Beijing's Genocide Olympics
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I'm Barry Weiss. This is Honestly. And for today, the debacle of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing with my guest and absolute favorite China reporter, Josh Rogin. Josh, thanks for doing this. Great to be back. Josh, you're a columnist for The Washington Post, and you're always ahead of the curve when it comes to the subject of China.

Some might know you as the guy who last year took down the idea that the lab leak theory was just some right wing conspiracy. You're also the author of the book Chaos Under Heaven, which is about China under the Trump years and into the COVID era, which somehow we're still living in. So I just want to jump right in with you today. As we join you on a Friday night in China.

Athletes from all over the world are gathering backstage for the opening ceremony of the 24th Olympic Winter Games. The Winter Olympics in Beijing are underway right now. Welcome to the Olympic Winter Games, Beijing 2022. And I'd love if you can drop us into the beginning of those games, to the opening ceremonies, and describe for me the absurd scene that played out that night.

This is the mission of the Olympic Games. Bringing us together in peaceful competition. Always building bridges, never erecting walls. Become stronger together. And with uniqueness, grand style, but also unmistakable messaging. The opening ceremony of the Beijing Games.

So for months, if not years, we've been wondering how would the Chinese Communist Party in 2022 handle what is clearly their biggest threat?

project, international showcase that they've had since 2008 at least and could have for the next 10 years at this crazy moment. And far from something that would align with the professed Olympic spirit and the professed values of the Olympic Games, the entire event was orchestrated to push the Chinese Communist Party's political agenda.

First, what they did was they lined up all of the representatives of all of the minority in costume in two rows on the ice and had them pass a Chinese flag down the line between them. And, you know, that's meant to show that, oh, all of our minorities are very happy when the truth is many of them are undergoing severe repression. The Tibetans, the Inner Mongolians, not to mention the Hong Kongers, not to mention the Uyghurs who are

seeing their culture and their history and their language stolen from them, and then seeing their children stolen from them, and then seeing their freedom and agency and dignity stolen from them. And now a return to the snowflake theme we have seen throughout tonight's show. And Jingxu, our professor, we know what the snowflake symbolizes here in the West. What do you suppose the intent is here?

Well, director John Yimou said that he wanted to bring the East and West together in the image of the snowflake. He took the inspiration from the English saying, no two snowflakes are alike.

and a line from an 8th century Chinese poem that describes a snowing canopy as a setting for a gathering. And you might notice that each spoke of the snowflake instead of crystal is actually the shape of a Chinese knot that you actually see in many spring festival ornaments.

So what is being conveyed here is that like a snowflake, this is a unique coming together of friends and people to be celebrated for their differences and commonality. Now, if that wasn't bad enough, then they had the torch lighter to light the torch. They chose a Uyghur athlete.

This moment is quite provocative. It's a statement from the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, to choose an athlete from the Uyghur minority. It is an in-your-face response to those Western nations, including the U.S., who have called this Chinese treatment of that group genocide and diplomatically boycotted these games. There will be much discussion about this choice. The message is clear to Uyghurs, both inside China and around the world. You can carry the torch or you can go to the camps.

Okay, those are your two choices.

You can be part of this effort to deny the atrocities against your own people, to spread propaganda denying the atrocities that your family members are going through, or you can be part of those atrocities. The Uyghurs, a minority in China who are oppressed, who are tortured, who are interned by the Chinese government in the Jiangjiang region. The Chinese government forces them to be sterilized. The Chinese government is committing genocide against

against the Uyghurs. And I think it was Jake Tapper who did a whole segment on CNN about how this evokes something that happened in 1936. And we've seen this play out before. When the Nazis were running the Olympics and the IOC negotiated quite grotesquely to have Adolf Hitler include one Jewish athlete on his team.

And that Jewish athlete won a medal and gave the Hail Hitler salute. And they asked her, her name was Helene Meyer. And they asked her later why she did that, because, of course, the Jews, both in Germany and around the world, were pretty upset about that. She said, maybe it will save my family. OK. I was also thinking of the

1936 games in Berlin and kind of refreshing my memory as to what the debate was, the moral debate and the political debate was back then. And there was a huge debate actually that went down in this country.

And some people said that, of course, we need to boycott. Of course, we need to boycott these games because in the very city where the games are going to be held, there are signs up in public parks that say, Jews not admitted. And this is the ultimate chance to strike a blow to the Nazis' sort of public image they desired to project to the world. But then there were other people who basically said, no, we should let the American athletes compete because

A, because the game shouldn't be politicized. And B, if we participate and we show that American athletes, specifically black American athletes, win in these games, it will put the lie to the notion of Aryan superiority.

And, of course, that side won. There was no big boycott of the 1936 games. And Jesse Owens, the black son of sharecroppers, won four Olympic gold medals, which he received, you know, while standing below these Nazi flags. So, you know, going into this year's Olympics, was there any –

equivalent debate? No, there was no debate. There weren't any sides. You know what I found out? Because I broke the story about the Biden administration's diplomatic boycott a month ahead of when they wanted to announce it.

And I'm telling you some insider kind of stuff right now. But, you know, so be it. What happened was that the Biden team looked at that thing and they're like, oh, my God, we can't send anybody to the Beijing Olympics. That would be a terrible story. Why would we want to do that? It's COVID anyway. Nobody wants to go. So they're like, we can. And then they're like, oh, but we're not going to do a full boycott because that's going to bring the wrath of the corporations. OK, the sponsors, the everyone who has an interest. There's a reason that even hawkish senators say,

who are like on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays want to, you know, punish China were against a full boycott is because there's a lot of moneyed interests that are that are sucking off of the teat of that enterprise. OK, so.

