of the election has been criminalized.

ASEAN, the 11-nation regional bloc of which Myanmar is still officially a part, has said it will not recognize election results. The United Nations said the election “seems nearly certain to further ingrain insecurity, fear and polarization throughout the country.” And the European Union described the election as a “sham” before it even began. But Myanmar’s military junta does have powerful support. China has propped up the military regime in exchange for access to resources, and the Myanmar election was only announced after discussions between Xi Jinping and Min Aung Hlaing. Election observers include officials from Belarus, Russia, India and Nicaragua. And in September, Hlaing visited Moscow, signing agreements to cooperate on nuclear energy and space exploration, and to protect each other from international justice. 

This month, Myanmar’s military was forced to defend its conduct in the Hague, as hearings began at the International Court of Justice where it stands accused of of perpetrating a long-running genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority. Already, by 2018, as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Myanmar, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had described the situation as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” In 2019, The Gambia approached the ICJ to file a lawsuit against Myanmar, the first filed on behalf of a persecuted people by a third party. The hearings, which have only just started and could take years to conclude, will nonetheless still have implications and set judicial precedents for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the ICJ.

Not that it has stopped Myanmar’s military from continuing to use methods, since deposing the democratically elected government in 2021, such as “arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, and indiscriminate attacks on civilians”  that Human Rights Watch said amounted to “war crimes.” Even now, the country is embroiled in bloody conflict. Over 170 armed resistance groups have coalesced to seize 42% of the country. Heavy bombing and artillery fire are commonplace throughout the country. Over 3,5 million people have been displaced into the likes of Thailand and India, 7,700 have been killed by the military, and over 30,300 arrested of which 630 are children.

A local medic from the mountainous Chin State, large swathes of which are rebel-held, told me she had been detained by Myanmar military forces while giving medical assistance to rebels. “My ankles and wrists were chained,” she said, “and wooden blocks were used as restraints.” She was beaten and threatened with sexual assault and said she could smell the dead bodies of other detainees.

This is the backdrop in which Myanmar goes to polls for the final phase of the elections. Despite ASEAN’s rejection of the results, China insists elections are a way out of the civil war and towards stability. In a recent column in the “South China Morning Post”, an analyst argued that “China is the only country with the clout, experience and contacts to talk and make deals with all sides.” Myanmar is a critical supplier of rare earths to China.

Given the transactional foreign policy that has become a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States, it’s perhaps not surprising that the White House too has been warming to Myanmar’s military government. As the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela and acquisitive, imperial interest in both Greenland and Canada show, all relations with foreign countries are seen exclusively in terms of economic and strategic value. Normalizing relations even with Myanmar’s authoritarian regime would be palatable if it delivered access to rare earths and caused unease in Beijing.

The United States, through USAID, played a strong supporting role in Myanmar’s elections in 2015 and 2020 and in 2024 warned about the deteriorating “human rights crisis” in the country. But in July last year, Myanmar’s military leader Hlaing sent Donald Trump a letter complimenting his “strong leadership.” It was a response to a letter from Washington outlining the tariff imposed on exports from Myanmar, a communication that the military junta treated as acknowledgement of its status as the legitimate government. The Trump administration then appeared interested in a dialogue with the Myanmar military junta about access to rare earths. Just weeks later, in what the Trump administration said was a coincidence, it lifted sanctions on individuals and companies connected to the junta.

Also in July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a cable to U.S. diplomats advising them to refrain from criticizing foreign elections as “consistent with the administration’s emphasis on national sovereignty.” And in November, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that Myanmar had “made notable progress in governance and stability” and had “plans for free and fair elections.” It was a remarkable statement of faith in a junta accused of genocide and of overthrowing a democratically elected civilian government, but consistent with the Trump administration’s prioritizing of transactional partnerships over moral principles. From January 26, Myanmar nationals will no longer be eligible for temporary protected status in the U.S., with the Trump administration citing the elections as evidence that Myanmar was safe.

With Russia, China and the U.S. in the Myanmar military’s corner, the implication is clear. The new Great Game is the global tussle for minerals and resources, making Venezuela, Greenland, Canada and Myanmar, among others, the new spheres of superpower hostility.

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The post The Yangon playbook: Why military rule is being legitimized appeared first on Coda Story.

China has been the dominant force at COP30. It has made an effective case to be the global leader in the fight to avert the climate crisis in the absence of the United States, which not only did not attend the conference but is in the process of withdrawing altogether from the Paris Agreement of 2015, the international climate treaty. The U.S., which also withdrew from the agreement in Donald Trump’s first term, before rejoining when Joe Biden became president, now stands alongside Iran, Yemen and Libya as the only countries to not be party to the treaty. Country delegations and even climate activists have been loath to criticise China which dominates the climate agenda as the world’s largest emitter but also by far the largest producer of green energy, both in terms of generating it and building the technology to generate it.

The country’s enormous green energy industrial complex is largely located in Xinjiang (or East Turkestan, as advocates for Uyghur independence call it) and Tibet. Both are at the center of renewable energy expansion, lithium and mineral mining, and clean tech supply chains. In Xinjiang, the Chinese media celebrates the efficiency with which the government “transforms deserts into a renewable energy goldmine.” Renewable energies, particularly solar, are critical to Chinese, and presumably global, plans to produce the electricity demanded by AI computing and data centers. China controls over 80% of the solar panel industry supply chain, from raw materials through to finished products. But there is, say government departments in both the U.S. and U.K., credible evidence that modern slavery and forced labor play a large role in China’s dominant clean tech position. 

Tibet meanwhile is a major source for critical minerals, including the lithium that helps China dominate the production of batteries, electric vehicles and copper. China has also approved the construction of the world’s largest hydroelectric dam in Tibet, in a seismically active zone. The effect, claims the Stockholm-based Institute for Security & Development Policy, is that the Tibetan Plateau is “warming at more than twice the global average: glaciers are retreating, permafrost is thawing, grasslands are degrading, and the rhythms of water flow that support life across much of Asia are being disrupted.”    

When approached, I’ve found that major global climate and environmental civil society organizations, nearly all based in the global north, are hesitant or unwilling to speak critically about China and completely silent when it comes to Uyghur and Tibetan human rights. Some Tibetan refugees, based outside of Tibet, have told me they’ve been excluded when trying to engage with climate justice organizations and networks. Last year, when over 1000 Tibetans were arrested after demonstrating against a planned hydropower dam in Dege, there was little international comment. And earlier this year, when the jail sentence of Tibetan environmental activist, A-Nya Sengdran was extended, there was yet more silence. You’d be hard-pressed to find even soft criticism of China from nearly all the major global climate or environmental groups. Perhaps it’s because global organizations like Greenpeace, World Resources Institute, WWF, and Conservation International, have offices or staff in China and speaking out on human rights could lead to Chinese staff being investigated or detained. But even groups with no China presence are largely quiet on rights issues.

At COP30, China basked in a diplomatic victory. André Corrêa do Lago, the Brazilian diplomat in charge of organizing the summit, said “China is coming up with solutions that are for everyone, not just China.” As countries push to agree to a “roadmap” at COP30 to phase out fossil fuels, they will have to turn to China for the technology to switch to renewable sources. This means everyone, including countries that might otherwise see China as a geopolitical rival. For instance, Britain’s Ministry of Defence has warned employees not to discuss sensitive information while they were using Chinese-made electric vehicles. The “MoD needs electric vehicles,” the Global Times were quick to point out, to “hit net zero targets” and so needs China. Britain’s anxiety then, the paper argued, is less about security and more about “China’s technological leadership.”  

“China gets it,” said California governor Gavin Newsom, one of the few American political leaders to go to COP30. “America is toast competitively, if we don't wake up to what the hell they're doing in this space.” He wasn’t talking about the climate crisis. “It’s not about electric power,” Newsom said, “it’s about economic power.” As the U.S. turns its back on the climate crisis, it becomes inevitable that  the world will continue to ignore the human rights and ecological abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang on which a Chinese-fueled global green transition is built.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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“They were not necessarily ignorant or dumb,” is how Sorkin describes it. “They might know, or guess, that an investment pool was manipulating the price. But if they got the timing right, even a total outsider could capture a bit of the upside before the pool ‘pulled the plug’ and dumped its shares back on the market.”

It’s a weird truth about pyramid schemes: they’re actually very profitable if you get into them early enough, and no one knows when the money’s going to stop flowing so people keep investing even after they know it’s a con. There are very many places in the book when it felt like it could be about 2025 – the importance of murky lending to supporting asset prices; the corruption of the political class; the arrogance of the strutting business tycoons; the insistence that predatory practices were actually “democratising finance” and so on.

Above all, I feel a constant melancholy over how none of the foot soldiers in this campaign had any idea about the size of the wave rearing over them, and how it would sweep away everything for a generation. The subtitle of the book refers to the 1929 catastrophe as “the greatest crash in Wall Street history”, and I worry that it might before too long be relegated to being the second greatest. Buy the book, that’s my advice, while you’ve got some money to spare.

So anyway, to distract myself from the depressing nature of my historical musings, I listened to the latest episode of The Laundry podcast, which is a thoughtful and in-depth interview with Elisa de Andro Madazo and Giles Thomson, respectively the president and vice-president of the Financial Action Task Force, the world’s standard-setter on fighting money laundering. 

They are articulate and clearly both care and think deeply about their institution, as well as about their roles within it. They expressed careful and coherent opinions on the need to bring fairness and efficiency and effectiveness to a struggle that has (my words, not theirs) too often lacked all three. 

But, in a world in which cryptocurrencies are sweeping aside controls on finance, the United States has given up on corporate transparency, criminal groups are driving sanctions evasion, Chinese money laundering gangs are gaining ever-greater influence, and Western laws are failing to tackle kleptocrats, everything they said just seemed so irrelevant. Once again the historical parallel for the FATF was an institution in the interwar years. The League of Nations was a bureaucracy that was well-meaning, tireless, thoughtful to the end, but completely ineffective when faced with challenges from powerful nations. 

Laundering drug money

I mentioned Chinese money laundering organisations (CLMOs) above, and I’d like to draw your attention to this excellent new paper, from venerable British think tank RUSI, about their scope, approach and significance. The growth of Chinese gangs, and their rapid takeover of much of money laundering conducted for organised criminal groups (OCGs) over the last decade or so, is a remarkable and ill-understood phenomenon.

The secret of their popularity is not hard to understand, as the paper makes clear: “all the profit is made in China and therefore CMLOs can afford to offer their services to OCGs in the West for free, or close to free”. Traditional money launderers were charging Western criminals perhaps 15 percent to move money, so it is clear why OCGs would prefer to take their business to someone who’ll do it for nothing.

The CLMOs’ techniques are based around transferring value globally outside the banking system (i.e. by moving luxury goods, commodities, cryptocurrencies, etc) which means that much of the compliance system created under pressure from the FATF is essentially useless in detecting their activities. 

But why have they been able to launder money so cheaply when their Western rivals could not? 

I think the more important point to take from this is that they have been able to create their system because of restrictions imposed in both China and the West. Chinese capital controls have made it hard for wealthy citizens of the People’s Republic to get their money out of the country. Meanwhile Western drug laws have created a huge cash-rich criminal economy. It is by connecting this demand for cash (from Chinese people outside China) and supply of cash (from drug gangs in the West) that CMLOs have been able to corner the market. 

This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I’m going to offer it anyway: if you need another reason to take drug supplies out of the hands of criminals, CLMOs are it. Prohibition hasn’t just failed on its own terms, it has created the liquidity for a vast underground economy being exploited by our geopolitical rivals.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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The post ‘Iceberg, right ahead’ & the rise of Chinese laundries appeared first on Coda Story.

But perhaps the real shock should be that Silicon Valley was shocked at all.

For years, Silicon Valley and its cheerleaders spread the narrative of inevitable American dominance of the artificial intelligence industry. From the "Why China Can't Innovate" cover story in the Harvard Business Review to the breathless reporting on billion-dollar investments in AI, U.S. media spent years building an image of insurmountable Western technological superiority. Even this week, when Wired reported on the "shock, awe, and questions" DeepSeek had sparked, the persistent subtext seemed to be that technological efficiency from unexpected quarters was somehow fundamentally illegitimate. 

“In the West, our sense of exceptionalism is truly our greatest weakness,” says data analyst Christopher Wylie, author of MindF*ck, who famously blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica in 2017. 

That arrogance was on full display just last year when OpenAI's Sam Altman, speaking to an audience in India, declared: "It's totally hopeless to compete with us. You can try and it's your job to try but I believe it is hopeless." He was dismissing the possibility that teams outside Silicon Valley could build substantial AI systems with limited resources.

There are still questions over whether DeepSeek had access to more computing power than it is admitting. Scale AI chief executive Alexandr Wong said in a recent interview that the Chinese company had access to thousands more of the highest grade chips than people know about, despite U.S. export controls.  What's clear, though, is that Altman didn't anticipate that a competitor would simply refuse to play by the rules he was trying to set and would instead reimagine the game itself.

By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight. While companies like OpenAI have poured hundreds of billions into massive data centers—with the Stargate project alone pledging an “initial investment” of $100 billion—DeepSeek demonstrated a fundamentally different path to innovation.

"For the first time in public, they've provided an efficient way to train reasoning models," explains Thomas Cao, professor of technology policy at Tufts University. "The technical detail is that they've come up with a way to do reinforcement learning without supervision. You don't have to hand-label a lot of data. That makes training much more efficient."

By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight.

For the American media, which has drunk the Silicon Valley Kool Aid, the DeepSeek story is a hard one to stomach. For a long time, Wylie argues, while countries in Asia made massive technological breakthroughs, the story commonly told to the American people focused on American tech exceptionalism. 

An alternative approach, Wylie says, would be to see and “acknowledge that China is doing good things we can learn from without meaning that we have to adopt their system. Things can exist in parallel.” But instead, he adds, the mainstream media followed the politicians down the rabbit hole of focusing on the "China threat." 

These geopolitical fears have helped Big Tech shield itself from genuine competition and regulatory scrutiny. The narrative of a Cold War style “AI race” with China has also fed the assumption that a major technological power can be bullied into submission through trade restrictions. 

That assumption has also crumpled. The U.S. has spent the past two years attempting to curtail China's AI development through increasingly strict controls on advanced semiconductors. These restrictions, which began under Biden in 2022 and were significantly expanded last week under Trump, were designed to prevent Chinese companies from accessing the most advanced chips needed for AI development. 

DeepSeek developed its model using older generation chips stockpiled before the restrictions took effect, and its breakthrough has been held up as an example of genuine, bootstrap innovation. But Professor Cao cautions against reading too much into how export controls have catalysed development and innovation at DeepSeek. "If there had been no export control requirements,” he said, “DeepSeek could have been able to do things even more efficiently and faster. We don't see the counterfactual." 

DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to both Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it. 

As millions of Americans downloaded DeepSeek, making it the most downloaded app in the U.S., OpenAI’s Steven Heidel peevishly claimed that using it would mean giving away data to the Chinese Communist Party. Lawmakers too have warned about national security risks and dozens of stories like this one echoed suggestions that the app could be sending U.S. data to China. 

Security concers aside,  what really sets DeepSeek apart from its Western counterparts is not just efficiency of the model, but also the fact that it is open source. Which, counter-intuitively, makes a Beijing-funded app more democratic than its Silicon Valley predecessors. 

In the heated discourse surrounding technological innovation, "open source" has become more than just a technical term—it's a philosophy of transparency. Unlike proprietary models where code is a closely guarded corporate secret, open source invites global scrutiny and collective improvement.

DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it.

At its core, open source means that the source code of a software is made freely available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. When a technology is open source, users can download the entire code, run it on their own servers, and verify every line of its functionality. For consumers and technologists alike, open source means the ability to understand, modify, and improve technology without asking permission. It's a model that prioritizes collective advancement over corporate control. Already, for instance, the Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba has released a new version of its own large language model that it says is an upgrade on DeepSpeak.

Unlike ChatGPT or any other Western AI system, DeepSource can be run locally without giving away any data. "Despite the media fear-mongering, the irony is DeepSeek is now open source and could be implemented in a far more privacy-preserving way than anything offered by Meta or OpenAI,"  Wylie says. “If Sam Altman open sourced OpenAI, we wouldn’t look at it with the same skepticism, he would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize."

The open-source nature of DeepSeek is a huge part of the disruption it has caused. It challenges Silicon Valley's entire proprietary model and challenges our collective assumptions about both AI development and global competition. Not surprisingly, part of Silicon Valley’s response has been to complain that Chinese companies are using American companies’ intellectual property, even as their own large language models have been built by consuming vast amounts of information without permission.

This counterintuitive strategy of openness coming from an authoritarian state also gives China a massive soft power win that it will translate into geopolitical brownie points. Just as TikTok's algorithms outmaneuvered Instagram and YouTube by focusing on accessibility over profit, DeepSeek, which is currently topping iPhone downloads, represents another moment where what's better for users—open-source, efficient, privacy-preserving—challenges what's better for the boardroom.

We are yet to see how DeepSeek will reroute the development of AI, but just as the original Sputnik moment galvanized American scientific innovation during the Cold War, DeepSeek could shake Silicon Valley out of its complacency. For Professor Cao the immediate lesson is that the US must reinvest in fundamental research or risk falling behind. For Wylie, the takeaway of the DeepSeek fallout in the US is more meta: There is no need for a new Cold War, he argues. “There will only be an AI war if we decide to have one.”

Additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

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As anticipated, Trump began his second term in office with a flurry of executive orders, including withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement (again); withdrawing from the World Health Organisation, completing a process he began in 2020; suspending all U.S. foreign aid programs for 90 days, in part because the industry and bureaucracy “serve to destablize world peace”; insisting that it is “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female” and ending “the Federal funding of gender ideology.” He also unleashed a number of aggressive economic threats, potentially sparking a global trade war.

But beyond these attention-grabbing gestures designed for both domestic and international audiences, Trump is engaged in a game of international high stakes poker. At his inauguration, Silicon Valley leaders shared front-row space with Cabinet picks, visual confirmation that Trump primary allegiances are to the tech billionaires. It is these already stratospherically wealthy men, that Trump seeks to further enrich – the unseemly scramble to buy TikTok, effectively the seizure of a foreign-owned asset, being an example of how the administration and the broligarchs will work together. 

In response, countries in Trump’s crosshairs – China particularly – will reconfigure their own alliances to counter the effect of the U.S. president’s penchant for protectionism and isolationism. Tellingly, Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping held a widely publicized video conference call just hours after Trump’s inauguration to reaffirm their deep, abiding strategic partnership and to reform the “global governance system” dominated by the United States.

It was a strong move in the geopolitical chess game. Here's how some of the key players are positioning themselves for what comes next:

China: Unspecified Chinese goods will be subject to a 10% tariff from February 1, claims Trump. "We always believe there is no winner in a tariff or trade war," said a Chinese spokesperson in response, continuing China's tactic in the face of the U.S. president’s pronouncements of acting like the only adult in the room. If anything, by saying he would impose only a 10% tariff, Trump had climbed down from his earlier talk of 60% levies. Still, both the Chinese yuan and stock markets fell in response to Trump’s threats. Before the inauguration Trump and the Chinese president had apparently had a productive call. But, as noted earlier, the most prominent call in the hours after Trump began his second term was between Xi and Putin and their ambition to reshape the global order .

Russia: President Trump used his first day in office to issue a rare and blunt criticism of Vladimir Putin. "I think he should make a deal," Trump said about Putin's position in the war with Ukraine. "I think he's destroying Russia by not making a deal. I think Russia is kinda in big trouble." It suggests Trump believes Putin is feeling the heat and might be pushed, however unwillingly, to take a seat at the negotiating table. Putin, for his part, praised Trump's character and courage and willingness to "avoid World War III." His chummy tone was followed through by the state-owned Russian media, which uniformly praised Trump's values as aligning with Russian values. Still, Putin's first call was to Xi, not Trump – a reminder that Russia intends to play a key role in a new global order that challenges American dominance.

Canada: It’s not just China that is Trump’s crosshairs. Also on February 1, Trump insists he will impose 25% tariffs on both Canada and Mexico as retribution for apparently letting swathes of illegals and fentanyl, the drug synonymous with the opioid crisis, cross over into the United States. The fentanyl, incidentally, Trump insists, comes from China. Justin Trudeau, Canada's lame duck prime minister, said Canada would be willing to "inflict economic pain" on the U.S. if necessary to get Trump to back off. Will Trump really begin his term in office with a trade war against America's closest allies? The European Union too, Trump says, “treats us very, very badly, so they’re going to be in for tariffs.”

India: As with Putin, Trump is said to have chemistry with the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. But in keeping with his belligerent post-inauguration mood, Trump threatened to levy "100% tariffs" on BRICS nations, including India, if they sought to reduce dependence on the dollar as the currency of international trade. Indian stock markets traded lower with investors nervous about retaliatory tariffs against India. But the Indian government is reportedly mulling tariff cuts on U.S. goods to placate Trump. Other placatory gestures include India indicating its willingness to take back 18,000 illegal migrants. Modi is said to be desperately seeking bilateral talks with Trump in February. Trump’s decision to end so-called birthright citizenship from February 20, thus denying babies born in the U.S. citizenship if their parents are not permanent residents, has left hundreds of thousands of Indians on temporary visas in limbo. India has long maintained that the movement of skilled Indian labour from India to the U.S. benefits both countries.  Should Modi get his longed-for audience with Trump next month, they will have a lot of tensions to address.

Trump's first week back in the White House reveals a clear strategy beneath the apparently freewheeling threats. America first, in his view, has always meant not just putting the interests of America and Americans first but maintaining America’s position as the world’s pre-eminent power. And that means eliminating or at least neutralising the opposition.

From his actions in the first week, it’s clear Trump’s mind is on China. His newly appointed secretary of state, Marco Rubio, held his first meeting not with European allies but with counterparts from India, Australia and Japan - members of the Quad, a group explicitly intended to counter China's influence in the Indo-Pacific region. While Trump builds this coalition with one hand, with his other hand he wields targeted economic threats against BRICS, a group which has proposed itself as an alternative to Western hegemony. India happens to be a member of BRICS too, though key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, which had said it would join BRICS, have postponed any such step, perhaps recognising Trump’s penchant for retribution.

Meanwhile, Putin and Xi's video call signals the possibility that Trump's return to office might accelerate the urgency to execute on their shared vision of a post-American world order. The question is whether Trump's strategy of mixing economic coercion, even against allies, with strategic coalition-building will hold them at bay or further weaken America’s global standing.

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On Chinese social media, the crisis in California is being treated as conclusive evidence that US society is broken. Some of the criticism cuts uncomfortably deep - for instance, Chinese commentators have pointed to the stark divide between rich and poor Californians and how they have faced different fates after losing their homes. "Even the world's largest economy still does not have the ability to protect the safety of its citizens when disasters occur," wrote academic Lu Qi. Another blogger put it more bluntly: "So, do you know why the wildfire in the United States is out of control? Because there is no one in control. Of course, they didn’t put out the fire or save anyone"

Chinese state media drew flattering comparisons between China’s response to catastrophe and that of the U.S. government. Look at last week's Tibet earthquake, Chinese media crowed, where over 14,000 rescue workers were deployed on search and rescue operations. And remember the 2022 Chongqing wildfire, they added, reposting videos of locals transporting extinguishers, supplies and emergency workers to remote areas on mopeds to fight the fires. Writing in the state-owned Beijing Daily, columnist Bao Nan described the fires as a “completely man-made disaster.” The fire chief, he alleged, borrowing far-right tropes, “seemed more focused on LGBT initiatives.” Proclaiming the superiority of China’s governance and capacity for collective action, Nan argued that  “superheroes in American blockbusters may stir up some passion for a moment, but when facing actual disasters, we don't need solitary heroes.” What’s more effective, he wrote, is “the power of group solidarity."

Russian coverage of the California wildfires took a different but equally calculated tack. Rather than dwell on comparisons between the United States and Russia, they amplified American political conflict and the ongoing corrosive blame game. Russian state media, such as RIA Novosti, has extensively reported Elon Musk's condemnation of the California government and its supposed mismanagement of federal resources. 

Meanwhile, the Russian-appointed governor of occupied Kherson, opted for some straight-up trolling. “The California fires have left many ordinary residents homeless,” he told the state-run news agency TASS, “therefore, our region is ready to welcome any American citizen who has lost their home and livelihood. Naturally, this applies only to those who have not financed the Ukrainian army or supported the current Kiev regime, which has caused far more civilian casualties through its actions than the fires in LA.” 

What's consistently been missing from Chinese and Russian coverage is, of course, context, balance and introspection. When it comes to holding up mirrors, both Moscow and Beijing make sure that theirs only point outward. Each regime is crafting a self-serving narrative. China positions itself as the champion of collective action and social cohesion, while Russia seizes every opportunity to show the United States as fundamentally flawed and dysfunctional. What both Beijing and Moscow get is that the most effective propaganda isn't necessarily about creating fake news - it's about distorting truths to exacerbate genuine societal tensions.

What makes this type of propaganda so effective is the marshaling of selective facts and manipulation of issues that resonate with people, playing up any polarizing political implications. While we often focus on detecting "fake news," authoritarian states have mastered something more sophisticated: using social media to exploit points of conflict, appealing to users’ prejudices to effectively turning them into useful idiots. Silicon Valley's platforms have handed these states an unprecedented ability to influence communities worldwide with propaganda narratives. 

And they don’t even need to make up stories about inequality or government dysfunction. Because the most effective propaganda is the kind that is grown from kernels of truth.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here for more insights like these straight into your inbox.

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Think pieces and blogs across Chinese state media hailed the conversation as yet more evidence that Putin backs China’s claims over Taiwan — which in turn bolsters his own expansionism. 

“Putin is very good at helping China teach a lesson to its rebellious son. He made demands on Musk and hit Taiwan's weakest points,” wrote one Chinese military commentator to his 300,000 followers following the revelation. 

SpaceX responded to the allegation by saying that Starlink doesn’t operate over Taiwan because Taiwan won’t grant the company a license. The island democracy doesn’t want Starlink having majority ownership control over any satellite connection, so it’s been racing to build its own independent satellite internet service, free of Elon Musk’s grip.

Musk said last year, to Taiwan’s fury, that he believes Taiwan to be an “integral part of China,” comparing it to Hawaii. So it makes sense that the self-ruled island doesn’t want the billionaire in control of its satellite internet. 

Nonetheless, satellite internet is something Taiwan urgently needs. Its undersea fiber optic cables connecting the island to the internet are vulnerable, easily severed by ships in the South China Sea. It’s happened 27 times in the last five years. And as the Chinese military stages almost daily “war games” and drills around the island, including simulating a blockade of the island’s ports — an exercise it carried out most recently in October — it feels more urgent than ever that Taiwan has some way of accessing the internet via satellite. But it doesn’t want Starlink having the power to turn on – or off – that connection.  

What would Trump do if Xi Jinping imposed a blockade on Taiwan? “Oh, very easy,” he told a Wall Street Journal reporter last month. “I would say: If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you at 150% to 200%,” meaning he would impose tariffs. When asked if he would use military force against a blockade, Trump replied “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me and knows I’m fucking crazy.” 

Our colleagues at the China Digital Times collected and translated a series of responses to this statement that are worth a read. It was “intriguing”, wrote Hong Kong professor Ding Xueliang, that this was Trump’s only response. 

Chairman Rabbit, a nationalist WeChat blogger with more than two million followers, went further: “Trump has absolutely no interest in Taiwan or the South China Sea, and has no intention of becoming embroiled in a conflict with China,” he wrote. 

Since the Musk-Putin revelations, Taiwan’s government has said it welcomes applications from all satellite internet services, including Starlink, “provided they comply with Taiwanese laws.” 

The irony is that manufacturers in Taiwan actually make some key bits of hardware for Starlink satellite systems, like circuit boards and semiconductor chips. 

Taiwan supplies 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, and Trump wants to slap tariffs on those too. He has said in the past, without providing much evidence, that Taiwan “stole our chip business.” 

