Insider Interview: Exposing and Confronting the CCP’s Genocidal Subjugation of It’s People (feat. Olivia Enos)
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Welcome to China Insider, a podcast from the Hudson Institute's China Center. I'm Miles Yu, Senior Fellow and Director of the China Center.

In this week's segment of China Insider Interviews, I'm thrilled to welcome the newest member to our China team here at the Hudson Institute, Olivia Enos, and to discuss her recent project on human rights, particularly related to the Uyghurs suffering in Xinjiang province and many, many more salient issues. Olivia specializes in human rights and national security challenges in Asia.

Her work focuses on China, North Korea, Hong Kong, Burma, Cambodia, and more. She covers issues including democracy, governance, religious freedom, and refugees. So welcome to China Insider and Insider Interview, Olivia. Well, thank you so much, Miles, for having me on. It's really, really exciting to be here. Very, very good. So let me just go right to it. Human rights,

It's such a hallmark of global politics. For years, years, even for decades, in the U.S.-China relationship, we don't talk about it in a sort of a primary place. We usually use that, I would not say as a window dressing, but particularly the Chinese government obviously does not want to talk about it. Therefore, U.S. government normally don't want to talk about it.

Why is human rights so important in the bilateral relationship between China and the United States? I think this is a really core and central question. I think as you mentioned, Miles, unfortunately for US foreign policy and US policy toward China, human rights issues have often been viewed as secondary, maybe even tangential to a lot of the security and strategy conversations that we're having. And I think this is a huge mistake.

because the reality is is that the Chinese Communist Party does not view repression, does not view human rights violations as tangential. They view it as very, very central. There's a fabulous book written by Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell called China's Search for Security. It's a fabulous book. Everyone should read it if they're interested in China. But

But in that book, Nathan and Scobell argue that China has a couple of core foreign policy priorities. One is to maintain sovereignty, and the second is to safeguard internal stability or security.

And the CCP has defined what the U.S. traditionally thinks of as human rights issues, so like unrest in Hong Kong or persecution of Uyghurs and Tibetans or any sort of religious minority or overall persecution of the Chinese people.

as core to its foreign policy goals. They see it as central to being able to maintain the party's preeminence, the party's power. And so they continue to engage in rights violation after rights violation. And so when the U.S. government decides to say, eh, we'll get to human rights issues after we've dealt with other security or economic challenges, I think we're leaving a lot of really important groundwork

off the table when we could be using this as an essential component of broader overarching U.S. strategy towards China. And I know we're going to be talking about that a lot today in the Uyghur context, but I'm excited to tease out those ideas more. Fantastic. You said it better than anybody I know. Human rights is the hallmark of the

US-China interactions yet we give up the leverage. We're good at China doesn't have it because the entire regime rests on suppression of basic human rights of Chinese people. You look at how Chinese government operates, you know mention about foreign policy sovereignty or other issues but domestically every single policy issue from the Chinese Communist Party is aiming at how to keep the population under control and

how to deprive their basic human rights, how to bamboozle them to believe in the Chinese propaganda indoctrination. That's why they have this world's most advanced surveillance system, the most comprehensive and most efficient censorship system. So human rights violation.

to the CCP is what oxygen to a normal human being. So that's why if you don't talk about this, and then you give up your leverage. Now in the United States Department, you have a huge bureau called the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. We give up our right, our opportunity to interact with the Chinese people, to interact with the Chinese dissident back almost 40 years ago.

This is the beginning of the Clinton administration or even beyond. Sovereignty has to be popular sovereignty. If people do not consent sovereignty,

to your representation of them, therefore you don't have a sovereignty. That's what democracy is all about. Democracy is being literally in Chinese, it means that is literally translated as people being their master. Yeah, I think there's also a failure in US government at times.

to recognize just how fundamentally different our two systems are. Like, you know, you're talking about representative democracy or republic where every single person in the U.S. enjoys basic fundamental human rights and

In a communist setting like China, the rights of an individual are viewed as entirely subservient to the government and their ability to rule with the iron fist. And I think one of the things that has been so shocking to me, both in my work that I've done on China but also on North Korea, is that you see authoritarian governments, and that's what they are. We have to label them as they are, authoritarian governments saying, okay,

All of the things that you as a human hold really dear, like close interpersonal trust in family relationships, in neighbor relationships, in friendships generally, those should be undermined for the purposes of replacing trust that you would have on a people-to-people level and

and putting in place a government that everything that you can count on, everything that matters to you can only be provided through the government. And it creates this really pernicious cycle where, yes, of course, it props up regimes like the Kim regime in North Korea or Xi in China, as the case may be.