And so they were always going to do the diplomatic, which is like half measure. And they were just sitting on it for months because they didn't want to talk about it because they didn't want to push it. They didn't want to go around the world trying to see if they could make it work for the whole world, because then if they failed, then they would have failed. They'd rather not try. Can I tell you another insider story? Because this is all happening in Washington at the same time that the Uyghurs and the Tibetans and the Mongolians are going around meeting with athletes trying to get them to give a shit.

OK, and trying to get the corporations to feel a little shame and trying to get the lawmakers. And the lawmakers, you know, those are the easy gets because they can write letters and they write bills and nobody reads the letters and nobody passes the bills and they all pat themselves on the back. And the Uyghurs are still suffering. OK, and the only thing the only thing that got done last year was this.

bill to pass the, it's called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, to stop slave labor goods from coming into our shores. And the administration fought it tooth and nail behind the scenes until I exposed it. And then they got embarrassed and then they passed it and signed it. And now we're waiting to see if they'll implement it. But the point is, none of these institutions are doing anything that I can see to actually use whatever leverage we have to try to convince the Chinese government to stop the genocide.

And that's atrocious. Josh, describe that for me, if you would. The Tibetans and the Uyghurs sort of going around begging, I assume. Yeah, pleading. What were they saying? What was their appeal? And what was the response? What were they being told? Yeah. I mean, listen, I've just spent, you know, the last 15 years or so getting to know people.

Lots and lots and lots of brave, courageous men and women, boys and girls who are fighting for their homeland, fighting for their families, for their culture, for their identity. You know, think about a Hong Kong student democracy activist.

You never go home again, ever. 22 years old, just went to the streets trying to preserve what little freedom they had at that time. Lost that battle, abandoned by the international community, exiled, etc. Think about, I know dozens of Uyghurs, American citizens who have family members in the camp. Why? Nobody cares. They can't get any information. Occasionally, one of them will have enough juice to get a phone call or something like that.

And Tibetans don't even get me started. You know, there's this whole community of suffering people that don't get any attention in our discourse because we're always asking, you know, Tony Blinken and Mitt Romney, and we're never focusing on the suffering. So I think we have to give a voice to the voiceless. But that's my that's my pitch. But then now I'll actually answer your question, which is that they went around to these athletes and athletes like, oh, this is horrible. But if we say anything, we're going to lose our.

We were told by our sponsors and by our national committees, not just in America, European countries, Canada, that if we say anything, that's not going to be good. And they also don't know if they could get arrested because the Chinese government threatened to arrest them now. So they're scared. They're very scared. Again,

Again, as journalists, we're always focused on the athletes. Say something, say something. But they're not the ones with the power. They don't have any money or influence. They're just trying to live their lives. It's Coca-Cola. It's Nike. Exactly. And Airbnb and Allianz and NBC and all of these companies that are paying for the privilege of helping a genocidal regime burnish its image on the world stage. Why are they doing that? That's not right.

Can you remind us all of the reasons that an American might find a good reason to boycott this year's Olympics? I mean, again, whether or not you think these are reasons to boycott or not boycott, I mean, I guess like reasonable people can disagree. But if you want me to give you a litany of the malign actions of the Chinese Communist Party, we're going to need a longer podcast. OK, it's really extensive. I start with the genocide because I think that's the one that's

that's the most egregious. It's not just about the Uyghurs. In the far northwestern province of China called Xinjiang, there resides a rich tapestry of ethnic minorities, all of whom are being scooped up and put in camps by the Chinese Communist Party. And people will focus on this term genocide and the legal definition and poke holes in the statistics. But what I'm saying is that if you've talked to the survivors, if you've talked to the families of the missing, if you've

done the work to educate yourself, you'll realize that it's really indisputable what the intent is, which is to snuff out this nationality, to snuff out this culture and society, and separate these people from their children and prevent them from having more children, which is a genocide. Now, the camps are only the latest bit of it because what the Chinese government has done in this region is they've securitized everything.

And they've used the surveillance and the AI that we helped them develop and help them build an industry around. And they've turned it on all these people. So they were living in an open air prison before camps ever existed. And they started doing that originally in Tibet. And in Tibet, what they've done is so pernicious. What they've done is they've

grid it off the entire region and track every Tibetan in it and then set these neighborhoods into little teams where the head of the team rotates. And so you're in a little team with your neighborhood and then it's your job to rat out your neighbors. But in two weeks, it's going to be their job to rat out you. You know, so they make everybody police everybody. Then all of a sudden in Inner Mongolia, where the Inner Mongolians were like probably the ones that were like less active

objecting to the CCP, right? They were trying to get along with it, you know what I mean? They weren't like the Uyghurs who were protesting their oppression. And all of a sudden, all their textbooks go away. And next thing they know, all of a sudden, all of their leaders are getting scooped up. And so it's coming to Inner Mongolia soon, mark my words. And then if you look at Hong Kong, you're like, oh, wait a second, all that technology, all those

prisons, all of that, all those techniques are now being used in Hong Kong. And then if you're sitting 90 miles away in Taiwan, you're like, oh my God, because you know you could be next. And you don't know if the international community would lift a finger if that contingency actually happened. And it could happen tomorrow. I don't think it's going to happen tomorrow, but it could happen tomorrow.

So that's a litany of grievances, but they're all connected and they're all connected because the party connects them, because what happens in Xinjiang doesn't stay in Xinjiang. OK, and because the lighter parts of the abuse, which are like the social credit system, the monitoring and all of that nonsense where they make you download Xi Jinping's book. And, you know, if you don't click on the right thing once a day, you know, you can't get on the train.