But Taiwan’s politicians say Trump needs Taiwan just as much as Taiwan needs Trump. Francois Wu, the country’s Deputy Foreign Minister, told reporters this week that "without Taiwan, he cannot make America great again. He needs the semiconductors made here."
On election day in the U.S., it was revealed that Starlink had asked its Taiwanese suppliers to shift manufacturing off the island, citing “geopolitical risks.” The report sparked fury in Taiwan, with talk of boycotting Tesla, and viral praise for Musk’s “foresight” across Chinese social media.

This story was originally published as a newsletter. To get Coda’s stories straight into your inbox, sign up here. 

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I knew Ramadan would start on June 28 because someone in the cell before us had carved a calendar into the wall with their fingernail. Late at night, after the task of watching over the other prisoners was assigned, someone else in our cell was selected to scratch off the old day. Everyone would bicker among themselves for the chance to erase another day of their sentence, but since I believed that I would be in there for life, the calendar didn’t interest me much. I’d often forget to mark it when it was my turn.

On the eve of Ramadan, my shift as watchman began at 1 a.m. This time, I remembered to update the calendar and saw that someone had added a small drawing of a crescent and star just above the date. My heart pounded—I worried that I’d been spotted. I took a quick glance around the room. No one who’d already spent a year labeled “dangerous”—and tortured for it, as I had been—would have dared to draw this. Only someone rounded up after May 2014 could have been so bold. With my heart pounding in my chest and the buzzing eyes of the video cameras aimed at me, no matter where in the cell I was, I rarely had the chance to formulate any thoughts, let alone write them on the wall.

I was arrested on August 19, 2013, in Kashgar, more than two thousand miles west of Beijing. I was born in the capital of Uyghur culture, and I was shaped by it. The city taught me to love books, knowledge, and righteousness, and it was there that I stood proudly behind the lectern of a Chinese university as an instructor. But now, this city had become my prison. That August, officers from the Chinese security forces came to interrogate me. They accused me of opposing the spread of the state language by teaching Uyghur preschoolers their mother tongue. Apparently, I was indoctrinating children in the spirit of separatism. During the interrogation, I was informed that the preschool I’d founded amounted to preparation for an Uyghur state, and that the lectures I’d given on linguistics in different Uyghur cities were incitement to terrorism. According to the officers, my crime was having studied in the United States under a Ford scholarship between 2009 and 2011. I was told that I was a CIA agent sent to break up “Xinjiang.” 

In the 1980s and ’90s, it seemed as if Uyghurs—a long-oppressed, predominantly Muslim ethnic minority group—were on their way to greater freedom within the Chinese system. It had become easier to use our own language to publish books, produce movies, and practice Islam. But the fist closed again, and the protests calling for an end to our persecution were harshly punished. Our fear returned. 

I left to study linguistics in the United States so that I could learn how to keep our language and culture alive. In the past, it had been natural: young people learned from elders in mosques, during traditional communal gatherings called meshrep, and in our large, multigenerational homes. But then meshrep was banned, and in many places minors were forbidden by the Chinese Communist Party to enter religious buildings. Meanwhile, poverty in the countryside was taking its toll on families. Young adults migrated for work in bigger cities where the Han money was, and children were forcibly sent to assimilationist, Mandarin-language boarding schools.

By the time I was locked away, it had become clear that the reform and opening that had transformed Uyghur society in the ’90s would not be returning. I was lucky enough to be let out because international academic and human rights organizations demanded my release. But there are not many like me. In 2017, convinced that all Uyghurs were terror threats, China rounded up more than a million of us—including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic people native to the region—and put us into prison camps. In these camps, prisoners are “reeducated,” forced to denounce their identities and declare themselves Chinese. Torture and rape are rampant. Forced labor in factories and cotton fields is systematic. Death by deliberate neglect is common.

Since 2019, China’s claimed the camps have been closed. Many have been, but only because the Xinjiang government arranged a wave of mass sentencing to take their place. Today, Uyghurs receive sentences of five, fifteen, or twenty years—and sometimes even life—for such “crimes” as owning a Qur’an, speaking to family members living abroad, or refusing to drink alcohol. A lost generation of children has been functionally orphaned and now lives in state residential schools, where physical abuse is the norm and the Uyghur language is strictly forbidden. 

I could not have known how bad things would become when I chose to leave the United States and return home. 

My arrest was a foretaste of the crackdown of 2017, when the mass disappearances started, but I had no illusions about the risk of going back. No, I found myself staring at the scratched-out calendar in that prison cell because I had felt a calling to return to Kashgar, the city I loved. I had a calling to go back with my wife and daughter and build a language school and cultural center for Uyghur people, a place where we could practice our faith and speak our language. 

On the plane from Chicago to Beijing, my daughter hit it off with the other passengers. The trip took more than twenty hours, but for Mesude, who had been living in America for years, it was like a game. She spoke English with confidence and had the mannerisms and ease of an American. When we finally got to Beijing, a student was supposed to meet us at the airport. But I’d forgotten where we were supposed to meet. I opened up my laptop to check, but it was dead. I couldn’t find an outlet anywhere in the stately airport, and the employees at the information desk were of no use. 

Eventually, I summoned the courage to ask airport security if there was a place I could charge my laptop. Instead of answering, they demanded to see my ID. “Dad, why does this man hate you so much?” Mesude asked me in English. 

The cop could tell from looking at our faces and listening to our accents that we were Uyghur. “Since when do people from Xinjiang speak Human?” he asked, sneering. “And he’s even taught his kid English!” I took Mesude’s hand and left. I’d lived in Beijing ten years earlier, and every time I saw such ugly expressions of contempt, I wanted to reject their “glorious” civilization. I’d long since learned I couldn’t defend myself against them, and so I chose to stay quiet. 

An Uyghur like me could not get basic human respect in Beijing. Not as a student, as I’d been years before, and not now, with a family and two graduate degrees. If we had been in America, I’d have taken the cop to court for racial discrimination. But in China, it wasn’t worth the time or trouble to try to report him. The law here didn’t recognize the value of a person’s dignity. My daughter stared at me, the question still written on her face. I lowered my gaze and changed the subject. 

Mesude had spent most of her life in America, where everyone was from somewhere else. But even in China, we Uyghurs are treated like foreigners. And until recently, we were. China calls our homeland Xinjiang—“New Frontier.” Our language is a sister to Uzbek and cousin to Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish. For centuries, our land was located on the eastern edge of Turkestan, known today as Central Asia—not on the western end of China. We were conquered in the 1700s by the Qing, an expansionist dynasty that had seized control of Beijing. In the northern reaches of our homeland, a Mongol people called the Junghars resisted Qing expansion, so the Qing annihilated them. In their old pastures, the Qing founded a capital for the domain, naming it Dihua—“Civilization.” On the advice of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, his Chinese counterpart Mao Zedong conquered the young East Turkestan Republic in 1949 to secure access to the region’s oil reserves and created special incentives for Han settlers to move in. In the beginning, the communists decried “Han chauvinism,” and even restored Dihua’s original name: Urumqi. But Han chauvinism endured. On the “mainland,” people guard their wallets and pinch their noses when we pass by. To them, we’re pickpockets and terrorists, kebab sellers and drug dealers. If there’s anything good about us, it’s how much we love to sing and dance. 

Once we were out of the airport, we couldn’t get a hotel room. Some hotels told us there were vacancies over the phone, then changed their minds when they saw our faces. Others said yes once they’d seen us, but when they looked at our IDs, told us there was an order from the higher-ups not to let in people from Xinjiang. Our Beijing-quality clothes, our English, and our smooth Mandarin could hide what we were at first, but the 65 at the start of our ID numbers would give us away. I’d gotten used to this treatment, but I couldn’t stand to see the exhaustion on my wife’s face or the confusion in my daughter’s eyes as we carried her on our backs from hotel to hotel, answering her unending questions. I was humiliated. Relief finally came late in the afternoon, when we found a room close to the rear gate of the University where I’d once studied. 

As we lay in bed, the kids from the elementary school next door left to go home. In front of the building, women were selling freshly hatched chicks, shouting “One yuan! One yuan!” Children gathered around, waving coins in the air. As they came to pick them up, some of their parents bought them chicks. My daughter looked at the students for a moment, then asked, “Daddy, do all those kids know how to take care of them?” 

Her confusion was justified. They were children, they couldn’t take care of themselves, let alone chicks. In America, Mesude had been disappointed when we wouldn’t let her have a cat. There were so many formalities: to get a pet, you had to fill out an application with a shelter so they could make sure that you weren’t on the list of known abusers, that you knew how to take care of the animal, and that you could pay for the insurance. My daughter had been too young to look after a pet, and neither I nor my wife had had any experience with animals, so it wasn’t an option. My daughter was surprised at this “business” of irresponsibly and mercilessly selling fragile baby animals. She couldn’t stand to see kids her own age treating terrified, defenseless chicks like stones they’d picked up on the road. 

When, at last, we made it back to Urumqi and its Uyghur neighborhood, I was surprised to see a blue police booth in front of our building. Inside it sat a dark-skinned Uyghur officer ready to inspect anyone trying to enter. She hadn’t been there when I’d left. The differences between Uyghur and Han regions had grown in the two years I’d been gone. In the places where the Han live, skyscrapers had sprung up. The streets were lined with ads showing stylish Chinese women wearing Zara, Nike, Adidas, Levis, and other foreign brands. But on those streets and in the malls and markets of Han areas, any Uyghur who tried to get past the iron-barred gates was pulled aside to have their bags searched. 

The first friend I caught up with met me in a restaurant on Consulate Street. He seemed on edge, routinely glancing around as though looking for someone. There was no clear connection between any sentence he said and the next, but I understood what he was really telling me when he suggested that I return to America after the summer and stay there for my doctorate or something else, as long as I didn’t stay here. I spent the next few days catching up with other acquaintances and looking around Urumqi for the right place to open up my school. I’d already posted online about my plan, and word traveled fast, so I didn’t have to explain much. They all said it was pure fantasy, and they were certain that nothing would come of it. 

I sped through the week looking for funders, collaborators, and people to help me handle the bureaucracy. Instead of offering support, my friends reacted with shock and stern warnings. Everyone said the same thing: “There’s nowhere left in Urumqi.” The Old City, where Uyghurs had lived for hundreds of years, was now nicknamed “Gaza.” Anyone who managed to escape this prison was considered a hero. And here I was coming back. 

I had been in the United States during the worst riots of July 2009. But my wife and daughter were still in Urumqi. I watched from Kansas as two Uyghurs from my hometown were beaten to death. Han workers at a toy factory in the southeastern Chinese city of Shaoguan had accused them of raping a Han woman, and a lynch mob assembled against the factory’s Uyghur employees. Videos of the violence spread quickly online, and on July 5, protests erupted in Urumqi. Uyghur students demonstrated with Chinese flags, demanding justice from the government. When the protest was violently suppressed, it turned into a riot. Uyghurs attacked Han and destroyed the shops they’d opened in our neighborhoods. Then the army came in and stood by for days as Han attacked Uyghurs. No one knows for sure how many died—at least over a hundred—and thousands of Uyghurs were disappeared by the police. 

“Don’t go outside,” I said to my wife over the phone. “Just stay at home.” For a few days, she did. Our daughter fell asleep to the sound of gunfire. That call was the last time I’d speak to her for nine months. The government shut off the internet, and international calls couldn’t get through. After I lost contact with my wife, I began to panic. Luckily, one of the other Chinese Ford Scholars at Kansas University was a former People’s Liberation Army officer. We’d already grown close, and when I told him what had happened, he promised to help. A week later, he put me in touch with army contacts who’d been deployed to Urumqi. Each time, I was given a different number to call. The people on the other end arranged to make sure my wife was safe and have food delivered to her apartment.

For days, my wife and daughter were trapped at home. Once, Mesude heard the sound of army helicopters circling the city, then a man’s voice down by the door to the building. She jumped up and ran to look outside, thinking her father had come back from America to save her. She opened the window and waved, shouting for me. The soldier she’d heard whirled around to aim his rifle at her. 

It was worse on the streets. One day, when they finally ventured outside with Mesude’s grandmother, they were spotted by Han rioters, who chased after them. Another time, Mesude and her mother fled onto a bus, and the mob surrounded them, banging on the windows. Mesude crawled under a seat, sobbing.  The bus driver sped to the police station, but the rioters followed behind. In full view of the police, they boarded the bus and began to beat the passengers. My wife was hit on the head and lost consciousness. She woke up in a hospital. It was overcrowded with people who were gravely injured, and she received no attention. The patients were kept inside by guards, but she snuck past them and returned home. 

Because of the communications blackout, I didn’t hear of any of this as it was happening. I was wracked with fear. One afternoon, hardly knowing what I was doing, I tried to walk to Walmart for groceries, but quickly lost my way. The streets of the suburban neighborhood confused me, and after a couple wrong turns I ended up wandering around in a cul-de-sac. I think I walked back and forth several times. Finally, a man called out to me. “What’s up?” he said from behind the truck he was working on in his driveway,  “Can I do something for you?” He was strong-looking, with bright red hair and a Midwestern accent. “I’ve lost my way,” I said.

“Okay, no worries. I can help. Where are you from?”

“The northwest part of China.”

“Ah.” The man paused. “I heard about that. Isn’t something happening there? I read about it in The New York Times.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s my city.”

“He gave me a hug, introduced himself, and invited me in for coffee. His name was David. We talked for a bit more, then he asked if I was hungry. It had been a while since I’d set out for food. “Yes,” I said. He heated us up a pizza and we ate together on his porch. I told him about my family, what I knew about the riots, what Ürümchi was like.

Eventually, I mentioned that I’d been on my way to Wal-mart. He immediately offered to drive me. I remember I bought some apples. After I was done, he told me that it wasn’t good to be without a car in America – he’d let me have his bike so I could get around.

“Pain is like an infectious disease,” he told me before we parted. “If you stay sad, it’ll affect people around you. Besides, it’s not good to hold onto it. If you feel alone, you can always call me.” 

For a full year, I didn’t know what had become of my family. I wasn’t able to talk to them. It would be more than a year before I could get them safely to Kansas to join me. And then another three years before I decided to return to Urumqi.

Now that I was back in Urumqi, I heard the terrible stories of people rounded up for questioning during the riots. It was almost as if they were competing with each other to offer up the bloodiest tale. I saw such suffering in people’s eyes, felt such hopelessness in their words that it became hard to breathe. After the July riots, the feeling of tragedy stuck around and Urumqi never again felt safe. Uyghurs there understood that whatever had protected them until that day could no longer be trusted. As we took the elevator down to leave our apartment, everyone kept glancing up at the camera in the corner, standing as far away from me as they could. I realized they thought I was under watch. That was the day I decided to leave the city. 

Besides, the only people in Urumqi willing to hear me out about my school were just interested in setting up English classes or making some money and putting up ads in Uyghur. I was constantly asked how to make it to America, how to get European residency, or how to become a Turkish citizen. People had stopped bragging about where their homes were, instead boasting about the foreign countries to which their kids had fled. Anyone who said, “My son’s living abroad,” really meant, “My son’s in a place where he won’t be beaten down.” I kept thinking of a proverb I’d heard old people say: “If you’re safe in your own place, you’ll see color in your face.” Everyone around me looked sick.  

People had gotten sick of their realities and were desperate to get out. Some left so that their children would grow up Western, without the defect of Uyghurness. Some who thought Uyghurs had no future in China left to find foreign countries that might agree to take them. Some people believed that China’s supposedly high-quality and “bilingual” education was actually just a way to turn Uyghurs into obedient good-for-nothings, and so they yearned for the developed education systems of the West. They chose to become refugees rather than live without the freedom to raise their children fully in Uyghur culture. In 2011, more than twenty Uyghurs left for Kansas. Until that year, I never knew of more than four in the whole state. A wave of more than a thousand others ended up in European refugee camps and eventually were granted asylum—more than the number who’d fled there after the communists conquered East Turkestan in 1949. Others equated their journey out of China to the pilgrimage of the Prophet Muhammad, who’d left his own home in Mecca for freedom in Medina. 

If you managed to get out, people called you a winner. Once, when I was talking with a friend, I brought up a merchant we’d known whose business had failed. But when I mentioned that he’d gone on to settle in Turkey, my friend was amazed. “Wow,” he said. “He really made it in the end.”

So I decided to leave Urumqi and return to my hometown of Kashgar. I was excited to take a semester or two off to spend more time with Mesude and teach her to speak Uyghur. Going back to Kashgar was like reuniting with an old friend who I’d not seen in years. The covered, snaking streets. The neighborhoods crammed with old two-story houses. The ancient mosques—although now, they were unlocked only during prayer time. The sprawling markets in the shade of willows that teemed with men’s doppas—our traditional skullcaps—and women’s headscarves. You could see the seasons change by the front steps of the Heytgah Mosque, where people sold cold yogurt drinks or tea from a steaming samovar. 

Nearby were restaurants and pottery shops that old Kashgar families had run for generations. The sound of the city was music. The dumpling makers sang as they counted out orders: “Oh! One manta! Two manta! Three manta!” The bowl makers and blacksmiths kept the beat with their hammers as the call to prayer echoed down narrow alleys where each craft had its own market. In the coat bazaar, the instrument bazaar, or the hat bazaar, there were hundreds of the same item for sale, handmade in every color imaginable. Even after the government evicted Kashgaris from the Old City to tear down the ancient buildings and replace them with replicas for tourists, the soul of my hometown survived. In Kashgar, you never heard the gunshots or screams that kept people in Urumqi on edge. Urumqi was a gray city of security fences, where cops set up surveillance stations on your street, and you could get carried off with a black sack pulled over your head. I thought Kashgar could never become like that.

But even Kashgar had changed. Before I left, I’d barely heard the word hijrah, or sacred migration, outside Qur’an readings at the mosque. But now, back home, it was constantly coming up in conversation, and people there meant something different by it than in cosmopolitan Urumqi. During Friday prayers one week, the imam denounced a book that called for Uyghurs to live abroad. It said they should move to Muslim countries where they could practice their faith freely and raise their children in it, and that God would reward them for living in the lands of the caliphate. None of this was true, the imam said, because after the Prophet liberated Mecca, he announced the end of migration as a religious duty. In 2004, I’d heard words like these on the virtue of migration from an Uyghur who helped students find schools in Malaysia. He’d get excited and say, “Going to Malaysia to study is just like going on hijrah” He collected payments from many students and ran visa scams with Han-owned language schools. I was furious with him. 

The imam went on about those who thought that sending their children abroad to countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt was hijrah. He said that if a child hasn’t grown up in a family and society that provides him with an Islamic education, sending him to study even in Mecca won’t ensure he lives a moral life. I wondered what could drive someone to call even the most rudimentary work abroad hijrah and indebt themselves to Han smugglers to get there. 

He said that just leaving for another country wasn’t hijrah and that besides, it was wrong to recommend it either way. He spoke of the Uyghurs who’d been duped by smugglers and left to die in the forests of Vietnam and the rice paddies of Thailand. But since the imam devoted an entire sermon to this, people’s desire to leave must’ve truly been strong.

Back when it seemed that China would keep granting freedom to the Uyghurs, we began to reconnect with the rest of the Islamic world. Young Uyghurs went to study at Al-Azhar in Cairo, traders split time between Kashgar and Uzbekistan, and businessmen set up shop in Istanbul. They brought back the Turkish language, Bollywood, and a new, stricter vision of Islam. When the Chinese government began to tighten the leash, suddenly fearful of what it had allowed us, many saw piety as a way to fight back. Some women traded the traditional Uyghur headscarf for full veils, and mullahs denounced our traditional music and dance as un-Islamic. The Chinese Communist Party called this “Talibanization” and tried to stamp it out. 

Now, after the bloodshed on the streets of Urumqi, the Uyghur masses were in deep shock and terrified for their safety. Intellectuals who knew where things were headed fell into despair. Those who could leave, did. Choosing to stay meant I had more in common with those who took refuge in religion or even with the naive who told themselves things would go back to normal. 

Why would I choose to return, knowing about the surveillance, detentions, and slander that awaited me? Let my daughter push me away if it meant she’d stay Uyghur. Let my daughter shine, as I had, thriving in Uyghur misfortune. Only in this way could she become Uyghur. What worried me most was my daughter calmly analyzing our disaster from a distance. Even if my daughter spoke Uyghur, as long as she didn’t know what was happening to our people, she wouldn’t really be Uyghur. I reminded myself that as horrible as life was in Kashgar, having her grow up in America would cut her off from who she was. I chose to raise her in the same conditions that had made me Uyghur. 

But things in Kashgar didn’t go as I hoped. Within two weeks, I started to regret coming back. It wasn’t just hearing so much hopelessness, nihilism, and apathy from the people around me. On the first phone call I made, the sound began to echo. I tried buying phones from a couple other brands, but no matter whom I called, I heard my own voice played back to me. People told me that it sounded like my voice was coming from another room and that they’d also hear their own voice bounce back at them. Not only that, but all the people opening language schools who I’d been hoping to collaborate with in Kashgar believed I had been blacklisted and even that I was being followed. In the end, I couldn’t find anyone who’d agree to work with me. Meanwhile, my daughter could barely speak Uyghur and struggled having anyone to talk to in English besides my wife and me. 

Despite it all, I managed to open the school. We quickly reached full enrollment, and others started similar programs in other cities. For a short time, it seemed that the government might leave me alone—the state-run local news even began filming a profile on me. But it couldn’t last. Strangers called to deliver vague threats and warnings. I began to prepare for the worst. No one was surprised when the police showed up at my house and invited me back to the station. 

I was in prison from August 19, 2013 to November 27, 2014, though for all I knew, it would be forever. In a quick show trial, I—along with two friends who helped run the school—was convicted of “fraudulent fundraising.” There was never any doubt about the real reason we were targeted—I was forced to wear the yellow vest of a political prisoner at all times. 

In Chinese prisons, society follows its own rules. Strength keeps you safe, and violent criminals sit at the top of the hierarchy. Political prisoners, set apart by their special uniforms, lie at the bottom. But every prison was different. In some, the guards were a constant presence, always threatening a beating. Köktagh prison was run mostly by the inmates. Each cell had a boss and underlings picked out by the guards—the second-in-command in mine was a Hui named Hai Xiaoyang. He was cruel, though in ways I was used to by that point. For no reason, he made other prisoners sleep on the floor. I bided my time, waiting for a chance to change him. One day, I interpreted between him and an Uyghur prisoner. Xiayang was surprised by my Chinese proficiency and asked me who I was. When I mentioned my time in Beijing, America, and Turkey, the sneer on his face was replaced by curiosity. 

I began to teach English to Xiaoyang. Instead of spending all day, every day, sitting cross-legged in my cell, I got to move my arms and legs a bit. He’d already known a bit of the language, and since he was still young, he picked it up easily. To start, I prepared some short texts for him to memorize. Once I’d taught him sentences about daily life in the cell and the names of the objects within it, I wouldn’t let him speak to me in Chinese. Within a month or two, he could read and understand English texts up to a half a page long. Since I was such a devoted and approachable teacher, he stopped saying “no” to me in other matters. Gradually, his insults and curses toward the other Uyghur prisoners stopped too. I passed him readings on the importance of compassion, equality, respect, freedom, and justice. 

One day, he said to me, “I admit it, I was wrong. I won’t do anything to hurt Uyghurs. I’ll never be that evil.” He fell silent. “Not just us,” I said. “Anyone.” Xiaoyang was the grandson of a mullah, but his mother was Han. He’d spent his childhood feeling ashamed in front of adults and learned to keep his distance from other people.

For over a year, I grew close with people like Xiaoyang. It’s possible, I discovered, to be friends with someone who beats you. Many of the common criminals I got to know were young Uyghurs already hardened by the cruelty of life in Xinjiang. There was Memetyüsüp, the Uyghur orphan who’d killed the Han pedophile given custody of his sister. Gheyret, the heroin addict, had been brought in at eighteen for stealing a piece of jade. He’d found God, and I was tortured for teaching him how to pray during Ramadan. Yaqupjan came in clutching the amulet his mother had made for him. On his first day in prison, our cellmates tore it from his hands. 

 They let me go as abruptly as they’d arrested me. One evening, I was rushed out from prison and driven to the Urumqi municipal court. With the invisible motions I’d picked up in prison—a slight bend in my back and a flick of my hand—I prayed for the patience and health of friends who I was now leaving behind. But I also forgave our oppressors. They were victims of a broken system. Even the man who’d arrested me in Kashgar, the one who’d torn off my clothes. Even the cops who forced me to dance like a monkey and crawl on all fours like a donkey in front of dozens of people. Inside the car as we drove away, one of the officers asked the others, “If these people ever get us, won’t they do the same things?” Everything they’d subjected me to melted away. Well done, I thought. God forbid that our legacy ever be sinking to the level of you and your government. If we did what you’ve done, would we be any different from you? This is how animals behave. What human being would ever bite back at the animal who’d bitten his leg? I still remember how, in my evening prayer after I was released, I threw away my anger alongside my filthy prison slippers. 

A few weeks before I left America, I’d debated my decision on the phone with a trusted Uyghur scholar. He advised me to stay. I began to defend my choice, but the conversation was cut short. I’d been counting on his support. Without it, I felt much less sure of what I was about to do. After that, I stopped asking people I knew in America what they thought, and many of them didn’t even realize that I was going to leave. Some even offered to help me find a job. Uyghurs who’d made it to America would never think of going back. I worried that if I mentioned my plan to them, they’d talk me out of it, so I never brought it up. 

Going back was my wife’s idea. One day, when she went to see some Turkish friends of ours, the conversation turned to the parts of life in the United States they found frustrating. Mesude couldn’t take it. “Why are you saying bad things about America? I love America!” she said. Everyone was shocked. Not long after, she announced, “I’m going to marry Jason.” I laughed so hard I couldn’t speak. Jason was a Black boy from her preschool.  

Mesude was four years old and beginning to learn how people were different. In her understanding, there were parents and kids, girls and boys, men and women, small and big. There were also, she said, American and Uyghur. Within all of these, she thought of herself as a kid, a girl, small, and American. My daughter had first learned she was Uyghur when she was trapped during the riots at home, when she was chased in the streets, when the bus she boarded with her mother was surrounded by men,  armed and grinning, when she saw those Han grown-ups coming to hurt her. 

When she first arrived in America, she was still terrified of riding the bus. But life in America helped her forget she was Uyghur. Within a year, she even forgot how to pronounce the word. America was hers, and she wouldn’t have us criticizing it. I thought of her growing up in America, becoming foreign to her own people. I knew that if I returned, I could be surveilled, detained, or worse, but these were risks I took for my daughter. 

The first person I had to tell about my decision was my thesis advisor. She’d spent two years guiding me in my research and had helped me secure a stipend to support myself through the completion of a PhD. “Are you sure?” she replied over email. Afterward, I spent a long time handwriting a letter explaining myself and, to thank her for the untiring kindness she’d shown me, delivered it along with five or six books I’d brought from East Turkestan. I never got a response. 

My wife and I spent the final days of that May packing everything we wanted to bring back. But the preparations were easy compared to the conversations. My friends joked about my new life in America, and I wouldn’t correct them. Yet I couldn’t refuse when a childhood friend called me up as we were emptying our apartment and invited us to visit his new house in Nebraska. We stayed for two days. He and I spoke late into the night. He tried to talk me out of leaving, and as I listened to what he had to say, I couldn’t bear to disagree. I agreed to stay. In the morning, we woke up to perfect weather. “It’s such a beautiful day,” I said as I opened up his windows. “Yeah,” my friend replied. “Because you’re not going back.” My heart sank as I remembered what I’d told him. I kept up the lie until the day before our flight, but he must have been able to tell that I’d made up my mind. “In case you’re still thinking about leaving,” he said, “if you try, I’ll come to the airport to arrest you myself. I’ll lock you up in my basement for so long your visa will expire and you’ll have to just stay there.”

Sometimes, when I had second thoughts, it strengthened my resolve to remember that Mesude had forgotten how to pronounce the word Uyghur. For our first six months in America, we spoke in Uyghurche, but later, even if we pushed her, she’d only reply to us in English. She used to love long phone calls with her grandparents, but as her ability in the language weakened, she’d refuse to join in our conversations. Once, when we were calling people back home, she threw a fit over something small and wouldn’t talk to us. 