But it makes it so that human life is in some ways like worth less worth living because you're always relying on a government that does not have your best interest, but has the interests of the party at the core. And that results in a lot of human rights violation. It doesn't matter whether you're looking in the Soviet context or the North Korean context or the Chinese context. It

it has always had the same outcomes. And that's why it's so shocking to me that history keeps repeating itself or that even folks here in the U.S. are like, well, what about communism? Maybe we should consider this utopian mindset when we have both historical and modern failures that so vividly represent that the system doesn't work. Or totalitarian dictatorships, abuse,

the rights of the people in the name of the people. That's why the most repressive regimes like China,

Soviet Union, they will have the people in there. People's Republic of China, People's Republic of Mongolia, People's Republic of Hungary, People's Republic of Romania. It's all in the name of people. Now, Olivia, we're discussing the fundamental issue of human rights in bilateral relationship between China and the United States in downtown Washington, D.C. We're several blocks away from the White House.

The bilateral relationship has always been the domain by professional diplomats or foreign policy experts. And that's where the problem is because we view US-China relationship profoundly and preponderantly only from the point of view of a foreign policy. Now, foreign policy is good thing, but foreign policy cares about smooth relationship.

Foreign policy talks about how to manage the relationship. You hear the phrase all the time, how to manage the relationship, how to control the competition. But that's precisely the problem because human rights usually is lacking. Because there's a lack of human rights permanence in U.S.-China relationship, so U.S. government often faces a lot of criticism by the domestic audience in the United States.

And here's my pet peeve about this. The US government routinely rolls out human rights reports condemning China for its human rights violations, but often to shut up the domestic criticism. Not necessarily to improve the bilateral relationship,

And that's where I find the problem is because they go to China, the pre-functuary condemn China and then come back and say, hey, let's continue business as usual. Yeah. Yeah, I think there needs to be a real commitment. And I think that there is a role for the American people to play in holding the

those whom they have elected to account, right? Because China policy is made both by Congress and the executive branch. And so I think there's a real need for the American people also to be better educated on the extent of the rights violations that are occurring. I mean, I myself grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in suburban, like a suburb of Chicago. And when I go back and visit, a lot of times,

friends of mine who are very well educated have never even heard about the Uyghur genocide that's ongoing, much less like what's happening to Tibetans or Falun Gong or Christians or Catholics or others in China. And I think that there's a need for better education

for the purposes of holding folks in Washington to account. Because, you know, the commitments to addressing the China issue are very fair weather. Like, it depends on the day and where the wind is blowing and all of these things. And the reality is, is that the CCP poses arguably the most significant national security threat to the United States.

And it poses that threat on every single level on security on economics and of course on human rights Yeah, well before go to the specifics about your work in Uyghurs and Tibet Tibetans, let me ask you a more general question Why is that that during the Cold War we were so harsh on the Soviet Union we placed human rights

particularly since the 1970s, at the center of our dealing with the Soviet Union, mostly due to the Helsinki Accords. We inserted in the Helsinki Accords with the Soviets the issue of human rights. Ever since then, the United States has been consistently supporting the Soviet dissidents. Whenever Sakharov, Sharansky are in trouble, our president, our State Department, our media,

Launched a barrage of attacks on the Soviet system for violation of human rights that I think really contributed tremendously to the collapse that evil empire that wrong so rightly labeled Why is that on China? We don't talk about human rights as much we don't was a believe due to the inference of people like Henry Kissinger that believe the Chinese people

particularly Chinese government, is burdened by 5,000 years of history. All China wanted is rejuvenation of the nation. So we should be sympathetic to the Chinese leader for their arduous task of standing up as the superpower in the world. Why is that a sharp contrast? We don't look at China's

systemic egregious violation of human rights on a massive scale on present human history as what it is, is a communist regime whose systemic repression of human rights is literally that systemic.

