Samantha Power: belief

Transcript context

…Well, let me agree with a part of the premise, which is, given the scale of the brutality and, really, the atrocity being carried out against a people — the Uighur people in China — we’re seeing woefully insufficient coverage and criticism. So I agree with that premise, in part because of the gravity of the harm. It’s hard to imagine what would be sufficient. I mean, that’s unbelievable. They can’t get out. They talk about reeducation and rehabilitation. It’s not like there’s some test where you say, “I love President Xi, and I wish he could be dictator, not only for life but for 100 lives,” and then you get out of jail. This is mass incarceration with no shelf life, and no one can escape this if you are a Uighur and speak your language and practice your culture. I mean, it’s sick. So woefully insufficient. In terms of the soft-pedaling, I guess I’d want to look at that as an empirical question. I think part of what’s going on is you don’t hear a lot of criticism coming from the United States government. Every now and then, because of the religious freedom commitments of different individuals within the Trump administration, you’ll hear some discussion of the Uighurs more than you might, let’s say, in Saudi Arabia. Because there’s a broader attack on China because of trade and other things, this sort of gets lumped in with that, and there seems more comfort criticizing them than countries with which we are aligned and seem totally unprepared to criticize — again, like Saudi Arabia. But it’s not as if the Trump administration has a human rights policy as such. It’s not as if they’re looking at the conditions inside particular countries. If they were, they’d probably be nervous about discussions of detention, given the amount of detention being done in the migrant and immigration context by the Trump administration — not that there’s any parallel, but nonetheless, it’s the kind of thing that would be thrown back at them. So I think that there’s not enough noise. But it’s hard for me to know whether or not that latest Brookings piece isn’t going all in on that, or because of censorship or because of corporate influence — it’s plausible that that’s a factor — or because they actually feel that they don’t have a great recommendation as to what can be done. I find in advocacy, you see the most spirited advocacy in circumstances like Bosnia where policymakers are on the brink of doing one thing or another, and activists feel like, in making their recommendations or in taking over the op-ed pages, that they’re sort of one step away from really making a difference. On the Uighur policy, even if we were in office — the Obama administration or the next Democratic administration — it’s hard to speak with confidence that any particular tool that you employed would convince the Chinese government to think differently about this repulsive and brutal policy that it’s practicing. And so I think that is another factor. hat any particular tool that you employed would convince the Chinese government to think differently about this repulsive and brutal policy that it’s practicing. And so I think that is another factor. But I’m sure the money is a factor as well, and it is terrifying. I see even here the extent to which you see such a willful attempt on the part of the Chinese government to sort of insinuate themselves into American college campuses, to really shrivel up the safe spaces in which criticism of China can occur, even thousands and thousands of miles away from where any instability might take root and might actually threaten the regime. And again, with us more recessive on these questions — we, the United States, that is — I think you’re seeing an emboldened China using the money that it has, using the economic leverage that it has around the world, using the student exchanges that many of us really do think are a good idea as a general proposition, in part to increase connections among our peoples as our governments grow more estranged. But they are all in on this strategy of sanitizing China’s reputation globally. And think tanks and independent institutions, educational institutions absolutely have to defy the intimidation and the really de facto bribery that China brings to bear in order to advance that agenda. Why is democracy so rare in the Middle East? Another easy question.…

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