I bit back my anger and asked what was wrong. “Why do you keep talking about things I can’t understand?” she asked. And she was right. The world we spoke about in our long conversations with people back home was an Uyghur one, built on the Uyghur language. But what my American daughter saw, learned, and felt took shape in her mind in English. Even though we lived in the same house, Mesude was in her own English world. Our daughter loved us and wanted to share a world with us, but she knew that the one inside her head was beautiful, and she wouldn’t allow it to be conquered. Still, staying in America would mean losing her. 

I felt that an Uyghur who couldn’t stand with her father at Eid prayers in the mosque wasn’t really an Uyghur. Neither was one whose heart stood still at the service’s seven takbirs. If my daughter couldn’t go with her mother in matching black headscarves on Laylat al-Qadr and Eid al-Fitr to weep among relatives at her grandfather’s grave, if the sound of the Qur’an’s surahs and ayats couldn’t set her trembling, then I couldn’t make her Uyghur. If she didn’t stop me on my way home from the mosque and ask, “Daddy, what do they say there? What does it mean?” then I couldn’t make her Uyghur. Life in Kashgar would be harder for all of us, but I owed it to my daughter. Returning was my hope, my right, my pleasure, and my good fortune.

Translated by Avi Ackermann.

The post I risked prison to keep the Uyghur culture alive appeared first on Coda Story.

“No, no, that’s not right,” I interjected. “I’m here because I precisely don’t want to become a war correspondent in the future.” 

The Kuma Academy, established in September 2022, trains citizens in the basic skills they might need to survive and help their compatriots in the event of an attack. Civil defense has been on many people’s minds in Taiwan since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “If China Attacks,” a book covering potential scenarios for a Chinese invasion — co-written by Kuma Academy co-founder Puma Shen — has become a bestseller. 

Many of the attendees at the academy seem like regular office workers or homemakers. The youngest person I talk to is a high school student. A great deal of the curriculum is practical — basic medical training, contingency planning for an invasion, even what kind of material you should hide behind to protect yourself from gunfire. But a lot of the training is less about skills and more about shoring up the sense of agency that regular people feel: making them understand that they have the power to resist.  

In the face of Chinese propaganda and disinformation, that could be as important as weapons drills and first aid. Taiwan holds elections this month, pitting the pro-autonomy Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) against the more pro-Beijing KMT. The outcome of the vote has huge consequences for relations across the Taiwan Strait and for the future of an autonomous Taiwan, whose independence Beijing has vehemently opposed — and threatened to violently reverse — since the island first began to govern itself in 1949. Successfully interfering in the democratic process using what the Taiwanese government calls “cognitive warfare” could be a way for Beijing to achieve its goals in Taiwan without firing a shot. 

Despite — or because of — the stakes, Taiwan’s response to the challenge of Chinese election interference isn’t siloed in government ministries or the military. Just as civil resistance has to be embedded in society, the responsibility of defending the information space has been entrusted to an informal network of civil society organizations, think tanks, civilian hackerspaces and fact-checkers. 

“We’re often asked by international media if Taiwan has an umbrella organization for addressing disinformation-related issues. Or if there is a government institution coordinating these kinds of responses,” said Chihhao Yu, one of the co-founders of Information Environment Research Center (IORG), a think tank in Taiwan that researches cognitive warfare. “But first, there’s no such thing. Second, I don’t think there should be such an institution — that would be a single point of failure.”

Disinformation from China is hardly new in Taiwan. During the Cold War, before the term “disinformation” was in the common lexicon, the Chinese Communist Party injected propaganda into the public sphere, trying to instill the idea that reunification was inevitable, and it was futile to resist. This is spread through many channels, including newspapers, magazines and radio. But, as in the rest of the world, social media has made it easier to reach a wide audience and spread falsehoods more rapidly and with greater deniability. Disinformation now circulates on international platforms including Facebook, Instagram, X and the South Korean-owned messaging app Line, which is popular in Taiwan, as well as on local forums such as PTT and DCard.

Disinformation from China used to be easy to spot. Its creators would use terms that weren't part of the local Taiwanese lexicon or write with simplified Chinese characters, the standard script in mainland China — Taiwan uses a traditional set of characters instead. However, this is changing, as information operations become more sophisticated and better at adapting language for the target audience. “Grammar, terms, and words are more and more similar to that of Taiwan in Chinese disinformation,” said Billion Lee, co-founder of the fact-checking organization Cofacts.

With the election approaching, the Chinese government has increased its efforts to localize its propaganda, recruiting social media influencers to spread its messaging and allegedly buying influence at the grassroots level by subsidizing trips to China for local Taiwanese politicians and their constituents. Over 400 trips took place in November and nearly 30% of Taipei’s borough chiefs — the lowest level of elected officials — have participated in them. 

The medium used to spread propaganda and disinformation has evolved as well. Cofacts started out in 2016 by building a fact-checking chatbot on Line, focusing on text-based falsehoods. Now, it has to work across multiple platforms and formats, including TikTok reels, Instagram stories, YouTube shorts and podcasts.

The aim of this election disinformation is often fairly obvious — boosting Beijing’s preferred candidates and discrediting those it considers hostile. 

In late November, 40 people were detained by Taiwanese authorities on voting interference charges. A separate investigation found a web of accounts across Facebook, YouTube and TikTok that worked to prop up support for the pro-China KMT. The so-called “Agitate Taiwan” network also attacked third-party candidate Ko Wen-je, whose party favors closer relations with China, but whose candidacy may divide the vote in a way that leads to a victory for the historically independence-leaning DPP. 

Other themes, Lee said, include trying to undermine the DPP leadership and casting them as inept by insinuating, falsely, that they failed to secure vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic, and alleging that the DPP only pushed for the development of Taiwan’s domestically produced vaccine, Medigen, because it had made illicit investments in the company. Messaging also often targets Taipei’s relationship with the U.S., suggesting that America would abandon Taiwan in the event of a war.

These overtly political messages intersect with other influence operations and more traditional espionage. In November, 10 Taiwanese military personnel were arrested after allegedly making online videos pledging to surrender in the event of a Chinese invasion. One of those charged, a lieutenant colonel, was allegedly offered $15 million by China to fly a Chinook helicopter across the median line of the Taiwan Strait to a waiting Chinese aircraft carrier. Such defections and public promises not to resist, weaponized and spread on social media, are clearly aimed at undermining public morale in Taiwan. 

Those efforts can be oddly targeted. In May, Cynthia Yang, the deputy secretary-general of a nonprofit in Taiwan , received a series of calls from people with mainland Chinese accents after she ordered a copy of “If China Attacks” from the Taiwanese bookseller Eslite. The callers claimed to be from customer service, but they questioned Yang about her “ideologically problematic” purchase. It seemed to be an effort at psychological intimidation. After the incident was reported on by Taiwanese media, the book’s co-author Puma Shen quipped on social media that his next book would be titled “If China Calls.”

Fighting back against this full-spectrum influence campaign is hard. Chinese disinformation tactics have fed into a broader polarization in Taiwan, which is fragmenting the internet.  “Everyone uses a different internet these days,” Lee said. There's increasing recognition online that people inhabit echo chambers comprising their peers, which are difficult to break out of. 

It means that the organizations — mainly civil society groups — arrayed against a superpower keen on undermining Taiwan's democratic processes face a complex task.  Often these groups are small and scrappy, run by volunteers or just a handful of staff. They’re in an arms race that they can’t win — or at least, that they can’t win alone.

To compete, they’re collaborating. “Even if we don’t know each other, we can work together without directly cooperating,” said Yu from the Information Environment Research Center. “To use Cofacts as an example, we don’t directly coordinate with Cofacts. But because Cofacts has an open database with an open license, we can use their datasets of rumors and community fact-checking to conduct research, and we continue to do so.”

Cofacts has emerged as an important piece of infrastructure for Taiwan’s fact-checking ecosystem. The organization has used its Line bot as a way to build an enormous database of disinformation spotted in the wild, which it makes available to other groups via an application programming interface. Crucially, the bot allows users to collect disinformation that wasn’t circulating on open social media, such as Facebook or Twitter, but in closed-door messaging apps such as Line or Facebook Messenger. 

Systematically collecting that data allows other organizations to conduct more sophisticated analysis, spot patterns and respond strategically, rather than chasing down every lie and fact-checking it.

This collaborative approach can be traced back to g0v, the influential civic hacker community, from which a number of innovative initiatives have emerged in the past decade — from digitizing historical documents significant to contemporary Taiwanese politics to gamifying the identification of satellite images to find illegal factories on farmland. 

The g0v community runs decentralized hackathons for developing project ideas , taking place in classrooms and offices and bringing together anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred people. Not all ideas make it to fruition, but some of the projects that come out of g0v — including those that tackle disinformation — may begin with just a small breakout group huddled in the corner of a hackathon.

It is these small civil society groups that Taiwan relies on to stay ahead of Chinese innovations in disinformation, with the hope that by being nimble and adaptable, they can hold back the tide. Bigger threats are coming. The rise of generative artificial intelligence, which can quickly create text, images, videos and more at scale, could allow China to increase the volume of propaganda it produces and make it seem more authentic by accurately using Taiwanese idioms and references. Certainly, there is no shortage of materials produced out of Taiwan’s open and free Internet for generative AI to learn from. 

Still, the solution may be precisely in the decentralized and networked nature of these efforts to combat Chinese disinformation campaigns. After all, a set-up in which a number of differing solutions emerge at once, often organically and spontaneously, has no single point of failure, as to borrow Yu’s words. 

“We wanted to connect people who wrote code and people concerned with society to work together,” Lee said, when asked about why she and her collaborators began Cofacts. Perhaps it’s faith in society to know for itself what’s best that keeps such groups going. And this may be the best weapon against authoritarianism — the belief that the connections between people can be enough to deal with a much larger enemy. The fight is on.

CORRECTION [01/12/2024 09:52AM EST]: The original version of this story stated that 40 people were detained by Taiwanese authorities on voting interference charges in connection to the Agitate Taiwan network. The detentions were not directly related to the network.

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The post Taiwan confronts China’s disinformation behemoth ahead of vote appeared first on Coda Story.

Together, the U.S. and China are responsible for more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and both countries need to take action to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, as Newsom argued on his trip. One technology that most scientists agree will make a meaningful difference for the climate is solar panels. U.S. appetite for photovoltaics is growing, and although it’s the world's biggest polluter, China happens to dominate the global supply chain for solar panels: Chinese companies manufacture panels more efficiently and at greater scale than suppliers in other countries, and they sell them at rock-bottom prices.

But there’s a big problem at the start of the supply chain. Part of what makes China’s solar industry so prolific is that it is rooted in China’s Xinjiang province, home to a vast system of forced labor in detention camps and prisons where an estimated 1-2 million ethnic Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minority groups are held against their will. There is strong evidence that Uyghurs in Xinjiang live in conditions akin to slavery. Key components of solar energy, in other words, are being brought to much of the world by the victims of what U.S. authorities call an ongoing genocide.

None of this material officially lands in the U.S., owing to the 2022 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a federal regulation that restricts imports of any goods from Xinjiang — the only law of its kind among the world’s biggest economies. Still, the topic of solar panel production — a critical weapon in today's arsenal of climate action — is intrinsically tangled up with Uyghur forced labor. Yet Newsom made no mention of the Uyghurs on his recent China tour, a silence that has become all too common among left-wing and climate advocacy groups. At the same time, the Uyghur plight has captured a certain element of the right-wing political zeitgeist in the U.S. for reasons that are more complicated than one might expect: The Uyghur genocide is a near-perfect reason not to invest in solar energy, a prime talking point for right-wing media personalities and Republican lawmakers known for promoting climate skepticism and disinformation.

Uyghur forced labor is also unlikely to have come up when U.S. climate envoy John Kerry met with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua in California last week. Their talks, Kerry later told delegates at a conference in Singapore, led “to some very solid understandings and agreements” in preparation for the upcoming COP28, the United Nations climate summit that begins in Dubai on November 30. The timing of the talks suggests that the U.S. acknowledges that Chinese dominance of the solar industry is unlikely to be challenged anytime soon. In the first half of 2023, Chinese exports of solar panels grew by 34% worldwide, and China already controls 80% of the global market share. 

Climate scientists say that we have perhaps only a few years left to reduce emissions and avoid a runaway greenhouse gas scenario, which could lead to rapid sea-level rise, mass desertification and potentially billions of climate refugees. Extreme weather events fueled by the changing climate are becoming more frequent and their impacts more devastating. Canada saw 18 million hectares of forest burn this year, emitting a haze that had people from Maine to Virginia donning KN95s just to walk outside. Last year in Pakistan, historic floods covered one-third of the country.  

“The lack of progress on emissions reduction means that we can be ever more certain that the window for keeping warming to safe levels is rapidly closing,” said Robin Lamboll, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, in a recent press statement.

There is an urgent need to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, and solar power is seen as an essential part of how to do this — it’s affordable and can be placed nearly anywhere. Without a rapid increase in the amount of solar installations around the world, limiting climate change might be impossible.

But right now, a huge proportion of solar installations are a product of Uyghur forced labor. A 2021 report from Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. highlighted the solar industry’s dependency on materials from Xinjiang, estimating that 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon come from the region. The report detailed how Uyghurs and other minorities were made to live in camps that are “surrounded by razor-wire fences, iron gates, and security cameras, and are monitored by police or additional security.” Factories are located within the camps, and Uyghurs cannot leave voluntarily. And there is evidence that workers are unpaid. One former camp detainee, Gulzira Auelhan, told Canadian journalists that she was regularly shocked with a stun gun and subjected to injections of unknown substances. She felt she was treated “like a slave.”

For Uyghurs in exile, what is happening is clear — a genocide that aims to eliminate the Uyghur language, culture and identity and turn their homeland into another Chinese region. Mosques and old Uyghur neighborhoods are being replaced by hotels and high-rise apartments and populated by members of China’s dominant ethnic group: the Han Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is now the primary language taught in schools. “Putting it bluntly, the Uyghur genocide is more real and immediate than climate change,” says Arslan Hidayat, a Uyghur Australian program director at the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs. He believes that stories like Auelhan’s barely scratch the surface of what’s happening. 

“It’s still not widely known that Uyghur forced labor is used in the supply chain of solar panels,” said Hidayat.

Seaver Wang is a climate director at the California-based Breakthrough Institute, which published another report on the connections between Xinjiang and solar energy last year. Wang hoped the wave of research on the issue would be a wake-up call for the industry and for climate and energy nonprofits. But the reaction has been mixed at best. “Labor and some industry groups were very eager to talk about the issue,” he said. “But other constituencies, like solar developers and areas of the climate advocacy movement, who are really prioritizing deployment and affordability, didn’t want to rock the boat.”

Indeed, major environmentalists and climate groups have said little about the origins of so much of the world’s solar energy technology, possibly out of fear of inadvertently harming the expansion of clean energy. Recent reports on solar in China from international organizations including Ember, Global Energy Monitor and Climate Energy Finance make no mention of the solar industry’s links to Xinjiang. 

The same is true for major American nonprofits. Even as they strongly support the expansion of solar, Sierra Club, 350.org, NRDC, Environmental Defense Fund and the National Wildlife Federation make no mention of Uyghur forced labor on their websites or social media. None agreed to speak to me for this story. 

Only the Union of Concerned Scientists mentions issues related to Uyghur forced labor on their website and agreed to be interviewed for this story. “UCS strongly advocates for justice and fairness to be centered in all our climate solutions,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the climate and energy program, via email. “The clean energy economy we are striving to build should not replicate the human rights, environmental and social harms of the fossil fuel based economy.” Cleetus declined to comment on the decisions of its peer organizations not to acknowledge the issue.

Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at California’s San José State University, has a theory about why so many climate advocates and groups hesitate to speak on Uyghur forced labor. “It’s an area that people are uncomfortable talking about because they fear it undermines the objectives of getting more solar,” said Mulvaney. “It's almost as if people are concerned that any information about solar that could be interpreted as a negative could be amplified through the same networks that are doing climate disinformation.”

To wit, U.S. think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute, both heavily right-leaning, have released dozens of blog posts, op-eds and interviews focusing on Uyghur forced labor. These groups are also notorious hubs of climate disinformation.

One headline from a Heartland Institute blog post warned that “China’s Slave Labor, Coal-Fired, Mass-Subsidized Solar Panels Dominate the Planet.” An article on far-right news site Breitbart cautioned that the clean energy clauses in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act “may fund China’s Uyghur slavery.” Further amplifying the focus on Uyghur forced labor in solar are right-wing media outlets like Daily Signal and Newsmax and the pseudo-educational organization PraegerU.

Alongside mentions of Uyghur forced labor in the solar industry, one typically finds far less factual claims — that the emissions generated throughout the life cycle of solar panels are as bad as fossil fuels, that climate change is not responsible for recent extreme weather events, or that “net zero” and socially responsible investment trends are insider tactics meant to weaken the American economy. Some even push political disinformation. There are claims that President Joe Biden is pro-solar because he has received donations from China or because his son, Hunter Biden, has links to China — and that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is benefiting personally due to his investments in Chinese solar. 

Organizations like these are spreading climate skepticism, minimizing the threat of climate change, and casting doubt on its links to extreme weather events. This has also been the refrain from elected officials like Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, sponsor of the Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act, a bill that would further prohibit federal funds from being used to buy solar components from Xinjiang.

Another common argument holds that domestic fossil fuel production is better for the economy than importing solar from China. Support for fossil fuels does seem to be a common link across the groups and political figures focused on the issue. In fact, politicians speaking out about Uyghur forced labor in solar are among the top recipients of political donations from the fossil fuel industry. According to data from Open Secrets, a nonpartisan project that tracks political spending, Scott alongside two cosponsors of his Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act — Senators Marco Rubio and John Kennedy — accepted more contributions from the oil and gas industries than almost all other U.S. senators in 2022.

The U.S. is not the only country where this kind of narrative has found a home. Earlier this year, Taishi Sugiyama, who directs research at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, agitated on the issue after officials in Tokyo announced a plan to mandate solar panels on all newly constructed homes in the city. Like conservatives in the U.S., Sugiyama cited the plight of the Uyghurs as a primary reason to divest from solar. But Sugiyama’s think tank is a well known source of climate disinformation in Japan.

“Sugiyama is basically using absolutely any argument he can, real or false, in order to pursue what he’s aiming for in terms of his anti-climate objectives,” said James Lorenz, the executive director of Actions Speak Louder, a corporate accountability nonprofit focused on the climate. Some of Sugiyama’s allies have close links to Japanese companies importing coal, natural gas and petroleum from abroad. Two of the institute’s board members represent Sumitomo and JICDEC, both major importers of fossil fuels in Japan.

Early reports about China’s crackdown on ethnic Uyghurs, including the detention of thousands of people as part of a massive "political reeducation" program, emerged in 2017. Dustin Mulvaney, the environmental studies professor, thinks that would have been the optimal time to act. “Had the industry had that traceability in place back then, had they had this conversation back then, they might not find themselves in this situation today,” he said.

But now, six years later, both the climate and the Uyghur human rights crisis have worsened. Implicit in the silence from many climate and environmentalists is the idea that, in order to address climate change, the Uyghur cause may have to be sacrificed. Mulvaney feels that environmental advocates have hesitated to criticize solar or bring up forced labor issues for fear of playing into anti-solar messaging.

Mulvaney has personally experienced this, seeing his critiques being misquoted in right-wing media. “But I don't think it works that way. I think people are a little too guarded in protecting solar from criticism.”

To the Breakthrough Institute’s Seaver Wang, being forced to choose between reclaiming human rights in Xinjiang and ramping up clean energy quickly enough to address climate change presents a false dichotomy. 

“We’re willing to have open and frank conversations around responsible sourcing everywhere but China,” said Wang. “I recognize that there are climate versus human rights trade-offs, but let’s talk about those trade-offs rather than just prioritizing climate, because it all factors into equity at the end.”

For Uyghurs like Hidayat, who are used to being ignored by not only climate activists but also by progressive politicians, he’s open to any support and is glad to see people like Rick Scott proposing stronger regulations on solar imports from China, even if their motives are less than pure. At the same time, Hidayat is wary that they might be using the Uyghur crisis for their own political benefits, and would welcome more actions from environmentalists. 

“There is nothing clean about using solar panels linked to Uyghur forced labor,” said Hidayat. Instead, he says there needs to be a “change in the definition of what clean energy is. The whole supply chain, from A to Z, the raw materials all the way to its installation, has to be free of human rights abuses for it to actually be defined as green, clean tech.”

How do we get there? Wang wants to see a frank discussion, rather than the silence or politicization that has dominated the debate so far. 

“I do think that we could balance clean energy deployment, meet climate ambitions and address human rights in Xinjiang,” said Wang. “But I know it won't be easy,” he said. “It's not an unmitigated win-win.”

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In Africa’s first ‘safe city,’ surveillance reigns

Lights, cameras, what action? In Nairobi, the question looms large for millions of Kenyans, whose every move is captured by the flash of a CCTV camera at intersections across the capital.

Though government promises of increased safety and better traffic control seem to play on a loop, crime levels here continue to rise. In the 1990s, Nairobi, with its abundant grasslands, forests and rivers, was known as the “Green City in the Sun.” Today, we more often call it “Nairobbery.”

I see it every time I venture into Nairobi’s Central Business District. Navigating downtown Nairobi on foot can feel like an extreme sport. I clutch my handbag, keep my phone tucked away and walk swiftly to dodge “boda boda” (motorbike) riders and hawkers whose claim on pedestrian walks is quasi-authoritarian. Every so often, I’ll hear a woman scream “mwizi!” and then see a thief dart down an alleyway. If not that, it will be a motorist hooting loudly at a traffic stop to alert another driver that their vehicle is being stripped of its parts, right then and there.

Every city street is dotted with cameras. They fire off a blinding flash each time a car drives past. But other than that, they seem to have little effect. I have yet to hear of or witness an incident in which thugs were about to rob someone, looked up, saw the CCTV cameras then stopped and walked away.

Nairobi launched its massive traffic surveillance system in 2014 as the country was grappling with a terrorism crisis. A series of major attacks by al-Shabab militants, including the September 2013 attack at Nairobi’s Westgate shopping complex in which 67 people were killed, left the city reeling and politicians under extreme pressure to implement solutions. A modern, digitized surveillance system became a national security priority. And the Chinese tech hardware giant Huawei was there to provide it. 

A joint contract between Huawei and Kenya’s leading telecom, Safaricom, brought us the Integrated Urban Surveillance System, and we became the site of Huawei’s first “Safe City” project in Africa. Hundreds of cameras were deployed across Nairobi’s Central Business District and major highways, all networked and sending data to Kenya’s National Police Headquarters. Nairobi today boasts nearly 2,000 CCTV cameras citywide.

On paper, the system promised the ultimate silver bullet: It put real-time surveillance tools into the hands of more than 9,000 police officers to support crime prevention, accelerated responses and recovery. Officials say police monitor the Kenyan capital at all times and quickly dispatch first responders in case of an emergency.

But do the cameras work? Nine years since they were installed, it is hard to see the benefits of these electronic eyes that follow us around the city day after day.

Early on, Huawei claimed that from 2014 to 2015, crime had decreased by 46% in areas supported by their technologies, but the company has since scrubbed its website of this report. Kenya’s National Police Service reported a smaller drop in crime rates in 2015 in Nairobi, and an increase in Mombasa, the other major city where Huawei’s cameras were deployed. But by 2017, Nairobi’s reported crime rates surpassed pre-installation levels.

According to a June 2023 report by Coda’s partners at the Edgelands Institute, an organization that studies the digitalization of urban security, there has been a steady rise in criminal activity in Nairobi for nearly a decade.

So why did Nairobi adopt this system in the first place? One straightforward answer: Kenya had a problem, and China offered a solution. The Kenyan authorities had to take action and Huawei had cameras to sell. So they made a deal.

Nairobi’s surveillance apparatus today has become part of the “Digital Silk Road” — China’s quest to wire the world. It is a central component of the Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious global infrastructure development strategy that has spread China’s economic and political influence across the world. 

This hasn’t been easy for China in the industrialized West, with companies like Huawei battling sanctions by the U.S. and legal obstacles both in the U.K. and European Union countries. But in Africa, the Chinese technology giant has a quasi-monopoly on telecommunications infrastructure and technology deployment. Components from the company make up around 70% of 4G networks across the continent.

Chinese companies also have had a hand in building or renovating nearly 200 government buildings across the continent. They have built secure intra-governmental telecommunications networks and gifted computers to at least 35 African governments, according to research by the Heritage Foundation.

Grace Bomu Mutung’u, a Kenyan scholar of IT policy in Kenya and Africa, currently working with the Open Society Foundations, sees this as part of a race to develop and dominate network infrastructure, and to use this position to gather and capitalize on data that flows through networks.

“The Chinese are way ahead of imperial companies because they are approaching it from a different angle,” she told me. She posits that for China, the Digital Silk Road is meant to set a foundation for an artificial intelligence-based economy that China can control and profit from. Mutung’u derided African governments for being so beholden to development that their leaders keep missing the forest for the trees. “We seem to be caught in this big race. We have yet to define for ourselves what we want from this new economy.”

The failure to define what Africa wants from the data-driven economy and an obsession with basic infrastructure development projects is taking the continent through what feels like another Berlin scramble, Mutung’u told me, referring to the period between the 19th and early 20th centuries that saw European powers increase their stake in Africa from around 10% to about 90%.

“Everybody wants to claim a part of Africa,” she said. “If it wasn’t the Chinese, there would be somebody else trying to take charge of resources.” Mutung’u was alluding to China’s strategy of financing African infrastructure projects in exchange for the continent’s natural resources.

Nairobi was the first city in Africa to deploy Huawei’s Safe City system. Since then, cities in Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and a dozen other countries across the continent have followed suit. All this has drawn scrutiny from rights groups who see the company as a conduit in the exportation of China’s authoritarian surveillance practices. 

Indeed, Nairobi’s vast web of networked CCTV cameras offers little in the way of transparency or accountability, and experts like Mutung’u say the country doesn’t have sufficient data protection laws in place to prevent the abuse of data moving through surveillance systems. When the surveillance system was put in place in 2014, the country had no data protection laws. Kenya’s Personal Data Protection Act came into force in 2019, but the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner has yet to fully implement and enforce the law.

In a critique of what he described at the time as a “massive new spying system,” human rights lawyer and digital rights expert Ephraim Kenyanito argued that the government and Safaricom would be “operating this powerful new surveillance network effectively without checks and balances.” A few years later, in 2017, Privacy International raised concerns about the risks of capturing and storing all this data without clear policies on how that data should be treated or protected.

There was good reason to worry. In January 2018, an investigation by the French newspaper Le Monde revealed that there had been a data breach at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa following a hacking incident. Every night for five years, between 2012 and 2017, data downloaded from AU servers was sent to servers located in China. The Le Monde investigation alleged the involvement of the Chinese government, which denied the accusation. In March 2023, another massive cyber attack at AU headquarters left employees without access to the internet and their work emails for weeks.

The most recent incident brought to the fore growing concerns among local experts and advocacy groups about the surveillance of African leaders as Chinese construction companies continue to win contracts to build sensitive African government offices, and Chinese tech companies continue to supply our telecommunication and surveillance infrastructure. But if these fears have had any effect on agreements between the powers that be, it is not evident.

As the cameras on the streets of Nairobi continue to flash, researchers continue to ponder how, if at all, digital technologies are being used in the approach to security, coexistence and surveillance in the capital city.

The Edgelands Institute report found little evidence linking the adoption of surveillance technology and a decrease in crime in Kenya. It did find that a driving factor in rising crime rates was unemployment. For people under 35, the unemployment rate has almost doubled since 2015 and now hovers at 13.5%.

In a 2022 survey by Kenya’s National Crime Research Centre, a majority of respondents identified community policing as the most effective method of crime reduction. Only 4.2% of respondents identified the use of technology such as CCTV cameras as an effective method.