Yeah. Well, I guess it's been said before that people are politics. And Ronald Reagan was a bold leader and he had a clear vision for how he wanted to counter the Soviet Union. And of course, it was a very multifaceted strategy that engaged in a lot of different elements of security and economic and human rights related issues.

But Ronald Reagan recognized that America was this shining city on a hill and that freedom was something that was precious, that was worth preserving in our own domestic context, but also worth sharing with people who yearn for freedom all across the globe.

And I think he made this a centerpiece of U.S. efforts. And, you know, if we want to get into the nitty gritties, I mean, the information operations, for example, that were done during the Soviet Union to undermine the Soviet leadership were just incredible. And they gave people access to the information that they needed to be able to make decisions about how and in what ways they wanted to counter the Soviet Union at that time.

I think it's incredible to see the ways in which people saw America standing up for freedom and were inspired by that. I mean, I even remember in high school, I traveled to Romania with my church and the legacy that Ceausescu had left was immense. But the legacy of faithful Catholics and Christians who had led the counterinsurgency against Ceausescu, this horrible communist leader, even there in the Soviet bloc countries, was

It was just so palpable. It was really clear and really evident. And so I think you need bold leadership. And to be honest, Biden has not been that at all. The Biden administration has, in the ways that they have communicated about China, not been clear that the CCP is an adversary.

They have said, oh, it's an adversary and a partner, which is really quite odd to phrase it in that way. And so I think that American people even are left with, is China sort of a friend and also sort of an enemy?

And so I think it's led to a stagnant policymaking that has often been working at odds. There have been competing visions, and I know we'll discuss this in the Uyghur context, but just very briefly here.

The Biden administration's commitment to climate, for example, has made them less committed to enforcing U.S. policy to counter Uyghur forced labor or to tackle Uyghur human rights challenges in general. Or the desire to make a profit in China has made them less outspoken when it came to like Hong Kong's policy.

just complete stepping away from any sort of democratic freedoms. And so it's created what some might say is a schizophrenic policy where on one hand, they're like, we have to counter China. But then on the other hand, we're seeking cooperation and collaboration in ways that undermine all of those other efforts. And you did not have that with Reagan. So I think there's a real need for bold leadership, yes, at the executive level,

But to be honest, even if you can't have hope at the executive level, like in the president, to deliver what you want, we've got to see so much more from Congress.

And I just think that Congress was very active in like the pandemic era. But a lot of the attention and a lot of the unity around the China issue that existed immediately, like in the aftermath of the pandemic or right around the pandemic, that's starting to wane. So I feel like you and I have a really big responsibility to educate members and to educate people.

Folks generally about the threat that the CCP is posing on all levels. Yeah in addition to the to the unity that you mentioned I think there's also a fundamental different understanding the China threat pretty much everybody that realized China is a big threat to the United States That's a bipartisan right you come from heritage before you know where you work for many years and I myself served in the previous administration and Trump administration now we're living in a Biden era and

the contracts couldn't be clearer to me. That is, in the previous administration, we had a very different understanding of strategic intent

of the Chinese Communist Party, we completely changed our view on the nature of the Chinese Communist Party. That is, it's ideological. Its aim is to undermine the democracy and freedom-driven international order to replace it with the Chinese Communist Party-led order. Now, the Biden administration is different. Biden administration seemingly agreeing with us that China is a big threat, but they view this

China threat purely from the transactional point of view. There's the issue of South China Sea, there's the issue of fentanyl, there's the issue of border illegal crossing. There is a whole bunch of China siding with Russia. And it's just like to solve your illness by taking Tylenol. It's not really complete solution with all due respect to Tylenol.

This is very different from the Cold War era. In the Cold War era, you have a bipartisan ideological understanding of the Soviet system. So you mentioned about Ronald Reagan was staunch, freedom-loving American president, a leader with courage. Jimmy Carter's foreign policy foundation is called human rights. But his reaction to Soviet aggression and violating human rights is very feeble and anemic.

When Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, all he could do was boycott the Moscow Summer Olympics of 1980. But you do have some people, national leaders, bipartisan, who have complete same understanding of communism. Anti-communism was not a dirty word in the Cold War. You have Democrats, Scoop Jackson, JFK, Sam Nunn, Fulbright.

Those guys are also in the house. You have a Stephen Solard who understood the nature of communism and they have no problem those are anti-communist Democrats and Of course you have on the Republican side and many more Jason Helms and Barry Goldwater all those guys were American as well nowadays the Democrats really refuse to

to recognize that it's very hard for them to call Chinese Communist Party communist. So they're essentially in our mind is a nationalist. So this is the problem. This is a problem we have right now. So I think on that ground, we do not have a national consensus overall. We do have consensus on the threat posed by China, how to deal with it. So you can see from this election, I still don't know what Tim Walz stands on China.

This is a problem. We need transparency. Our national leader should give American people a clear statement on their stand on Chinese communism. So, by the way, we digress. So, there's the Soviet Union. You mentioned about, of course, the interests of social groups. China and Soviet Union differ in a fundamental way that Soviet Union was completely cut off from the free trading system of the globe. China is not. China is...

as a member, they enjoy full membership of international trading system. So that's probably right. That's why we have interest from Wall Street, from other countries. Let me just move away a little bit to the issue of Uyghur issue and the plight and suffering of Tibetans and Uyghurs.

Can you describe a little bit more about the scale? Why is that evoked so much emotional response from the United States? Yeah. You are the leading scholar on this issue. Oh, well, I don't know about that. There's so many incredible people working in the field. But, you know, the CCP today is carrying out what we now know to be

ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity, against the Uyghur people. There's at least 1.8 million Uyghurs that are currently held. That number is likely conservative. Some people say as many as 3 million held in political reeducation facilities there.

You mentioned earlier in the podcast about how the CCP just has an incredible surveillance tax system. That surveillance tech aided and abetted in the expediency of what is this ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity. It just enabled...

the CCP to round up Uyghurs at such a fast, fast-paced level. And I think we're all shocked by that. The CCP is also running what some, including incredible China scholar Adrian Zenz at the Victims of Communism Memorial Museum has said is the largest state-sponsored program of forced labor in the world.

So there's an estimated 3 million Uyghurs that are currently subject to forced labor. And I think when you look at the methods and the means that the CCP has used to exploit the Uyghur people, it really typifies like the absolute worst elements of collectivization, which is a key feature of communism throughout history. And so I think everyone has been absolutely shocked because the CCP hasn't just exploited

put folks in the political reeducation camps, hasn't just engaged in forced labor. They've also sought to erase and eliminate the next generation of Uyghurs. And I know when the Trump administration made their atrocity determination on the last day of the administration, for example, one of the pieces of evidence that they found most convincing was also some research from Adrian Sands that had found evidence

Chinese Communist Party documents that stated explicitly that they had a goal of forcibly sterilizing over 80% of Uyghur women of childbearing age in certain parts of Xinjiang.

So if you forcibly sterilize 80% of Uyghur women of childbearing age, you have just erased the next generation of people. And you've done it silently. Like it's so, again, expedient, if you will. And what a terrible way to say that, but that's what's happening. And so the Uyghur people, I think,

you know, it bears hallmarks of previous atrocities that we thought were relegated to the history books like the Holocaust, but it's taken on some different forms. And so I think that's why it receives the level of attention that it does. But honestly, the level of attention is not enough. Oh,

That's right. You mentioned about the Trump administration designation of the Chinese atrocities in Xinjiang as genocide. I'm very familiar with that process because I was there. Yeah. So in the last days of Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is, by the way, a tremendous American leader with courage, tremendous courage. And he basically asked the bureaus, the experts, give me the facts.

And we give them the facts. And he said, why is it still not considered as a genocide? Because there are five categories, criterias by the United Nations. Each one of them, if violated, would be qualified as genocide. Right. You don't have to violate all five, just one. China probably violates at least four and a half. Yeah. Right. So you mentioned about the forced sterilization.

