Orville Schell’s 30-Year Secret: Exposing China’s Secret Prisons

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1:04Now scientists are warning of what that flooding could look like with El Nino. But what is El Nino? And how exactly is it going to affect us here in the Bay? I'm Erica Cruz Guevara, subscribe to the Bay, local news to keep you rooted. And here how the Bay is preparing for this year's Super El Nino, wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Forum, I'm Meena Kim. Orville Shell has been a leading scholar on China for more than 50 years visiting the nation since the 1970s. He's Asia Society's director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations and former Dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. In 1991, Shell helped CBS's 60 Minutes conduct an expose into China's forced labor camps where prisoners were making products that were being secretly exported to American markets. But he shelved the written account he'd promised then to the New Yorker until now.

2:05Shell's new book called China's Secret Prisons recounts the making of the 60 Minutes episode and how forced labor despite its illegality still supplies U.S. and other global markets today. Orville Shell joins me now. Welcome to Forum. Pleasure. Orville, help me understand, first of all, just the origins and theory behind the state imposed forced labor system in China. Well you know when China became the People's Republic of China in 1949 after Maltese at home defeated John Kaishak and he fled to Taiwan, they adopted sort of wholesale the Soviet system of government. You know all of the relationship between the party and the state, all of the structures were just adopted wholesale. And part of that of course was Russia's system of penal institutions.

3:07But interestingly China added a dimension to what Russians had long used in Siberia, which is namely just in prison people and you make them work and it's punishment. But Maltese had a kind of a new element he threw into the pot and that was that trying to follow the dictum of Stalin that part of socialist revolution was to re-engineer the human soul. He thought okay it's not just enough to put people in prison, we need to add a new another element and that was thought before. What we have referred to in this country often as brainwashing. So the idea was that if you could help people understand their political incorrectness, you know the incorrectness of their thinking. It was as crucial as to make them pay penance for their so-called political crimes.

4:12So they added that element. So reformed through labor camps meant that you got reformed by working for the state at no pay or extremely low pay and rare cases. But you also had to reform yourself politically and also although Malt never wrote about this psychologically. So then if it was about that reform, the people that were there were there because they were political prisoners essentially because they said and quote unquote thought things that were wrong according to the government. Yes, so this sort of wonderfully coined term in Chinese incorrect thought and that that thought needs to be quote rectified. It can be rectified if the party compels people while in prison or even out of prison to go to all these struggle sessions and study meetings. And I went to a bunch of these when I was first in China when Malt was still alive and the

5:12cultural revolution was still going on. I mean these head bangingly boring meetings where you had to read some document and you had to deliver self criticisms about your own thinking and even confessions. And these were sort of exercises that really did undermine I think people's belief in themselves because if in fact there's a punishment and you're in prison shouldn't there logically also be a crime. So then people start searching within themselves all right what did I do wrong? How can I get out of this bond? It was a very crippling exercise that Malt is doing sort of inadvertently a trip to pond and through into the into the whole question of incarceration for political purposes. Well, so these places were not just physically savage but also sort of mentally savage as well. And then in 19 in the I guess early 1990s or late was it 1991 when David Gilbert approached

6:14you but 60 minutes a 60 minutes producer calls you up and says he wants to document these places. Tell me what your reaction was to them. Well, I didn't know this guy David Galber who is a producer for Ed Bradley at 60 minutes and I just thought he was bereft of his senses. I mean you know you want to get into Chinese prisons with a giant camera and a big TV crew and a sound man with a fishnet vest in the whole nine yards. There wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that that could happen. So how did he convince you then to get in? Well, he kept at it and I was a... Tenacious producer. I thought this is interesting but I really couldn't see how to do it. It was a rather terrifying prospect too to think of trying to penetrate these prison systems. But then it suddenly occurred to me that I'd met someone who was at Stanford at the Hoover institution who'd spent 19 years in the camps and was documenting that as his project