All of that nonsense, that's all over China. But, you know, sooner rather than later, it's going to get worse, not better. What is the goal of all of this? What is the goal of the camps, the surveillance system, the forcing people to read certain books, the forcing them to sort of stazi on each other? What is the goal? What's the strategy?

I mean, I think the way that you have to sort of think about it, and it is connected to their military expansion in the South China Sea. It's also connected to their economic aggression, which is seen in things like the $2 trillion Belt and Road Initiative, which is subjecting entire continents like Africa and South America to generations of debt trap diplomacy and corruption.

horrendous corruptions and the like. It's an expansion. It's a worldwide expansion. And its goal is to promote the, well, if we read their own documents and listen to what they say, they see themselves as in an existential ideological struggle with the West. This is what Xi Jinping says.

If you listen to him, if you care to, you know, when people show me who they are, I tend to believe them. OK, and what Xi Jinping says, some documents leaked, some of them, he said it publicly, but it's all on the same theme. They think they're in an ideological existential struggle with the West. In other words, we're going to try to coexist, but it might not work out that way. And the fact that they think that way should tell us something. I would say to our athletes that

You're there to compete. Do not risk incurring the anger of the Chinese government because they are ruthless. Right before the games were set to begin, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, sort of gave this address to American athletes. And she said this. I know there is a temptation on the part of some to speak out while they are there. I respect that.

But I also worry about what the Chinese government might do. What did you make of this statement? And can you remind me what Nancy Pelosi's politics have historically been around China? Yeah, this is a real gut punch, you know, to the activists. My immediate thought was like, I googled, you know, I brought up the video of Nancy Pelosi in 1991 in Tiananmen Square. I remember it.

The three U.S. Congress members, part of a human rights delegation, said they couldn't leave China without visiting Tiananmen Square to pay their respects to pro-democracy activists slain there two years ago. We've been told for two days now that there's freedom of speech in China. The lawmakers unfurled a small hand-painted memorial banner.

She traveled to Tiananmen Square two years after the massacre of democracy activists and students, and on that spot unfurled a pro-democracy banner. Police pulled the three U.S. lawmakers aside for questioning and roughed up and detained seven television journalists. The police came in to tell her what's what, and it wasn't just her, she was part of a delegation.

And they shuffled them off and this and that, but it made international news. And she was like, yeah, the Chinese say they have free speech. I'm just testing that proposition. What's the problem? I was like, oh, I wish I could introduce 2022 Nancy Pelosi to 1991 Nancy Pelosi. You know what I mean? She might learn a thing or three. Is that 30-year arc sort of her capture America's own sort of shift vis-a-vis China? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think the power is corrupting by its nature. There are allegations of business conflicts of interest. I'm not really in a position to adjudicate those right now. I have noticed that a lot of the

former champions of human rights against China, including Dianne Feinstein, you know, they have some investments that like run against that, you know what I mean? Or they're married to people or related to people who have investments that run against them. That's the conflict of interest, right? It doesn't have to be like some overt act, like she's supposedly sitting in some room being like, oh, I can say this or that, or I'm going to lose this or that money. It doesn't really work that way.

You know, what the Chinese do is they see the relationships over decades and they did it with Neil Bush and they did it with Hunter Biden. And eventually they'll do it with anyone who will take the payoff, who will take the money or, you know, find themselves in a position where they already took the money. And then the next thing you know, oh, wait, what can I say? What can I say? And.

That's it. That's the corruption. That's the rotten art society. It's not China specific, by the way. We've got a lot of American special interests corrupting our politicians, too. And most of it is done in a way that it's really hard to report on. But the proof is when all of a sudden the messages change and all of a sudden they're cowardice shows.

Nancy Pelosi used the word ruthless when she referred to what the CCP might do to athletes who speak out of turn. And I immediately, when I saw that clip, thought of the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai. Right. First of all, I wanted you to remind us of her story and also the role, strange role that she's sort of played at these games. Well, Peng Shuai, tennis star, tennis.

former Olympian posted a dramatic personal diary entry on the Chinese internet where she accused a senior Chinese official, he just happened to be the one who was the head of the Olympic Committee for a long time there, of sexual assault. And 30 minutes later the post disappeared and then Peng Shuai disappeared. This happens a lot actually in China. Somebody, some actress

Some movie star, somebody, some business leader will say the wrong thing. Next thing you know, he's gone. Sometimes they fall out of windows. Sometimes they fall off of walls. Sometimes they get arrested and convicted of something. Sometimes they just disappear. But this one really hit a nerve, right? Because it really wasn't about speaking about the government. She was a sexual assault victim. And the craziest part of it was that

the Women's Tennis Association responding to its members, and especially a couple of prominent members like Serena Williams and others, did the right thing, which you never see, which is that they demanded that Peng Shuai be produced without coercion and that

There would be an investigation or they were going to pull out of China and sacrifice hundreds of millions of dollars. And then they did just that. You never see that, you know. I never think about the Women's Tennis Association. And suddenly it had more balls than like the NBA. You never see it. Everyone combined. Right. And then the International Olympic Committee did the opposite thing, which is they helped women.

the Chinese Communist Party produced a hostage video with Peng Shuai, which was clearly under duress, where she recanted all of her accusations. And then a subsequent interview that came out during the Olympics. And then she shows up in the stands, right, during the skiing competition. Right. So, you know, she, I feel it's a personal tragedy, right? She has no choice, right? If she doesn't do what they say, she could go to jail, her family could go to jail or worse. Right.

