Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

TikTok CEO Shou Chew testifies at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, as lawmakers scrutinize the Chinese-owned video-sharing app on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 23, 2023.

Is TikTok a Trojan horse for America’s greatest rival? Or is it a creative outlet that fosters community and entrepreneurship – and no worse than other social media platforms when it comes to privacy, screen addiction, and disinformation concerns? 

That’s the question at hand on Capitol Hill, where there’s growing momentum to ban the increasingly popular platform, whose parent company is Chinese. Fueled in part by pandemic shutdowns, the app’s reach has expanded nearly 20-fold over the past five years to more than 1 billion users. Of those, 150 million are in the United States – including 2 in 3 American teenagers. 

TikTok CEO Shou Chew’s testimony before Congress on Thursday marked one of the most anticipated appearances on the Hill this year. Speaking before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a packed hearing room, he argued that any safety and security concerns should be addressed through broad legislation rather than through targeted action against his company. 

“The potential security, privacy, content manipulation concerns are really not unique to us,” said Mr. Chew, a Harvard Business School graduate from Singapore. “We believe what’s needed are clear, transparent rules that apply broadly to all tech companies. Ownership is not at the core of addressing these concerns.”

What actions, if any, Congress ultimately takes will ride in large part on whether lawmakers agree with that framing. If they see TikTok as just another social media platform that could dull or destroy the American mind but is linked to China rather than Silicon Valley, singling it out may seem unfair or even xenophobic. But if they conclude the app poses a legitimate national security threat – as a potential vehicle for espionage or propaganda that goes beyond general concerns about privacy and disinformation – that could build support for specific actions up to and including a forced sale or outright ban. 

“From the data it collects to the content it controls, TikTok is a grave threat of foreign influence in American life,” said Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Washington Republican, who is calling for a ban on the platform. 

“It’s been said it is like allowing the Soviet Union the power to produce Saturday morning cartoons during the Cold War, but much more powerful and much more dangerous,” she added.

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

TikTok CEO Shou Chew, a Harvard Business School graduate from Singapore, argued March 23 at a packed congressional hearing that any safety and security concerns should be addressed through broad legislation rather than through targeted action against his company.

TikTok bans already in place

In February, the Biden administration ordered TikTok removed from all government devices. Canada, three European Union bodies, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom all have similar bans for government devices, and India banned it completely in 2020. The issue has gained momentum on Capitol Hill in the past few months, as a strong bipartisan coalition of lawmakers concerned about China has begun scrutinizing various aspects of the U.S.-China relationship. 

Advocates of a TikTok ban point to Chinese laws that allow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to access the data of Chinese-owned companies, and say TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, could therefore be compelled to hand over data on American TikTok users. 

According to a Department of Homeland Security data security advisory to U.S. businesses, Article 7 of China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law allows Chinese intelligence agencies to secretly access U.S. data and compel Chinese firms to create back doors for the government to access data they don’t control. Those who obstruct such actions can be dismissed, investigated, and/or detained, the advisory said. 

Mr. Chew said in his prepared testimony that China had never requested data from TikTok on U.S. users, and that his company would not honor such a request. He also described an initiative in the works to address national security concerns, dubbed “Project Texas,” which includes building a “firewall” and moving U.S. data onto cloud servers run by Oracle. However, the Biden administration has reportedly rejected Project Texas as insufficient, pushing ByteDance to sell the company or face a ban on the platform. 

Lawmakers point to reports that U.S. data from the platform has already been shared within China. BuzzFeed reported last summer on recordings of more than 80 internal meetings that revealed that Chinese employees had access to U.S. user data at least on some occasions. “Everything is seen in China,” a member of TikTok’s trust and safety department said, according to the BuzzFeed report.

The FBI and Department of Justice are investigating reports that ByteDance gleaned data from the app about at least two U.S. journalists, including one from BuzzFeed, and used that data to surveil them. The ByteDance employees involved have been fired.