7:16at Stanford. So I called him up and his first reaction was, I don't want anything to do with this. I don't... The people I know I would never introduce you to. There's no hope of anything. But we kept up the conversation and then one day he kind of got a strange look in his eye and he... This was Wu Hong Da or Harry Wu and he said, you know what? He said, if anybody goes back to China to do this, I should do it because I know what I'm doing. I know where the camps are. I know people who are in the camps living outside of them now because they have no homes or no family to go back to and working in the prison factories. I could go back and possibly get some video. Why was Harry Wu imprisoned in these camps in the first place? You know, he never really knew why. And this is one of the ways that I think this whole protocol of imprisonment and ideological

8:17reform is so powerful is that very often you will ask the Chinese Communist Party or the cadres whatever if you're being interrogated, detained, imprisoned, whatever. You'll say, well, what was the fault? What was the crime? And they say, you know what you did. And of course that triggers everybody to think of a thousand reasons why they might have run off the rails somehow. So it was during, I think the Hungarian uprising in 1956 that he did speak out. He thinks that was the reason and thus he was locked up as a righteous. Locked up for 19 years and yet willing to go back, what was he risking by doing this investigation under cover investigation with you in 60 minutes? Well, I asked myself that very question. I wondered what motivates this person. And as I got to know him, I began to realize that one of the things that probably gave

9:18him both the fortitude and the reason to risk going back to the very camps he'd been in, which he could end up in again, was that he was a Catholic. He was raised in a very wealthy Shanghai banking family and he went to Jesuit schools and his father was also deeply religious. And he often said to me that his faith was what sustained him in the camps. And as we got to know each other and worked very closely together for almost a year, he often said that he felt he owed it to them. And I said, who's them? And he said all the other people who were in the camps and there were minions of them who cannot speak out, many are dead, many are damaged. But many are incapable of being able to say anything about what happened to themselves. We're talking with China's call on journalist Orville Shell about a 60 minutes investigation

10:22to infiltrate China's forest labor camps in 1991. And he's written a book about it called Inside China Secret Prisons and undercover expose and it's lasting legacy. We will talk about it's lasting legacy today. But listeners, you're invited to join the conversation. If you know anything about China's forest labor detention system or want to ask Orville about it, you can email forum at kqd.org, find us on discord, lose guy, Facebook or Instagram. Or at kqd forum or you can call us at 866-733-6786-866-733-6786. And let me remind listeners, you are listening to forum. I'm Meena Kim. He did understand the stakes though I do understand that he insisted on recording on camera sort of last Will and Testament, Orville. Well before we actually went to China and he began trying to penetrate these old camps with a camera bag that had a peephole and a hidden Sony cam inside the camera bag peaking

11:28out. He of course got very, very concerned about, you know, he realized he was going back into the dragon's lair and he wasn't sure what would happen. And I was going to go back with him but be sort of back up. Should anything happen, provide him with video cassettes, take the cassettes that he might succeed in shooting. And so he did go back. And it was pretty extraordinary what he succeeded in doing and the great tragedy was he got out with all these tapes and all of the 60 minutes crew from New York came out to Berkeley and we got a big sweet enough air month. We started putting these cassettes into the video player, all excited and thinking we had to cat in the bag and one after the other. I mean the video on it was pictures of the sky, pictures of his feet, he's running.

12:30We have to get out of here. There wasn't one 10 second sequence in all of the hours he had shot. It was suitable for commercial American television. Wow. You write about the Velcro flap, you know, the bag being over. I mean, it is just heartbreaking to listen to and yet ultimately, you know, this does happen. He does go back to try to make all this happen again, shoot it again, risk it. Make his life and his freedom again. And this does ultimately air on 60 minutes in 1991. And after the break, we'll get into that saga more and more. But you know, it is, it is pretty incredible that, that this aired back then. And what I really want to get into is why, even though this aired in 1991, you didn't

13:35want to publish your written account. We'll have more with Orville Shell right after the break. His book about China's Secret Prisons and undercover expoze and its lasting legacy about a perilous attempt to investigate the forced labor camps for 60 minutes and what made Orville Shell write a written account of it, release a written account of it. Now, stay with us. Support for Forum comes from Genentech, the original biotech company. For over 50 years, Genentech has redefined what is possible by challenging the status quo. They have helped drive more than 40 breakthroughs across various diseases, including multiple sclerosis, cancer, vision loss, and food allergies. But their greatest breakthroughs are the ones patients feel, whether it's getting back to familiar routines or creating new ones. And more about Genentech's many breakthroughs at gene.com. That's g-e-n-e.com. You're listening to Forum.

