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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In this episode, Rushan Abbas reveals how the Chinese communist regime has escalated its campaign against the Uyghurs.

Uyghurs are being mass surveilled, forcibly sterilized, and exploited as slave labor both in Xinjiang and in other provinces across China. There are growing signs of large-scale forced organ harvesting in the region—including an apparent special lane in the city of Kashgar’s airport dedicated to the transport of human organs.

In 2018, the Chinese regime imprisoned Rushan Abbas’s sister Gulshan in an apparent attempt to silence Rushan. Her sister was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and she has since spent almost seven years detained—with no end in sight.

Rushan Abbas is the author of the powerful memoir “Unbroken: One Uyghur’s Fight for Freedom.” She is the founder and executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs and chairperson of the World Uyghur Congress’s executive committee.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Rushan Abbas, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you for having me again.

Your book is titled, Unbroken. How did they try to break you? And who did the attempt at breaking?

The Chinese communist government has occupied our homeland since 1949. Ever since the occupation, they have been trying to target our people every so often, like every seven to ten years or so. During the 50s, the Uyghurs were targeted in the name of nationalists. During the 60s, in the Cultural Revolution, Uyghurs were targeted under the pretext of counterrevolutionaries. Then, later, Uyghurs became separatists immediately after the Soviet collapse and the establishment of independent states like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Then, right after the 9/11 tragedy in the United States, Uyghurs were targeted as terrorists because of our religion.

So constantly, our spirit, our ethnic identity, our religion, and the entire Uyghur community are being targeted. The Chinese government tried to break our whole identity, spirit, and hope. That’s why I wanted to name the book Unbroken, because with broken hearts, with our family members being in detention, with my sister being in jail as part of China’s transnational repression, we still continue to fight with unbroken will and strength.

Let’s talk about that. We hear this term transnational repression. It’s almost, you know, kind of a government term; it’s almost become one. But what does that actually mean? What does it mean for you exactly? How does that connect with your sister?

Transnational repression means that a government targets other countries’ citizens because of our connection back home. For example, in my case, in September 2018, almost seven years ago, after the mass detention of the Uyghurs in East Turkestan, I spoke at the Hudson Institute about this mass detention while I was outlining the fate of my in-laws; 24 members of my husband’s family went missing.

When I talked about that, they went after my sister. The government detained my sister to silence me. So basically, me living in the United States since 1989, being a U.S. citizen since 1995, did not matter. Because of my family ties, they took my sister to punish me.

So this is actually a part of China’s transnational repression. It should be recognized as an international crime because the Chinese government is not only targeting people like the Uyghurs and the Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, or Hong Kongers, but they’re coming after all these people living in the Western free world.

There are 102 Chinese police stations all over the world, including in the United States. The Chinese government uses those police stations to monitor, manipulate, and make threats to the citizens of the Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, Tibetans, or Falun Gong practitioners.

I’m really going to dig into this transnational repression part because it’s been something that’s very much on my mind the last year or two. Before we go there, let’s talk about East Turkestan. What does that actually mean? We hear about Xinjiang province in China. It’s the same thing, but why are you choosing to use East Turkestan?

Before the Chinese occupiers, during the Manchurian dynasty, first occupied our homeland in the late 1700s and 1800s. In 1886, the name Xinjiang was given to us, and Xinjiang means new territory. We are not new territory for anybody; that’s our land. The Uyghurs have been living there for thousands of years.

Also, East Turkestan is not only a geographical and historical name; we use that to resist the name given to us by the Chinese occupiers. Some people call it the Uyghur region, and officially the Chinese government calls it Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which is not autonomous. It’s just the end of a name, not real autonomy. But we would like to call it East Turkestan.

What is the reality for Uyghurs in the region right now?

The Uyghur identity, Uyghur ethnicity, Uyghur language, and our religion are all being criminalized. Everything about us, what makes us who we are, is being targeted. When this recent mass detention started and the Chinese government was arresting millions of people, Cui Tiankai, one of the former Chinese ambassadors to the United States, when he was interviewed, was asked why they were holding those millions of Uyghurs in so-called re-education centers. Because that’s what they were claiming; those are re-education centers. He openly said, by re-educating them, we are trying to make them normal people.

Can you imagine? Because of the beautiful culture we have, the language we speak, and the religion we believe in, in front of this barbaric regime, we are not even considered normal human beings. They don’t even look at us as normal humans, like a normal commodity. So they feel that they need to re-educate us to become Han Chinese, forsaking our language, forsaking our religion, and forsaking our ethnic identity.