And the system has meanwhile raised concerns among privacy-conscious members of society regarding potential infringement upon the right to privacy for Kenyans and the technical capabilities of these technologies, including AI facial recognition. The secrecy often surrounding this surveillance, the Edgelands Institute report notes, complicates trust between citizens and the state.

It may be some time yet before the lights and the cameras lead to action.

Surveillance Cities: A Magnum Photos / Coda collaboration

Digital footprints on the dark side of Geneva

Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos

Watching the streets of Medellín

Juan David Restrepo Ortiz

and

Juan Diego Restrepo Echeverri

The post In Africa’s first ‘safe city,’ surveillance reigns appeared first on Coda Story.

When authorities in Inner Mongolia announced in 2020 that the language would no longer be the language of instruction in schools, ethnic Mongolians — who make up about 18% of the population — feared the loss of their language, one of the last remaining markers of their distinctive identity. The news and then plans for protest flowed across WeChat, China’s largest messaging service. Parents were soon marching by the thousands in the streets of the local capital, demanding that the decision be reversed.

With the remarkable exception of the so-called Zero Covid protests of 2022, demonstrations of any size are incredibly rare in China, partially because online surveillance prevents large numbers of people from openly discussing sensitive issues in Mandarin, much less planning public marches. With automated surveillance technologies having a hard time with Mongolian though, protestors had the advantage of being able to coordinate with relative freedom. 

Most of the world's writing systems have been digitized using centralized standard code (known as Unicode), but the Mongolian script was encoded so sloppily that it is barely usable. Instead, people use a jumble of competing, often incompatible programs when they need to type in Mongolian. WeChat has a Mongolian keyboard, but it’s unwieldy and users often prefer to send each other screenshots of text instead. The constant exchange of images is inconvenient, but it has the unintended benefit of being much more complicated for authorities to monitor and censor.

All but 60 of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages are considered “low-resource” by artificial intelligence researchers. Mongolian belongs to the vast majority of languages barely represented on the internet whose speakers deal with many challenges resulting from the predominance of English on the global internet. As technology improves, automated processes across the internet — from search engines to social media sites — may start to work a lot better for under-resourced languages. This could do a lot of good, giving those language speakers access to all kinds of tools and markets, but it will likely also reduce the degree to which languages like Mongolian fly under the radar of censors. The tradeoff for languages that have historically hovered on the margins of the internet is between safety and convenience on one hand, and freedom from censorship and intrusive eavesdropping on the other.

Back in Inner Mongolia, when parents were posting on WeChat about their plans to protest, it became clear that the app’s algorithms couldn’t make sense of the jpegs of Mongolian cursive, said Soyonbo Borjgin, a local journalist who covered the protests. The images and the long voice messages that protesters would exchange were protected by the Chinese state’s ignorance — there were no AI resources available to monitor them, and overworked police translators had little chance of surveilling all possibly subversive communication. 

China’s efforts to stifle the Mongolian language within its borders have only intensified since the protests. Keen on the technological dimensions of the battle, Borjgin began looking into a machine learning system that was being developed at Inner Mongolia University. The system would allow computers to read images of the Mongolian script, after being fed and trained on digital reams of printed material that had been published when Mongolian still had Chinese state support. While reporting the story, Borjgin was told by the lead researcher that the project had received state money. Borjgin took this as a clear signal: The researchers were getting funding because what they were doing amounted to a state security project. The technology would likely be used to prevent future dissident organizing.

Until recently, AI has only worked well for the vanishingly small number of languages with large bodies of texts to train the technology on. Even national languages with hundreds of millions of speakers, like Bangla, have largely remained outside the priorities of tech companies. Last year, though, both Google and Meta announced projects to develop AI for under-resourced languages. But while newer AI models are able to generate some output in a wide set of languages, there’s not much evidence to suggest that it’s high quality. 

Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, explained that once tech companies have established the capacity to process a new language, they have a tendency to congratulate themselves and then move on. A market dominated by “big” languages gives them little incentive to keep investing in improvements. Hellina Nigatu, a computer science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, added that low-resource languages face the risk of “constantly trying to catch up” — or even losing speakers — to English.

Researchers also warn that even as the accuracy of machine translation improves, language models miss out on important, culturally specific details that can have real-world consequences. Companies like Meta, which partially rely on AI to review social media posts for things like hate speech and violence, have run into problems when they try to use the technology for under-resourced languages. Because they’ve been trained on just the few texts available, their AI systems too often have an incomplete picture of what words mean and how they’re used.

Arzu Geybulla, an Azerbaijani journalist who specializes in digital censorship, said that one problem with using AI to moderate social media content in under-resourced languages is the “lack of understanding of cultural, historical, political nuances in the way the language is being used on these platforms.” In Azerbaijan, where violence against Armenians is regularly celebrated online, the word “Armenian” itself is often used as a slur to attack dissidents. Because the term is innocuous in most other contexts, it’s easy for AI and even non-specialist human moderators to overlook its use. She also noted that AI used by social media platforms often lumps the Azerbaijani language together with languages spoken in neighboring countries: Azerbaijanis frequently send her screenshots of automated replies in Russian or Turkish to the hate speech reports they’d submitted in Azerbaijani.

But Geybulla believes improving AI for monitoring hate speech and incitement in Azerbaijani will lock in an essentially defective system. “I’m totally against training the algorithm,” she told me. “Content moderation needs to be done by humans in all contexts.” In the hands of an authoritarian government, sophisticated AI for previously neglected languages can become a tool for censorship. 

According to Geybulla, Azerbaijani currently has such “an old school system of surveillance and authoritarianism that I wouldn't be surprised if they still rely on Soviet methods.” Given the government’s demonstrated willingness to jail people for what they say online and to engage in mass online astroturfing, she believes that improving automated flagging for the Azerbaijani language would only make the repression worse. Instead of strengthening these easily abusable technologies, she argues that companies should invest in human moderators. “If I can identify inauthentic accounts on Facebook, surely someone at Facebook can do that too, and faster than I do,” she said. 

Different languages require different approaches when building AI. Indigenous languages in the Americas, for instance, show forms of complexity that are hard to account for without either large amounts of data — which they currently do not have — or diligent expert supervision. 

One such expert is Michael Running Wolf, founder of the First Languages AI Reality initiative, who says developers underestimate the challenge of American languages. While working as a researcher on Amazon’s Alexa, he began to wonder what was keeping him from building speech recognition for Cheyenne, his mother’s language. Part of the problem, he realized, was computer scientists’ unwillingness to recognize that American languages might present challenges that their algorithms couldn’t understand. “All languages are seen through the lens of English,” he told me.

Running Wolf thinks Anglocentrism is mostly to blame for the neglect that Indigenous languages have faced in the tech world. “The AI field, like any other space, is occupied by people who are set in their ways and unintentionally have a very colonial perspective,” he told me. “It's not as if we haven't had the ability to create AI for Indigenous languages until today. It's just no one cares.” 

American languages were put in this position deliberately. Until well into the 20th century, the U.S. government’s policy position on Indigenous American languages was eradication. From 1860 to 1978, tens of thousands of children were forcibly separated from their parents and kept in boarding schools where speaking their mother tongues brought beatings or worse. Nearly all Indigenous American languages today are at immediate risk of extinction. Running Wolf hopes AI tools like machine translation will make Indigenous languages easier to learn to fluency, making up for the current lack of materials and teachers and reviving the languages as primary means of communication.

His project also relies on training young Indigenous people in machine learning — he’s already held a coding boot camp on the Lakota reservation. If his efforts succeed, he said, “we'll have Indigenous peoples who are the experts in natural language processing.” Running Wolf said he hopes this will help tribal nations to build up much-needed wealth within the booming tech industry.

The idea of his research allowing automated surveillance of Indigenous languages doesn’t scare Running Wolf so much, he told me. He compared their future online to their current status in the high school basketball games that take place across North and South Dakota. Indigenous teams use Lakota to call plays without their opponents understanding. “And guess what? The non-Indigenous teams are learning Lakota so that they know what the Lakota are doing,” Running Wolf explained. “I think that's actually a good thing.”

The problem of surveillance, he said, is “a problem of success.” He hopes for a future in which Indigenous computer scientists are “dealing with surveillance risk because the technology's so prevalent and so many people speak Chickasaw, so many people speak Lakota or Cree, or Ute — there's so many speakers that the NSA now needs to have the AI so that they can monitor us,” referring to the U.S. National Security Agency, infamous for its snooping on communications at home and abroad.

Not everyone wishes for that future. The Cheyenne Nation, for instance, wants little to do with outsiders, he told me, and isn’t currently interested in using the systems he’s building. “I don’t begrudge that perspective because that’s a perfectly healthy response to decades, generations of exploitation,” he said.

Like Running Wolf, Borjgin believes that in some cases, opening a language up to online surveillance is a sacrifice necessary to keep it alive in the digital era. “I somewhat don’t exist on the internet,” he said. Because their language has such a small online culture, he said, “there’s an identity crisis for Mongols who grew up in the city,” pushing them instead towards Mandarin. 

Despite the intense political repression that some of China’s other ethnic minorities face, Borjgin said, “one thing I envy about Tibetan and Uyghur is once I ask them something they will just google it with their own input system and they can find the result in one second.” Even though he knows that it will be used to stifle dissent, Borjgin still supports improving the digitization of the Mongol script: “If you don't have the advanced technology, if it only stays to the print books, then the language will be eradicated. I think the tradeoff is okay for me.”

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It was February 2009, and a disaster was about to occur 500 miles above Siberia: A dead Russian satellite, Cosmos-2251, was on a direct collision course with a communications satellite operated by Iridium, an American company.

The orbits of the two wrapped around the globe, their paths forming a giant X. As they approached one another, it would have been clear to anyone watching that they were headed for exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. 

But no one was watching. The satellites crashed into each other, at a relative speed of more than 22,000 miles per hour.

They immediately broke into thousands of pieces.

Lisa Ruth Rand was watching the news of the dramatic breakup just as she was beginning graduate school. When the two spacecraft crashed, they formed two streams of debris that continued along the orbital paths they’d once traveled. It made Rand, who today works as an historian of technology at the California Institute of Technology, realize that Earthlings only have limited dominion over this part of the universe. 

“Human beings, yes, can design and control objects to a certain extent,” Rand told me. “Ultimately, nature plays a role as well.”

And there nature was, slinging brand new space trash around the planet.

Either Russia or the U.S. could have worked a little harder to prevent the collision: Both countries did some satellite tracking and collision warning, but the pending Cosmos-Iridium doom wasn’t on their radar.

The debris that the Cosmos-Iridium crash left in its wake has posed potential collision risks for other satellites ever since. And that garbage has plenty of company. For decades, countries and companies have launched satellites, let them live out their useful lives and then kept them in orbit long after they were “dead,” or inactive. They’ve also left behind spent rocket bodies and whirling debris from other crashes past. In low Earth orbit — the part of space where satellites are closest to the Earth itself — accumulating debris poses a crash risk but cannot, on its own, get out of the way. Alongside it are thousands of live satellites that must avoid both the debris and one another.

And the issue is only going to get worse. On August 23, an Indian spacecraft became the first to land on the moon’s south pole region. Just days before, a Russian craft attempting a similar feat crashed into the moon’s surface. The two events herald the start of a new space race, which brings with it the threat of adding even more space junk into the mix.

Just as car accidents are more likely to happen at rush hour, space collisions are bound to increase as active satellite and spacecraft traffic ramps up, littering the celestial road with trash. Crashes are more likely than ever today because there are more spacecraft in the near orbits. And even though most of us can’t see it, the picture up there isn’t pretty.

The number of active satellites in Earth’s orbit has jumped from around 1,000 in 2009, when the Cosmos-Iridium crash occurred, to nearly 7,000, thanks to satellite “constellations”: sets of dozens, hundreds or thousands of small spacecraft that work together to perform a single task. About 4,000 of the satellites currently in orbit are in constellations run by Starlink, the satellite internet service owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

When you’re on Earth’s surface, you reap the rewards of satellite infrastructure without thinking too much about what’s going on above you. But if that infrastructure, or parts of it, stopped functioning, you’d think about it a lot.

Imagine if GPS went down. Though GPS satellites don’t sit in the most crowded orbits where the big constellations are, their part of space nevertheless has its own share of crash risk, and a cascading set of events could cause them to malfunction. Without a live navigation system, aircraft couldn’t get from place to place. Weapons systems couldn’t aim at targets. Drones wouldn’t know where they were or where to go. You couldn’t find your way to the grocery store in a different neighborhood or use Tinder in any neighborhood. GPS satellites also act as ultra-precise clocks, sending out timing signals that industries across the world rely on. Without those time stamps, the electrical grid could freeze up, financial transactions couldn’t go through, and data packets flowing through the internet and mobile networks wouldn’t work right. 

Communications satellites would cause even more issues on Earth if they stopped doing their jobs. Soldiers, ships and aircraft could lose access to secure communication channels. Civilian pilots couldn’t talk to air traffic control. Cargo ships couldn’t speak to those on land. People in conflict zones would have difficulty getting information from, or providing information to, the outside.

On top of the disruptions to services that rely on communications satellites, without orbital infrastructure, humans would lose access to key weather forecasting data, leaving us relatively blind to signs of oncoming natural disasters. Lots of intelligence is gathered from above too: Without satellites, nations would lose insights into what’s happening on the ground in times of war – satellites offer key information on things like troop buildup or movement. Earth observation companies help with acquiring some of that intelligence and also collect images and data that help with climate change monitoring, agriculture, mining, piracy, illegal fishing, deforestation and disaster aid. But they can only do that if their satellites work properly.

All told, a major collision in space could spell catastrophe on the ground. The only way to avoid serious crashes and the creation of more debris is to make sure that the orbit doesn’t get too crowded — and that the crowd already up there stays safe from itself.

After the Cosmos-Iridium crash, the U.S. amped up its collision-avoidance capabilities and began issuing collision warnings to satellite operators all over the world, including to foreign governments. The number of warnings that the U.S. government sends out has increased greatly since 2009, alongside the jump in orbiting spacecraft. 

Despite the growing orbital population, though, only a patchwork of regulation and governance exists for “space traffic management.” The International Telecommunication Union governs the use of the electromagnetic spectrum — regulating the frequencies on which satellites communicate and the use of the Earth’s orbit as a resource. But it has no enforcement powers. The U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space also weighs in on space traffic issues periodically and is attempting to ramp up this work, but it does not issue enforceable standards either. While the U.S. alert system exists, it is not equipped to be the space traffic manager for the whole world.

“It’s pretty minimal,” said Victoria Samson, the Washington office director for the Secure World Foundation, a think tank dedicated to safe, sustainable and peaceful uses of space. “There is no requirement for action when receiving those conjunction warnings,” she told me. “And there is no one coordinating any of it.”

No two active satellites have ever crashed into each other to date, except a spacecraft that collided with the Mir space station while trying to dock there. The Cosmos-Iridium crash involved one active satellite and one dead one. But without clear authority or protocols, mishaps inevitably occur, and as the amount of stuff floating in space increases, so does the likelihood of a major crash.

People like Samson and Lisa Ruth Rand worry that the existing regulatory system may not be comprehensive or international enough to make sure satellites stay safe in this new era. If another big crash, or a set of crashes, did happen, the results on the ground could be hugely disruptive. 

“That infrastructure is so invisible,” Rand told me. “It’s not the same thing as when the lights go out. But when the satellites go out, that’s going to be a pretty big deal.”

“There will eventually need to be a more formal coordinating mechanism,” said Samson, “rather than two-party discussions on an ad hoc basis.” 

A recent SpaceX fiasco offers a cautionary tale: In 2019, SpaceX had just 60 Starlink satellites in orbit. Predictions showed that one of those 60 had a relatively high likelihood of colliding with a European Space Agency satellite called Aeolus. The space agency saw this coming – having projected the spacecrafts’ predictable paths into the future – and reached out to SpaceX about a week in advance, asking if the company intended to move to a safer spot. SpaceX said it had no such plans: The likelihood of a crash was, at the time, about 1 in 50,000. 

But as the days went by, that probability rose, reaching around 1 in 1,000 — still not likely but not a number to play around with.

The European Space Agency repeatedly tried to reach SpaceX again as the situation evolved.

They heard nothing back. 

They sent 29 alerts to SpaceX. Still, there was no reply.

As the day of the potential collision grew closer, with no word from SpaceX, the European Space Agency decided to change its own object’s trajectory. 

SpaceX, it turns out, had a bug in its notification system, and the company was on a holiday weekend. No one was checking their email.

SpaceX doesn’t need any particular one of its Starlink satellites to continue to provide internet: It has thousands of satellites in part to make individual satellites expendable and redundant. But if it had impacted Aeolus, or any satellite that doesn’t have such redundancy, the crash could cut capabilities — and the debris from the collision could put many more spacecraft at risk.

SpaceX has so far avoided all crashes because it can propel its Starlink satellites away from danger. Nevertheless, it has been implicated in a lot of potential crashes. In 2021, with just 1,700 satellites in orbit — in contrast to today’s 4,000 — the company was already involved in half of all close-approach alerts, known as “conjunction alerts,” according to Hugh Lewis of the astronautics research group at the University of Southampton. 

And 4,000 is far from the final figure that SpaceX is aiming for. The company’s initial constellation will boast 12,000 satellites, and in its final form could involve 42,000. Today, the satellites provide internet and communication access for people in rural areas and in conflict zones like Ukraine — at least when Musk keeps the services turned on.

When the remainder of the initial set of Starlink satellites are in orbit, Musk’s enterprise could be implicated in 90% of all collision warnings, Lewis estimates.

Since 2020, Lewis has been analyzing Starlink satellites’ conjunction rates and measuring how often satellites have to maneuver around potential problems. In one recent dispatch, his data showed that the satellites have had to perform more than 50,000 moves since the end of 2020 to avoid potential crashes.

Lewis’ data indicates that as the number of Starlink satellites increases, the cumulative number of avoidance maneuvers increases at an approximately exponential rate. In other words, a few more satellites equals many more moves and a greater potential for disaster.

“On the basis of probability, something bad is going to happen,” he said.

There is a paradox here: Creating more satellite infrastructure to enable more connections and capabilities on Earth could be precisely what threatens those connections and capabilities. One way to dull that double-edged sword is to get satellite makers to coordinate — internationally and by law — to make sure their proposed constellations can play nice.

There are options for fixing the mistakes of the past. For instance, we could take the trash out now. Humans could clean up the space around our planet by removing our old debris — transporting dead satellites to “graveyard” orbits where they won’t bother anything, or “deorbiting” them by sending them to burn up in the atmosphere.

But such a proposition is tricky. The U.S. can only touch trash that the U.S. created. Russia can only touch its own trash. The same goes for China or anyone else. 

Touch someone else’s trash without permission, and you could create a full-on international incident. Sometimes, too, if you touch your own trash without telling others you plan to, you may stir global tensions. 

In 2021, China’s Shijian-21 spacecraft spent months hovering around an orbit, getting close to other satellites — with the country staying mum about its actions. Finally, Shijian-21 sidled up to a defunct Chinese navigation satellite, docked with it and towed it to a graveyard orbit. 

That’s an example of what scientists call “space debris mitigation,” and it’s technically good: That satellite was no longer a part of the traffic and no longer presented a risk to other spacecraft. But if a satellite can get that close to and physically move another spacecraft, it could do so to any spacecraft, regardless of who it belongs to. The same technology could also be weaponized to damage or deactivate a satellite. 

Brian Chow, a space policy analyst, says China shares information about its commercial activities but is “evasive about those that can enhance its military capability,” like the Shijian-21 incident. 

“China has been secretive in the development and tests of its rendezvous and proximity operations,” Chow said. And that secrecy — alongside the opacity surrounding China’s other space activities with military implications — is unlikely to change.

The lack of communication from China concerns officials from other countries because of China’s ability to potentially conduct an attack in space or cause space “situational awareness” problems. From a traffic perspective, without direct information from the country, managing potential crashes becomes more difficult: Space traffic trackers can make better predictions and give better warnings if they receive direct information from satellite operators about a spacecraft’s position or planned maneuvering. The Shijian-21 event and the silence around it, however, are typical of China’s lack of transparency. 

In another example, earlier this year, Lieutenant General DeAnna M. Burt of the U.S. Space Force said that when the U.S. sends warnings about conjunctions that could affect China’s space station, they get crickets in return.

“Many authoritarian countries that don’t share information with the populace don't share it internationally,” said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow for LeoLabs, a private company that performs its own space traffic tracking and management on behalf of satellite companies and space agencies. “And so I’d be concerned if China and Russia started putting up 10,000-, 13,000-satellite constellations that they would be as open about what they’re doing.”

Imagine a constellation that would add exponentially to the crash risk, like SpaceX does, but whose operators wouldn’t coordinate or share precise information that cannot be gathered from afar.

China does, actually, have a plan for such a constellation: a 13,000-spacecraft herd called Guowang that will, like Starlink, provide internet service. For Guowang to work well for the world, the country needs to become a part of space traffic dialogue and share information. 

Chow believes they will. “If China does not collaborate or share information, the U.S. would have to rely on its own warning system and ability to maneuver,” he said. “On the other hand, as this constellation will primarily be used for commercial purposes, China will likely share information to avoid these satellites from being hit so that they can perform their missions cheaper and better.”

That could lead to more formal crash-avoidance coordination that Samson, of the Secure World Foundation, sees coming. But whatever that system looks like, it can’t be the only protective mechanism in place. “There will also have to be rules of the road established,” Samson said. “If two satellites are heading toward each other, who moves?” The newer satellite? The larger one? “And continued sharing of space situational awareness data is key to have a common understanding of the orbital environment,” she said.

Making sure that space stays safe is key to protecting life on the ground too. The modern world would cease to turn without satellites, and catastrophic crashes could move us closer to that point. Regulation, cooperation and public awareness are ways to step back and keep space traffic running smoothly, without stifling the good parts of orbital infrastructure — like increased connectivity on Earth.

Cleaning up orbit and orbital behavior may seem daunting, but it’s possible: It happened, for instance, with the oceans. Until the middle of the 20th century, people thought these bodies of saltwater were so large that mere human pollution could never alter them. When it became clear that the seas could indeed get slimy, people rallied to curtail the dumping of waste into the oceans.

While those initiatives have been far from perfect (see: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), collective awareness of our ability to negatively impact the planet is much greater than it used to be.

The same could be more broadly true of space in the future. After all, environmental awareness of space is as old as environmental awareness on the planet. Earth’s environmental movement came about at the same time as the Space Age, around the 1960s, and the two shaped each other. “There’s been an almost explicitly environmental consciousness of outer space from the very beginning of the Space Age,” said Rand, the environmental historian.

That idea even shows up in what little international regulation exists in orbit. “There’s parts that are evident in the Outer Space Treaty,” Rand said, referring to the U.N. document signed by 113 nations about how to behave beyond Earth. For instance, the treaty has a provision stating that states “shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies,” things like creating debris, causing crashes and making things too crowded for comfort.

The Outer Space Treaty also treats orbit as an international place — a common resource that no one owns but for which everyone bears responsibility. A coordination system that recognizes that responsibility could keep orbit, and everything satellites help us do on Earth, safe for the future.

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Across the water, shimmering in the heat, stand imposing steel and concrete structures — the brand new plants built by Sinomine, one of the several Chinese companies that have invested in Zimbabwe’s nascent lithium mining industry. Soon, Sinomine will be exporting the lithium from its Bikita mines to massive battery manufacturing factories in China. This neglected rural district is now one more pawn in China’s gambit to control the world’s supplies of rare earth elements and minerals.

The Mungezi River forms the border between Bikita and the equally poor neighboring district of Gutu. On a Friday afternoon in July, Nelson Chamisa, the young, charismatic leader of Zimbabwe’s opposition, is on the campaign trail.

“Our minerals are being exploited,” Chamisa says to the crowd at a rally. “You are getting nothing. The only thing you are getting are cracks in your houses from the dynamite blasts. Our people are still jobless, they still remain poor.” 

On August 23, 2023, Zimbabweans are scheduled to vote in a general election. Chamisa and the incumbent president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, are — as they were in 2018 — in a standoff, with none of the other candidates expected to be in the running. Mnangagwa took over the presidency in Zimbabwe in 2017, when long-time president and strongman Robert Mugabe was deposed in a coup. A year later, Mnangagwa won a disputed election. During his time in office, Zimbabwe has lurched from one economic crisis to another.

But now Zimbabwe has been marked as a potential lithium hub. “Lithium batteries,” Elon Musk tweeted last year, “are the new oil.” China is, by a significant margin, the world’s largest manufacturer of these batteries, which are used to power electric vehicles, laptops and mobile phones among other things. And as the pressure to transition away from fossil fuels grows, the demand for lithium has been outstripping supply, raising prices and setting off a scramble to discover alternative sources.

Chinese and Western companies have their eyes on mining minerals across Africa, including, for example, Morocco and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The cobalt reserves in the DRC are critical to the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries, leading to a rush to mine the metals often under inhuman conditions. When Pope Francis visited Kinshasa, the DRC’s capital, he said that the “poison of greed” was “choking Africa” and that the continent was “not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered.” 

But with the value of the EV battery market projected to increase from about $56 billion in 2022 to an estimated $135 billion in 2027, Zimbabwe’s lithium deposits represent an enormous economic opportunity for a debt-ridden country that has been suffering from international economic isolation and U.S. sanctions for 20 years. 

Sanctioned by the United States, Mnangagwa has turned to China, Russia and Iran for support. In July 2023, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi stopped in the Zimbabwean capital Harare as part of his three-country African tour. The crowd waved Zimbabwean and Iranian flags. Mnangagwa described Raisi as his brother. “When you see him, you see me,” said Mnangagwa. “When you see me, you see him.” 

And at the 2023 Russia-Africa summit in Saint Petersburg, Vladimir Putin reportedly gave Mnangagwa a helicopter. Putin also included Zimbabwe among a half dozen nations that Russia promised to supply with grain for free after refusing to extend the Black Sea grain deal that enabled exports of Ukrainian grain to Africa. Victims of American sanctions must cooperate, Mnangagwa said, “and this is the cooperation we are seeing.”

In Mnangagwa’s view, the West has had decades to mine and invest in Zimbabwean minerals and has done little. Sinomine and other Chinese companies, on the other hand, have moved quickly. The fruits of Chinese investment are evident across Zimbabwe. Last year, Mnangagwa delivered a State of the Nation address from a new $200 million parliamentary building entirely funded and constructed by China. Opponents of Chinese investment, Mnangagwa says, just want to hand Zimbabwe to the West. “They want our lithium,” Mnangagwa says of Western companies, “they want our minerals.”

Instead, it is Chinese companies, the Zimbabwean government argues, that offer Zimbabwe the best deal. For instance, Sinomine expects to create 1,000 jobs at its two Bikita plants and export up to $500 million of lithium concentrate every year. By comparison, the plants’ previous European owners did nothing for 50 years.  

Standing on the back of a pickup truck, Nelson Chamisa tells cheering supporters that these projections of Chinese success mean little unless locals benefit from the jobs and the profits. “Do you see any development from the lithium here?” Chamisa asked his supporters in Gutu. “Kana,” they roared back. Nothing.

According to the Zimbabwe Investment Development Agency, international investors are flocking to the country for lithium. Of the 116 investment licenses issued to foreign investors in the first three months of 2023, 42 were given to companies seeking to buy into the lithium industry. “Without doubt, mining outstrips every other area,” Tafadzwa Chinhamo, the head of ZIDA told me. “Most of our licenses right now are for lithium mining, prospecting and processing.”

His list of applications for licenses tells the story of the race to mine Zimbabwean lithium. In the first half of 2023, he told me, ZIDA received 160 investor applications from China, up from 53 over the same period in 2022. By contrast, there were only five U.S. applications and 10 U.K. applications. The Chinese applications for the first quarter of 2023 pledged investments of $944 million, compared to $166 million proposed by U.S. investors.

Zimbabwe’s opposition claims that Chinese companies are being given free rein over the nation’s mineral resources and allowed to cut regulatory corners and scar the environment. The ruling party says the opposition are megaphones for the West.