That's maybe an unsolvable problem, but the fact that the IOC was complicit in that torture and abuse is unforgivable. The fact that the Women's Tennis Association stood up to the CCP shows that anyone could do it. And it sort of destroyed this myth that you have to side with them because they're just so big and powerful that there's nothing that they can do that you don't have to stand up and salute. So in that sense, it's a watershed moment in sports interaction with China, but

You know, for Peng Shuai, she did the one thing that you can never do. She exposed the wrongdoing of a CCP official. And, you know, we have to make sure that we just don't take her carefully staged return to public life at face value. And we have to understand that she's still being victimized to this day. Josh, has any American politician ever

come out to really stand against the CCP and these games? Yeah, I mean, listen, there's a lot of chest thumping in Washington and a lot of what was it? Beijing behaving badly hashtag and several, you know, lawmakers introduced bills to take away the IOC's tax exempt status. They even passed a

comprehensive China bill in the House doesn't have a chance of doing really anything. It's like, so there's a lot of what I call kabuki legislating going on because it's very sort of politically popular to be tough on China. I'm tough on China. That's a really good commercial. None of it is really done in such a way as to affect the problem. And there's no real efforts at

Bipartisanship beyond getting that China bill, which doesn't do anything, doesn't spend a dollar, doesn't spend one red cent, except for Saab conductors, which we can get into. But anyway, the point is that a lot of politicians saying the right things, not a lot of politicians getting together to use their power and influence to stand up for the suffering, to

raise the pressure, raise the leverage, and then protect ourselves, right? And then reorganize our government and our institutions in order to face the threat that's the most important one. And that's a generational project that's not going on.

Why is that not going on? How is it that even when all of the lights and all of the cameras are on Beijing, we can see what it is? It's very clear. We see how the party operates. We see what they're telling us. And yet all we can do is be like, oh, yeah, no, here's a bill. And then, well, looks like we got to talk about Ukraine now, you know? And that's the cycle we're in. We can't compete with China if we can't function. And we can't make the argument that free and societies are better to the rest of the world if they don't produce for their citizens. And

You know, if we're not living up to our values, then it makes it impossible for us to preach them. And of course, that's what the Chinese want, which is why their propaganda is aimed at dividing us, at exacerbating the tensions inside of our own society.

To set us against each other, which they're doing. I mean, we're doing a pretty good job of all by ourselves, but they're happy to pour fuel on that fire. So, you know, my pitch to the whole it's everyone to the progressives and the neoliberals, the neocons and the MAGA warriors is like, you know, let's get together on this thing because it's actually a shared interest in.

You know, there really isn't a part of American society that's pro-genocide. And let's start there. And maybe if we start on the human rights piece, we can build that into a more constructive discourse, at least, on how to face this very complex problem, which is a Chinese Communist Party that acts like a mafia organization and runs the biggest, richest country in the world. It's committing a genocide on our watch. After the break, what's been happening behind the scenes in Beijing? Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Josh, right now in Beijing, are athletes heeding Nancy Pelosi's warning by staying silent or

Are they protesting? Has there been any sort of standout in the way that, you know, Enes Kanter Freedom, a Celtics player born in Turkey, has spoken out? Anyone that's come close to that kind of courage? Yeah, there has. There was a British athlete named Gus Kenworthy, if my memory serves, who spoke out forcefully against the human rights atrocities, I think before he got on the plane. And there was one snowboarder I saw with a Uyghur hat.

flag on his snowboard. I thought that was cool. Uh, Adam Rippon, who's a coach, he's been on CNN saying that like, you know, they never should have had the games in the first place. Isn't it weird that they gave the games to them in the first place, considering the genocide, none of them got scooped up. They're all fine. You know what I mean? Uh, but you know, my reporting is that there were athletes that decided not to go to the opening ceremony in protest, but have not spoken up and that they will speak up when they leave China, uh, in a

And that was their decision. The activists respect that decision. For that reason, we're not naming them. We're saying exactly which countries they're from, even though I know a couple of the names in my head right now. And I've seen the correspondence just to verify that I'm not making this up. But the bottom line is that 99.9 percent of them were bullied into fear. And Josh, what about back here in the U.S.? Have people

There have been protests in American cities or on college campuses, the kind of places that, you know, we're used to seeing intense and passionate protests against other kind of injustices. Yeah. I mean, there's the hashtag NoBeijing22 campaign. Again, Students for a Free Tibet, the World Uyghur Congress, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the Hong Kong Democracy Council, Hong Kong U.S.,

keep Taiwan free. You know, these groups are working night and day and they have chapters all over. It doesn't get any coverage, you know. Well, tell us about what's going on at your alma mater, GW, George Washington University. Yeah. So this is a really perfect example because last week, a bunch of students put up a bunch of posters protesting Chinese human rights abuses connected to the Olympics. Now, the posters were

were painted by a Chinese dissident artist named Badia Chao, who I know is a friend of mine, full disclosure. And he has been doing this kind of art for years. Very famous. He's always getting attacked by the Chinese government, by Chinese state media. He lives in Australia. So the Chinese Student and Scholars Association, which is a Chinese international student organization,

decried the posters as racist, said they were exacerbating anti-Asian, anti-Chinese hate on campus, and said whoever posted them should be punished, and wrote to the university president, Mark Wright, and asked him to get them torn down, and that he should investigate whoever put them up, and he agreed. And when he wrote back to this organization, he wrote that he was personally offended by the posters, and that he would find out who had posted them,

And that email leaked. And Badiachow, who's been through this before, because again, this happens to him wherever he goes into a lot of dissidents. For people who are following Chinese influence operations, this is an old story, right? I don't know why the president of the George Washington University didn't know about this, okay? But all over the world for the last years, you have these Chinese students and scholars associations

misusing the language of social justice to censor criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, right? But you have them appropriating a real issue, the rise of anti-Asian hate and violence in our country, which is a stain on our society and something we have to do more about, and conflating that with the Chinese Communist Party's right to commit a genocide. And it was particularly egregious in this case because the person they were accusing, of course, was a Chinese dissident.

which, you know, should dissuade anyone out there from thinking that, you know, criticizing the Chinese Communist Party is racist because the CCP is not a race, as my Hong Kong democracy activist friends taught me, right? Because they're Chinese and they hate the CCP. And Badajoz is Chinese and he hates the CCP, okay? And so attacking the CCP can't be racist because lots of Chinese people hate the CCP. So

It wasn't new that – and these Chinese students and scholars associations are often in direct communication with the Chinese consulates and embassies and are often funded by them, and there have been a million scandals – not a million, but a bunch of scandals about this. I don't know if the GW one is – I haven't seen the evidence that they're connected, but the point is more often than not, they're working with the embassies, and the language, of course, is the same. The propaganda is the same.