With that kind of policy toward the Uyghurs, Uyghur women are facing forced sterilizations. Uyghur children are taken from their families. Reports show that about a million Uyghur children are taken from their families. Uyghur women face forced sterilization and forced marriages, and Uyghur babies are no longer being born. The Chinese embassy in the United States publicly celebrated those genocidal efforts by tweeting on X now, saying that Uyghur women are no longer baby-making machines. That’s exactly what they said.

The Uyghurs are subjected to forced labor. Just last year, 3.4 million Uyghurs were transferred as free laborers. The Uyghur economy is completely destroyed. Uyghur businesses are being destroyed. The land is taken. In 20 years, the land transferred from oil or farms to the government increased more than 50 times. After taking their lands, after destroying their businesses, they are shipping them off as slaves in the name of poverty alleviation. Those are all pretexts.

This is an astonishing society-wide effort. What do you make of some American and other influencers going to China and seemingly having great experiences with people who appear to be Uyghurs on camera?

Even when I was living back home, we used to see that happening a lot. Even we, in our home, hosted some foreign visitors. The government brings in people—like my father, who is one of the Uyghur scholars. We used to host delegations visiting some scholars, and they bring in all kinds of fancy chefs, and they bring in all kinds of lamb and food and all exotic fruit that we have never seen in our lives. Who knows where they were shipped from? They put it on the table and make this really huge fancy feast and show them this is the ordinary life of the Uyghurs. This was happening like 35, 40 years ago.

Now, whitewashing the genocide, the Chinese government is using influencers, Westerners, or people who have a large following on YouTube or Twitter, and taking them on Potemkin-style visits. These visits are paid for by the Chinese government and controlled by them. They only get to see certain people who are prearranged and visit certain areas that are set up like a stage, and they talk to people who are coached to answer. If anybody says anything wrong or speaks the reality, they will disappear the next day.

The world should not be fooled by those whitewashing efforts by the Chinese government, which is currently spending millions and billions of dollars on that to whitewash the genocide, spread disinformation, and fill the world with false narratives about the reality. But the reality is that the Uyghurs are facing full-fledged active genocide. There are reports from the UN Human Rights Council documenting all this horrible situation.

Not just that, time after time, we have the Chinese government’s own leaked data supporting everything we are saying. So it’s not like I am saying this as a sister of a victim, or a Uyghur activist, or someone else is talking about this because she or he was a former camp victim and has experienced all this; we have tons of the Chinese government’s own documents, pictures, and data.

The U.S. and Canada agree that genocide is happening to the Uyghur people, that they are being, you know, basically eliminated in whole or in part as an entire group of people. That’s what that word means. I see that word used; actually, this is one of my pet peeves. I see that word used very casually for other horrible things that happen, but not that. That’s like, that is kind of the top level. That’s why there was a genocide convention signed at one point. Out of curiosity, do you notice that the word genocide seems to be used very flippantly these days?

Yes, genocide is being used very casually. Sometimes it frustrates me when I try to explain to people that the intent of completely erasing the Uyghur population; Uyghur babies are no longer being born. Dr. Adrian Zenz’s recent report shows that in some of the mostly Uyghur populated areas, Uyghur births dropped down to zero percent. So this is aligning with the Genocide Convention’s description of crimes of genocide.

But it seems like right now it’s being used for any atrocity. I’m not trying to demonize any cause or any atrocity, but if there are some killings or some atrocities here and there, people use the word genocide. I’m not sure what’s going on because it demonizes actual genocide, just to show respect to the Holocaust and the Jewish people, we didn’t use the word genocide very casually. Even when I give presentations to some of the Jewish communities or other places connected to Holocaust museums, I switch my presentation, changing the word genocide to atrocity, and concentration camps to internment camps.

But after I finish giving the presentation, they stand up and say that this is genocide. This is what happened to our grandparents, our ancestors. So what’s happening to the Uyghur people is confirmed by the U.S., with the first Trump administration, and then the last Biden administration, where Secretary Blinken confirmed it.

Now Secretary Rubio confirmed it twice recently. Once on February 27th, with the deportation of 40 innocent Uyghurs from Thailand back to China. Secretary Rubio released his statement saying that what the PRC is doing to the Uyghurs is genocide and crimes against humanity. Then again on March 14th, Secretary Rubio sanctioned some of the Thai officials responsible for this deportation.