This has not gone unnoticed in Washington, D.C.

At a March confirmation hearing for Pamela Tremont, the U.S. ambassador-designate to Zimbabwe, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was clear on what they expected her to do — go to Zimbabwe and counter China’s influence. Chinese and Russian interests, Tremont told the committee, “comprise about 90% of the foreign direct investment in Zimbabwe’s mineral sector.” Expressing doubt about the terms of the contracts, Tremont added that she “would certainly hope the Zimbabwean government is ensuring that the Zimbabwean people are getting fair compensation for the minerals taken from their country.”

Her comments riled the Chinese embassy in Harare. A spokesperson told The Herald, Zimbabwe’s state-owned daily newspaper, that “Zimbabwe should not be used as a wrestling ground for major-country rivalry.” China, the spokesperson said, was focused on bringing more development to Zimbabwe, while the U.S. was slapping “illegal” sanctions on Zimbabwe and meddling in its internal affairs.

But Chinese investment in Zimbabwe is not without controversy.

Goromonzi is a farming area just east of Harare, the capital. Standing on a red-soiled ridge, I saw maize fields stretching to the horizon on one side of the Nyaguwe River. On the other side, Shengxiang, a small Chinese company, has started mining for lithium. According to the local office of the Environmental Management Agency, the company is operating in the area illegally.

“We inspected the mine, found them in breach of regulations, fined them and ordered them to stop operations until they got an EIA [environmental impact assessment authorisation],” said Astas Mabwe, the officer in charge of the area. Still, Mabwe told me, the company kept mining.

A member of the ruling party told me anonymously: “Who is going to go out and fight an investor when the president is calling for more investment?”

The Chinese Chamber of Enterprises in Zimbabwe, which represents over 80 companies in the country, insists that companies like Shengxiang are in the minority. Allegations of illegal operations, Chinese authorities say, are part of a campaign of deliberate misinformation.

Last year, local newspapers published a series of articles that argued that Chinese companies in Zimbabwe had flouted a number of laws safeguarding the environment and labor rights. The reporting was attributed to the Information for Development Trust, a journalism program funded by the U.S. embassy in Harare.

Aja Stefanon, from the U.S. embassy’s economic affairs department, said last year that the program’s “work has ensured that the media plays its watchdog role in safeguarding shared goals in labor, human rights, and natural resources governance.”

Predictably, the Chinese embassy saw it differently. It told The Herald that the Information for Development Trust was “a puppet sponsored and manipulated by the U.S. Embassy to attack Chinese investment in Zimbabwe.” It “had long fabricated false information and published anti-China news,” the Chinese embassy said.  

Back in Bikita, Sinomine, under the conditions of its mining license, will spend an extra $2 million to supply uninterrupted power to local villages. This June, Sinomine started to drill 35 boreholes to provide water to these villages.
Until then, Molly Mandityira, a local village head said, eight villages shared a single borehole. “This,” she told me, “changes everything.” With people in rural areas generally voting in far greater numbers than people in urban areas, Mnangagwa might be counting on Chinese investment to win him the election

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The post As Zimbabwe elections near, China is the dragon in the room appeared first on Coda Story.

“People here, local people, just don't take it very seriously,” said Jambey Wangdi as he sipped on some fresh watermelon juice in a hotel in Tawang, a town in the state of Arunachal Pradesh that sits on India’s jagged eastern Himalayan border with China. He punctuated these words with a phlegmatic shrug. I had asked him how Arunachali people feel about being on the frontline of an intense, intractable and very current border dispute between two nuclear powers.

On June 21, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi began a four-day “state visit” to the United States — an event that is slightly more ceremonial than an “official” visit and an honor typically reserved for close allies. High on the agenda will be both countries’ strategic need to counter China’s economic and military might and its regional assertiveness. India is being talked up by the Biden administration as the “cornerstone of a free, open Indo-Pacific.” But as the U.S. and India grow closer, the latter’s diplomatic relations with China have nosedived. “This is the worst time I’ve seen in my living memory in I-C relations,” tweeted Nirupama Menon Rao, the former Indian ambassador to both China and the United States. “And I’m not exaggerating. It’s serious.” 

On the eve of his visit to the U.S., Modi told the Wall Street Journal in a rare interview, that for “normal bilateral ties with China, peace and tranquility in the border areas is essential.”  Last month, I traveled to  Tawang, which sits 10,000 feet above sea level and about 20 miles from Bum La Pass, the border post between India and Chinese-occupied Tibet. China has long claimed Tawang, a center of Tibetan Buddhism, as rightfully Chinese. I met Wangdi at a ritzy resort on the city’s outskirts. A high-ranking functionary in the Arunachal Pradesh government, he was keen to impress upon me the patriotism of people in the state. “Physically we may look a bit different, the shape of our eyes may be different,” he told me. “But emotionally, mentally, we really consider ourselves to be true Indians.”

According to Wangdi, the Indian government’s focus on improving infrastructure in the northeast of the country means that Arunachal Pradesh and Tawang in particular are booming. As I drove up to Tawang from the plains on freshly paved roads, evidence was everywhere. Unfinished construction, scattered outcroppings of concrete mushrooms, marred the mountainscape. 

Even the hotel in which we sat was still only half-built. The yet-to-be-installed picture windows in yet-to-be-finished rooms will look out on a famous 17th century Buddhist monastery. Future guests will also see the 30-foot high gilded Buddha that towers over Tawang, a giant looking down on Lilliput.

It was an overcast day in the middle of May when we spoke, the air heavy with the promise of rain. Wangdi leaned back in his chair, every inch the local grandee, self-assured and hospitable. “As far as tourism potential goes,” he told me, “Tawang is at the very top.”

He says the speed and purpose with which Modi’s government is developing Arunachal Pradesh, gradually making the state accessible by air, rail and road, is guaranteed to create economic opportunities and to match the impressive progress on China’s side of the border. Oken Tayeng, a successful tour operator, told me that Arunachal Pradesh was now “at a crucial threshold.” The state, he said, “can still decide the kind of tourists it wants to attract.” He cites neighboring Bhutan as a model for “how to bring in high-quality tourists with little environmental impact.” 

But Tawang is not there yet. The rampant building spree appears ad hoc and unregulated amidst the coniferous hills and cascading waterfalls. Wandering through the center of Tawang — its shabby streets similar to those in dozens of other small Indian hill towns, with tourists from Bengal, Gujarat and Maharashtra haggling with vendors in Hindi — it is hard to understand why China believes that most of Arunachal Pradesh, and certainly all of Tawang, is theirs.

India’s traditional neighboring rival has been Pakistan. But it is India’s burgeoning rivalry with China that preoccupies security analysts, as the two Asian behemoths, particularly over the last three years, have become embroiled in a bitter, and at times violent, standoff along their 2,100-mile border. Neither country appears willing to take a step back or disengage. 

Though Tawang has been administered by independent India for 72 years now, China maintains that the town is culturally and historically a part of Tibet and therefore Chinese territory. Since 2020, China is estimated to have occupied almost 1,000 square miles of previously Indian-controlled territory in border regions. Satellite images show Chinese-built bridges, roads and watchtowers stretching several miles into what was commonly considered the Indian side of the so-called “Line of Actual Control.” 

Prime Minister Modi has vociferously denied any concession of territory to China. In June 2020, Indian and Chinese soldiers fought in the western Himalayan region of Ladakh, in the Galwan Valley. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand combat. They “have been martyred,” said Modi at the time. “But those who dared Bharat Mata (Mother India), they have been taught a lesson.” Such was the current strength of the Indian army, he added, that “no one can eye even one inch of territory.”

China did not officially disclose any casualties. It was the first loss of life for Indian and Chinese troops on the border since 1975. Another brawl broke out in the final weeks of 2022. On December 9, hundreds of Chinese and Indian troops faced off on the border near Tawang. Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh told the Indian Parliament that at least 300 Chinese soldiers had tried to cross over into territory held by India. The troops engaged briefly, with their fists and improvised weapons. Six Indian soldiers were reported to have been treated for minor injuries. To prevent fistfights from turning into firefights, India and China have had agreements in place for decades, committing not to use live firearms within a mile or so of the border. But both sides have now deployed arms, and as many as 60,000 troops each, to the border. The situation is “fragile and dangerous,” India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar told the press.  

Ashok Kantha, a former Indian ambassador to China, says that China has been “pushing the envelope” on border issues with India for over a decade now, seeing what it can get away with. These “gray zone” maneuvers, falling just short of a declaration of war, he told me, are “typical of China’s pressure tactics and intended to make India pay a heavy price for border management.” Kantha, who now directs the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi, was referring to the exorbitant costs incurred by India to keep additional troops in harsh and remote terrain all year round and the costs of building the infrastructure to prevent what he called China’s “salami-slicing” method of incrementally expanding its territorial claims.

Writing for The Caravan, an Indian English-language magazine, last October, Sushant Singh, a fellow at the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, pointed out that “perceived signs of weakness vis-a-vis Pakistan and China are anathema to Modi’s strongman image.” So the Modi government, Singh added, has adopted the “undemocratic domestic strategy of keeping the Indian public in the dark” by restricting “access to journalists and blocking questions and discussions in parliament.” 

Instead, the government and the pliant mainstream media have chosen to hype Modi’s “friendship” with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In 2014, when Modi became prime minister, the two famously sat together on a gaudy ceremonial swing in Modi’s home state of Gujarat. 

“Modi’s personalized diplomacy with Xi,” Singh wrote, “has been an abysmal failure.” Over the phone, Singh told me that despite Modi’s posturing about India’s status as a leading global power and Modi’s own status as a charismatic global statesman, the prime minister is fearful of escalating tensions with China.

It is an uncharacteristic diffidence. In February, India’s foreign minister metaphorically hoisted a white flag when questioned about border disputes with China. “As a smaller economy,” Jaishankar said, “what am I going to do, pick a fight with a bigger economy?” It was a discomfiting echo, from a key Indian cabinet minister, of the official Chinese contempt for India’s pretensions. “China,” Ashok Kantha told me, “sees its relationship with India through the prism of its larger rivalry with the United States.” 

Sushant Singh put it more bluntly. “China,” he said, “figures very highly in the Indian imagination. India hardly figures in the Chinese imagination.”

In the Chinese understanding of the global hierarchy, Singh told me, “India is too weak to be granted agency in its own right.” Instead, China thinks of its relations with India as a subplot to the main narrative: China plans to become the world’s preeminent power by 2049. As if to back up this reading, a major security conference held in Singapore in early June was dominated by talk of the rivalry between China and the United States. “A confrontation” between the two superpowers, said the Chinese defense minister, “would be an unbearable disaster for the world.” 

Talk of India, meanwhile, was relegated to a footnote. A Chinese colonel told journalists that India was “unlikely to catch up to China in the coming decades because of its weak industrial infrastructure.” In a dismissive aside, he asked: “When you look at the Indian military’s weapon systems, what types of tanks, aircraft and warships were made and developed by Indians themselves?” The answer is: none.

China’s confidence that it has the upper hand in its relationship with India is bolstered by the numbers. Its economy is nearly six times the size of India’s, and China spends about $225 billion on defense compared to India’s $72 billion.

It is India’s urgency in improving infrastructure in its border areas, in connecting once-isolated states like Arunachal Pradesh to the rest of the country, that accounts in part for China’s increased belligerence, Ashok Kantha told me. Back in Tawang, the construction equipment I saw strewn everywhere, the roads being scoured into the hills and the soldiers who outnumbered the tourists all told the story of India’s attempts to catch up to China.

Sushant Singh traces this development back to 2006, when the influential Indian foreign secretary at the time, Shyam Saran, rejected India’s prevailing strategy of treating its border areas as “buffer zones between China and the Indian heartland.” It was, Singh told me, “an ‘outpost’ outlook inherited from the British.” Instead, Saran argued that India needed to radically upgrade its capacity along the border. It needed to put down hundreds of miles of new roads, lay railway tracks and build bridges and airports. From India’s perspective, this necessary self-assertion in the border regions has revived arguments that had lain dormant for two decades.

While India and China may have been growing further apart for at least 15 years now, the deadly fight in the Galwan valley in 2020 marked the start of what Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar has said is “a very challenging and abnormal phase in our ties with China.” In 2022, China introduced a new border security law, which described the territorial sovereignty of China as “sacred and inviolable.” It also made it official state policy to continue to expand and support the construction of villages and towns along border areas.

India, again belatedly reacting to China’s initiative, announced its own “vibrant villages” scheme to build settlements in long-neglected, often poor and desolate border areas. China has reportedly already built some 600 villages in occupied Tibet. It took until 2023 for India to begin building its first “vibrant village” in Arunachal Pradesh. Home Minister Amit Shah visited the state this April to kickstart the program. “Whenever I come to Arunachal,” said Shah, “my heart is filled with patriotism because no one greets people here by saying, ‘namaste,’ they say, ‘Jai Hind’ (long live India) instead.” 

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman responded to Shah’s visit by saying it “violated China’s territorial sovereignty.” It was a reminder that China has no intention of relinquishing its claim to Arunachal Pradesh. While China claims the whole state of Arunachal Pradesh as its own, it is mostly Tawang that it prizes. “Tawang is indispensable to China,” a retired colonel in the Chinese army told the BBC in March 2023. In 2017, a former Chinese diplomat described Tawang as “inalienable from China’s Tibet in terms of cultural background and administrative jurisdiction.” He added that the “boundary question was not created by China or India, so we shouldn’t be inheriting it and letting the ghosts of colonialism continue to haunt our bilateral relations.”

It all started, as have many of the world’s present-day territorial disputes, when the British drew a line.

In 1913, negotiations began in Simla, the summer capital of British India, where administrators would retire to escape the heat of the plains. Attending this summit were representatives of British India, Tibet and the new Republic of China — founded after the revolution in 1911 that ended about 275 years of Qing dynasty rule and 1,000 years of Chinese imperial history. Tibet, much to the chagrin of the Chinese representative, was invited as a quasi-independent state. After 1911, the British considered Tibet to be under Chinese “suzerainty,” meaning that Tibet had limited self-rule.

Negotiations played out over several months. When they came to a close, the British representative, Sir Henry McMahon, had determined where the border lines should be drawn between China and Tibet and between Tibet and British India. But China and Tibet could not agree on their border, nor on the extent or nature of China’s so-called suzerainty over a Tibet chafing for independence. 

A document signed by the Tibetans and initialed by Henry McMahon set out the contours of the border line between British India and Tibet, without Chinese agreement — the Chinese delegate walked out of the conference in its final phase. China has since claimed that Tibet, as a Chinese protectorate, had no right to negotiate treaties on its own behalf. The line dividing Tibet and British India, which later became known as the McMahon Line, continues to be the basis of India’s territorial claims. 

The Simla conference ended messily in July 1914, as Europe found itself preparing for World War I. For two decades after the conference, the British authorities did nothing to enforce the McMahon Line. Tibet still saw its writ as extending through what was called the Tawang Tract.

By the mid-1930s though, wrote the journalist and historian Neville Maxwell, a British official named Olaf Caroe tried to “doctor and garble the records of the Simla Conference to make them support the assertion that India’s northeastern borderline lay legitimately just where McMahon had tried unsuccessfully to place it.” Maxwell is a controversial figure in India, largely because he blames India and its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, for forcing China into the month-long Sino-Indian war in 1962 by insisting on the legality of the McMahon Line and refusing to come to an independently negotiated border settlement. 
What Maxwell took at face value, the Indian editor Pradip Phanjoubam has written, was that “Tibet was Chinese territory all throughout history,” regardless of what the “Tibetans themselves think on the matter.”

India and China in fact did not share a border until October 1951, when the People’s Republic of China — itself only established by Mao Zedong in 1949 — officially annexed Tibet. The British, despite drawing the McMahon Line, had largely stayed out of Tawang, leaving it to be controlled by Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. But alert to the implications of Chinese aggression in Tibet, India sent an expedition to Tawang led by Major Ralengnao “Bob” Khathing who quickly and efficiently established Indian rule by February 1951. 

According to the scholar Sonia Trikha Shukla, Bob Khathing won over residents in Tawang, most of whom were part of the Monpa tribe, with his “tact, firmness and discretion.” He showed, Shukla said, the “benign, enlightened” face of the Indian administration some 37 years after Tawang was supposedly ceded to British India in Simla. China, perhaps preoccupied by the Korean War, didn’t object to India’s takeover of Tawang at the time.

But then, in 1959, there was a popular uprising in Tibet against Chinese control. Fearing arrest and possibly death, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism, escaped over the Tibetan border into Tawang. When I visited the monastery in Tawang, I saw photographs in the tiny museum of a lean, young Dalai Lama wearing a hat at a rakish angle that made him look a little like the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. 

The Dalai Lama, who has lived in India for over 60 years now, set up the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala in the western Himalayas.

“When the Dalai Lama and his followers fled to India,” wrote historian Jian Chen, an emeritus professor at Cornell University, China became hostile. Two “hitherto friendly countries,” he added, “became bitter adversaries.” According to Chen, when top Chinese leaders discussed Tibet in a Politburo meeting in 1959, Deng Xiaoping — who succeeded Mao in 1976 and transformed China’s economy — said that India was behind the Tibetan rebellion. China believed that the Indian government had allowed the CIA to train Tibetan guerillas on Indian soil, in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong. 

India, Mao argued, despite its non-aligned foreign policy, remained a slave to Western interests. “When the time comes,” Chen quotes Mao as saying, “we certainly will settle accounts with them.”

Those accounts were settled in 1962. While the rest of the world was distracted by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the distinct prospect of the Cold War turning hot, a confrontation between India and China over border delimitations was becoming inevitable. Chinese forces crossed into Tawang on October 20, 1962 and overwhelmed the small number of poorly equipped Indian troops on the border. Prime Minister Nehru turned desperately to the United States and Britain for help. But before any international intervention became necessary, China called a unilateral ceasefire. 

After a month of territorial gains, China, perhaps concerned about the harsh Himalayan winter, perhaps fearful of American intervention, moved its troops back behind the McMahon Line. While China voluntarily retreated from Tawang and present-day Arunachal Pradesh, it retained control over Aksai Chin, about 15,000 square miles of barely populated, high-altitude desert, territory that India claims but that is of strategic value to China, connecting Tibet to the Uyghur Muslim heartland of Xinjiang.

During the 1962 war, thousands of Indians of Chinese descent were removed from their homes and held in internment camps just because of the way they looked, much like Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during World War II. Joy Ma was born in an internment camp in India in 1962. She wrote a book about the 3,000 Chinese-Indians imprisoned in Deoli, in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. I spoke to Ma, who now lives in California, and her co-author Dilip D’Souza on Zoom. Though the war in 1962 lasted only a month, Ma said, many “Chinese-Indians spent up to five years in Deoli Camp.” Some died in the camp. “Some,” she wrote in her book, “were deported to China on ships — a strange and cruel fate to visit on people whose families had been Indian for generations, who spoke only Indian languages and for whom China was a country as foreign as, say, Rwanda might have been.”

Ma told me that she grew up in Calcutta and had lived in India until she went to graduate school in the United States. After the war was over, her family couldn’t bring themselves to speak about what had been done to them. “The government was just so punitive,” Ma said. And, long after the war, even their neighbors would ostracize them. “People didn’t want to know us,” she told me, “didn’t want us to visit.” Ma is among a number of Chinese-Indians, most of whom have emigrated to North America, who are seeking an acknowledgement and an apology from the Indian government. 

It’s unlikely to come anytime soon. The war with China looms large in the Indian imagination — for decades after the war, the national tenor was maudlin, mournful, self-pitying but hardly introspective. India positioned itself as a victim rather than any sort of perpetrator. Apart from Ma and D’Souza’s book, there has been no public discussion of the internment of Chinese-Indians or contrition about the destruction of a once-thriving Chinese-Indian community. Only a few hundred Chinese-Indians are left in Calcutta, for instance. Yet every Chinese New Year the media descends on the city to broadcast pictures of dragon dances and celebrate the delicious, hybrid cuisine while resolutely ignoring the jailing of Chinese-Indians in 1962. Over the last three years, as India’s border quarrel with China rose in pitch and intensity, Ma told me, the small Chinese-Indian community has been reminded of its vulnerability and its perpetually provisional status in India. 

“The border,” Ma said, “is the reason for our misery.”

The aftershocks of the 1962 war continue to reverberate in India in other ways too. The abject defeat is a stick with which the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party, still beats Nehru.  The war is cited as Exhibit A in the BJP-led prosecution of Nehru’s alleged failings as prime minister. A common trope in the BJP’s narrative is that Nehru was too complacent and too weak-willed to effectively defend India’s borders against Chinese incursions. In December 2022, when Indian and Chinese soldiers brawled on the border near Tawang, the BJP chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, Pema Khandu, offered some boastful reassurance at a private event. “It’s not 1962 anymore,” he said in Hindi. “It’s 2022 and we’re in the Narendra Modi era.” India could now be relied upon to keep China at bay. And part of how the BJP plans to boost India’s defensive capacities is to invest heavily in Northeast India.

While India prides itself on its linguistic and ethnic diversity, with its pluralism and democratic inclusiveness cited as major weapons in its competition with China, the far less palatable truth is that its union is fractious, riven with conflict and prejudice. In particular, the eight landlocked states of Northeast India, which share borders with China, Myanmar, Bhutan and Bangladesh, have been frequently at odds with the Indian mainstream.  

Modi himself tweeted, on March 26, that the “Northeast is witnessing all-round development. Once known for blockades and violence, the region is now known for its development strides.”

A little over a month later, on May 3, Manipur, one of the Northeastern states that Modi was referring to, exploded in ethnic and sectarian violence that has resulted in over 100 deaths. After weeks of silence, the Indian government moved 10,000 soldiers into Manipur to keep the peace. Still, deaths and cases of arson continue to be reported. Internet services have also been largely unavailable since the conflict began and, at the time of publication, had yet to be restored.

Manipur is a powder keg of ethnic resentment at least in part because the BJP’s Hindu-centric approach stirs up communal trouble, in this case between the largely Christian tribes in the hills and the Hindu Meitei people in the valley. In Assam, another state in the Northeast, the BJP’s flawed attempt to build a national register of citizens has left two million people, many of them Muslim, facing statelessness. 

Still, in Arunachal Pradesh, it is a common refrain that Modi’s time in power has coincided both with an acceleration in infrastructure building and a renewed commitment to the region. Modi himself has visited Northeast India about 50 times in nine years. The fruits of his personal attention are evident in the recent electoral successes the BJP has enjoyed there: Modi’s party is now the dominant political force in the region.

In the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh, I visited Thembang, an ancient Monpa village that is currently waiting to be awarded UNESCO World Heritage status. On the afternoon I was there, the village was deserted except for some thick-set mountain dogs and a drunk swaying precariously down some stone steps. Despite the poverty of the present-day village, the remnants of massive stone walls and gates betray a more salubrious past. For centuries, Thembang was a “dzong,” a fortified administrative and ecclesiastical hub. Dzongs have been a feature of Buddhist architecture since the 12th century, particularly in Bhutan, which also borders Arunachal Pradesh. They are places of local significance, places of business and bustle, politics and religion. 

Walking out of Thembang, I was stopped by Jambay. He only gave me his first name. Obviously prosperous and educated, he spoke fluent English and was eager for conversation with a passing stranger. His family line in Thembang, Jambay said, goes “as far back as it’s possible to go.” But, given the remoteness and relative lack of opportunity in the area, Jambay had been sent to school in Bangalore. He went on to work in the Indian civil service in Delhi. Now, Jambay told me, he had “turned full circle,” returning to his home village to work on a U.N.-sponsored conservation project. 

I steered our conversation toward his opinion, as an Arunachali in close proximity to the border, on China’s assertion that Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory. Younger people, Jambay said, “know only that they are Indian.” His grandfather’s generation, though, saw themselves as Monpas who were part of a sprawling Tibetan Buddhist land, their cultural totems being the Tawang monastery and the Dalai Lama’s seat in Lhasa. Until 1951, when China annexed Tibet, trade and travel between Lhasa and Tawang — thousands of miles of mountain wilderness traversed on foot and on horseback — was ceaseless, Jambay said.

In 1962, Jambay told me, Chinese troops passed through Thembang on the way to Bomdila, where they battled with the last of the crumbling Indian resistance. The war “was not much discussed” within his family, Jambay said, “because it was so short and most people escaped into Assam before the worst of the fighting.” The few who were “left behind,” Jambay told me, “lived with the Chinese soldiers.” They were “good to the locals,” Jambay said. “Maybe because they wanted to win the people’s hearts.”

But the Chinese soldiers, Jambay said, did not leave a favorable impression. “Indian nationalism flourishes in Arunachal Pradesh,” he told me, “because people resent the Chinese for how they treated the Dalai Lama and are grateful that India gave him refuge.” 

But there is, he added, also a new edge in people’s feelings about Nehru and the Congress party, which ruled India for more than 50 of the country’s 75 years as an independent nation. The Congress is now in opposition, a pastiche of the grand party it once was, pitching Nehru’s great-grandson into a losing battle against Modi, who has effectively styled himself as the destroyer of a complacent, English-speaking Indian elite, which clung fast to their inherited privileges.

Jambay says Congress was reluctant to build infrastructure in Arunachal Pradesh because it could also be used by the enemy, whether the Chinese or insurgents from within. “That,” Jambay told me, “is negative thinking, to not want to prepare yourself because you’re so worried about giving your enemy an opportunity.” Some of what Jambay refers to as “step-motherly treatment” is evident in the fact that, until 1972, Arunachal Pradesh was known as the North East Frontier Agency, an unlovely bureaucratic label that suggested that the region only mattered as a buffer between India and China. It took until 1987 for the Indian government to declare Arunachal Pradesh a fully-fledged state.

As for Nehru, Jambay says he “gave up on the Northeast in 1962 when he said, ‘My heart goes out to the people of Assam,’ after the Chinese took over Bomdila.” He is repeating, with conviction, the BJP’s main talkingpoints. The implication is that until the rise of Narendra Modi, the Northeastern states were not treated as fully Indian.

Any Indian visitor to Arunachal Pradesh will invariably remark on two things that appear to separate the state from its Northeastern neighbors. Pretty much everyone in the state speaks Hindi. And Arunachalis wear their patriotism on their sleeves.

Jambey Wangdi, the government official I met at the sparkling new hotel in Tawang, told me that people in Arunachal Pradesh are “taught Hindi right from their childhood.” The state, he said, “puts a lot of emphasis on Hindi speaking and Indianness.” Hindi has become a link language in a state with dozens of different tribes that speak in as many dialects. 

The Hindi spoken by Arunachalis, as Wangdi cheerfully admits, is not “grammatically perfect” and is spoken with a distinctive local accent. But it connects the state to the 650 million people in India who speak Hindi as either their first or second language. After the 1962 war with China, the Indian government made language integration a priority, promoting the study of Hindi in schools. Bollywood also hooked Arunachalis onto Hindi. “We love the songs,” Wangdi said, “we sing them all the time.” 

Throughout our conversation, Wangdi kept coming back to themes of Indianness and patriotism. He told me that his father was a junior officer in the intelligence bureau posted at the border in 1962. “You could make a movie about his life,” Wangdi said. Among the stories his father told about the war was one about Chinese soldiers helping farmers in Tawang to work their fields. “In the evenings,” Wangdi said, “the soldiers would gather people together and say, ‘Look at my eyes, look at your eyes. We’re the same. What do you have in common with those Indians with their big eyes, their big noses and their beards?’”

The point, for Wangdi, is that the Chinese soldiers thought external appearances were enough to engender solidarity and kinship. But they underestimated the Nehru government’s efforts to make tribal people, who were culturally Tibetan Buddhists and who were cut adrift in rough, remote terrain, see themselves as part of a vast Indian nation. 

Verrier Elwin, a British-born Indian anthropologist, advised Nehru on how to integrate the North East Frontier Agency and its unruly tribes into India. In Elwin’s slim 1957 book, “A Philosophy for NEFA,” he wrote: “Elsewhere in the world, colonists have gone into tribal areas for what they can get; the Government of India has gone into NEFA for what it can give.”

In Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian government, so repressive in putting down insurgencies in other parts of the country, including the Northeast, seems to have created genuine national feeling. At the monastery in Tawang one morning, its yolk-yellow roofs glinting in the sun, I watched as the young monks, straight-backed in their robes, sang the Indian national anthem. It seemed to me almost performative. But Tongam Rina, an editor at the Arunachal Times, told me that Arunachalis had been systematically and effectively “Indianized.” 

In school, she said, pupils recited the “National Pledge,” which begins: “India is my country / All Indians are my brothers and sisters / I love my country / and I am proud of its rich and varied heritage.” On WhatsApp, she forwarded me a recent tweet from the Arunachal Pradesh chief minister’s office, featuring a video of local schoolgirls singing a “soul-stirring patriotic song, filling the air with love for our motherland.” A hard-nosed journalist, Tongam told me that displays of patriotism should not mask the structural problems in Arunachal Pradesh — a lack of jobs, for instance, or the Indian government’s desire to mimic Chinese policies in Tibet by pursuing a narrow development agenda while ignoring its effects on the environment or on local people’s lives.

Nehru’s severest critics argue that it was his refusal to negotiate over the dubiously drawn borders bequeathed by the British Raj that pushed India into a disastrous war. The scars of that conflict mean that, despite the bellicose posturings of Modi and his right-hand man Amit Shah, the government has little desire to take on a militarily and economically superior China. But for at least three years now, both countries have been staring each other down. And there is little indication of when they will choose to return to the dormant, if unresolved, status that characterized their border relations for half a century after 1962.

Sanjib Baruah, a political studies professor at Bard College, told me that “relations between India and China have deteriorated during the last decade primarily because of global strategic realignments.” As it always has, China sees its relationship to India only in the context of wider Chinese geopolitical ambition. President Xi Jinping, Baruah said, has expressed his belief that the U.S. and its allies are conspiring to contain further Chinese advancement. “This is the context,” Baruah added, “in which China sees India’s growing closeness with the U.S. as a threat.” 

In February, two U.S. senators introduced a bipartisan resolution in the Senate “reaffirming the United States’ recognition of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as an integral part of the Republic of India.” The resolution noted that the U.S. “recognizes the McMahon Line as the international boundary between the People’s Republic of China and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.” China, said Baruah, the Bard professor, “probably sees the resolution as a provocation.”

The history of the McMahon Line, with the haphazard way it came to be an international border between India and China and the renewed fervor with which both nations claim Arunachal Pradesh’s status to be non-negotiable, is evocative of Benedict Anderson’s line in his seminal work, “Imagined Communities.” It is, Anderson wrote, “the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.” To see Tawang as an integral part of either India or China is a willful act of magical thinking.  

Before I left Tawang, I spoke again to Jambey Wangdi. It seemed he too had chance and destiny on his mind. “If the problem of Tibet could be solved,” he said, “whether it’s autonomy or a free Tibet…” He trailed off. Wangdi left the tantalizing prospect of a free Tibet unexplored. He didn’t speculate what that might mean for Tawang, which is closely connected to Tibet through their shared Buddhism. In 1683, the sixth Dalai Lama was born in Tawang, one of only two to have been born outside the precincts of Tibet proper. So even then Tawang’s geographical status, if not its cultural identity, was liminal — a peripheral place between other, bigger, more significant places.

It feels like a place that was designed to provoke arguments. Tawang’s value to both India and China is symbolic: It’s about geopolitics, strategy and national self-image. As a consequence, Wangdi pointed out, “the amount of money spent on the military on the border is enormous.” If you have a good neighbor, he said, “you can spend that money on health and education.” If you have a good neighbor, he laughed, “you can get some sleep at night.”

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Hundreds of Uyghurs fled China in 2014, as the Chinese authorities launched a crackdown on the Muslim-majority ethnic group native to the northwest region of Xinjiang. The aim, the government said, was to stamp out extremism and separatist movements in the region. The authorities called it the “strike hard campaign against violent terrorism” and created a program of repression to closely monitor, surveil and control the Uyghur population.

The authorities bulldozed mosques, saw any expression of religion as extremist and confiscated Qurans. By 2018, as many as one million Uyghurs had been sent to so-called “re-education” camps. Across the region, an extensive high-tech system of surveillance was rolled out to monitor every movement of the Uyghur population. This remains the case to this day, with the Chinese police in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, reportedly requiring residents to download a mobile app which enables them to monitor phones. 

Back in 2014, Uyghurs seeking to flee the burgeoning crackdown were forced to take a notoriously dangerous route, known as the “smugglers’ road,” through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand into Malaysia — from there, they could reach Turkey. Though Malaysia had previously deported some Uyghur Muslims to China, in 2018, a Malaysian court released 11 Uyghurs on human rights grounds and allowed them safe passage to Turkey. By September 2020, despite Chinese anger, Malaysia declared it would not extradite Uyghurs seeking refuge in a third country. 

But before they could make it to Malaysia, many Uyghurs were detained by the immigration authorities in Thailand and returned to China. Human rights groups condemned the deportations, saying that Uyghurs returned to China “disappear into a black hole” and face persecution and torture upon their return. 

Hashim Mohammed, 26, was 16 when he left China. He spent three years in detention in Thailand before making a dramatic escape. He now lives in Turkey — but thoughts of his fellow inmates, who remain in Thai detention, are with him every day. This is his account of how he made it out of China through the smugglers’ road. 

Hashim’s Story 

On New Year’s Day, in 2019, I was released from immigration detention in Istanbul. It was late evening — around 10 p.m. It was the first time I had walked free in five years. And it was the end of my long journey from China’s Uyghur region, which I ran away from in 2014. 

It started back in the city of Urumqi in Xinjiang, 10 years ago now. I was 16 years old and had recently begun boxing at my local gym. In the evenings, I started to spend some time reciting and reading the Quran. The local Chinese authorities were beginning their mass crackdown on Uyghurs in the name of combating terrorist activity. Any display of religious devotion was deemed suspicious. 

The local police considered my boxing gym to be a sinister and dangerous place. They kept asking us what we were training for. They thought we were planning something. They started arresting some of the students and coaches at the gym. Police visited my house and went through all my possessions. They couldn’t find anything.

After some time, the gym closed — like lots of similar gyms all over the Uyghur region. People around me were being arrested, seemingly for no good reason. I realized I couldn't live the way I wanted in my hometown, so I decided to leave. 

At that time, thousands of Uyghurs were doing the same thing. I had heard of a smugglers’ route out of China, through Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and eventually to Malaysia. From there, I’d be able to fly to Turkey and start a new life. We called it the “illegal way.” It’s very quick once you leave China, it only takes seven days to get to Malaysia. 

At the border leaving China, we met with the smugglers who would get us out. They stuffed around 12 of us into a regular car, all of us sitting on top of each other. I was traveling alone, I didn’t know anyone else in the car. 

I remember one guy, Muhammad, who I met in the car for the first time. He was from the same area as me. He was with his wife and two kids and seemed friendly. 

The road was terrifying. There was a pit of anxiety in my stomach as the smugglers drove through the mountainous jungle at night at breakneck speed. I watched the speedometer needle always hovering above 100 kmph (about 60 mph), and I couldn’t help thinking about how many people were in the car. We heard about another group, crossing the border into Cambodia in a boat, who nearly drowned. After just seven days, we reached Thailand and the border with Malaysia. We sat in the jungle, trying to decide what to do — we could try climbing the border fence. 

But we also saw a rumor on WhatsApp that if you handed yourself in to the Thai border police, they would let you cross the border to Malaysia and fly onward to Turkey within 15 days. People on the app were saying some Uyghurs had already managed it. At this point, we’d been sleeping outside, in the jungle, for days, and we believed it. We handed ourselves in, and the police took a group of us to a local immigration detention center in the Thai jungle. 

Fifteen days slipped by, and we began to realize that we’d made a terrible mistake. With every day that passed, our hope that we would get to Turkey slipped away a little further. No one came to help us. We were worried that the Thai authorities would send us back to China.  

I was put in a dark cell with 12 guys — all Uyghurs like me, all trying to escape China. Throughout our time in jail, we lived under the constant threat of being deported back to China. We were terrified of that prospect. We tried many times to escape.

I never imagined that I would stay there for three years and eight months, from the ages of 16 to 19. I used to dream about what life would be like if I was free. I thought about simply walking down the street and could hardly imagine it. 

There were no windows in the cell, just a little vent at the very top of the room. We used to take turns climbing up, using a rope made out of plastic bags, just to look through the vent. Through the grill, we could see that Thailand was very beautiful. It was so lush. We had never seen such a beautiful, green place. Day and night, we climbed up the rope to peer out through the vent. 

We knew that the detention center we were in was very close to the Thai border. One guy who I shared the cell with figured out something about the place we were in. The walls, he said, in this building built for the heat were actually very thin.

We managed to get hold of two tools. A spoon and an old nail. 

We began, painstakingly, to gouge a hole in the wall of the bathroom block. We took turns. Day and night, we had a rota and quietly scraped away at the wall, making a hole just big enough for a man to fit through. There was a camera in the cell, and the guards checked on us frequently. But they didn’t check the bathroom — and the camera couldn’t see into the bathroom area, either. 

We all got calluses and cuts on our hands from using these flimsy tools to try to dig through the wall. We each pulled 30-minute shifts. To the guards watching the cameras, it looked like we were just taking showers. 

The guys in the cell next door to ours were working on a hole of their own. We planned to coordinate our breakout at the same time, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. 

We dug through as much of the wall as we could, without breaking through to the other side until the last moment. There was just a thin layer of plaster between us and the outside world. We drew numbers to decide who would be the first to climb out. Out of 12 people, I drew the number four. A good number, all things considered. My friend Muhammad, who I met on the journey to Thailand, pulled number nine. Not so good.

That Sunday, we all pretended to go to sleep. With the guards checking on us every few hours, we lay there with our eyes shut and our minds racing, thinking about what we were about to do.

Two a.m. rolled around. Quietly, carefully, we removed the last piece of the wall, pulling it inward without a noise. The first, second and third man slipped through the hole, jumped down and ran out of the compound. Then it was my turn. I clambered through the hole, jumped over the barbed wire below me and ran.

The guys in the next cell had not prepared things as well as us. They still had a thick layer of cement to break through. They ripped the basin off the bathroom wall and used it to smash through the last layer. It made an awful sound. The guards came running. Six more guys got out after me, but two didn’t make it. One of them was Muhammad. 

The detention center we were in wasn’t very high security. The gate into the complex had been left unlocked. We sprinted out of it, barefoot, in just our shorts and t-shirts, and ran into the jungle on the other side of the road, where we all scattered. 

I hid out for eight days in the jungle as the guards and the local police tracked us through the trees. I had saved some food from my prison rations and drank the water that dripped off the leaves in the humidity.

It’s impossible to move through the undergrowth without making a lot of noise — so when the police got close, we had to just stay dead still and hope they wouldn’t find us. At one point, we were completely surrounded by the police and could hear their voices and their dogs barking and see their flashlights through the trees. It was terrifying.

Finally, after days of walking and hiding in the undergrowth, we made it to Thailand’s border with Malaysia. It’s a tall fence, topped with barbed wire. I managed to climb it and jump over — but the guy I was with couldn’t make it. He was later caught and sent back to detention.

In total, there were 20 of us who had managed to break out of the Thai jail. Eleven made it to Malaysia. The others were caught and are still in the detention center in Thailand. 

After spending another year in detention in Malaysia, I was finally able to leave for Turkey. After two months in Turkish immigration detention, I walked free. I had spent my best years — from the age of 16 until 21 — in a cell. I feel such sorrow when I think of the others who didn’t make it. It’s a helpless feeling, knowing they’re still in there, living under the threat of being sent back to China. 

Now I have a good life in Istanbul. Every morning, I go to the boxing gym. I’d like to get married and start my own family here. But half of me lives in my home region, and my dream is to one day go back to my home country.

Muhammad, my friend who I met on the smuggler’s road, is still in the Thai jail. He’s such an open and friendly person, and he was like my older brother inside. When the hope drained out of me and I broke down, he always reassured me and tried to calm me down. He would tell me stories about the history of Islam and the history of the Uyghur people. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. I think about him, and the other Uyghurs still trapped in Thailand, all the time.

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While it’s true that ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, is beholden to Chinese law, there’s no publicly available evidence that the Chinese government itself has spied on people in the U.S. through TikTok. Last year, ByteDance was found to have tracked the IP addresses of journalists covering the company, though the employees who took part in this effort were fired soon after the news came to light. 

TikTok has been under intense regulatory scrutiny since 2019, with policymakers especially concerned about where and how it stores data belonging to U.S. users. As of now, the company says, it sits in its data centers in Virginia and Singapore. However, it’s also working on “Project Texas”: a $1.5 billion plan to route all U.S. user data through the servers of the Austin-based computing giant Oracle, managed through a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security.

At the hearing, Chew said this would act as a “firewall” to protect U.S. user data. But legislators appear unconvinced. Their security concerns have led to a place where U.S. sanctions on TikTok seem like a real possibility. Legal experts caution that a ban might not have legs, due to free speech protections under the First Amendment. But even if it doesn’t stand up in court, restrictions on the app could have significant ripple effects for other China-owned companies, both in the U.S. and other Western countries.

Political posturing among legislators like McMorris Rodgers make it look as though Washington is ready to ban all sorts of Chinese technology from U.S. territory. But this is easier said than done. Chinese technology has become deeply embedded in the West, whether in stand-alone products like Hikvision security cameras or in the individual parts used to make networked technologies, ranging from mobile phones to smart speakers.

The case of Huawei might offer some clues. The Chinese telecommunications infrastructure firm was effectively banned by the Trump administration in 2019 over fears of espionage. While the Shenzhen-based company was initially allowed to continue developing 5G networks in Britain, this was swiftly overturned following analysis by the U.K. government’s National Cyber Security Centre — and amid the trade war between the U.S. and China emerging at the time. 

“Many in the U.K. said, ‘Don’t worry, Huawei isn’t a problem,’” explained Sam Olsen, the CEO of the Evenstar Institute, a London-based business strategy and geopolitical think tank. “But the actions of the U.S. created a business case for U.K. companies to move away from Huawei and Chinese technology more broadly.”

So far, many of the U.K.’s bans on Chinese technology have been restricted to government property: TikTok has been banned on civil servants’ work devices and government departments are barred from installing Hikvision surveillance cameras at sensitive sites.

But Olsen believes more sanctions are on the way. He cites cellular components of networked devices commonplace in the home and the office: smart thermostats, refrigerators and connected security systems, often referred to as the Internet of Things, some of which capture copious amounts of user data by design. Key parts of these products are made in China by companies like Quectel and Fibocom. Most have geolocation capabilities. “By their nature, these devices contain sensitive data: a car that’s parked outside a government location could potentially reveal an agent’s identity and behavioral patterns,” he said.

Chinese technologies that can track cross-border metrics are in the firing line, too. China’s dominance in global trade means it possesses immense logistics data. For example, LOGINK, a Chinese transport and logistics platform, links shippers internationally on a closed platform. “The software is integrated into China’s 93 ports in 53 countries, meaning it has access to the visibility of global supply chains,” said Olsen. “From a national security angle, China could divert sensitive cargo thanks to the platform's data.”

Likewise, Beijing-based Nuctech builds security scanning technology used at EU borders and major international sporting events. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration banned the equipment in American airports in 2014, but most Western allies are yet to follow. “The technology is scanning everything going in and out of Europe, giving China huge data to work from,” said Olsen.

According to Olsen, cheap manufacturing and a market of 1.5 billion people meant it initially made business and political sense for Western allies to cozy up to China. However, he says, there has been a collective naivete regarding China’s longer-term goals, which “never wanted to settle as a bit player in a Western feudal system.”

Now, under Xi Jinping’s leadership, the “wolf warrior diplomacy” style of figures like Zhao Lijian, an ex-foreign ministry spokesman, is on full display: coercion, confrontation and conflict as China asserts its status as a true global superpower. After decades of investment in Chinese technology for its high quality and cheap price, some political forces in Western nations want to backtrack. But this may force them to choose between market pressures and national security interests.

“U.K. government enthusiasm for Chinese investment and trade partnerships has, for 20 years, rubbed up against cybersecurity concerns,” said Tim Stevens, a reader in global security at King’s College London. “But now, the cybersecurity aspects of Chinese state-firm relations are too serious for any government or firm to ignore: There are few, if any, restrictions on what data the Chinese government can obtain from ‘private’ companies, and no independent oversight of those relationships.”

While sanctions on Chinese technology ramp up, a complete disentanglement is unlikely, if not impossible. Chinese tech isn’t only embedded in Western devices — but in its economies, too. Olsen says one way of easing reliance on China is the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act: the $280 billion investment to boost semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. “If that ran its course, the U.S. would be able to export to its allies, gain self-sufficiency and encourage the likes of Apple to diversify its tech away from China.”

It’s unclear if we’re entering another Cold War, says Richard Harknett, a professor of political science and the director of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati. However, the nature of technology and cybersecurity mean the devices we all use can be leveraged by global superpowers in the name of espionage: digital frontlines in which a live shot is never fired. “Unauthorized data collection, data manipulation and manipulating computer networks are the ways superpowers are trying to gain advantages against each other,” Harknett said. “We’re in a new phase of strategic competition across all countries. Cyberspace is allowing states to use digital means to undermine each other’s economies, militaries and trust in government.”

Through that lens, for the National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone to compare TikTok to a “loaded gun” makes sense from a U.S. geopolitical perspective. Olsen, however, says the platform has become more of a totem for the current freezing of U.S.-China relations. “It’s a symbol of Chinese data and influence in the West,” he said.

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As a people subject to ongoing repression in China — or genocide, as a U.S. congressional committee heard in Washington, D.C. last week — it could appear the Uyghurs have found peace in Turkey, a space where they can preserve and even revive their language and literature. 

But on Tuesday, March 14, the Kutadgu Bilik bookshop was raided by the Turkish police. They dragged books out in large bags to a van parked outside.

The first time the police raided the shop in August 2022, they confiscated hundreds of books. This time, members of the Uyghur community protested. Some lay down in front of the police van to prevent it from leaving.

“This shop is a solution for us,” the owner, Abdulla Turkistanli, told me, a day after the police raid. “We can teach our next generations here, we can keep our culture alive.”

Uyghur bookstores in Istanbul play a vital role in sustaining the culture, in giving Uyghurs across generations and continents access to their language and history. Estimates of the Uyghur population in Turkey vary from over 50,000 to around 150,000, making it probably the largest community of Uyghurs outside their traditional home in Xinjiang, a vast region in northwest China that borders several Central Asian countries, Russia, Pakistan and India.

For close to a decade now, the Chinese state has been conducting a violent crackdown on its Uyghur population. This campaign, which has increased in intensity since 2017, extends far beyond China’s borders. Uyghurs in the diaspora are subject to surveillance, while their families back home are sent to re-education centers and prisons where many have been tortured and raped. Uyghur literature has also been a prime target, with dozens of renowned writers, poets, publishers and academics disappeared into the labyrinthine system of internment camps. 

This has all but destroyed the small trickle of books coming out of the region, severing a critical link between those who escaped and those still trapped inside.

Turkistanli, the bookshop owner, wears his exhaustion on his face. Years of pressure from the Chinese state have left him depleted of energy, if not of the will to keep fighting. On the night of the raid earlier this month, he was rushed to a hospital with heart problems. It has been, he told me, a chronic ailment, first sustained after he was imprisoned in Kyrgyzstan after leaving Xinjiang in 2008. He says he was tortured by Chinese officials and injected with a mysterious substance. 

Speaking on March 23 to the newly formed U.S. bipartisan committee examining the rivalry with China, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman who was detained in a Chinese re-education camp for three years, said that the detainees were told they were being vaccinated when they were injected with undisclosed drugs but were actually being sterilized. 

Turkistanli was eventually able to leave Kyrgyzstan for Turkey. In 2013, he opened his first bookstore. At the time, he said, Uyghurs could travel more freely between Istanbul and Xinjiang. The Uyghur diaspora would return from each visit laden with books. In this way, hundreds, if not thousands, of books were removed to safety.

Over the years, the Uyghur diaspora community in Istanbul has added thousands of volumes to the Kutadgu Bilik collection. But the cost of reprinting these books is high. There are usually only two to four copies of any given title in Turkistanli’s shop. The Turkish police, when they raid the shop, say that Turkistanli does not have the copyrights necessary to reprint books. Acquiring the copyrights, Turkistanli told me, is impossible without the cooperation of Chinese authorities. Even contacting the authors of the books, if they are in Xinjiang, is impossible. Turkistanli estimates that around 90% of the books in his shop were written by people who have been swallowed up by the prisons and re-education camps.

He believes that the Turkish police are acting under pressure from the Chinese state when they raid Uyghur bookshops. In this environment, he told me, he does not know how much longer his shop can stay open.

It is a fate that other Uyghur booksellers in Istanbul also face.

In the district of Zeytinburnu, the once bustling heart of Uyghur life in Istanbul, Abdulhalil Abithaci told me he would soon be closing his bookshop. The pandemic, he said, and Turkey’s underperforming economy has meant that many Uyghurs — who tend to make less money than the general Turkish population — cannot afford to buy books anymore. Many, he adds, are leaving Zeytinburnu for less expensive areas, while others have left Turkey altogether to seek a better life further away from China’s reach in Europe, North America and Australia.

The first wave of Uyghurs came to Istanbul in the 1950s, escaping religious persecution under a newly formed communist regime in China. Subsequent periods of repression drove more and more Uyghurs to flee abroad. The fall of the Soviet Union brought a new era of controls, as the Chinese state increasingly sought to “Sinicize” Uyghurs by forcing them to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture. 

For the few able to escape China’s harsher crackdowns since 2017, Turkey has been a place of refuge. As Turkic people, Uyghurs and Turks share historical, linguistic and cultural ties, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once seen as an advocate for Uyghurs. But as Ankara has sought closer ties to China, the situation for Uyghur refugees has become more precarious.

Turkey is home to the largest number of refugees in the world, with millions escaping war in Syria in particular. The Turkish government, though, is itself a notorious conductor of cross-border repression, especially targeting suspected followers of a movement led by the Muslim preacher and scholar Fethullah Gulen who has been based in the United States for over two decades. According to a report by the think tank Freedom House, Turkey was second only to China between 2014 and 2021 in perpetrating acts of “physical transnational repression.”

It is because Turkey so often acts to repress dissent beyond its borders that it acts as a willing accomplice to other repressive regimes, including China, says Howard Eissenstat, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University. “It boils down to a transactionalism,” he told me, “that both China and Turkey see as part of international relations, since neither is concerned with the rule of law.”

Many Uyghurs living in Istanbul fear that the threat to their safety is growing, as Erdogan and Chinese President Xi Jinping become closer. Seyfullah Karatug, for instance, told me he feels his life as a Uyghur refugee in Istanbul depends on the whim of an unpredictable Turkish state. The fear of arrest or deportation constantly hangs over him.

I met the 24-year-old Karatug at the Uyghur bookshop Kutadgu Bilik, the day after the police raided it. One of his eyes had been blackened during the protests from the night before. Karatug told me he visits the store almost every day. As the only Uyghur bookstore in Sefakoy, Kutadgu Bilik closing would be a personal disaster. That’s why Karatug raced to the store when he received a WhatsApp message that it was being raided by the police.

When he asked the police if they had a warrant and filmed them manhandling protestors, a policeman punched him in the face. Video footage seen by Coda Story, as well as a hospital report, corroborates Karatug’s claims. Karatug told me his father had sent him and his brother to Egypt in 2016, fearing for their future in China. The brothers have had no contact with their family since late 2017, when they believe their father was arrested. Knowing the sacrifice his father made, Karatug told me, made him determined to keep his language and cultural traditions alive, to pass them onto his younger brother. It’s why Uyghur bookshops are so important to him.

For now, though, Kutadgu Bilik at least remains open. Once Abdulhalil Abithaci’s bookshop in Zeytinburnu closes, though, there will only be two Uyghur bookshops left in Istanbul. The impact will be felt beyond the streets of the Turkish metropolis, hurting the Uyghur diaspora around the world.

“Books are very important for the survival of our culture and people,” Dilnur Reyhan, a Uyghur sociologist based in Paris, told me over the phone. “If the bookstores in Istanbul do not survive, it will be a major blow. That is why I think the Chinese state ordered this attack, and the Turkish authorities executed it.” Reyhan, who edits a Uyghur-French magazine, added that the war in Ukraine had driven up the price of paper, putting the hope of creating new Uyghur bookstores away from Turkey further out of reach.

One Uyghur software developer, Memeteli Niyaz, has built a website that has around 3,000 free ebooks on it, 600 of which were sent from within China by an anonymous source. But Niyaz has already been forced to migrate the website to a new host after the one he was using received copyright complaints. He fears his website, too, will inevitably be shut down. 

A week after the raid, I visited Abdulla Turkistanli again. He told me that some Turkish writers had come to the shop and encouraged him to carry on providing books to Istanbul’s Uyghur community. Turkistanli had just donated hundreds of books from his shop to the community, something he does every year at the start of Ramadan. This year, he was more generous than usual.

If the store is raided again, he told me, it is better that the books are already spread throughout the community, where there is at least a chance they will be read, enjoyed and protected.

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The human rights court had determined that states that are party to the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes virtually all European nations except Russia and Belarus, cannot extradite people to China unless the Chinese government can demonstrate that the extradited person will not be tortured or be subject to inhuman and degrading treatment. This shuts down extraditions to a country that does not allow international scrutiny of its penitentiaries, underscoring international concern over the Chinese government’s widening dragnet that tries to bring home dissidents and critics living in exile.

But China still has the capability to tie down its citizens in lengthy legal battles by issuing Interpol red notices — an international alert that requests other countries find and arrest suspects who have fled abroad for extradition or other legal actions — while also deploying an array of illegal tools of repression. Despite Europe's attempt to close the door on China's extradition campaigns, Beijing has ratified a spate of new extradition treaties with countries outside of Europe.

In Liu v. Poland, the human rights court, which is based in Strasbourg, France, ruled that extraditing Hung Tao Liu, a Taiwanese man who had appealed his extradition from Poland, would place him at a significant risk of ill treatment and torture. 

The judgment “substantially reduces the chances of extradition of persons to the PRC”, said Marcin Gorski, referring to the People’s Republic of China. Gorski is a Polish professor of law at the University of Ludz who represented Liu in the case.

China alleges Liu led a major telecommunications fraud. In an earlier case, the Spanish government in 2019 extradited 94 Taiwanese citizens to China as part of the same probe. The human rights court’s ruling covers anyone facing extradition to China, whether they are wanted for political reasons or for white-collar economic crimes.

China’s attempts to bring home dissidents and critics who are Chinese citizens living abroad have been intensifying over the past decade in tandem with China’s integration into the global financial system and its emergence as a world power, according to Nate Schenkkan, a senior director of research at Freedom House whose work focuses on authoritarianism.

Beijing has pursued dissidents in all corners of the world, triggering a response from the U.S. The White House has sought to control technology exports that can be used by China to conduct acts of repression while boosting the capacity of domestic law enforcement agencies to deal with the targeting of Chinese dissidents on U.S. soil. Members of Congress have introduced a bill that would define and criminalize transnational repression in federal law.

Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine last year was a wake-up call for Europe to the security threat posed not just by Moscow but by Beijing. But it has been left mostly to courts to protect people from China’s expanding reach.

European officials are failing to take action when it comes to the threat posed by China, often relying too heavily on the legal system to sort out the problem, said Laura Harth, the campaign director at the China-focused organization Safeguard Defenders.

While in many cases it is unlikely that China will be successful in its extradition attempts, the burden of defending themselves means the targets are quickly bogged down in costly legal battles, said Harth.

Europe’s human rights court has come under criticism from governments in recent years, accused of politicizing the domestic affairs of countries in Europe. The U.K. has made attempts to ignore the court’s rulings on granting prisoners the right to vote, and ministers have flirted with the idea of quitting the European Convention in response to the barriers it poses to the U.K.’s controversial plans on national immigration policy.