At a Monitor Breakfast this week, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia acknowledged that many of the China-specific concerns around TikTok are based on potential harm rather than on demonstrated harm, but urged a proactive approach.

“Do we really want to wait to see the potential of that exploitation?” asked Senator Warner, sponsor of the RESTRICT Act, which would give the Biden administration the power to ban TikTok as well as future companies linked with “foreign adversaries.” The bill has 18 co-sponsors, equally split between Democrats and Republicans. 

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Kristine Thompson (left) of Los Angeles, who promotes plus-size fashion on TikTok, says the platform helps elevate Black and brown voices that she wouldn't have been aware of otherwise – like fellow TikTok creator Robert Lucas (right), a self-taught cake artist from Statesboro, Georgia, who left his IT job when his TikTok hobby became fruitful enough to sustain him financially. They have 1.7 million and 2.6 million followers, respectively.

Why TikTok has garnered such appeal

Then-President Donald Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020, but was struck down by federal judges. A renewed attempt to ban the app would likely face legal challenges, with critics and some legal scholars saying it raises First Amendment concerns. 

One challenge of implementing a ban now is that the platform has become an integral part of so many Americans’ lives – and livelihoods. Mr. Chew testified that more than 5 million businesses, many of them small businesses, use the platform. 

During the early months of the pandemic, Callie Goodwin of South Carolina was inspired to start a greeting-card company, @sparksofjoyco, to bring joy to people during a time of sadness and social isolation. Today, she has sold more than 35,000 cards – with 95% of her business coming via TikTok. 

“A ban would erase a source of income for millions of small-business owners across America,” she said at a gathering of opponents to a TikTok ban, held outside the House of Representatives on Wednesday. 

The gathering was headlined by Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York, who has emerged as TikTok’s strongest ally in the House at a time when there is a growing bipartisan push to get tough on China. 

He advocated stronger legislation to address concerns around privacy, disinformation, and the potential for social media to cause real-world harm, but said it was important to do it in a comprehensive way and not single out any one company. 

After all, he pointed out, Facebook turned the other way as Russia used it to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and no one pushed to ban that platform.

“Let’s have a broader, more honest conversation about social media, and let’s not scapegoat TikTok because they happen to be owned by a Chinese organization in this time of heightened xenophobia since COVID.” 

Fellow progressive Rep. Robert Garcia of California championed the platform as an important space for marginalized communities. “There’s so many young queer kids, queer creators, who are able to find themselves in this space, share information, feel comfortable, and in some cases come out and share their stories,” said Representative Garcia, who is gay. 

The California congressman also extolled TikTok’s “uplifting” of the voices of Black and brown people in new ways, enabling them to create brands and platforms that he said they wouldn’t have been able to create on any other social media app.

Kristine Thompson, who promotes body-positive fashion for plus-size women to her 1.7 million followers on TikTok, says she agrees with that wholeheartedly. She highlights fellow TikTok creator Robert Lucas, a self-taught cake artist from Georgia, as someone she wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. He eventually developed such a following on TikTok that he was able to quit his information technology job. Today he has 2.6 million followers.

“TikTok has even introduced me to different nuances within my own community,” Ms. Thompson says.

Incisive questioning from lawmakers

Such views were largely left out of today’s hearing, which focused mainly on data privacy and misinformation concerns. Nor did lawmakers discuss the likelihood that a similar social media platform could emerge in TikTok’s place. 

Mr. Chew vowed that TikTok would prioritize safety, particularly for teens; protect U.S. data from foreign access and government manipulation; and be transparent. His opening statement departed from his prepared remarks, notably changing a promise to protect U.S. user data from “unauthorized” foreign access to protecting it from “unwanted” foreign access.

He faced incisive questioning from both House Democrats and Republicans at today’s hearing, who displayed unusual bipartisan unity. 

“Are you 100% certain that ByteDance or the CCP cannot use your company, or its divisions, to make content to promote pro-CCP messages for an act of aggression against Taiwan?” asked Chair McMorris Rodgers. 