14:36I'm Meena Kim. We're talking this hour with China Scholar and Journalist Orville Shell, who helped expose illegal prison secretly exporting goods made by political prisoners into American markets. And he's written an account of it in a new book called Inside China Secret Prisons and undercover expoze and its lasting legacy. And listeners, do you know anything about China's forced labor detention or prison system and want to ask, or do you want to ask Orville about it? You can do so by emailing forum at kqed.org, finding us on our social channels at kqed forum, giving us a call at 866-733-6786, 866-633-6786. Maybe you know someone who has been a political prisoner or has an experience with brainwashing. What questions do you have about the state of U.S.-China relations? With respect to human rights or other issues. So Orville, you know, we were talking about it. It was very difficult to get the footage for the 60-minute episode, but it ultimately aired in 1991.

15:36But you're a written account that you had promised the New Yorker at that time didn't publish. You held on to it. Tell me why. Well, you know, when I got back in the 60-minute program aired and made quite a stir, I wasn't, I was in, got interviewed, but my real role was not just not made manifest. And I kept a journal during the whole thing and every day I would make some, you know, write down what happened and thoughts and whatnot. And so after it came out, I was looking through the journal and I thought, wow, this is, this is a hell of a story, you know, chasing around China and all the things that happened to us. So I wrote it up for the New Yorker, which I was covering China for the New Yorker at that time and sent it in and they edited it and they sent it back and was going through

16:37the proofs. Oh, and it got very far. It got very far. And I suddenly hit me. I can't publish this. I have a Chinese wife or parents are in Beijing. We have friends all over China and I, not the least of which was my own career. And this is an interesting question to the way China controls access to China, whether it's for businessmen, journalists, you know, cultural figures, scholars, and makes you trim your jib in certain ways. And I realized that if I published this and really revealed myself as sort of the hand in the glove, it would be lights out. So it was great regret I threw it in the box. But then recently, after my wife had passed away sadly and, you know, things were different. I pulled it out and read it and I thought, my goodness, this is more relevant now than

17:40then because what's been going on in Xinjiang with a forced labor, the new kinds of labor camps, some 400 plus that have been built there and millions of people been put into them. And so I thought, well, let me redo this. And I'm ready now to publish it and the devil take the hindmost. So I did rewrite it. And it also gave me an opportunity as I went through the daily entries to sort of do some real backwards reflecting about what was going on here. Why was this happening? What was I thinking and what did it mean? So I did. And it's now out. Yeah. What were the things that changed for you personally that made it okay for you to release this now? You know, I think that I've been so closely involved with China my whole life.

18:41And indeed my grandfather, I bear his name, went to China. The graduated from Yale, went to Johns Hopkins, became a doctor, went to China, went up the Yangtze River and was part of the team that set up the Yale Medical School, China's first medical school. My father was almost born in China, but my grandmother got such morning sickness they had to come home. But so my family sort of deeply immersed in this field. And I thought, well, it's time for me to publish this now. And at my stage of life, my career is not yet to be made. It's either made or it's not going to get made. It's just have to say what I think. And I do think one of the things that compelled me to or impelled me to do it was that I could see ever more clearly since then how the dialogue, the discussion, the political

19:45sort of discourse on China was so dependent on China's ability to exercise chokehold. And one of the biggest chokeholds was access. And as you know now as a journalist, you know, there's almost no American journalist in China because China has denied access. So that for me was, okay, let's just do what I didn't dare do then, which is to speak some truth to power and publish whatever it is that I thought. Yeah. You write. So even if it meant banishment forever, I decided to go ahead. Lister Noel writes on Discord, what does the guest know about the Weger camps and forced labor? Help me understand, or will why this information from 1991 is still radioactive today. It's still significant because China has kind of repurposed the idea of reform through