So then there was outrage, and here comes Marco Rubio dunking on the GW president for doing the wrong thing, for falling for it, for believing that a protest against a genocide, which is like the most racist policy on earth—genocide is pretty racist. Think about it. You're getting rid of a whole group of people who are part of them anyway.

And for calling that offensive and and he was actually defending censorship and he realized it after after it became a scandal and he reversed his course and, you know, said he made a mistake in it, et cetera. But my point was sort of like, why didn't he know? How is it that in 2022, when this has happened so many times, especially to school like GW, which has nothing like I got a degree in East Asian studies from GW, right?

OK, well, do you do you think the reason is because college presidents right now are unbelievably defensive, are kind of always ready to negotiate or bend the knee towards student protest, always ready to apologize? And because that's the posture, you know.

He didn't even realize what it was. Or do you think it's more craven than that? Yeah. And that he did know what it was? No, no, no. I think you're right. And again, because I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt because I don't have evidence to the contrary that he was caught off guard, that he generally thought he was defending his students. And, you know, again, they may have been offended.

I don't even think we have to say that they were not offended. If they were offended, fine, but that doesn't mean they have the right to censor other students. Offensive speech is the thing we're trying to protect. But you can't ignore the money incentive. You can't ignore that schools like, especially GW, they get a huge chunk of their money from full freight international students. A huge chunk of those come from China. And that the retaliation of pissing off that community would be very, very costly for

enormously costly and you can't ignore that especially in their endowments and investments and their relationships on the other side uh there are costs to doing the right thing there are costs to defending free speech and there are costs to standing up to the chinese communist party and it doesn't seem to me that a lot of university administrators or boards frankly are willing to pay that cost

One of the things I find so fascinating, and I'm curious if this is a small phenomenon or if it's extremely widespread, is the way in which these organizations use the language of anti-racism and social justice to kind of cover for the evildoings of the CCP.

There's an organization that came on my radar recently called the Black China Caucus that essentially seemed to be a propaganda front for the CCP. And there it was getting quoted and lauded in places like the Nation and the New Republic. First of all, do you know about that organization? And, you know, how widespread is this propaganda campaign and this specific tactic?

Oh, I mean, it's massive. I don't know about that particular organization, but there are literally hundreds in the United States and literally thousands around the world. This gets back to the United Front issue that we were talking about. It's, you know, the way that the Chinese Communist Party launders its messages to have –

Chinese Communist Party talking points come out of American mouths. And they do that through a range of relationships and mostly through front organizations. And, you know, the way that we know it comes from them is because when they got into the diplomatic meeting, I don't know if you remember in Anchorage, where the state counselor Yang Jiechi is, you know, haranguing Antony Blinken. What is he saying? He's saying, look at Black Lives Matter. You guys are slaughtering blacks. That's what he said on camera. Now, again,

I think what Blinken said was probably operative here, which is like, yeah, we have problems. Our society has problems, deep problems. But we try to talk about them openly, try to deal with them openly. It doesn't always go well, but we're not denying them. But you're denying the weaker genocide. You're saying, no, there's nothing going on. The weaker genocide is happy, which is horrendous and a lie. So that's the difference is that it's not a he said, she said. There is a truth out there.

And their attempts to exacerbate our internal divisions are primarily to undermine our faith in our own democracy, but also to undermine faith in democracy at large in order to advance their own autocratic, corrupt, totalitarian, dictatorial aggressions.

So, Josh, we've yet to talk about the role that COVID is playing in the game so far. How is it affecting the ongoing struggle to get the Chinese to let investigators look into the evidence that COVID-19 may have actually leaked out of that lab in Wuhan? Right. No, I mean, so you in your very kind introduction, you describe me as someone who's sort of

I'm paraphrasing you, mainstreamed the lab leak theory or destroyed the conspiracy. You did. Well, I mean, I just did the reporting.

Sure. But in doing the reporting, you broke open the conversation. I hope my reporting had some influence. But the point is that I wasn't trying to shift the narrative. I was just trying to get to the ground truth. Well, maybe maybe it was Jon Stewart going on Colbert and using the Hershey analogy. But yes. But you know what really shifted it, Barry? To be honest, it was when Joe Biden got on TV and said there are two theories. We should check them both out. In other words, not that I've never ever said that. I think

I'm sure the lab did it. All I said is we got to check it out. We got to investigate both. And don't tell me not to investigate both because you must have some sort of reason for telling me not to look at the lab, especially if you're one of the best friends. But anyway, not to belabor that point, because if you want to credit with me with solving the pandemic, I'm really I'm not going to argue, fight you that hard. But fair enough. I tried to contribute by doing the reporting. And there were a lot of people who did it who deserve a lot of credit. But anyway, the point is.