That is a genocidal. Yeah. You're talking about the whole population, you know, get rid of their posterity. Yeah. And the crux of genocide and the hardest element to prove is intent to destroy in whole or in part a people group on the basis of their ethnicity, race, religion, et cetera. And it's so clear from that evidence. I remember Secretary Pompeo showed me several inches thick

of legal opinions from our lawyers who are splitting hairs. So splitting hairs about the atrocity against humanity versus genocide. They said on the cautious side, we probably should not go for genocide. Secretary Pompeo said on the cautious side,

we should not do anything. So you cannot expect the United States, the beacon of freedom and democracy, the hope of tens of hundreds of millions of people in the world who come here to seek freedom, to breathe freely, and to say nothing. You have over one million at the time, that's the figure, Uyghurs locked up,

in concentration camp by the regime that we're still splitting hair. So that's basically is a very, very important trap. By the way, since that designation, there has been no evidence to doubt the validity of designation by anybody. So that's why you have to act on courage. You have to act on evidence.

You have to act on most importantly unconscious. Yeah, absolutely and you know I so I advocated in the private sector in the nonprofit space as you mentioned I was at Heritage at the time I wrote a paper calling on that administration issue and atrocity determination and had the opportunity to brief Secretary Pompeo on this issue and it was a real honor to be able to go and do that and

But one of the main reasons that I was so excited about an atrocity determination is like people always ask me like, well, you know, what is properly labeling something? Like what does that mean for anyone? And it means so much. There is power in saying exactly what something is. And this is clear as clear can be that it was both genocide and crimes against humanity. But beyond that, an atrocity determination is so powerful because it sparks people.

additional follow-on action. And what you got after the atrocity determination was Congress saying, okay, we have to do something about this. And then you had the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which came along like in relatively short order after. And I really do believe that the atrocity determination

helped to kind of light a fire under Congress's belly. And that's why our system is so cool, right? That you have the executive branch, you have the legislative branch, they communicate with each other

But then they make decisions separately. And it's amazing how they can kind of feed off of each other to create meaningful change and help people at the end of the day. You mentioned about taking the difficulty out of somebody's intent. That's actually very, very philosophical and even epistemological because—

How do you prove somebody's intent? So therefore you must have some kind of ideological grounding to understand what really animates the system like Chinese CCP regime to operate, right? Yeah. When a foreign policy designation is made, our leaders often listen to the professional lawyers and that's I think is a mistake. You also have to listen to experts from outside of bureaucracy.

So that's why we, Secretary Pompeo, listen to voices such as the voices from Mary Kissel, Ambassador Kelly Curry, and you, and the Uyghurs themselves. And so many, yeah, so many people. I have helped Secretary Pompeo meet with so many groups from the captive nations.

Tibetans, Falun Gong followers, Christians and Buddhists, you name it. I mean, no secular state has made so many dissidents. And most importantly, of course, you mentioned the Chinese communist regime is not just about targeting minorities and disadvantaged groups. The regime aimed at capturing all.

So that's why China's atrocities were not just against minorities like Uyghurs and Tibetans, but against the entire Chinese population. Absolutely. So you mentioned about the camps for Uyghurs.

The size of the camps is much, much bigger for the ordinary Chinese, called the Lao guy system, labor reform camps. We have been documenting it for decades and decades. So this is not just a regime that targets small groups. It's just about the whole population. Let's move on a little bit to another issue about the intent. When China concentrated its efforts suppressing Uyghurs by locking up millions of them in the camps,

The US led the international coalition to condemn Chinese practices. Oddly enough, we didn't have any Muslim majority country to go along with us. Not even Indonesia, not even Malaysia, not even Berlin, not even Suriname. Those were moderate Muslim states. I figured out, this is when I was at the administration, the reason why, because we approached the AI

AI is not artificial intelligence. AI means Amnesty International. Because Amnesty International, the methods, by the way, is a tremendous human rights organization. They focus on cases. When something happens and then we come to rescue, we come to condemn, urge the dictators to release them, right? But doesn't explain, doesn't focus on why this case happened in the first place, which is why do they intend to do this kind of stuff?