20:49labor in different ways as it's moved forward and particularly in the desert area, Xinjiang, which is China's westernmost province, four times the size of California, where there is an ethnic Weger Muslim population. And of course they've had long standing struggles with ethnic minorities, whether it's Tibetans, Weger's, Mongolians. And so that they began to, there was some very serious terrorist acts committed by Muslims in China, one in Yunnan, another few in Xinjiang. So they began cracking down very harshly. And one of the ways they did that was to build a whole new generation of what they called vocational education schools that did combine this idea of thought reform and political study with labor.

21:50And in many cases these were completely extrajudicial. Just people who were Muslims could be, they have a category for what they call pre-criminal. In other words, someone goes to a mosque a lot. They were a beard. They studied the Koran. That was grounds to sort of preemptively detain them. So this was a rather large enterprise in China. And in Xinjiang there are certain commodities like polysilicon, cotton, even tomato paste. And many companies were moving out there and benefiting from these force labor enterprises and didn't really even know it because their supply chains were not clear to them. So this is why I thought this is a new version of what we had spent that almost a year trying

22:51to uncover for 60 minutes. But the principles are the same. And the idea of detaining people extrajudicial. And even if it was judicial, they would just be accused of making disorder or crimes that are very, very indistinct and allow great latitude for the authorities to move. So in the products that these weaker Muslims are making, which you just talked about, maybe there are others that you can talk about, right? Even though it's illegal in the US to import products made by forced labor, they are making their way into US markets. How is the Chinese government able to do this? The Chinese government is able to use, to take products made in these prison factories by very simple technique. They don't do it directly.

23:53So every camp has two names. One is the camp name, the prison camp name, and the other is the protection facility name. But they don't even sell from the production facility. They run it through an export import company, which kind of launders the whatever it is that they are selling. So you can't trace back where it comes from. Now we do have under the Biden administration Congress passed this force labor prevention act, which says all companies must guarantee that things coming from Xinjiang are not made with forced labor. Well, how do you do that? It's almost impossible. China has now made laws which make it illegal to investigate your supply chain. So if you're a big clothing company or a solar panel company or whatever company that

24:54sources things, it's impossible for you to authenticate that your supply chain is not involved with forced labor. And then the Chinese Communist Party did something very clever. They decided to ship prisoners from Xinjiang, from Uyghurs, out of Xinjiang to forced labor facilities elsewhere in China. So the problem of products exported to America and other companies was not exclusively and geographically based in Xinjiang. So it's a cat and mouse game that's almost impossible to control. Let me go to color Greg and Palo Alto. Greg, go ahead. You're on. Hello. I just wanted to find out, Mr. Shell has kept current on what's been going on in China. And if he could comment on the incredible growth that's taken place in China over the

25:55last 20 or 25 years, and whether or not the weaker situation is that different from other workers in China, are they also under sort of authoritarian control, if you will? It just remains. So anyway, that's the question. Thank you. Not only that, but you also talk about how, with the surveillance technology, that is it exists now. It's even more intense. Yes. I mean, you know, back in the good old days, for instance, cash enabled people to live on the margins unsurveiled in China, because you couldn't with digital payment systems, the state will know every bus ticket, plane ticket, train ticket, you bought every restaurant you ate at where every hotel you lived in. And this means that the sort of techno autocracy part of the new system is pretty intense.

26:59It makes it very difficult for anybody to elude government surveillance. There are cameras every kilometer on highways, there are facial recognition cameras, you know, ten of them at every intersection. They can follow you around the country, around the city, without ever having someone to have to gumshoe behind you. So this is created a situation both in prisons and also outside of prisons, where it's very hard to have a life unobserved. And of course, if they mark you, they can see your face when you cross the street and then ten seconds later they have your whole file. Whereas before the party files, they kept what they call the Dangan on every Chinese would be paper files and you'd have to go to the place where they resided and look at them. Now it's all centralized, digitized.