Look at the pandemic in year three, okay? And you will see a lot of crazy writing and talk out there now by people who are like, want to praise China as saying, oh, they did a great job in year one or two. Look, they had only 5,000 deaths. Never mind that statistic is a lie. And never mind that their draconian lockdowns are cruel and abuses of their own. But

Suffice to say, you could make an argument that they handled it more competently in that first year. Again, that doesn't speak to the origin or the fact that they used the pandemic to bully the international community and to coerce and blackmail countries all over the world for crazy reasons. But

In year three, you can no longer make the argument that their COVID policy is the best one because zero COVID in 2022 doesn't make any sense because Omicron doesn't respect it and because their vaccines are shit. And they've got a billion people who are eventually going to get Omicron and they can't change course. Authoritarians are not better at long-term planning. They're just better at making decisions quick. But then when they have to change because the situation changes because this variant is different from the last one, they can't. Again, that

Doesn't mean we're changing well, but what I'm saying is that they're not changing at all. So for China, it's an unsolvable problem because they can't open up, which means they can't have an economic recovery. Or if they do open up, then they're going to have a billion people who are going to get Omicron right away. So think about that. They're really kind of screwed. And this comes at the worst time for Xi Jinping because he's making his pitch for his third term. He wants to be emperor. He's not emperor yet.

I think of it as a mafia don, but you could think of it as an emperor. That's in November. That's at the end of this year. So he's up for the most scrutiny he's going to have. After this, it's all downhill. Once he gets his third term, look out. You'll have a Putin-style thing because look at Putin. He doesn't care. He's like, I'm going to be dead soon. I'm going to try some crazy shit before I die. That's what Putin's attitude is. Putin's attitude is, F you all. I'm going to attack who I'm going to attack. Xi Jinping doesn't have that power yet, but he will next year.

So this is the crucial time when we gotta get our act together, okay? And the Olympics should have removed all doubt. It should have...

Communicate it to governments, people around the world, you know, lawmakers, journalists, students, activists, whatever it is. If you look at that and you're like, hey, wait a second, we have a problem here. Not that China's 10 feet tall, not that we have to have a Cold War, but just that, oh, wait, this is something that affects us, that the Chinese Communist Party's actions and strategies affect.

or something that we can't ignore and that we have to be clear about what's going on. And that's that the party controls everything in the party is genocidal and repressive and expansionist and doesn't give one shit about what we say anymore.

So we're left with, while keeping the door open to cooperation and encouraging it on the things that we care about, like climate change and all the rest, focusing on our resilience and to strengthen the antibodies in our own democracies and then hopefully fix our economy so that we can survive and then figure out what we have to decouple. And yeah, we're going to have to decouple from the AI. We can't help them with the AI anymore. It didn't work out. We tried. It didn't work out. Sorry, Google.

You know, that's why we got to decouple. You know what else we're going to need to decouple? Masks, which you would have been crazy in 2018 if you would have said we're going to need our own masks. Now no one has to make that argument because they blackmailed us with masks. And, you know, I could make a whole list of things we should decouple, but it's not everything. Isn't it more fundamental than those specific things? Isn't it about sort of a choice between whether or not we are going to be

I have the attitude that feels to me 20 years outdated, that we can be completely integrated and they're going to liberalize ultimately and we're not giving anything up in doing so versus what we know now, which is that isn't true. They're stealing our IP. They're screwing us over. They're screwing up the supply chain. And maybe the solution is a more fundamental decoupling. And what's strange about our politics at the moment is

I don't know if that's an argument sort of from the far left or the national conservative right, because everything's so upside down. But, I mean, is it really just about those discrete subjects like masks or...

Or AI. Isn't it deeper than that? Yes. These are all data points in a much more serious discussion, which is, first of all, what is the structural problem in the U.S.-China relationship? The structural problem is very simple. It's that you have one power that's expanding and one power that doesn't want to leave the region.

So unless one of those things changes, that's a problem. That's a structural problem. There's no John Kerry climate change deal is going to fix. OK, if they are intent on expanding and seems like they are because guess what? We're going to have Chinese military bases on Pacific Islands in 2022. That's the prediction. OK, expanding past the second island chain.

They're going to join TPP if we don't join it, maybe. Who knows? So, yes, the fact that they're expanding and we don't want to leave the region, that's what they want. That's an unsolvable problem. But the bigger thing that I think you're getting to is, you know, just for me evokes, you know, Christopher Hitchens, you know, said that in the end, you know, the idea that totalitarian, aggressive...

expansionist dictatorships and free and open societies can coexist might not be true. Actually, he said it's not true. He said it's not desirable that it be true. He said because the things that we value, I'm paraphrasing that, things that we value in our culture and our society are not compatible with that kind of system where the party is God, where the leader is God, and the people are

are the chattel of the party state. And eventually, I mean, to me, I don't think that means that we have to decouple everything right now or that we have to go to Cold War or Hot War or any of those nightmare scenarios. But man, there's something to that. Again, yes, we have to be clear-eyed that our engagement strategy failed. It was hubristic to think that they were going to change to be like us. China's development is going to proceed based on China's decisions one way or the other. But

Yeah, something that keeps me up at night is what happens when we realize that actually those two systems are fundamentally incompatible. After the break, we'll be back with Josh Rogin on how the Chinese Communist Party is spying on athletes in Beijing and much more. Just to go back to the games for a minute.

How is because you see things from Twitter, right, about athletes getting the same meal three times a day for eight days and being isolated in these terrible rooms. I haven't really gotten a full picture, though. Do you have a sort of headline about how Chinese covid policy is affecting the Olympic athletes? Sure. Two ways. One is that they've abused the covid situation to abuse the athletes. Right. So that includes a health app.