After several exchanges in which she politely but firmly reiterated the question, and Mr. Chew did not directly answer, she added, “If you can’t say 100% certain, I take that as a ‘no.’”

Indeed, one issue that remains somewhat murky, even after today’s marathon hearing, is the relationship between ByteDance and TikTok, and how far the arm of the Chinese government can reach.

“It’s not just whether under a particular law, access could be given to this data,” says Sarah Cook, senior adviser for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan at Freedom House. “That’s the way the CCP operates; it has many avenues for applying coercion over a company to do its bidding.”

That said, an outright ban could be disproportionate – and a bad precedent, she adds. It’s important that the U.S., as a democracy, considers the balance between freedom of expression and data privacy. “How does a democratic society deal with these very real concerns, but in a way that itself protects rights? That’s a difficult circle to square.”

For weeks at the outset of the year, White House officials hinted that President Joe Biden would soon welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – newly returned to power – to the Oval Office for the traditional reaffirmation of “unbreakable” U.S.-Israel ties.

Then … nothing.

As recently as Monday, following Mr. Biden’s Sunday phone call with Mr. Netanyahu, the White House spokesperson for strategic communications, John Kirby, told Israeli TV Channel 13 there was no invitation and no “timetable” for the Israeli leader’s visit.

What shifted the White House from “invite” to “no invite” was an unprecedented and unflagging explosion of public opposition in Israel to the Netanyahu government’s proposed judicial reforms – an overhaul critics say would gut any semblance of separation of powers, place Israel on a slippery path to authoritarian rule, and ultimately threaten its cohesion and national security.

Moreover, the protests in Israel sparked an evolution in thinking inside the White House, from leaving Israel’s domestic issues untouched to considering the reforms a threat to the “shared values” that for more than seven decades have formed the foundation of trust underpinning the two democracies’ bonds.

The shift in thinking underscores rising alarm in the White House and among a growing number of Democratic congressional leaders and American Jews that Israel, long touted as a rock of solid democratic rule in the authoritarian sands of the Middle East, is at risk of mirroring a decade of global democratic backsliding.

“The Biden administration has come to understand that for the unprecedented numbers of Israelis who are protesting, this is about more than a judicial reform. It’s about whether or not their country will remain a pro-Western democracy governing a pluralistic, humanistic society,” says Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert who served in six administrations of both major political parties.

“For them,” he adds, “this has become a battle for what they believe is the soul of Israel.”

Nir Elias/Reuters

Police use a water canon to disperse Israeli pro-democracy demonstrators blocking a highway as part of a "Day of Shutdown," in Tel Aviv, Israel, March 23, 2023.

And although Mr. Biden is philosophically inclined toward Israel’s protesters – he came into office declaring the confrontation between democracy and autocracy the defining battle of this century – the White House is also mindful that experience shows that blatant threats and diktats from Washington have never worked to alter Israeli government behavior.

Thus, the subtle gesture of the White House invitation that now isn’t.

Urgent realization

“The Biden administration is being careful not to give the guys on the far right in Israel any reason to scream that America is interfering in domestic affairs, so Biden is letting the fact he’s declining to invite Netanyahu to the White House speak for itself,” says David Makovsky, director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a longtime expert in U.S.-Israel relations.

Noting that he has witnessed White House thinking on the proposed legislation “evolve” to where it is now seen to have clear national security implications, Mr. Makovsky says “there’s an urgent realization that our shared values are a pillar of the relationship no less than shared interests.”

“They’re saying,” he adds, “‘You can’t have objectionable values on something as central as democracy and believe you’re still entitled to a White House visit.’”

In the two leaders’ phone conversation Sunday, Mr. Biden told Mr. Netanyahu – who won a sixth term as prime minister in December – that over his long relationship with Israel he has never seen such high social anxiety among Israeli citizens. And he reminded his counterpart – as Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Mr. Netanyahu publicly when he visited Israel in February – that in democracies, major reforms are most successful when carried out with consensus.