27:59And it creates a kind of a new world where I think autocracy has gained a whole new kind of dimension of strength and ability to do what I think George Orwell could never have imagined in his wildest dream. Let me go to Collar, Jane next in San Jose. Jane, go ahead. You're on. Hi. Can you hear me all right? Hi, Ken. Great. I was a volunteer with Amnesty International Group 19 in Palo Alto in the early 1990s and we had the opportunity to interview Harry Wu for a public access television program about his experiences. And the thing that really stays with me decades later is the condition that Harry told me about in the Lao guy. He said that he was forced to stand in a bath of dye for twelve or fifteen hours a day

29:01while they were processing in the shoe factory. And now every time I see a piece of product made in China, I wonder about the conditions of the food. Have they improved or are they still as brutal as Mr. Schellnell? Thank you. Well, I think you could not say they've been proved because there have been new generations of political imprisonment after 1999. There was 89. There was a whole generation. And sort of each decade, there's different reasons to both improve, if you will, could use that word, the penal system and the devices that are used in political imprisonment to kind of, as I said earlier, correct the thought of the people in the camps. I think you know, I mean, the thing about Harry Wu, which was so extraordinary and I think

30:03it taught me a really profound lesson was that the people who we esteem is heroes who stand up, speak out, and they pay the consequences, but they also get damaged in some significant way. And this is the great tragedy that the people we know like Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Prize and died in jail, these people really have a hard time, you know, with marriages, with families, with kids, with friends, with colleagues, because something had to be so tough that there was some capacity that they didn't develop as human beings. They had a very difficult time in their life. And I would say Harry Wu was just such a person. Yeah, actually, we have a clip of Ed Bradley from 60 minutes talking with Harry Wu,

31:03about, you know, why he decided to do what he did and also giving us a little bit of a sense of how on their second trip they were successfully able to get some information out of the prisons. Entrance is strictly forbidden to anyone but labor camp personnel, but on this day, as we drove 15 miles from one end of the camp to the other, no one stopped us. We could never figure out why. During the way we could see prisoners at work building a canal with picks and shovels, which is exactly what Harry Wu did when he was in this prison. If they catch you doing this, what happens to you? Go back to the camp again. You could go back to prison. Of course, they were putting you back again. Why are you doing it then? Because I think the world have to realize there's a campsite in China. This clip from the 1991 60 minutes episode about the risky undercover investigation to expose

32:04China's vast network of gulags, essentially forced labor camps for political prisoners. I guess Marvel shall help 60 minutes with that investigation, finding the products that these prisoners were forced to make work. And as he writes in a new book called China Secret Prisons, these products still are infiltrating American markets. What that speaks to, you know, Harry Wu did not have. I guess life after the expose does not go well, essentially. He's detained by customs and imprisoned again briefly. And then his legacy is tarnished by sexual misconduct, allegations, and accusations of mishandling a financial fund that had been entrusted to his management as you write. So there was definitely an effect, of course, on the family. But also it speaks to the broader societal effects of this system, right? And how that manifests. We're coming up on a break, but, you know, is that something that's fully, people are fully wrapped their minds around in China? No.

33:05If you raise the question that you've just raised, they will say, oh, let's not talk about it. But I think this is one of the great, unplumbed areas that we don't really know, that the damage that was done societally and even mentally. But it cascades generation by generation. More with overshadow after the break. This is Forum. I'm Meena Kim. Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year I've been layering in some styles from the new Lou Le Mans fall drop, because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lou Le Mans fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at loulelamon.com. The Bay Area is already a place that deals with flooding in the winter.