Health monitoring app that is like riddled with security vulnerabilities that allows you to report on the guy sitting next to you if he says Tibet by accident. That includes. Seriously? Yeah, you should see the Citizen Lab. Everyone should go look, read the Citizen Lab research report on this app. And that said it had a political word sensitivity list. Like if you typed any of these words, click, you just got reported to the authorities who can come down and tell you what's what.

And, you know, that's one thing. But, you know, to be honest, when I have traveled in China, I assume I'm monitored. You know what I mean? It's just kind of a given. The other thing is that, you know, think about the advantage of, you know, they have all these facilities that no one's ever seen or used. And none of the Americans or anybody can practice on them. There are distinct disadvantages. I've never seen them before. One is like in the middle of like a dilapidated industrial park looks like Chernobyl.

You know what I mean? It's wacky. It's dystopian. But, you know, when you look at how they treat the people in quarantine, that's much better than they treat the Chinese people in quarantine. You should check out the videos of like when one person gets Omicron in Xi'an, they take the entire neighborhood on buses and put them in essentially prison stalls. So, you know, those Olympic athletes sitting in a hotel getting three horrendous bento boxes are sitting pretty. Yeah.

Compared to your average Chinese person who was within 10 miles of a COVID case. So, you know, a lot of foreigners are getting a taste of how the CCP treats human beings. And they treat them horrendously. And this is the best. This is what they're showing the world. This is them on their best behavior and their behavior is awful. That should be the takeaway here. Okay. But this is after this, when the cameras go away, I think it's going to get worse. I think all bets are off.

Are you actually watching the games? I typically love watching the Olympics, and I haven't watched a single second of them beyond clips that I've seen on social media. And I can't tell if it's because of some high moral principle or because of the hideous images that I've seen, like these ski ramps that are surrounded by what looks like a kind of nuclear wasteland.

And I wasn't sure if I was the only one. And then I read this statistic that viewership is down more than 40 percent since the last Winter Olympics in 2018. Yeah. Let me just say, like, I support the activists in their I will not watch campaign as part of hashtag no Beijing 22. And so I'm for that. But like a lot of things I'm for, I'm not like a purist like Judaism and

you know, sobriety, etc. So, you know, so I can't, I'm not gonna say I haven't watched it. I watched the opening ceremony, so I could see how they handled it. And I'll, I tune into the news of it. But yeah, in general, I think it's like, if you turn on an Olympics, and it turns your stomach, that should be a good sign that maybe like something horrible happened here. Do you think that China sees the fact that

viewership is down, that the image of it is not a great one, at least in the bubble that I'm living in.

Do you think that they see it that way? Do they see that this is a win or is it a disaster? Yeah, well, it's hard to know, but let me, here's what I see. Because, you know, at this point in my career, if you want to know something about sort of like Chinese propaganda and bots, just look through my timeline. You'll find them all. They're all there. Everyone from like the head of the Global Times down to like the 50 Cent Army guy in some factory on, you know, floor 74 doing the 12 to 8 shift. You know what I mean? All of them are tweeting at me and...

you know, it's clear that the propaganda machine is in full blast, full, full. Oh, my gosh. You know, it's just like a fire hose. And, you know, it's all the same. It's all the sort of wolf warrior bullshit. You know, you know, how dare you say there's a genocide? And then, you know, I've gotten into some like Internet tussles with like some of these figures from CGTN, which is like their English language. Well, it's in every language. But for example, in English language, quote unquote, news organizations, they're just a bunch of

propaganda mouthpieces and you know they're pumping out the party line everything's wonderful isn't this great oh yeah look look we had three Uyghurs you know they all had smiles on their faces what are you talking about you cold warrior Mike Pompeo blah blah blah blah you know so it's not it hasn't changed it's just more you know and again what does that tell you it in the worst case scenario it tells you that they don't have the capacity to admit to change course

which could be a scary scenario. In other words, no one can get, no one, even in China before, there was somebody inside the system being like, hey, wait a second, maybe we should change course. But no one would dare say that now because you disappear right away and your family too. So who's going to do that? Who's going to tell Xi Jinping, hey, listen, maybe we should back off now.

And that's a scary scenario because then you get into questions about an escalation ladder and how do we deal with that? And are we pushing them into being more aggressive? And those are complex conversations that are worth having. But no, what I see from them is like, everything's wonderful. We just did the great job. Anyone who says anything different is a racist cold warrior, Mike Pompeo. Mike Pompeo's water boy is what I'm going to call you from now on. No, that's what they call me. You just propagated CCP propaganda. You were doing it jokingly, but...

So lately, Biden and the White House have been focused on Russia and Ukraine, with President Biden saying that the invasion of Ukraine by Russia would be, quote, the most consequential thing that's happened in the world in terms of war and peace since World War II. Hard to see how that's the case. Anyway, you wrote a column saying that all of this is distracting them from what's happening in Asia. I wonder if you can make that case for us.

Right. Now, I don't want this to be confused...

with what I sort of see as a very wrong idea that's coming out in some parts of the Republican Party, which is that we have to abandon Ukraine in order to focus on China. That's not what I'm saying. So you will see anyone from Josh Hawley to Tucker Carlson to some people in the think tank community being like, well, we can't walk and chew gum. We got to tell the Russians they can have Ukraine, screw it. And, you know, because that's going to, I don't think that. I think that's fundamentally wrong, in fact. And it's wrong for a very simple reason is that

you know, the autocrats are teamed up. They're not great allies. They actually fear each other and hate each other. Putin and Xi don't trust each other. Again, think of it like two mafia dons, right? They can have their criminal organizations cooperate. It doesn't mean they trust each other. They can't trust each other. But for the purposes of this conversation, they're on the same side. And we're on the side with the free and open societies. And Ukraine wants to be on our side. We should keep them on our side if we can. Okay? So I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is that

Look at what happened. All of our resources, all of our attention is all focused on this. And Putin's plan is to screw with our minds so that we focus on him so he can do some crazy stuff before he croaks.