There was an independent Uyghur tribunal set forward by the World Uyghur Congress, and the independent Uyghur tribunal in London also declared it genocide. More than a dozen countries and parliaments around the world have confirmed that what’s happening to the Uyghurs is genocide.

We use that term because it’s basically the worst thing that human beings can do to one another that we can think of. I remember during the China Tribunal, which looked at the forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners of conscience. They struggled with this question: is it genocide? Because of the profit motive, right? But it’s also interesting that what always seems to go with these genocidal situations is a lot of slave labor, a lot of basically working people to death, which is another piece of the story. I think I may have touched on it earlier, but there’s a heck of a lot of slave labor happening. Cotton, for example, is a big one. You want to speak to that a tiny bit?

Yes, absolutely. Again, when I was living back home from a very young age, it was very natural for Uyghur people to be taken out of their homes, taken out of their schools, and shipped to the farms to pick cotton during cotton harvesting. That was part of Uyghur people’s lives. Back like 50 or 60 years ago, it was called hashar in the Uyghur language, meaning free labor. Now, 84% of China’s cotton output to the world comes from our region, which is handpicked by Uyghur slaves.

Everything you use, actually, everything that we have a connection with daily, like the car we drive, the tomatoes in our pasta, the seafood that we like, the purse you carry, or the shirt on your back, is tainted with Uyghur slaves’ blood, sweat, and tears. The Chinese government is very effectively making this genocide a profitable venture for them. Certain tons of human rights violations here came from our region. The Uyghurs here made it over to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. Certain tons of human rights violations here—how many lives does that represent? We didn’t see that being covered in mainstream media.

If you Google it, you will find it in some 10 or 15 pages of a CNN report somewhere. The Chinese state media reported 1.1 million Han Chinese cadres, mostly male, deployed into Uyghur homes, living inside their homes to supervise and monitor Uyghurs’ daily lives. When most of the husbands, most of the males in the home, are taken to forced labor facilities or prisons or those detention centers, Uyghur women are subjected to sexual abuse inside their own homes, and there is government-sponsored mass rape of Uyghur women. Organ harvesting was first implemented on Falun Gong practitioners. We used to hear a lot that they were the victims.Then it was moved and expanded to the Tibetans and the Uyghurs.

Starting from 2016, before this mass detention, the Uyghurs were subject to mandatory house checkups and DNA collections. We were not sure at the time what this was for. When this mass detention started, we began to hear that crematoria were being built next to the concentration camps, as well as the airports in the major Uyghur cities like Kashgar, where there’s a fast lane, a special lane dedicated to people transporting human organs.Crematoria and organ harvesting, forced organ harvesting, should be a warning sign to the world.

But people are not paying attention. It’s happening on our watch, but we are not getting enough attention to this. Currently, there is actually a bill being introduced by Congressman Chris Smith, which has passed in the House. We really need to see that swiftly put forward and passed in the Senate.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act with Chris Smith. There’s actually a second bill, the Falun Gong Protection Act, which is coming through. There’s a third bill in committee that would basically prevent U.S. entities like insurance companies from paying for transplants. I believe that’s one in this committee. So it’s an interesting development, because we’ve been following this issue at The Epoch Times for almost 20 years, but we’re finally seeing some sort of traction around at least legislation at the federal level.

Something that comes through in your book, which I thought was very powerful. I mean, you have a whole testimony of your father, right? But it kind of highlights to me how Uyghurs have been persecuted for quite some time. You talked about this at the very beginning. But to me, it highlights the cost of basically the world turning a blind eye to atrocities, whether or not they hit the genocide mark, right, so to speak, because this is what happened. It seems like this is what happened to the Uyghurs. It seemed there was basically not much action internationally.

Eventually, we ended up with a situation with millions of people in these concentration camps. Similarly, with the world completely turning a blind eye to this forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners, which expanded into other groups, including the Uyghurs. Right now, the evidence is being gathered to basically show that as well. Have you reflected on this, the sort of the cost of no response?

Absolutely. Tyranny survives and builds on an expense because of silence. Basically, I say silence is the oxygen of tyranny. The more we stay silent for whatever reasons—naivety or thinking that this is far, far away for some people that I have nothing to do with—everything will be fine for me. No, it’s not staying within China’s borders.

Because of the silence and inactivity of the world community, the international leaders, and the Western democratic countries in the name of economic engagement or continuously doing business with China, the Chinese government is expanding. Transnational repression is part of it. Yes, as my father’s memoir states, what happened to the Uyghur intellectuals, what happened to my grandpa.