34:07Now, scientists are warning of what that flooding could look like with El Niño. But what is El Niño? And how exactly is it going to affect us here in the Bay? I'm Erica Cruz Guevara. Subscribe to the Bay, local news to keep you rooted. To hear how the Bay is preparing for this year's Super El Niño, wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Forum. I'm Meena Kim. We're talking this hour with China Scholar and Journalist Orville Shell. About his 60 minutes investigation to infiltrate Chinese forced labor camps in 1991, he consulted for 60 minutes on that project and then wrote a written account of it for the New Yorker at that time. But then, bearing retaliation against his family and friends in China, he shelved that account for three decades. It's out now in a new book called Inside China's Secret Prisons, an undercover expose and it's lasting legacy. And listeners, you're joining the conversation with your questions about China's forced

35:08labor, detention practices, the system, sharing if you have any experience with political prisoners. There were an experience with brainwashing questions about the status of US-China relations with respect to trade, human rights, other issues. The email address is forumakqd.org. You can find us on Discord, Blue Sky, Facebook, or Instagram, or you can call us at 866-733-6786-866-633-6786. And Jeff Wright's on Discord, despite decades of legislation ranging from 1990's Customs Bands on Prison Labor imports to the contemporary Weaver Force Labor Prevention Act, how easily do modern global supply chains still absorb forced labor commodities through transshipment hubs, front companies, and obscured component manufacturing? I mean, essentially, you said it's almost impossible for us to know, right? Because you give the example of cotton and how you could combine a cotton shirt with cotton that was made in a forced prison camp with cotton that was made legally and so on, right?

36:12It's almost impossible. I mean, this is the sort of sophisticated world of intermingled supply chains that we live in, make it almost impossible to. And this is becoming increasingly more hopeless because China will not allow, as I said earlier, American or European or Western companies to actually assure, to inspect and know exactly where their supply chains go. You know, I have to say this, you may wonder, why does this matter? Why should an American really care about what goes on in China? So your shirt's made, cotton made by forced labor, what does it matter? I think the answer to that question is that it actually matters to China because China has accomplished so much. It is a kind of a miracle what, under the Communist Party, China has done in terms of development

37:12and yet, despite all the extraordinary highways, high speed rail, airlines, hotels, cities that have just exploded in growth, there's something still missing in this success story. I think you could sum up in a few very simple words like justice, fairness, just basic rule of law, humanism, things like that. So this country has accomplished so much and yet, by defending its Leninist system, and it borrowed from Stalin after all, it kind of makes the success story incomplete. And that is the thing I think which makes me, you know, as I look back over my long life, or been doing this for decade after decade after decade watching this incredible story and just thinking, well, maybe China's going to really get it together. There's a giant missing piece of the puzzle at all of this success.

38:15So are you saying that this, that Americans offense to a forced prison system, right? Is it thorn in China's side or like a taint that it cares a lot about? Yes, because, you know, actually China always says, we don't care what you think, you're violating our sovereignty, etc., etc., but the truth is that one of the sort of truths of the last hundred years is that Chinese leaders care deeply about what the outside world thinks of them. Because the outside world used to think of China as the sick man of Asia. So it does matter. And that's why I think we still have a kind of a soft power power, that the judgment of how they're doing does matter to them. I was going to say, well, in that vulnerability, does there not exist then, and avenue or opportunity for the US, right, to exert some leverage over the types of things that it does not want to see.

39:21Because, I mean, I would say today, right, China has enjoyed very little constraint on its trade activities throughout all of the things, the history, the Jeff just, you know, described. It's been a member of the World Trade Organization since 2001 holds most favored nation trade status in this granted after, right, multi-year efforts to get in. Well, the hope was, the conceit was that if we embrace China, let them into the World Trade Organization, give the most favored nation status slowly, they will change. And they won't become Jeffersonian democracy, but they will become a little more absorbable, soluble in the world of rule of law, little less punitive, a little less leninist. Well, it didn't really happen. Yeah. And our engagement was a really good idea, I think, to try, but we failed. Did you support it at the time? Very much. Yes, you advocated for it.