And Xi's plan is to focus our minds on anything but him so he can do things without us pushing back. So in a way, it works perfectly for both of them. That's not to say that their interests are aligned in Ukraine, because you'll see also you'll see the other thing you'll see a lot this week amongst the sort of D.C. chattering class is like, oh, well, Putin and China are teaming up. This is Kissinger's worst nightmare, blah, blah, blah, which is also sort of like, I think,

conventional and lazy for the simple reason that I just pointed out, which is they really don't like each other. But also because if you just think about Ukraine, right, does Xi Jinping want Putin to invade Ukraine? Of course not. He's got a foreign policy ideology based on sovereignty and non-intervention.

And Ukraine destroys that. And he's got to support it anyway and put his tail between his legs because he's got no choice because Putin's the only ally he has. And if you think about Taiwan, Xi's argument is not that we're invading our country, that that's our country. That's already our country. So we're just taking it back. So it actually undermines his argument for Taiwan. So there are a lot of fundamental differences between Putin and China. We shouldn't allow them to hype us into thinking that they're this great axis of

that we can't stand up to. But what I'm saying is that, you know, we have to think long-term in terms of reorganizing towards the China challenge while also dealing with whatever fires pop up here and there. And because in Washington, again, not just in government but also in the media, you

We're only thinking in terms of like, you know, news cycles or political cycles, right? It's very hard to think that, oh, wait, how do we what legislation are we going to need in order to make sure that the Development Finance Corporation is as geared towards investing in companies that are going to bolster Southeast Asian economies to compete digitally with Alibaba, right?

Like that, just what I said there, you could never get on TV because not enough people care about it, I guess. But, you know, oh, Putin's about to invade Ukraine. Yeah, no, no, that's wall-to-wall coverage. That's what I was trying to get at. Josh, as a final question, it's a bit of an existential one. I want to know why it's so hard to get people to care about what we've been talking about for the past little while. You know,

We're living in a moment where there is, first of all, limitless information about everything. So anyone who wants to find out about this can. But more broadly, we're living in a moment where everything feels like DEF CON 1. And I think about the past two weeks and the amount of

Right. Right.

to divert some tiny percentage of the rage and the passion that people seem to be bringing to bear on podcasts and comedians

to an expansionist regime that is currently carrying out a genocide. Right. I mean, I hate to end with that. I don't know, but I wish I could make sense of why there's so much suffering in the world and so many people don't seem to give a shit. And, you know, I have my theories, right? One is, you know, sort

sort of what you alluded to with the Joe Rogan thing, but I think that's more about our institutions, our corporations and our media and the incentives, right? When I read a column for The Washington Post, I have to think about

What's the audience? How big is that audience? And then how much time am I spending and resources of The Washington Post to report out the story versus how much engagement is it going to get? I'm not immune to those pressures. Luckily, I think The Washington Post does a really good job of sort of balancing that with the editorial interest. And I'm evidence of that, in fact, because they also never, ever stopped me from writing about one Syrian over...

or one Uyghur. So I'm very lucky, right? In the sense that I'm a columnist of the Washington Post and I can write about whatever I want and no one's ever told me what to write, what not to write. So I choose to write the things that I think are undercovered and uncared about and focus on human suffering and dignity and human rights and the things that I believe in. And I feel lucky to have that role. Most journalists don't have that. It's a game of seventh grade soccer. You know how it is, Barry. It's seventh grade soccer. Ball goes over here, everybody runs over there. Then the ball gets kicked over there, everybody runs over there.

That's it. And I feel it. I mean, I feel it even when I'm editing a piece or commissioning a piece and I'm deeply interested in these subjects. But I know that, you know, it's going to get

a fourth of the audience that a piece about, you know, a woke culture in an elite private school in Los Angeles is going to get. Right. And it's sort of, and, you know, just to get at the core of the issue, I don't, I think what you just pointed out, people should understand that this is not a legacy media problem. It applies to new media too. It applies to unconventional media. It applies to... It's everyone. It's everyone. Okay. So it's not like you can just destroy these legacy news organizations. Everyone's going to be doing the right thing all the time. The incentives are still the incentives. They just present themselves differently.

differently in different platforms in different cases. But my point is this, Barry. When people do learn about these things, they actually do care. When people, you know, when you see the slightest bit of momentum and interest and coverage, things do happen. I can testify to that. I've seen it, okay? So just imagine a world where these atrocities got the attention that they deserve. Just imagine...

a world where, you know, we had a better balance of the things that matter and the things that make us go, oh my God, you know? And,

I think that's an ideal. I think we should—it's worth putting that out there so that we can all start to think about that and work towards that ideal and get back to some sort of constructive discourse and then remember what it is that we're meant to do as journalists, which is speak truth to power and give a voice to the voiceless and afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. And again, I'm not saying I've done that perfectly. I'm not saying I've achieved that balance. I'm just saying that's the way that I think about it, and that's what I think about when I go to my computer every Monday morning.

Well, Josh, from your mouth to Twitter's ears, let's hope that we can take some of the attention that is put on things like Dave Chappelle's new special and Joe Rogan's podcast to standing up to the injustices of the CCP and the things we've been talking about today. As always, a total pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much. Likewise. Thank you.

Thank you as always for listening. Please go follow Josh Rogin on Twitter, read his columns in The Post, and buy his book, Chaos Under Heaven. It's about China under the Trump years and under the COVID pandemic. If you've got suggestions for guests, topics for debate, or you've just got a tip for us, please email us at tips at honestlypod.com. See you soon. Okay, that's it.