But for now, the court’s ruling on Chinese extraditions seems to be respected.

A Chinese businesswoman last summer was detained while passing through Italy. She was on her way to collect her kids from a holiday with their father in Greece. China had issued an Interpol red notice for her arrest and then requested her extradition.

Enrico Di Fiorino, a lawyer representing the businesswoman, said the European Court of Human Rights ruling was an important part of her defense and was likely to have played a role in winning the case.

Di Fiorino’s client is now free from extradition in Italy, but if she travels to other European countries, she is still at risk. If an Interpol red notice is issued against her while she is in a country that the Chinese government has an extradition treaty with, she risks being caught up in another lengthy legal battle. Hung Tao Liu, in the Poland case, spent five years in prison while litigating his extradition.

Formal extraditions comprise a small part of China’s larger campaign to silence and intimidate its dissidents into returning home. Coercion and harassment make up the bulk of China’s tactics. In fact, extraditions accounted for just 1% of the overall number of people returned to China. Involuntary returns, which include kidnappings, accounted for 64%.

Dissidents in Europe live in a climate of fear, frequently surveilled while their families back in China are harassed by the state. Several European countries have been investigating these more clandestine operations, most notably the use of overseas police stations, which can be used to silence Chinese dissidents living abroad.

Italy has been accused of hosting 11 overseas police stations. Chinese dissidents in the country are relieved by Italy’s court ruling while still fearful of China’s reach, said Harth.

In December, China ratified extradition treaties with Kenya, Congo, Uruguay and Armenia.

For Reinhard Butikofe, a German member of the European Parliament, this is concerning. But he cautioned that Europe should get its own house in order before European politicians can criticize other countries for cooperating with China’s extradition strategy. “I think before we can credibly approach anybody else, we have to clean up our own act first,” he said.

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The rise of the killer robot

Forget fantasyland Westworld machine murderers. Real-life lethal robots are now fighting their way into warzones and police departments worldwide. 

Coda’s Ilya Gridneff explored the rollout of a new generation of autonomous machines on Ukraine’s battlefields. Naval drones and unmanned, machine gun-equipped ground vehicles are “poised to upend modern warfare,” Gridneff wrote. The emergence of these “killer robot” devices raises all sorts of terrifying questions about the ever-blurring boundary between machines and humans and the existential risk of ceding too much control from the latter to the former. 

They’ve made it to California, too. Lawmakers in San Francisco, one of several U.S. cities doubling down on police surveillance in response to concerns about crime, recently faced severe backlash after nearly approving a measure that would have let police use robots to kill. The neighboring city of Oakland also explored (and then scrapped) a plan to arm police robots with guns. 

America’s post-Roe abortion surveillance matrix

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark case establishing a constitutional right to abortion, privacy experts were quick to point out the dangers of the decision in the digital age. As we wrote after a draft opinion was leaked in May, people’s search histories, text messages, location data, social media activity, purchasing records and use of reproductive health phone apps could all be used as evidence in legal cases against those who seek the procedure in states where the procedure is outlawed. 

“As soon as abortion becomes criminalized, then any sort of digital trace that people leave online at any stage of their journey could be evidence that might be used against them,” Nikolas Guggenberger, now-former executive director of Yale’s Information Society Project, explained. And that’s nothing to say of the incredibly messy universe of questions it might raise for speech on social media platforms. Already, companies have been accused of suppressing content about abortion and abortion-inducing drugs.

The spy in your pocket

It’s impossible to talk about authoritarian tech trends without talking about spyware. There is a huge global appetite for this technology by governments of all stripes. We’ve covered the topic extensively in our Authoritarian Tech newsletter — subscribe if you haven’t yet! — and the updates are coming in so quickly that it’s hard to keep track. In California, WhatsApp and Apple have sued the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group, and a group of journalists from the Salvadoran investigative newsroom El Faro are also taking NSO to court for building software that infected reporters’ phones and tracked their every move. 

For journalists targeted with spyware, the personal and professional harm can be severe and long-lasting. Over the summer, we covered the story of Togolese reporters who appeared on a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers that NSO clients targeted for surveillance. A year after the revelations, the threat of being infected with spyware continues to haunt them.

Engineering a perfect society – through mass surveillance

The scope of mass surveillance in China is so widespread that it’s difficult to truly wrap your mind around it. Coda reporter Liam Scott gave us a primer when he interviewed Wall Street Journal journalists Liza Lin and Josh Chin about their recent book, “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control,” which describes the country’s descent into mass surveillance as a tool of authoritarian social control. 

The magnitude of surveillance in Xinjiang, where the government has been accused of carrying out a genocide against Uyghur Muslims, is “truly totalitarian,” reporter Chin explained, with the goal of completely “remolding” the individuals it targets. This includes a system of biometric data collection, facial recognition technology, so-called “Big Brother” programs and advanced artificial intelligence that authorities have imposed on the population to exert “total control.” Outside of Xinjiang, residents have faced extreme surveillance under Beijing’s draconian “zero Covid” policy, which reporter Isobel Cockerell has explored at length in her excellent Infodemic newsletter. 

The building blocks of the surveillance nightmare unleashed in Xinjiang and beyond, however, can be found in the U.S., home to companies that happily supplied their technologies to the Chinese government as it constructed its panopticon. These tech companies, Chin explained, “midwifed the Chinese surveillance state from its most embryonic state in the early 2000s, and they continue to nurture it with capital and components.” China’s end goal with this tech, he believes, is to build a “perfectly engineered” society. If that’s not dystopian nightmare fodder, I’m not sure what is.

As we struggle to find a silver lining in all this, it may be time to take a step back and reconsider tried-and-true methods of communication. From protester signs in China to print-and-post samizdat networks in Belarus, our stories in 2022 also showed the enduring power of pen and paper. Enjoy your reading.

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China

China continued to be the most dangerous cross-border offender. As part of its highly sophisticated transnational repression campaign, the regime issued hundreds of lnterpol red notices — requests to police around the world to detain and send suspects back to China. In April, the Chinese government tried to force back four members of the Uyghur minority, who have been targeted heavily within and outside China, from Saudi Arabia. Among the four was a 13-year-old girl who, along with her mother, risks being sent to a detention center. Following an outcry from human rights groups, the deportation has been delayed. 

Under the banner of an anti-corruption program called Sky Net, the Chinese state has also ramped up efforts to repatriate Chinese nationals it accuses of corruption. The program has seen thousands targeted in the last few years, including the Chinese businessman Ma Chao, a member of the persecuted Falun Gong movement currently living in Cyprus. At the start of the year, members of his family in China were arrested to increase pressure on him to return. Just one month later, an Interpol notice was issued against his wife. 

Even within the U.S., traditionally seen as the ultimate safe haven for those escaping persecution abroad, China has ramped up its efforts to target dissidents. In October, the FBI charged seven individuals with conducting a campaign to surveil and coerce U.S. residents to return to China. In response to this concerning trend, a group of Democratic congressmen have introduced a bill that seeks to codify transnational repression as a crime under U.S. law.

Turkey

Turkey is one of the biggest transnational repression actors. High-profile attempts to return Kurds back to Turkey were a regular occurrence in 2022. Turkey has been able to leverage Russia’s war in Ukraine, demanding that Finland and Sweden commit to more proactively returning dissident Kurds to Turkey in exchange for Turkey’s support for their NATO membership bids. Turkey’s government has provided a list of dozens of people it wants repatriated. It continued to tap informal networks to attack and threaten journalists living abroad. Those targeted in Sweden include the Turkish-Kurdish journalist Ahmet Donmez, who, in March of this year, was attacked outside his home.

Iran

Over the years, the Iranian regime has used tactics such as assassinations, renditions and digital intimidation to target Iranian citizens in countries in Europe, the Middle East and North America, according to Freedom House. During the past three months of cascading protests across Iran, there has been renewed global interest in the dangers facing Iranian activists living at home and abroad.

In October, masked men attacked anti-government protestors outside the Iranian embassy in Berlin, leaving several injured. The British police recently warned two British-Iranian journalists and their families that they faced an increased “credible” threat from Iranian state security forces. The head of the U.K.’s domestic spy network, MI5, used his annual threat update to warn of Iran’s ambitions to “kidnap or even kill British or U.K.-based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime.” He said that there had been at least 10 such potential threats since January 2022.

Saudi Arabia

Since U.S.-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in 2018 inside the Saudi embassy in Turkey, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been under a measure of diplomatic pressure. That has not stopped him from expanding the Saudi government’s transnational repression efforts. In August, the same month that President Biden met with the prince, three people were sentenced in Saudi Arabia after being surveilled while abroad. One was a 34-year-old mother who had tweeted about the Kingdom while in the U.K. 

It was also in August that a former employee of Twitter was convicted in the U.S. for using his access to Twitter’s data to spy for the Saudi regime. Last week, a U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit against bin Salman that sought to hold him accountable for Khashoggi’s murder. The judge said that, while he felt uneasy about it, his hands were tied because the Biden administration had made a recommendation to give the Saudi leader political immunity. Having cemented its position as one of the worst transnational aggressors of 2022, the Biden administration’s policy is likely to provide wiggle room for the Saudi regime in 2023.

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A November 24 apartment fire in Urumqi, the capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, killed at least 10 people and injured at least nine more. Reports that zero-Covid measures delayed firefighters from reaching the blaze prompted unprecedented protests around the country.

State media in China have been blaming foreign forces and trying to distract viewers, which are typical strategies, said Joshua Kurlantzick, the author of a new book, “Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World.” 

Chinese media outside the country have had a more interesting response.“They’re not trying to make a major effort to spin it, since it’s pretty hard to spin for foreign audiences,” said Kurlantzick, who is also a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. Instead, they appear to be flooding social media platforms like Twitter with “massive amounts of spam to make it harder for reporters and independent observers to access information about what’s going on.”

In his new book, Kurlantzick analyzes how China is working to become a global media and disinformation superpower through an arsenal of tactics, including through state media, disinformation campaigns and digital infrastructure. 

China’s information efforts “could give Beijing more influence over the information that publics in many states consume — on the internet, through social media, on television, and on the radio,” he writes. Beijing’s investments have paid off in some areas — but far from all of them, Kurlantzick found.

I recently spoke with Kurlantzick about his new book. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you give me your book’s elevator pitch? 

I started out thinking that China was building a very large disinformation and state media influence apparatus and was becoming fairly successful at influencing the domestic politics and societies of other countries over the past decade, which it hadn’t really focused on doing except in a few places like Taiwan. That was my original thesis. 

I had seen a big growth in China’s efforts to build up its media and wield information tools and disinformation. Pro-Beijing entrepreneurs were buying up the local Chinese-language media so that there were very few non-pro-Beijing options for Chinese media. 

And what I found is they have had some success, but in reality a lot of the funds and time spent to expand state media, making it credible and wielding disinformation and influence in other countries, has actually not worked and in many cases has backfired. China has developed this massive effort to influence other countries, but it has failed as often as not. 

What are the main elements of China’s media offensive? 

One element is actual state media, like CGTN, China Radio International and Xinhua. The Xi administration has spent a huge amount of money expanding them and trying to upgrade them by hiring quality foreign journalists. But those have almost completely failed. Xinhua has had more success. Xinhua has signed a lot of content sharing agreements with a lot of news agencies around the world. In developing countries, Xinhua is increasingly stepping into the void left by other news wires like the Associated Press, because Xinhua content is free or cheap. 

The second prong is control over information pipes, building cables, 5G networks, etc. China has had some success with that in Africa and other places, but they are losing out as Western countries increasingly crack down on a lot of their efforts. 

The third prong is an increasingly sophisticated use of disinformation. They have become more sophisticated at using bots and flooding sites with disinformation. For instance, Meta and Twitter recently reported efforts by China to spread disinformation online to influence the U.S. midterm elections in November. 

What’s in it for China? 

Beijing felt that the entire global media environment was dominated by outlets that were from liberal democracies — NBC, CNN, other major Western news outlets — and that those outlets didn’t cover China fairly. They wanted to be able to get China’s story out there. They wanted to promote China’s own model and also get their views out there and build networks that were capable of delivering this message. 

You wrote that the Chinese government tried and failed to make CGTN like Al Jazeera, which is owned by the Qatari government. What went wrong? 

They wanted CGTN to be regarded as a credible source of information, like Al Jazeera. But the idea that China could have had something like Al Jazeera was always something of a fantasy. Qatar is a small state, and it has significant foreign policy on a few certain issues. But outside of those issues, Qatar has basically left its Al Jazeera reporters alone. China was never going to be able to do that because virtually any issue could have an impact on China. 

You write about the dominance of Xinhua’s content sharing agreements, especially with local news outlets in Southeast Asia. What are the implications of those agreements for people in their daily lives? 

Xinhua has had success at reaching audiences, and so those Chinese-language readers are getting a skewed view. It’s dramatically cutting them off. But the greater danger is Xinhua increasingly developing content sharing agreements with local language outlets. Like in Thailand, now there are a lot of Thai-language outlets using Xinhua content. That’s going to become more common in Southeast Asia, except in Singapore, where outlets have the money to pay for the major global wires. 

That’s going to be a serious problem because you’re going to have Xinhua copy increasingly picked up by a lot of local news outlets in the local languages. Readers don’t really notice where it comes from. That’s going to skew the views of the general reading public, and that’s quite dangerous. 

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WeChat is an omnipresent Chinese messaging app, and Kokas, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, needed it to talk to Chinese sources for her research. But, as Kokas told me, it soon became “a very meta experience.” To have WeChat on her personal phone meant that “you were subjecting yourself to precisely the type of surveillance that you were writing about.”

In the book, Kokas analyzes how Chinese firms and the Chinese government gather data on U.S. citizens for political and commercial gain, putting U.S. national security at risk. China is able to do this, Kokas points out, in part because the U.S. government does not have substantial regulations in place to protect users and their data.

“By tracing how China and the US have shaped the global movement of data, I hope this book empowers citizens around the world to navigate the complex terrain created by Silicon Valley, Washington, and Beijing,” she writes.

I recently spoke with Kokas on the phone. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What do “digital sovereignty” and “data trafficking” mean in layman's terms? 

Digital sovereignty is the idea of control over a country’s digital resources. Digital sovereignty is something that we see in countries that are trying to protect their digital domain from oversight from other countries. The Chinese government has a more expansive vision called cyber sovereignty, which is that any digital space that a country touches should be part of their digital domain.

Data trafficking is the movement of data from one country to another without the consent of users and without their understanding of the implications of their data being moved between national data regimes. For example, if I sign up for TikTok here in the U.S. and I find out that my data has been accessed in another country, that would be data trafficking. 

My favorite line in the book is when you write, “Most people are simply not exciting intelligence targets.” So what are the implications of data trafficking for most Americans in their daily lives? 

People are afraid that they are individually going to be targeted, and there are some scary stories, but ultimately the more interesting data for the Chinese government and for Chinese firms is actually at scale. So while you might not personally be interesting, you plus all of your neighbors, or you plus all of the people in your state, yield really rich insights that can enable the tracking and mapping of a whole society.

And while most people aren’t that interesting, there are specific subgroups that face intensive targeting, like Hong Kong democracy activists, as well as Uyghur and Tibetan activists. 

I also think there are other layers that are significant. One is economic risk. U.S. companies can’t gather data in China the same way that Chinese companies can in the United States, and that creates a fundamental asymmetry in the development of the digital economy in ways that will have long-standing implications for the development of products. At a certain point, it’s not necessarily just about spying or surveillance. It’s about what types of products you can build.

The third issue is national security. These platforms are becoming essential in daily life and the functioning of society. For example, TikTok now functions as a form of critical communications infrastructure. Chinese firms have also become involved in gathering and using health data and agricultural data from the United States. If that breaks down or if the Chinese government decides to pull participation from these firms, which they can do, it leads to a fundamental destabilization of key areas in the U.S. and global economy — areas like communication, health, food production. 

That’s not a risk that I think most people want to take.

Do you think the United States is at fault for not better protecting user data? Or is China more at fault for taking advantage of those weaknesses? 

A lot of China’s ability to go into other countries and propose tech platforms that rapidly gather data builds on the fact that U.S.-based companies have already been there. A great example of this is TikTok being officially based in the Cayman Islands. This is a classic move by U.S. firms to escape U.S. government scrutiny. And TikTok adopted this, so while their headquarters are officially in Beijing, they’re domiciled in the Cayman Islands. The other thing that U.S. firms pioneered was a lack of algorithmic transparency. And that’s at the foundation of a lot of these business models from which many Chinese entrepreneurs learn to grow their businesses.

The first and most important thing the U.S. government should do is pass national data regulations that have actual enforcement requirements in place. But there are significant differences within the U.S. government about what is and is not acceptable in terms of government oversight over corporations, as well as oversight over data. And even if laws are passed, enforcement is still really challenging. 

You present these issues as being contested, but it seems that the U.S. isn’t putting up much of a fight. 

The title should be something like, “China is taking over the digital world, and the U.S. kind of agreed to it.” But people I interviewed in the U.S. government and tech corporations would argue that by not heavily regulating the U.S. digital landscape, U.S. platforms are able to grow and compete with China that way. The other aspect is this resistance to changing U.S. data governance policies because that would be “letting China win” by adopting too many aspects of the Chinese model. I don’t fully agree with that framework. 

You wrote that you felt a sense of urgency while working on the book. Why did you feel that way? 

A lot of people outside China haven’t experienced China’s digital control directly, so they don’t understand the seriousness of what it means for that model to be exported and how difficult it is to put the genie back in the bottle once it’s out.

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The I.T.U. was first convened in 1865 in Paris as the International Telegraph Union, tasked with harmonizing communication standards, and has evolved to regulating almost everything that is connected. These regulations have become momentous for the future of the internet around the world.

Conference attendees aren’t encouraged to rush through the discussion points. Meetings began on September 26, and are scheduled to run until October 14 — including through some weekend days. Extended negotiations mean attendees have little time for sideline conversations or availability to speak to the press.

Still, the three weeks could have seemed an awful lot longer for most had it not been for a crucial decision taken in the first few days of the conference. An election for who would be next secretary-general — and as such be responsible for the general direction the organization takes — was won by the American candidate, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, who handily defeated the Russian candidate, Rashid Ismailov.

Ismailov was a former deputy head of Russia’s telecommunications ministry, and was in part defeated quite so significantly because of external geopolitical circumstances — turns out waging an unjust war against Ukraine is bad for your international reputation. But more than that, Ismailov, representing Russia, threatened to take the future of the internet down a different path to the open, liberalized one that we’ve gotten used to.

“Two things were at stake,” says Maria Farrell, an Irish tech policy expert. “One is the broad direction that the I.T.U. is going to take over the next decade — and there were two very different visions of what that would be. And the second was a sense check of global geopolitics, and what the numbers are between the two power groups.” 

On one side is the U.S. and Europe, and a drive for an open internet. And on the other, China and Russia’s pursuit of a closed-off internet that allows easy centralized control and censorship. 

By choosing to elect Bogdan-Martin, the I.T.U. membership dodged a bullet, and made a decision that many observers believe will help keep the internet fair and free for the next four years. “It marked a big opportunity,” says Mehwish Ansari, head of lobby group Article 19’s global digital team, who is attending the plenipotentiary.

“It’s a new Cold War: U.S.-Europe versus Russia-China, and their competing visions for how networks should function in terms of state control,” said Farrell. “This is one major, headline-grabbing skirmish in a long and very persistent underlying struggle for control of the internet,” she added. 

But it’s far from the last skirmish over what will become of our digital lives — and there are arguments that the secretary-general vote was far from the most important moment in the battle for the future of the internet.

For one thing, countries gave the U.S. candidate their support — but only for now. Farrell pointed out there’s a group of floating countries, including India, Brazil and South Africa, that can be convinced at times to vote with the western axis of international order, but need persuading. “Very often they will vote with Russia or China, depending on the issue they’re interested in,” she said.  

A growing list of countries and their leaders have dabbled in authoritarian crackdowns on free speech, including online. India scores 49 out of a possible 100 on Freedom House’s internet freedom index, Brazil scores 64, and South Africa 73. While none are anywhere near as censorious as Russia (30) or China (10), prior precedent suggests they aren’t exactly beacons of digital freedom.

That’s a concern because there are more significant votes still to come about the rollout of infrastructure underpinning the internet. The tendency of many countries to carry out speech crackdowns could portend future votes that align with the Russian and Chinese closed internet agenda. 

“The I.T.U. is a very important UN agency that impacts our day-to-day lives,” said Sebastian Bellagamba, vice president of external engagement at the Internet Society, who represented the non-profit at the Bucharest conference. Take Network 2030, a set of new internet protocol rules that has been debated by the I.T.U. over the last four years. “It’s a very linked set of ideas being pushed by Huawei, which is effectively an arm of the Chinese state,” said Farrell. China and its representatives want to introduce oversight of every data packet sent through the internet that would allow every IP address to be sourced back to a legally identifiable individual or company. 

It would be a boon for a controlling, centralized state like China to get that granular level of information on its users - and would move the internet away from an ad hoc network of peers to a very centralized, top-down model, said Farrell.

In her acceptance speech, Bogdan-Martin indicated that she wanted the I.T.U. to continue its comparatively hands-off approach to top-down control. That runs counter to Chinese plans. “There are always very well-funded and organized initiatives by China to use the I.T.U. to articulate and export its own incredibly state-centered view of the internet,” said Farrell.

“There's a lot of work being done at the ITU that is absolutely fundamental for how information and communications technology is designed, developed and deployed, and how telecommunication networks are designed, developed and deployed all around the world,” said Ansari at Article 19.

Concerns over Network 2030, the proposal to change internet protocol rules, which was repackaged in January 2020 by Huawei into a New IP proposal that would replace the existing internet protocol structure by 2030, are widely shared among open internet advocates. It’s a key battle that Bellagamba and the Internet Society believe is likely to dominate conversation at future I.T.U. plenipotentiary meetings. 

Like with the general secretary election, at stake is how much the internet will remain open and free. Under proposals presented by Huawei, the New IP plans would have included “intrinsic security” baked in—a phrase that leaves some outside China and its radius of control chilled. For China, knowing everything about users is “intrinsic security”. For others, it’s a mass invasion of privacy. A now-deleted page on the Huawei website gave justifications for the change to New IP including the need to meet the future of 6G networking, and technical improvements on shipping data around the globe at speed. “New IP does neither define governance models for the use of those technologies, nor lead to “more centralized, top-down control of the internet,” the company wrote, perhaps conscious of what critics were thinking. 

Among those critics is Bellagamba. “New IP, which instead of being a distributed, peer-to-peer protocol, would be a more top-down approach that is more centralized rather than distributed, and more able to be controlled centrally,” he says. In other words, the new standard would take away a data exchange that is spread out across the internet and put in its place a master control controlled by governments. “That’s an important battle to make sure it doesn’t come up again.”

It’s not just the plans for Network 2030 that are a potential flashpoint for future division, and a rallying flag for those looking to uphold freedoms on the internet. “We’re seeing the standardization of technologies in the I.T.U. without scrutiny of the human rights implications and without scrutiny of the user-centric implications of standardizing that technology,” says Ansari. 

Ansari’s warning applies not only to Chinese or Russian-backed plans: the firmament of big tech companies, overwhelmingly based in the U.S., have long been involved in gathering vast amounts of user data, triangulating it and packaging it up to sell on to companies for profit without much oversight. “The internet is not open at all, and that’s the reason for our presence here,” says Bellagamba. “In order for the internet to work, many actors need to be okay with the future of the internet — including the I.T.U., but it’s not the only one.”

The backdrop to each of these clashes is a broader battle over the future direction of life online. China has spent billions over decades developing its Great Firewall, which has largely stood firm despite the hope that the internet would foster democracy and political pluralism within the country. Russia is rapidly rolling out its own RuNet, a centralized, Balkanized version of the global internet over which the state can exert control, a closure that Russia has been accelerating dramatically since its re-invasion of Ukraine in February. 

Chinese and Russian versions of their internet are anathema to the open, decentralized internet that western countries profess to hold dear. The survival of entire political systems is tied to how the internet is allowed to be governed. And the tooth-and-nail fight for which approach will prevail will be won and lost at the I.T.U. 

In the breach is the future of the internet for the next billion internet users. “Why does this stuff matter?” asked Farrell. “It’s the fundamental question.” For people like herself who live in countries like the U.K., “Our lives are not going to be changed very much by this, or anything the I.T.U. does. But the people it does count for is the whole of the rest of the world — not Europe, not North America.”

Farrell asked me to imagine for a moment I’m the communications minister in a small-to-medium-sized African country. “Let’s say you’re Uganda,” she says. “You’ve just come to power; the president has told you the internet is a key driver of growth and middle-class jobs.” 

“And above all, we need to make sure we’re not just being a serf country for big U.S. firms that are extractive data firms,” she says. “It’s a neo-colonialist model. You’re looking at your telecoms companies within the country — likely one large incumbent, which was probably founded by a European telco in the first place, and a couple of smaller national incumbents. They come to you saying that a network upgrade is an expensive thing, and you need to bankroll its development.”

“At the same time, you’re looking at what’s going on in Syria or Tunisia, at the Arab Spring and you know you can be out of power very quickly. The internet is out of control,” she says. “It’s expensive and dangerous — and yet you have to have it.” 

But there’s a solution.

A Chinese business executive or politician comes calling, offering you a complete package that will solve all your problems. “They’ll give you everything from cheap loans to buy the equipment you need,” said Farrell. “They’ll train your engineers for you. They’ll ship their builders in for you. They’ll literally write the laws for you to keep a lid [on the internet.] They’ll take your civil servants and bring them back to China and train them in censorship. They’ll solve all your problems for you.”

Continued Farrell: “We have built an internet in such a way that it’s extractive and it’s expensive. It creates at least as many problems as it fixes. And right now, we’re not particularly open to thinking of that as a problem and how we can solve it for most of the people in the world.”

“This is just one iteration of a larger struggle,” she said. 

The post Stakes are momentous for the next battles for control of the global internet appeared first on Coda Story.

Emmanuel, a pseudonym to shield the Tanzanian PhD student from punitive measures by Chinese officials, hustled hard to get his scholarship to study for a masters in management studies eight years ago. He grew up in a village in the north of Tanzania, the son of subsistence farmers. Getting the scholarship to study in China meant that he wouldn’t have to save up for tuition fees. He was the first person in his family to leave the country.

He was assigned to a university in Wuhan. When he first stepped off the plane he was overwhelmed by the levels of development and construction work in the city. “The roads, the airports, the train stations, literally everything was just amazing,” described Emmanuel. “I was like, ‘wow, this is a good country to live in.’”

He was similarly impressed by the level of consideration he was shown when he first stepped out of the airport, speaking no Mandarin and clutching his university admission letter. A taxi driver, taking pity on this lost foreigner, drove him right to the door of the university registration office, and helped with his bags.

When he took the Wuhan metro for the first time Emmanuel imagined how he would explain it to his parents. “It’s not easy for them to understand that we have speed trains which can just pass underground,” he recalled. “They just think I’m joking because they never saw that thing before.” He looked around in wonder during his first days at the university: it seemed like there were more professors here than in all of Tanzania. He stayed in a university dorm which he shared with one other foreign student. Chinese students, meanwhile, are six to a dorm.

As the organizer of the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament in Wuhan, Emmanuel became a familiar face to the large community of African students in the city. Friendships with Chinese students were cordial but distant. “I speak bad English, but they speak worse,” he joked.

When covid hit, however, the mood changed. Emmanuel quickly discovered that most Chinese people were no longer as excited to meet him as he was to be there. African students began to face discrimination and micro-aggressions. “When you’re walking outside,” explained Emmanuel, “and a Chinese person is walking towards you, they will put on their mask, but they won’t do that if it is a Chinese person.”

It became almost impossible to live outside university facilities. When a South African student invited three friends to her apartment for a birthday celebration, the residents’ committee asked her to leave, even though the gathering was legally permitted. “If they find it is a black person, they will just say no, no, no, no,” said Emmanuel. “People don't talk about it. But it's real.”