“Biden is getting his point across,” Mr. Makovsky says, “and he’s doing it without using a sledgehammer.”

Michel Euler/AP/File

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Vice President Joe Biden talk prior to a meeting on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 21, 2016. President Biden spoke Sunday by phone with Mr. Netanyahu to “express concern” over his government’s planned overhaul of the country’s judicial system and to encourage compromise.

Israel’s proposed legislation would weaken the judiciary’s independence in numerous ways, critics say, but perhaps most significantly it would reduce the Supreme Court’s powers to check and balance government actions.

Indeed, some opponents of the changes suspect the objective of far-right proponents is first and foremost to eliminate the court’s ability to nullify government decisions, in particular those pertaining to the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The reforms would significantly reduce the justices’ ability to review laws and strike them down. Moreover, it would allow a simple majority in the 120-seat Knesset to override Supreme Court rulings, while also giving the government absolute control over judicial appointments.

Window-dressing

Within hours of Mr. Biden’s phone call, the Netanyahu government was airing a number of what it said were tweaks to the package of judicial reforms.

But Mr. Miller describes those changes as window-dressing, adding that they leave intact the most consequential aspects of the reform – those affecting the weight of the Supreme Court in the government’s balance of power.

“They are pushing ahead with a change that will give the government the edge in naming the justices,” says Mr. Miller, who is now a senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

For Mr. Makovsky, Mr. Netanyahu’s narrow field of maneuverability is roughly comparable to that of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was only able to secure the votes he needed to win the position he coveted by accommodating the demands of the most extreme and far-right members of his caucus.

Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the hard-right Religious Zionist Party, attends a news conference in Jerusalem, Jan. 8, 2023. He drew a U.S. rebuke after declaring during a weekend visit to France that there is “no such thing” as the Palestinian people.

In a similar way, he says, Mr. Netanyahu was only able to retake the prime minister’s chair by including the far right in his governing coalition – and by sticking to their demands, which include the judicial reforms.

Thus Mr. Netanyahu has in his government two extreme right leaders who joined forces in the last election: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power.

“Whenever you have rough parity between political forces, a small group with ideas out on the margins is able to wield disproportionate influence,” says Mr. Makovsky.

“We see it [in the United States] with McCarthy forced to give a small group of representatives disproportionate weight. And we see it in Israel,” he adds, “where in order to govern, Netanyahu has named as senior ministers two far-right leaders whose positions threaten the foundations of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

Mr. Smotrich drew a rebuke from the U.S. after declaring during a weekend visit to France that there is “no such thing” as the Palestinian people. He earlier prompted an international uproar – and comparisons to Nazi behavior – when he called for a West Bank Palestinian town to be “erased.”

Mr. Ben-Gvir has provoked outrage by ordering the demolitions of homes of Arabs in East Jerusalem to continue during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began Wednesday.

Abir Sultan/Reuters

Israel's Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the extreme-right Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power party, speaks with the media as he attends the weekly cabinet meeting in the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem, March 19, 2023.

Some in the U.S. have called it an exaggeration to deem Israel’s proposed judicial reforms a threat to the core of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and say the Biden administration should take Mr. Netanyahu at his word when he says Israel will remain a vibrant democracy.

Values and security

But others increasingly sound alarms over the national security implications of the legislation.

“There are more and more indications that normalization between Israel and the Arab countries is facing immense challenges, [while] Israel is gradually losing the support of its good friends in the U.S. and Europe,” says Shira Efron, director of policy research at Washington’s Israel Policy Forum and a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. Indeed, Gulf Arab leaders who have recently established diplomatic ties to Israel have warned that including the far right in the government will harm relations.

Israel’s security concerns and relations with key partners deserve “the full attention of a savvy and experienced national security cabinet,” Ms. Efron says. Instead, “the cabinet includes ministers with zero national security experience,” she adds, with their attention focused domestically “on undermining the court and building the infrastructure for exonerating corrupt politicians.”