So this is why my criticism of our approach to the Xinjiang Uyghur issue is that we focus on the suffering of the Uyghurs, the physical torture of them in the camps, but we do not focus on China's war against all organized religions from an ideological point of view. If we say China's atrocities in Xinjiang were about eliminating Muslim Islam as a faith,

And then it would be much harder for the Muslim majority country leaders to reject our appeal to help to condemn the Chinese government. I think unfortunately that a lot of the Muslim majority countries have been bought off by China in some way or another. I know he's like a mutual friend of ours, but Michael Sobolik...

at American Foreign Policy Council has done a lot to look at how China has used the Belt and Road Initiative to really coerce a lot of countries into silence. And this has included silence over human rights issues. Many of the Muslim in majority countries conducted atrocities similar to what China's been doing. Right, exactly. And I think that a lot of the countries are worried about the U.S. coming and saying, hey, you got to clean up your own act as well. So I think there's a bit of self-interest

a lot of self-interest involved, which I guess it always is in statecraft. But that concerns me a lot. And I think that there is a need to understand the religious and the cultural and the ethnic elements of persecution. I think that's an essential element of

China's ideological targeting of individuals. But I think there's also just a fundamental difference in how the CCP views people as people. They don't view people as having inherent value and worth. They view people as valuable and worthwhile if they end up building up the party. If you are working in opposition to the party, whether you're religious or non-religious, ethnic or non-ethnic, Han Chinese or anything else,

You are viewed as a threat if you are not just going along to get along with what the CCP is doing. And so that is why you have – it is a vast government system that is based and predicated on the subjugation of the Chinese people. And so I think there's a real need to, like, wake up to that and to not just –

half-heartedly commit to countering the human rights violations that the CCP is perpetrating, but to recognize that they're an essential element of the CCP's maintenance of power and that a failure to target a key node of the CCP's elements of power is leaving the U.S. on its back foot strategically.

Okay, great. So time passes very quickly, but I do have a very good question for you, and I'm dying to hear the answer. You are the world expert on this. Now, Congress passed a Wigger Forced Labor Prevention Act, and it's been there for several years, and the U.S. government has taken some actions, mostly in the form of sanctions and putting many companies in jail.

culpable on the entity list. I just read a fantastic article by you, a report as a matter of fact. It's called "Strengthening Implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act."

And you touched on some of the salient issues in the current discourse on Uyghur forced labor. Could you illuminate a little bit more on what you're finding? Yeah, absolutely. Well, when you have forced labor on the scale that you have it on, 3 million estimated people who are subjected to forced labor, the U.S. government really had no choice but to act. And the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act has many components, but the one that's most significant

well known as the rebuttable presumption. So now when goods that are suspected of being produced with Uyghur forced labor, whether that's originating in China or elsewhere, when they come to our borders, it is automatically assumed that they were produced with forced labor and therefore banned entry into the United States. It's an incredibly powerful tool and a tool that I would say we're still in the implementation phase

phase, so we're not seeing the full depth and breadth of what I think this tool really can do. The report was written at the two-year or almost three-year mark of UFLPA implementation, and it was intended to take stock of what's worked and what hasn't worked so far. And I would say that there are a couple of areas where UFLPA could really be strengthened.

One is that under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, if an importer has a good that stopped at the border and investigated by Customs and Border Patrol, the primary implementing agency, they have the ability to actually re-export that good before it's ever determined whether it was produced with Uyghur forced labor. I don't believe any company should be able to get away with

you know, potentially bringing some good that was tainted by workforce labor into the U.S. market and simply go and profit from that in another market context. So that's something that I think really needs to be dealt with and addressed. The second is that CBP has tools at its disposal to be able to actually fine or even subject an importer to forfeiture. Just for the benefit of our listeners, CBP stands for

Customs and Border Patrol. Yes, we were talking about how in D.C. we proliferate acronyms. So Customs and Border Patrol. But, you know, Customs and Border Patrol already has the authority to subject an importer to fines or even forfeiture for having imported goods produced with forced labor or engaging in fraud or gross fraud or negligence.