During the pandemic, Emmanuel has become the de facto leader of the small Tanzanian community in Wuhan. At the start of the pandemic the Tanzanian ambassador asked for his help with a dispute involving a Tanzanian student that threatened to become dangerous. The student had just started renting an apartment in a gated complex when members of the residents’ association gathered to block his access. The landlord kicked him out and refused to give him his advance payment of rent back. An argument ensued, and tensions began to escalate before the police were called.

When Emmanuel arrived at the scene the authorities were keen to defuse the situation. A Chinese Communist Party representative and the local policeman both apologized for the racism, and made the landlord pay back the rent. The Tanzanian student however, was still required to vacate.

Officials in Wuhan, for all their good intentions, seem to have tacitly accepted that it won’t be safe for African students outside the campus. Emmanuel doesn’t believe he would be attacked, but thinks that local Chinese might provoke Africans to fight so they would be deported. As a result, Emmanuel’s university has unofficially banned foreign students from leaving the university for their own protection. “We can’t go anywhere without permission,” explained Emmanuel, who compared the campus to a military base. “We say to our teachers, ‘why are you treating us like we are refugees? You should treat us like this is our home!’”

In 2020 China’s government offered more scholarships to African nationals than the leading Western governments combined. Between 2016 and 2018 alone, the number of African students in China shot up from nearly 40,000 to around 60,000.

Xi Jinping expressed his hope that students like Emmanuel — having spent years living and studying in China — would “tell China’s story well and spread China’s voice.” When students arrive, they are required to take courses on Chinese culture and language in their first year. When Emmanuel arrived in 2014 for example, he took lessons on Xi Jinping thought and on “the Chinese Dream.” The narrative that is presented is one of progress and development under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

I started doing research into the lived experiences of these scholarship students in 2021 to better understand how it might affect their research practices. I never intended to ask about their experiences of racism, but almost every conversation turned to it. The “story” of China they were learning to tell was not necessarily the one Xi had in mind.

China has a complicated relationship towards Black Africans. Unlike Great Britain, the colonial power from which Tanzania gained independence in 1961, the Chinese government actively supported African decolonization movements in the 1960s and began offering scholarships to African students in the 1970s. But Chinese people have historically been less welcoming. For example, the 1988 Nanjing protests — an infamous chapter in African-Sino relations — resulted in hundreds of African students fleeing to their embassies in Beijing after Chinese students tried to lock them in their dormitories and set fire to the building. Earlier this year, a video resurfaced online showing a Chinese man teaching African children to say in Mandarin “I am a black monster with a low IQ.” 

China has made extensive investments in Africa under its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, transforming the continent with massive development works. A 2020 survey conducted by Afrobarometer of 34 African countries found that 63% of Africans believe China is a positive influence on the continent, a better percentage than the positive ratings Africans confer on the United States and the United Nations.

But the survey also registered growing unease among Africans regarding Chinese economic influence on the continent. Returning students from China are poised to advance more critical views.

Many of the African students I interviewed didn’t want to say negative things about China for fear it could jeopardize their visas. Even the ebullient Emmanuel said he feared that the security services would knock on his door and question why he had spoken to a team of British researchers. Emmanuel won’t go on record as criticizing China until his PhD has been issued. 

But a picture emerged of discrimination, interpersonal hostility, and widespread racism. One African student in Nanjing said that people would move away from him if they found themselves next to him on the bus. A classmate called the police to demand compensation from an African student who accidentally knocked over a Chinese classmate during a soccer match. Yet another African student noted that the police would not help her when CCTV footage showed a Chinese man stealing her phone. “Most of the students here are just saying, ‘I have to graduate and go back home, I can’t ever come back to China,’” said Emmanuel. “China is for the Chinese.”

Racism is not the only surprise waiting for African students. They are told that they will be able to study in English, but many get to university and find that no-one speaks it. “It’s just a ploy to get more foreigners here,” says one student in Xiamen, a port city on China’s southeast coast, who is teaching himself Mandarin with an app.

Not all the experiences are negative. For many, winning a Chinese scholarship represented their only chance at further education. While the most stellar candidates can probably find opportunities in Europe and America, there is a much larger group of averagely-good students who still want to pursue an academic career, but can’t afford the fees. Chinese qualifications may not be the most highly prized, but the shortage of PhD graduates in many African countries all but guarantees these graduates an academic job when they return.

Many appreciate the Chinese style of teaching, which is more demanding, and places more of an emphasis on publication output than the academic culture in Africa. Students also often express appreciation for the lifestyle in China, which involves a healthier diet and more exercise than they’re used to. One Ghanian was grateful to get a diagnosis for diabetes in China. While he was living there, he got the condition under control with exercise and careful eating. “But getting back to Ghana, it's just carbohydrates everywhere.”

China’s attitude to Africa is part of President Xi’s assertive foreign policy. In the 1990s this relationship was defined by economics. Oil and metals imported from the continent were important for China’s growth. Today however, politics is a driving force. China has made it a tradition that its foreign minister visits Africa first every new year, while African countries tend to vote with China at the UN and lend their support on areas concerning human rights abuses.

Tanzania was one of the first places President Xi visited after becoming president in 2013. Emmanuel, then in his early 20s, had a junior clerical job in the office of Tanzania’s president’s wife. “I was very young,” Emmanuel recalled. After one particularly high-stakes meeting during which Emmanuel said he was “struggling to make everything look okay,” the Chinese ambassador made a gracious offer to his hosts: “He said to the president and then the first lady, ‘okay, I think this guy needs to go for further study in China.’”

The program has been good for Emmanuel, who hopes to go back and take up a job in Tanzania when he’s finished his PhD. One of the things he likes best is his doctorate supervisor. “She’s a very complicated woman,” he said, his eyes lighting up. “She was actually very strict like, you know, she never allowed a student to come late, if you're late you can’t enter the class, if she gives an assignment you have to do it the right way.” He was impressed to find comments from her half way through an essay, showing that she’d actually read it. According to Emmanuel, African teachers tended to just comment at the beginning and end. Other students grumbled about her but he requested her specifically because he wanted someone to put him under pressure. “Wow,” he said. “She’s always here. On my neck.”

Emmanuel is phlegmatic about the downsides of studying in China. It has saved him thousands of dollars in tuition fees and set him on a track to professorship in Tanzania. “It is what it is so we have to accept it.”

Nonetheless, he is going to be telling a very different story about China to the one Xi had in mind. “I have observed so much,” he says. “I didn’t close my eyes and just learn about the good side.”

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Rehima, a Uyghur woman living in Istanbul, Turkey, whose name has been changed to protect her family, spoke to her husband in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, last week. “They’re trying to kill us,” her husband told her, before saying he felt too hungry and weak to continue talking. “I don’t have the energy to speak,” he said. Rehima described how her husband — who spent three years in one of Xinjiang’s notorious “reeducation” camps before being released earlier this year — was now “devastated” by the lockdown. He has been shut inside his apartment for more than a month and his food supplies are dwindling to nothing. 

As China pursues its zero-Covid policy, Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic group native to the region, are growing increasingly desperate as they report running out of basic needs including medical supplies.  Bypassing strict controls on communication and risking their livelihoods by doing so, Uyghurs have been posting videos on Douyin — the Chinese domestic version of TikTok — highlighting the bleak conditions and the lack of food. 

One video shows a young man lying on the floor. The woman filming him says “he just passed out, saying he was starving, he lay down in the yard and has stayed here ever since.” According to Radio Free Asia, as many as 22 people “died of starvation or a lack of medical attention” on September 15 in Ghulja, the third largest city in Xinjiang.

“The entire city has been silent for 41 days,” one commenter wrote on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, referring to Ghulja. Now, they’re breaking their silence. 

“I’m more than 41 weeks pregnant, 9 days past my due date,” read one post on Weibo. “I waited at the hospital for five hours when they told us they were closing. What are we supposed to do?”

Videos uploaded to the app show mothers caring for feverish babies, locals arguing with police at checkpoints, and people collapsing on the street, apparently from hunger. 

Uyghurs living around the world have been alarmed by the news they are getting, and say they are deeply concerned about their relatives in the region. Activists set up numerous groups to try to collect and verify evidence uploaded to Chinese social media. The Uyghur community in Turkey, the Netherlands, and Australia have held protests against the lockdowns outside Chinese embassies, while more are being planned in the United States. 

As the rest of the world transitions out of the pandemic, China continues to operate a policy of stamping out the virus with the harshest possible measures. When a single case of the virus is detected in a community, vast numbers of people are ordered to test and quarantine. In Shanghai earlier this year, lockdown measures meant people ran out of food, and many reported beginning to starve. 

Now, a similar situation is unfolding in Xinjiang, the severe lockdown measures another trial inflicted on the resident Uyghur population who have endured years of the harshest surveillance crackdown in the world. As many as a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang have been funneled into concentration camps, with more corralled into forced labor programs. 

“The Chinese government is already committing crimes against humanity in Xinjiang in the name of counterterrorism,” said Yaqiu Wang, Senior China Researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Now, on top of that, the authorities are confining people in their homes in the name of the zero-covid policy, denying many residents access to food, medical care and other life necessities.” 

Elsewhere in China, strict Covid-prevention measures are still in place, with cities across the country frequently placed under quarantine without warning. In the southwestern province of Guizhou, a bus transporting residents to a quarantine center crashed on Sunday, killing 27 people. A photo showed the bus driver driving at night, wearing goggles, gloves, and a full hazmat suit. The crash caused uproar on Chinese social media, which was quickly suppressed by censors. “Our destiny is like that bus, driving into the falling night,” wrote one Weibo user. 

Also circulated widely in China were posts by a group of friends calling on people to “resolutely oppose the national testing regime, lockdowns across the country, and the epidemic prevention measures.”  

In Tibet, authorities in the capital of Lhasa have apologized for their handling of Covid measures, where residents report similar conditions to those in Xinjiang — a lack of food, medical care, and a dysfunctional testing system. Tibetans have taken to social media to complain of crowded, dirty conditions in quarantine facilities, with little access to food or drinking water. 

On Monday, Chinese officials said the number of new Covid infections was decreasing in Xinjiang region, with a total of 153 confirmed cases, and said “the majority of affected countries, cities, and districts have basically resumed normal life,” with thousands of tonnes of flour, oil and rice being delivered to the Yili region, from where the most desperate videos have originated. 

The region is usually under a de facto communication blackout, with very little information available online about daily life in Xinjiang. Uyghurs fear the repercussions, including arrest, of posting about their reality on social media. But as the zero-Covid policy lockdown enters its second month and people have begun to run out of food, they have little left to lose by protesting on social media. 

“I think they’re in a desperate position,” said Idris Ayas, 30, a Uyghur activist in Turkey. “ That’s why some of them, even though they face tremendous repression from the local government, are still choosing to resist.” 

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Several officers, some carrying assault weapons, surrounded the car, gestured for them to get out and interrogated them about what they were doing in the area. After persuading the police officers to let them go, Chin asked one of them how they had found them in the first place. 

“We have cameras back there,” Chin recalls the officer saying. “One of them recognized your license plate.”

Such advanced surveillance has become the norm in Xinjiang and around the country, according to Chin’s new book, “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control,” which he co-wrote with his Wall Street Journal colleague Liza Lin. 

The pair, both longtime China reporters, describe the building of a dystopian police state in Xinjiang, where China, many human rights groups say, is perpetrating genocide and crimes against humanity against the mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic groups. 

Under the guise of counterterrorism, they write, China has been using advanced artificial intelligence, facial recognition software, DNA collection, “Big Brother” programs and other tactics “to exert total control” over local populations. 

But surveillance is not limited to Xinjiang. Even in cities like Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, China is using surveillance to create a “digital utopia” where technology helps improve everything from traffic patterns to emergency responses. 

It’s “a new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance,” they write, and it’s a model China appears to be exporting to other authoritarian countries. 

I recently spoke with Chin — now based in Taiwan — and Lin — now based in Singapore — about their new book. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What shocked you most about surveillance in Xinjiang? 

Chin: The shock came in two waves. The first was just seeing so much futuristic and untested technology being unleashed indiscriminately, and seemingly without hesitation or consideration of the side-effects, on an entire population of people. The second came when we realized the Communist Party was using it to reboot one of the most reviled institutions of the 20th century — the mass incarceration of a religious minority in gulag-style camps.  

How do you compare surveillance in Xinjiang to the rest of China? 

Chin: In Xinjiang, surveillance is truly totalitarian. It covers every Turkic Muslim in the region. It’s pervasive and constant, and its aim is to remold the individuals it targets. In the rest of China, Covid complicates the picture. Pre-Covid, the Xinjiang style of hard surveillance was reserved for half-a-dozen categories of people, including ex-cons, dissidents and the mentally ill. People outside that category experienced surveillance mostly in terms of “smart city” conveniences, like being able to scan their faces to pay for subway tickets. But under “zero Covid,” nearly everyone in China has been subjected to hard surveillance in the form of health codes that track and limit their movements depending on their exposure — similar to the way authorities in Xinjiang track exposure to the “ideological virus” of religious ideas.  

Lin: Over the last 20 years, the Chinese social contract was that we’ll give you higher salaries and better living standards and you’ll keep us in power. But in the past five years, with Chinese economic growth slowing, the Chinese government realizes that the old social contract is no longer working because you’re going to hit a point where not everyone’s income is rising. You’re an authoritarian government, but you still need to keep your citizens happy to stay in power. So the new social contract, outside of Xinjiang, is we’re using all this technology to make your life nice and efficient by doing things like clearing traffic jams and helping ambulances get to hospitals faster, and you give us your loyalty. And the government has always viewed Xinjiang as a place that breeds separatism. They always want to clamp down on it, and with digital technology, they’ve found an almost easy way to do it. 

To what degree do you fault or blame U.S. technology companies for their role in the use and abuse of surveillance technology in China? 

Chin: U.S. tech companies midwifed the Chinese surveillance state from its most embryonic state in the early 2000s, and they continue to nurture it with capital and components. They’ve done this for the same reason American companies always do things: it’s extremely profitable. U.S. chip makers say they can’t control how every single buyer uses their products, which is true. But can they try harder than they are? Almost certainly.

Lin: Western technology and capital have been the building blocks of China’s surveillance state. Right from the early years, when China was seeking a way to build up its capability, folks like Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks, Cisco, Siemens were there to sell to Chinese police. I would describe the feeling Western companies had towards China in the early days and even up to recent years as naive optimism and strategic corporate ignorance. Now, folks are talking about the possible regulatory risks to doing business in the market and scouring their supply chains for evidence of forced labor. 

How much further can China take surveillance? 

Chin: Beijing's ultimate goal is something like a perfectly engineered society — one that has no dissidents because everyone is satisfied, that automatically course-corrects without leaders having to intervene with force. They seem more likely to end up with something less than perfect, which will still require them to track and punish misbehavior. They also have huge technical and political barriers to overcome. It’s hard to say where all this will end up, but I think it’s safe to say the Communist Party isn’t done trying to optimize its control over Chinese society.

It seems that the Chinese public generally approves of China’s surveillance technology. To what degree do you think that approval is a result of state propaganda? 

Chin: It’s extremely difficult to disentangle public opinion from propaganda in China. To some degree, it may not really matter. State surveillance is, at heart, a propaganda project. Its aim is to persuade people that they’re being watched, along with everyone around them. That gives people a sense of security while at the same time encouraging them to modify their own behavior. To the Party, what matters is the belief, not how people come to hold it.

Lin: I had gone into this project thinking state surveillance is always a very bad thing. But a lot of Chinese people find surveillance attractive. Chinese state media are not shy about saying how amazing the surveillance is at finding criminals. There are stories in local papers about abducted or missing children who were reunited with their parents because of facial recognition technology. The surveillance state is as much a propaganda project as it is a tech and infrastructure one.

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Since 2017, China has arrested some 1.5 million Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking, majority-Muslim people, for “reeducation.” Under the auspices of counterterrorism, Beijing has unleashed a wave of repression and rage against the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang. Using a combination of demographic resettling and forced sterilization, concentration camps, a panopticon of 21st-century surveillance technology, and forced labor, the Chinese Communist Party seeks to eradicate Uyghur culture and identity. 

In 2020, Tursun was disappeared, reportedly sentenced to 16 years in prison. He is among the hundreds of Uyghur intellectuals interred by the state in its bid to erase an independent local identity. 

“I chose to translate ‘The Backstreets’ because it was a masterful work of modernist fiction,” Byler told me in an email exchange. “It also spoke to the issue I was researching as an ethnographer: how rural migrant Uyghurs live despite the forms of systematic discrimination they experience while navigating settler-colonial institutions in the city.”

A stranger in his own land, the novel’s protagonist reflects on the alienating effects of racial discrimination and the climate of fear choking Xinjiang’s capital city Urumqi. In the modernist tradition, the novel follows a stream-of-consciousness journey of an unnamed labor migrant as he flees the poverty of the Uyghur countryside to take up a government post and find an apartment to live in. He wanders the streets shunned by those around him and horrified by the harsh urban landscape: “The murky condition of [Urumqi] in the fog, the murky mental condition of my brain, and the ambiguous position of my identity in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region seemed to be totally of the same substance; sometimes they mirror each other, and sometimes they seep into each other.” 

Tursun captures this lonely atmosphere through his character’s fixation on discarded items such as used condoms, abandoned clothing, and garbage. Each of these items evokes a feeling of connection, meaning, or nostalgia for the unnamed narrator as he grasps for a sense of purpose in the face of the indifference of the Communist Party bureaucracy. The Party, embodied by his ever-smiling supervisor, has little interest in his culture or individuality, forcing him for instance to write in Mandarin despite his struggles with the language.

‘China’s Rushdie’

Perhat Tursun was born in 1969 in Xinjiang, across the border from today’s Republic of Kyrgyzstan at the height of Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). His father, a schoolteacher, was arrested for “counterrevolutionary activites” while Red Guards terrorized the Uyghur countryside. 

Following Mao’s death in 1976, China embarked on market and ideological reforms, offering new space for Uyghur culture to breathe. It was during these years that Tursun moved to Beijing on a government scholarship to study world literature, and quickly immersed himself in the works of Kafka, Nietzsche, and Camus. 

Tursun’s own writing echoed the existentialist themes of his heroes, earning fans and hostile critics alike. Tursun drew comparisons to the author Salman Rushdie after his 1999 novel The Art of Suicide incensed Xinjiang’s Islamic establishment and led to book burnings and death threats. The region’s publishers — which are largely state-run — refused to publish Tursun’s work for the next 16 years. 

But Tursun has never considered his work to be political. In an illuminating essay that accompanies the novel, the Uyghur author compares his writing to Communist-era Czech author Milan Kundera: “Kundera is also writing about the human experience, but because of his circumstances, his fiction gets read as somehow political. It doesn’t start from politics, it just gets pulled into it. Human relationships are the center; they just get blocked by politics. The same is true for most writers if they are really honest.”

Byler informs me that Tursun, whom he knew personally, always expressed suspicion of ideological dogma and preferred to imagine a world of diverse possibilities. “In the end,” Byler says, “state authorities came to see Uyghur freedom of thought as potentially dangerous.”

A City Torn Apart

“The Backstreets” took Tursun 15 years to write and it meticulously documents the ethnic and class tensions that led to the explosive 2009 Urumqi riots and their aftermath. Throughout the novel, the protagonist struggles to rent a room “the size of a grave.”

Unlike Han migrants who came to the region in search of lucrative jobs in the oil sector, Uyghurs struggled to find work. According to Byler, while some Uyghurs remained within these institutions, the hierarchies of power came to center on Han individuals and values they brought with them, rather than the region’s indigenous inhabitants.

Other forms of discrimination permeated this rapidly gentrifying city. Rental and house-ownership regulations often prevented Uyghurs from becoming permanent residents in the city, while Han migrant resettlement in Xinjiang cities was encouraged and subsidized by the government. “During my fieldwork in the region,” says Byler, “settlers ranging from taxi drivers to university teachers told me over and over again that they viewed Uyghur migrants and colleagues as ‘backward’ and uncivilized.”

In one illuminating passage, the novel’s protagonist reflects on the gaze of racist contempt all-too familiar to Uyghurs: “This wasn’t the only moment when those eyes had stared ruthlessly at me. They appeared in my heart from the first time I opened my eyes to the world, like a poisonous snake. They continually stung my heart cruelly, making me writhe with pain.” 

In addition to being ostracized, Uyghurs are forced to constantly prove their worth. Tursun explores this theme through his protagonist’s Kafkaesque job writing official letters in a language imposed upon him by a state that treats him with such scorn. Despite his education and rank in the bureaucracy, the protagonist feels like a second-class citizen. This is made evident when he encounters a Han janitor whose “kingly attitude” and decisiveness of voice in Mandarin make him feel worthless. 

The narrator fixates on the injustice around him, falling into a destructive rage. “While I wandered about without finding even a place the size of a tomb in which I could fit my body, at the same time, others lived in apartments in giant buildings, cruised the streets in fast cars, and ate piles of food in restaurants; I began to hate people. Even though I was the shyest person in the world, I wanted to destroy those fancy buildings.”

This complex interplay of racial and class tensions created the powder keg that exploded in Urumqi on July 5, 2009. That evening, following a peaceful demonstration led by Uyghur students, the city erupted into ethnic violence. For three days, groups of Han and Uyghur youth prowled the streets with spiked clubs and machetes, killing one another in fierce brawls. By the end, the streets were covered in skull fragments, broken bodies, and pools of blood. 

These grim scenes are referenced when Tursun’s protagonist walks through a rain soaked alleyway. “I heard the sloshing sound of muddy footsteps as I walked. This noise made me really sad. I didn’t know why this sound made me sad. Perhaps it was because it sounded like blood splattering on the ground.”

The ‘People’s War’

The thickening fog in “The Backstreets” acts as a metaphor for the nationalist xenophobia blanketing Xi Jinping’s China. As the protagonist wades through the fog he sees a Han Chinese man approaching, muttering to himself about his desire to eradicate the entire Uyghur population by chopping them down with an ax. The word “chop” is repeated over 200 times to indicate his obsessive fixation on violence. “Every time he said the word ‘chop,’ in his mind, a man’s head was being cut off to roll on the ground, covered with blood.” 

This mindset forms the deep rot at the heart of society, corroding everyone it touches. “It wasn’t hard to see from his face that his anger was wearing down his soul. It looked like it was a straw roof being blown by the wind, or like perhaps it was being eaten out by a worm.”

Perhat references the Holocaust as the fog begins to take the shape of a “huge communal shower room.” Gruesome images are evoked, as people fantasize about carving up one another’s naked flesh to watch the blood spurt out. In his vision, it forms the crimson colors of the Chinese flag — perhaps a metaphor for ethnonationalism as social diversity is recast as one nation by threat of force. 

In another harrowing passage, Perhat reflects on the way people are more outraged by random acts of killing than they are by industrialized slaughter. “If the massacre took place in an orderly way, it seemed like an acceptable thing to people, and they stayed silent, bowing their heads.” 

For all the novel’s dark musings on identity, the nature of existence, and political violence, there are glimmers of hope that pierce through the fog. Confronted with the open hostility of his employer, our protagonist concludes that his life must be valuable otherwise it would not evoke such visceral contempt. He finds comfort in this knowledge and concludes that his greatest power and his strongest act of defiance is simply to keep on living.

“That’s right, the greatest thing in the world is living. There is nothing greater than living!” 

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The showrunners blamed technical issues, but Weibo users weren’t convinced, as China Digital Times recently reported. They suspected that the actual reason was “historical nihilism,” which broadly refers to any versions of Chinese history that conflict with the state’s more selective narrative. The show’s male protagonist, Liang Xiang, is based on the Manchu nobleman Liangbi, who led the effort to quash the 1911 Wuchang Uprising. That uprising eventually sparked the Xinhai Revolution, which led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty. 

That narrative was likely a problem for the government. To the Chinese Communist Party, the Xinhai Revolution is celebrated as having “ignited hope for a revitalized China.”

Last year, Chinese president Xi Jinping stressed the need for Chinese Communist Party members to know their tradition and history, to reprioritize their ideological education, in order to effectively carry forward the revolution. He spoke out against historical nihilism as dangerous, a theme he has expounded on since he came to power a decade ago.

Two months before the centenary celebrations in July last year, the Chinese authorities admitted to deleting more than two million posts on social media that a party spokesman described as having “polluted” the conversation. The offending posts, he said, were “disseminating historical nihilism.”

China must “dare to brandish the sword, dare to fight, and have the strength to refute historical nihilism and other wrong ideas and viewpoints,” wrote Zhuang Rongwen, the director of the all-powerful Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), in an April essay about strengthening the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) control of the internet. 

Chinese social media giants responded in swift succession. As China Digital Times reported, Douban, Douyin, Toutiao and Weibo all announced their own campaigns against “historical nihilism,” including encouraging users to report posts that conflicted with the CCP’s preferred narratives. 

This development underscores the CCP’s binary view of history as both a valuable resource and a threat, argues Katie Stallard, an editor at the New Statesman magazine and author of “Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea,” published in April. 

It just comes down to which version of history we’re dealing with — and who’s in control. 

“I see it as an attempt to codify the Communist Party’s version of history and to classify anything that challenges that version of history or the party’s interpretation of history as being nihilism,” Stallard said in a phone interview. “I see it as being a way to try and seal off their preferred version of history from challenge.”

One of the most important historical reference points for the CCP — and Xi himself — is the Century of Humiliation, according to Stallard. The Century of Humiliation refers to the period of intervention and subjugation of China by foreign powers from 1839 to 1949. 

The crucial endpoint of that story is the rise of the CCP and how they present themselves as rallying the people to fight back and defeat Japan at the end of World War II. “It’s critical to the story the Communist Party tells about itself and why it must be in power,” Stallard explains. “And so it needs to keep that under quite tight control. There are elements of truth in it, absolutely. But it’s a very selective version of history.”

Opposing the state’s version of history can have serious consequences. For instance, in May former journalist Luo Chanping was sentenced to seven months in prison for a social media post that questioned the wisdom of China’s military strategy during the Korean War and joked about soldiers who froze to death. 

But these consequences, as with the consequences to breaking many other rules in China, are enforced erratically. Jeremiah Jenne, a historian and writer based in Beijing, told me that in China “there are so many different ways to get in trouble. And most of the time, none of those ways will get you in trouble. Until that one time when they decide that you are in trouble.” 

The Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. did not respond to Coda Story’s request for comment on the concept of historical nihilism.

Stallard said the CCP believes a key component of national security is control over the ideological environment, and that includes history. “They formally classified [historical nihilism] as a tactic that China’s enemies are using to undermine the country and the Communist Party’s rule.” 

The CCP often points to the Soviet Union as a warning of what can happen if historical nihilism is not quashed. Xi has said that the threat of historical nihilism was an important lesson learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Xi fearing that Mao could be rejected in a similar way to Stalin and Lenin. 

To the CCP, controlling history is important for survival, says Angeli Datt, a China analyst at Freedom House. Document No. 9 — a high-level, internal CCP memo from 2013 — made the paranoid assertion that the “goal of historical nihilism, in the guise of ‘reassessing history,’ is to distort Party history and the history of New China.” 

But Datt thinks the CCP is blowing the significance of historical nihilism out of proportion. “These things aren’t going to topple the government. For a party with the size and the power of the CCP, to be afraid of that shows a level of deep insecurity,” she said. 

Jenne, the Beijing-based writer, agrees. “They talk a lot about cultural self-confidence, political self-confidence, but maybe a little bit of that is like the affirmation on the sticky note on the mirror in the morning, like, ‘We are the ruling party. The military works for us. All is well.’ But sometimes you don’t always believe your own affirmations,” he told me.

It’s difficult to determine what Chinese citizens genuinely believe about Chinese history, Stallard said. But to a certain extent, it doesn’t actually matter, since deference to the party narrative functions as a litmus test. 

“Xi is taking history very seriously,” Stallard said. “So you need to show that you do, too.” But whose history and whose narrative is a question Chinese people continue to ask, at the risk of being silenced.

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