Moreover, Mr. Miller says there is a direct correlation between what he calls the “values proposition” in the U.S.-Israel relationship and Israel’s national security. A threat to one, he says, weakens the other.

“The traditional basis for America’s support for Israel is the high coincidence of values along with the high coincidence of interests,” he says. For seven decades, it’s the “values proposition” that has given the relationship its “resilience,” the longtime participant in the bilateral partnership says.

Without the strong common values, he says, the relationship no longer has the bonding element that has made it special.

“You take that values proposition away, and you take away a key part of what the relationship has been,” Mr. Miller says. “If Israel is in conflict with those values, it becomes harder to give them the support the U.S. has provided for decades,” he adds. “And for Israel it becomes a national security issue.”

Stuck in Istanbul’s epic traffic on a bridge crossing from Asia to Europe on the fabled Bosporus Strait, my cab driver launches into a charged monologue about refugees destroying Turkey. 

He says Afghan refugees are stealing from bodies under the rubble of the Feb. 6 earthquake in southern Turkey, referring to a viral video accusing Afghans of stealing gold and cutting the arms off the dead. But the Turkish influencer, Ugur Kardas, who made the video was later arrested for spreading disinformation.

“We are not the thieves. We also died with you,” I say in my broken Turkish.  

No matter what I say or what the truth is, the cabbie believes that refugees are the reason for Turkey’s every problem – inflation, unaffordable rents, unemployment, and now the biggest natural disaster of the century that killed more than 54,000 people in Turkey and Syria. 

Istanbul’s been my home for seven years. But the anti-foreign sentiment has become so ominous that I have to prove my loyalty in public. The perennial question is: Where are you from? Upcoming elections don’t give refugees any reprieve; nearly every party is against them, and kicking out migrants seems politically popular.

Courtesy of the Qaderi family

Bahar Qaderi (right) with her father, Mohammed Amin Qaderi. Both died in the Feb. 6 earthquake in Adiyaman, Turkey, one month shy of Bahar's 11th birthday.

I was born in Afghanistan, and raised partly in the U.S. I moved here to work as a foreign reporter and to raise my two daughters. Istanbul is a culturally diverse, cat-loving, family-friendly, geographically accessible cosmopolitan hub. People were generally welcoming toward Afghans until a wave of migration beginning in 2015 turned Turkey against us. Tens of thousands have moved on to Europe but about 200,000 Afghans legally remain in Turkey – some 144,000 of them are refugees waiting for asylum elsewhere. Afghans are second only to Syrians as the largest refugee population in Turkey. The worst-hit targets of discrimination are Syrians, then us.

The consequences of prejudice are much worse for Afghans who don’t have Western passports like I do. I confront verbal hostility, but refugees are often illegally detained and deported.

Somehow, I thought the earthquake might have a unifying effect in Turkey. But in this city, mourning and on edge, anticipating the next big earthquake, Turks want a scapegoat.  

And yet, in the traffic standstill on the bridge, my driver stops his rant, scratches his neatly trimmed mustache, and quietly asks me which Afghans died under the rubble. 

Hundreds of Afghans were among the casualties in the 10 provinces hard hit by the quake, I tell him. I take out my phone to show him videos and photos so he can get another view of Afghans besides the one he saw presenting them as looters. 

I tell him about Mohammed Amin Qaderi whose extended family had housed me when I needed a home in Afghanistan and in New York, where some of them had settled. Mr. Qaderi and his family had fled the war in northern Afghanistan in 2017 and made it to Turkey. They, like most refugees, were sent away from urban areas to the hinterlands of Anatolia to live – with no legal right to work – while their asylum cases were processed. 

Courtesy of the Qaderi family

Lale (left) and Suheyl Qaderi (center) celebrate their sister Fariheh's (right) 7th birthday at their home in Adiyaman, Turkey, a year ago. That home collapsed in the earthquake and Fariheh died under the rubble with her father and another sister, Bahar, 10.