And yet not a single fine has been issued or good forfeited under UFLPA. And yet we know that there are goods that have been imported that are produced with forced labor. And I would say arguably an importer should face –

But finally, I think we have to find a way to make UFLPA helpful to the Uyghur people.

Because if a good is already making its way to a U.S. market, the forced labor has already occurred. But if you were to make better use of fines and forfeiture, et cetera, you could take the proceeds from that and put it into a survivor's fund for Uyghurs. There are many Uyghurs here who are Uyghur American, who are Uyghurs waiting for their asylum claims to be processed. That's a whole other issue I'm sure we could talk about for hours today.

but many of whom have family members that are detained back in Xinjiang. Imagine being able to use the funds from those violators of UFLPA and being able to take those back and pour them into the Uyghur community to be able to help them to try and get their family members out.

or to provide assistance after they've survived the atrocities that we've talked about being in the camps and subject to forced labor and otherwise. There's tons of other recommendations in the paper, but those three are the ones that kind of immediately come to my mind as next steps. Yeah, you should find out Olivia's excellent report on Hudson's website.

www.huston.org. Let me just say to you how powerful the concept of rebuttable presumption actually is. It's not just about rigor, it's about entire China. Because for decades,

We have been cooperating with China, engaging China under the false assumption that China is subject to market economy as ethos and operational regulations. No, China is fundamentally a

Non-market economy. China is fundamentally a communist state. Its economy is not decided by market fluctuations and demand and supply. Its economy is guided and protected by a totalitarian government of China.

This is one of the concepts, similar concept that developed by Secretary Pompeo during the Trump administration. He said, you know, during the Cold War, Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, "Trust but verify." Pompeo said, "No, no, no, we cannot trust China." So our operational methods toward China should be distrust but verify.

But verify. We assume you cannot be trusted. It is incumbent upon you to prove otherwise. This is so important because our entire economic engagement-- It's predicated on trust. That's right, but not trust. So we should do the other way around. I mean, reality has proven us right. I mean, I think what's going on in the last several years, all the talk about decoupling, all the talk about China being uninvestable, going through this, China cannot be trusted.

So China, in my view, is not even qualified to enjoy the benefits of international free trade system because China essentially is not free. Yeah, and I would say that for me it was so encouraging to see a powerful tool like a rebuttable presumption but also other economic tools that we have at our disposal today.

being reached for a little bit more readily like under the Trump administration, you did see a greater use of those financial tools of engagement in the human rights context specifically. Like, you know, other administrations have used it primarily in the security context, but there is so much ground to be like trod, well trod ground that you

has been used in the security sector that can apply in the human rights context. And it helps us to bring together our strategic efforts to counter China in a coherent way that somebody who is sitting in State Department can understand a little bit better. Coherent, but also multilateral, because you don't know how much time. This Biden administration's charge against the Trump administration that we act alone, we're a cowboy, we're unilateralists, is total nonsense.

You don't know how much time we spend on convincing our friends and allies, the Brits, the French, the Germans, to go along with our China policy. I mean, why are we condemning China's violation of the genocidal practice in Xinjiang? German companies like Volkswagen, they're building plants.

in Xinjiang at the heart of the Uighur population area. - Yes, they are, and Tesla too. - Well, that's a different issue, but what I'm saying is you have to, we place a premium on cooperation from our friends and allies. We're not acting alone. And it's our friends and allies sometimes who do not,

want to join us. They are all unilateralists, not us. So I think the Biden team is lucky because this is post-COVID. We laid a good foundation for Biden to work on. But most importantly, our China policy, I think, is pretty much like we have some common understanding. Where to go? Well,

Time has come for us to say goodbye. And Olivia, so nice to have you join us. Thank you so much for having me on. And you've been a wonderful addition to our China project here. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of China Insider. I'd like to thank our executive producer, Philip Hexeth,

who works tirelessly and professionally behind the scenes for every episode to make sure we deliver the best quality podcast to you, the listeners. If you enjoy the show, please spread the word. For Chinese listeners, please check our monthly review and analysis episode in Chinese. We'll see you next time.