40:22I spent my whole life trying to build bridges with China, but I spent also my whole life getting spat out and rebuked. Did you regret, you know, the fact that you advocated, you know, for market capitalism sort of leading toward democratic governance and seeing what's happened now? You know, I think it was a good try. And any great power should try to affect where possible, slow, peaceful change from leninist autocracies or whatever kind of autocracy to something else. And I think that's what we did. But I think this is where you get into the peculiar kind of restoration and reaction that was brought about by Xi Jinping, who you have to remember grew up during the Cultural Revolution. And his father was a counter-revolutionary.

41:22And he was sent away for seven years to a very poor village in Shanxi province, his sister committed suicide, his mother criticized him. In other words, you have a leader who grew up in a certain milieu of political ostracism. It's really important for us to understand a little bit more because one verity we know beyond a shadow of a doubt. Every kid in their teenage years, those are the formative years. That's when they're shaped. And when they become big leaders, they will be imprinted by that formative experience toward Donald Trump and his father. Now, I should say, I went with Donald Trump on his trip to China in May. And you asked about human rights. There was not one mention of human rights. In fact, Donald Trump was in a state of high-pander. And it was quite an astounding to see because we also knew that he had another side,

42:23which was very belligerent, anti-China. So this guy is something of a contradiction, which I think makes the whole equation with China very difficult to predict. Right. And now there's going to be a summit in a week or so. But talk to me. Help me understand then. If the effort to try to get China to open up, was at least worthy in its intent, the effect now seems to be that it could be leading to the U.S. is demise. So help me understand. She's project for China while he holds power or more. So yes, there are people who now say to have taken China in, traded with them, become so deeply involved in their supply chains, was feeding the beast. And that now we're dependent on them, for instance, critical minerals and rare earths. We can't, our tech industry would stop in a heartbeat if we don't have them. And they control 90% of the processing of those critical

43:27elements. So we're in a very complicated place where both countries are using their supply chains as chokeholds. And this was something that the Americans pioneered really when we were trying to keep products made with forced labor out of the U.S. That was a chokehold we exercise. But now China has chokeholds as well. And this is, we're in a sort of reciprocal punitive retaliatory era where each side is trying to choke the other, use just ordinary supply chains as political levers. When do you think she will act on Taiwan, if you believe you will? I think, you know, Mao Zedong said, let's leave Taiwan for a hundred years, it doesn't matter. This is what he said to Kissinger and Nixon in 1972. Xi Jinping has not said that. Xi Jinping has said, we need Taiwan to re-embrace the motherland sooner rather than later.

44:34And I think he's painted himself into a corner where a matter of face sort of compels him or will compel him sooner or later to do something. But I don't think it will be an amphibious assault. It will be a slow squeezing sanctions or just Taiwan for instance has one month supply of energy. And if it gets embargoed or a maritime blockade, it's going to have no choice but to yield. So it's a very fragile situation. But if that happens, we will in effect be in a kind of another global war. Do you think it would happen while Trump is in power and office? You know, this is why these summits are so important. But Trump is not a deaf diplomat. I don't think he fully understands the best way to keep the peace in the Taiwan Straits in Asia is deterrence. And that means being nice to your allies, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia,

45:35not alienating them. Xi Jinping needs to wake up every morning and say, well, this morning's not the morning for me to move on Taiwan in any way. And that is precisely what I think has been eroded by the attacks against Korea, the neglect of Japan and the whole sort of alliance structure that America wants that at the apex of. So there's the Taiwan question. There's the fourth labor question that we've been discussing right and human rights, though. Sounds unlikely that that will come up. There's also, of course, the administration strategy with the Iran War, right, to throttle the country economically while China is its biggest buyer of oil. So what do you see coming from the summit if anything substantive? You know, I went on the first summit during Trump's first term and then I went on this one. The truth is not much comes from any of them. The best we can hope for, I think, in this one coming up on September 24th is that there will be another summit. And in between those summits,