My book is written for three generations; my grandpa’s age, the times of my grandparents and my father, and now us. But it’s not just staying in East Turkestan or in Tibet, or when China, the democracy in Hong Kong, took a complete dark turn overnight, holding scholars like Jimmy Lai and the others. It’s expanding everywhere. Falun Gong practitioners are being targeted all over the world, in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Hong Kongers. We have Hong Kong activists; the Chinese government puts a bounty on their heads when they are living in a country like the United States.

So what does that mean? Is it staying far, far away on the other side of the ocean? No. Because of our ignorance, naivety, or whatever you call it, acceptance, or being normalized in the United States, now it’s here. We’ve got police stations right there in the heart of Manhattan. The Uyghur activists and the Tibetans and Hongkongers and Falun Gong practitioners, our family members, are calling with police sitting next to them and telling them to stay quiet or report about the other community members or stop speaking out for human rights abuses or else, you know, threatening by holding family members as hostages.

Not only that, they are also affecting Canadian MPs and silencing Western scholars. To me, eventually, little by little, China’s invasion through the West and the world, coming in with trade deals, suitcases of money, and smiling faces, is a silent invasion. China’s invasion is unlike Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which happened in broad daylight with tanks and soldiers and just the open invasion. The Chinese government’s goal is to replace the free world with its authoritarian system, and they are succeeding.

Not only that, actually, transnational repression is becoming a national security threat for all Western countries like the U.S., U.K., Canada, and all of Europe. If we don’t wake up and stop China now and hold the CCP accountable, it will be our next generations who will pay the consequences of a dark world with no human rights, no respect. Who knows what the world is going to face? I always say, just remember what’s happening to us today and imagine the future of the world tomorrow if we don’t stop China.

Something that I think isn’t very well known is the way that the Chinese regime treats essentially any of the people that are under what it believes is its jurisdiction. It treats them differently, even if they’re U.S. or Canadian citizens or something like that. I want to get you to speak to that because I don’t think a lot of people understand that. How does it treat those people that it views, like, for example, the Han Chinese, the Uyghurs, you know, and other groups that it sees as part of its control? It doesn’t matter where those people are in the world.

The government only has an authoritarian system and control over people. At the same time, it breathes on racism. The Han nationalism, they try to prey on that and they try to use that against any other nationalities like Tibetans and the Uyghurs. We are being treated as uncivilized people. The brainwashing of the general Han Chinese people about the Tibetans and Uyghurs is amazing.

When we used to travel to China proper, even ordinary Chinese people used to come to us and ask, do you have roads? Do you live in houses? Do you eat raw meat? They used to ask us questions as if we were some barbaric people. So this is the government’s brainwashing against the ethnic groups.

So there’s this other element, right? This is when I think it applies as much to the ethnic groups as it does to the Han Chinese themselves, where they kind of feel like they believe they own those people. You know what I’m talking about? That’s what I wanted to get you to speak to.

Again, the ideology they have is they want everyone to pledge themselves to the Communist Party, period. That’s it. If you have anything else, your faith or any other beliefs, then they feel threatened. And so they feel like all the groups or the ordinary people are servants of the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, and that they owe them and give them absolutely no privileges or any kind of rights. So the people living within China’s borders, even their own ordinary people, basically live with absolutely no basic rights.

There’s no such thing as rights. Your thoughts are being owned, your speech, your expression, even your movement are being owned. Basically, when I say owned, you cannot move around with this modern technology now, with spyware on your phone and the surveillance systems everywhere, checkpoints, facial recognition software, emotion detectors, iris scanning systems.

So basically, you are being monitored 24/7 to the point that everything the Chinese government is doing in East Turkestan on Uyghurs makes George Orwell’s imagination look like a shame, actually. We thought that was something described with unbelievable control of mind, control of people. But what’s happening in reality is 100 times worse than what George Orwell described in 1984.

Let’s use this example. We’re hearing a lot about the 300,000 Chinese students in the U.S. Like, what does the Chinese regime expect of them?

They expect, again, 100% loyalty. And they basically control them through the embassies and the consulates. I have witnessed it a few times, actually. The first one, the major one, was in 2008, when the Beijing Olympics torch was going around the cities. I was in San Francisco protesting.

And all of a sudden, all these Chinese students showed up because the Chinese consulate in San Francisco mobilized them. So see, the government can sit in Beijing and then just with one phone call to the embassy and consulates, they can mobilize the Chinese students in the United States to carry Chinese flags in support of the Chinese government and do all kinds of violence against the people who are peacefully protesting.

We were peacefully protesting with Tibetans and the Falun Gong practitioners and other people in San Francisco. We were brutally hit with flag poles, the red Chinese flag. And we were pushed around. We were elbowed in our chests and heads. When we reported to the police, this was back in 2008, so they were more protective because the Chinese government made the request from the police to protect them against those groups who were protesting against the government. So the police wouldn’t listen to us. They were protecting the attackers.

And when I complained to a couple of the police officers saying that I just got hit on my head and I got hit with an elbow on my chest and they are threatening us, they are doing this, they are doing that, one of them shouted at me and said, if you don’t want to end up downtown, shut up and be quiet. So that was the reality. Now I hope that law enforcement understands what’s going on.

But still, when Xi Jinping came over to San Francisco, we, former camp victims, Uyghur activists, Chinese dissidents, and Tibetan activists, faced the same sort of violence from those Chinese students. Those are the Chinese students who are studying in the United States. And we hope that they will accept democracy and freedom and be understanding, right? But no. The Chinese embassy, Chinese consulates, and the Chinese government still own them. And they can mobilize them against any kind of freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

And they have pretty powerful tools to do so because they’re only here, you know, because the Chinese regime has allowed them to. And there are even written and unwritten expectations. Like, if you’re not delivering enough intelligence, why aren’t you delivering enough intelligence? Is there some problem? Maybe you have some issue? Are you against the regime? There’s just this whole kind of climate, right? And then, of course, let’s say you don’t really want to do it. I’m sure there are plenty of people who don’t want to cooperate while your family is back home.

Yes, I was just about to say that, you know, basically every single Chinese student studying or living in the United States or anywhere in the world, their family members are hostages under the Chinese government’s hands. So they can use the family members to make them do whatever they want.

You had to make a really difficult decision once, right? When you decided to step up, you knew what might happen, right? And so, you know, I’m sure some people have criticized you, saying, look, you did this and look what happened to your family. How do you respond to that kind of criticism?

I tell them, yes, you are absolutely right. I get those kinds of questions, especially from some of the trolls on the internet who tag me, and I have been stopped in the streets of U.S. cities, even at Harvard, right after I gave a presentation to the Asia Society Association that requested, I mean, they put together a session. When I get those questions and the criticism, my response to them is, unless we defend the freedom and democracy you have in this country, just look at what I said today or look at my life today and imagine the future for yourself or the future of this world. If we only think about our own selfish reasons or our own security, what’s going to happen to the future?

The Chinese government tried to silence me by taking my father’s position when he was only 58 years old. I described that in the book as well. When I first spoke out in the United States, when I first did my activism back in the early ’90s, he was only 58 years old. They took his position and forced him to retire, but I continued.

When I saw my father later, I said, I’m sorry, because of me, he was 58 years old, intellectual, and there was time for him to do more for humanity and for his profession. But he was forced to lose everything and just sit at home. And when I apologized to my dad, I said, I’m so sorry that this is what happened to you.

He said, I am so proud of you. You did what you were supposed to do. I named you Rushan, which means ‘light’ in my language. During the Cultural Revolution, I was born in 1967 when everything was dark. My dad describes this Cultural Revolution. Everything was dark and no truth could be seen. So I named you Rushan, shadowlight. And he said, you are doing what I wanted you to do. So continue what you are doing, and I am very proud of you.

So I did, actually. When my sister was taken, and she is still in jail, almost for the last seven years, she is turning 63 next month. And September will mark the seven-year anniversary of her detention. I did my part for humanity. Yes, the cost is horrible. It hurts me, breaks my heart.

But there are millions of sisters, millions of mothers, grandmothers, fathers, brothers, and innocent people who are suffering because of the Chinese Communist regime’s brutality. And that must stop. And we have the opportunity in the free world to exercise our voice, speak out for these people, and be the voice for those millions of voiceless people. If we don’t do that, then we should be ashamed of ourselves.

This is the nature of totalitarian and especially communist regimes as they force you, as I’ve come to learn and explore in a number of episodes of this show, they put you into impossible situations and you have to choose. It’s a very difficult choice and I’ve known many people who have made it and if their families have suffered and they’ve suffered and in some cases they pay the ultimate price.

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