46:40maybe nothing too untoward will happen. But in terms of resolving major basic controversial issues that divide the countries, it's very difficult because our systems are completely opposite. I mean, remind listeners, we're talking with Orva Shell and you are listening to Forum. I'm Minakim. Well, we're getting a lot of questions along these lines from caller Sadia and Saratoga. Sadia, join us. You're on. Yeah, hi. Let me make sure I don't have the video on. Thank you for taking my call and thank you for this great program. Yeah, I think you guys probably covered a lot of what I wanted to ask. Really wanted to understand as a citizen of the world. Is there anything that we can do for, you know, just to make any

47:42dent in how things are going with respect to these human right violations, these labor camps? In what is our role in all of this? Well, yeah, I mean, that's that is a good question. And I think it really raises the fundamental question that are we our brothers keeper in any way? In other words, is what happens in China, purely China's business and we should just forget it, let them do whatever they want to do? Or is there some responsibility that human beings have as human beings to speak out for people who cannot speak out? And that's an individual judgment. And each American president has to make their own judgment about where they stand on that. And I think the president of Trump has decided this is not important. We're not going to mess up our deal making with any, you know, thrown in flies in the appointment here. Sandra in Oakland writes, a delegation of American prison wardens visited these facilities in the

48:42late 80s. They were accompanied by a French photographer, I'd dinner at one of the wardens homes. The photographer showed his slides and what you saw were political prisoners being reprogrammed by doing extremely tedious beat counting and other repetitive activities that always made me think twice about buying certain products knowing they were probably from these facilities. Another listener writes, I work for Target. They're completely opaque about their supply lines, especially to customers. I'm concerned that a large amount of their inventory is forced labor, does she all know? I don't think anybody knows. And this is the same problem with Amazon. They don't put country of origin at their products. But even if they did tell you a country of origin, how would you know which products from China are free and clear and which might be made with forced labor or whatever other we don't know? And it's impossible to find out because in a closed society, it's impossible to make the kinds of investigations that would assure that various congressional acts,

49:43which make forced labor products illegal, to identify them. At the very least, what lessons do you think exist for Americans today in looking at our system of criminal justice, detention, punishment, right, being taken and detained without being charged with a crime? I think it's hauntingly familiar to what I'm familiar with in China. That's what extra judicial detention is all about. You can just be locked up and nobody tells you why and there's no appeal process. So I think it's interesting for us to learn more about China because it's not a political system. I think we would like to imitate. We're talking about not just the influence of this, but in the US to some degree or at least you saw what it could become in China. But in your book, you also write about living through several

50:47decades of extraordinary openness in China, following Mao's death and the cultural revolution. Of course, moments of severe crackdown on pro-democracy movements in China. But you believe that this memory of openness still exists there, quote, like a deep underground aquifer. So tell me about what you feel still exists there. And also what you think it will require for that memory to resurface and take hold in some kind of impactful way in China. Well, perhaps to end on a slightly more optimistic note, it is imperative. I think that we take note of history. And within my lifetime, an experience in China, I first went during the cultural revolution when things were really locked down. I couldn't imagine. And Mao was alive that anything would ever change. And yet it did. And then China went through in the 80s and even into the 90s after the

51:491989 Beijing Massacre, a period of quite extraordinary opening and sort of reform. And this is what inspired everybody to believe in engagement that slowly it was changing. And we should support it. Send our universities and send foundations. Let's help out here in our missionary spirit. But alas, we ended up 12, 13 years ago with Xi Jinping coming to power. He was a very different leader than the leaders who Dong Xiaoping put in an office in different than Dong himself, who was dedicated to reform. And paradoxically, I would say 1989, the demonstrations, which everybody supported. And yes, you could say they were justified and right.

52:51It was that that ended, I think, the most hopeful period of openness in China because China's leaders' hands forth understood where reform might take their country. So it sounds like you're saying this memory could be resurfaced, but not while Xi Jinping holds power. It's still there, those years of openness are there. And eventually there are several generations who remember them, and they'll be back. The Orville Shell, you're listening to Forum. The book is inside China's Secret Presence. I'm Mina Kim. Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the Generosity Family Fund and the members of KQED. When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy to layer styles meet the demands of your day, and as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you.

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