There, in the town of Adiyman, the Qaderis’ apartment building collapsed in the February earthquake – just eight days before their appointment for resettlement in New York with Mr. Qaderi’s brother, Sharif Qaderi, who is a U.S. citizen.

Mohammed and his two daughters, Bahar, 10, and Fariheh, 7, died. His wife, Meryem Amini, and two of their children were pulled alive from the rubble, but none of them can walk – Ms. Amini’s legs were amputated, her 3-year-old son Suheyl lost a leg, and surgeons are monitoring her 10-year-old daughter Lale to decide whether she also needs an amputation. The survivors are each in different hospitals in Ankara unaware that half of their family is gone.

The cabbie, Burak, turns off the radio to hear me better. 

I see a glimpse of sympathy. 

“Who’s with the survivors now?” he asks. 

“Sharif, from America, and other family members are taking turns visiting the three survivors,” I reply. 

Burak scrolls the photos of the Qaderi children on my phone. He offers his condolences, and I feel I have accomplished something – somehow he may stop blaming Afghans, if just for a moment. 

Then suddenly, I burst into tears, sobbing. 

Burak fumbles, hands me a tissue, and apologizes. 

Courtesy of the Qaderi family

Afghan refugee Meryem Amini plays in the snow with her son, Suheyl (center), and daughter Fariheh in Adiyaman, Turkey, in December 2022. The building they lived in collapsed in the Feb. 6 earthquake just days before their final interviews for resettlement in the United States. Fariheh died, and Ms. Amini and Suheyl were severely injured.

But my tears aren’t just about Burak’s discrimination – nor the blow dealt by the earthquake. My grief, part of the story of my homeland, is layered in years of loss: an uncle lost to torture in the Soviet invasion, a 9-year-old classmate to a rocket, countless Afghan friends and colleagues to suicide bombings in the decades of war in Afghanistan. Now the Qaderi family is suffering, and Meryem Amini is barely hanging onto life.

In the chaotic aftermath of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan in August 2021, I managed to help evacuate two families with teen girls to California on a P2 visa granted for helping me report during the seven years – 2000 to 2007 – that I wrote from Afghanistan. 

Then I stopped talking or writing about Afghans. It physically hurt to think about the lives we left behind. The Taliban had won, and the American envoys anxious to end an unpopular war said the hardliners had reformed. Those of us who knew Afghanistan shook our heads, but few others cared.

The overwhelming sentiment about Afghans globally is fatigue and helplessness. The attitude I most often encounter is that Afghans lost a battle for freedom and were betrayed by the U.S. and its allies, but that Afghans had 20 years to save themselves from the depths of poverty and religious extremism. They failed themselves and the world. No one owes Afghans anything. 

These narratives are apparent in mainstream and social media – and these sentiments filter into how refugees are considered for asylum and treated in their host countries like Turkey.

I stop crying as I reach my destination. I tell Burak that most Afghans in Turkey want to leave, just as Turkey wants. But they are in purgatory, waiting for a Western country to accept them. They work jobs in construction and farming for low wages that Turks wouldn’t accept. Many are abused on the job. 

Burak says he’s sorry if his comments upset me; that he’s just angry that he can’t afford to eat meat and is accumulating debt to pay his rent in Istanbul. 

“Turkey’s your home as much as it is mine,” Burak says.

Fariba Nawa is an Istanbul-based journalist, host of “On Spec Podcast,” and author of “Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords and One Woman’s Journey through Afghanistan.”

Gulchehra Hoja is author of "A Stone Is Most Precious Where it Belongs."

As a Uyghur, Gulchehra Hoja grew up in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which she calls East Turkestan, a historic name for the region. Western reporting and satellite images point to more than 1 million Uyghurs being held in internment camps (designated “reeducation” camps by China) in the area in recent years. In her book, “A Stone Is Most Precious Where it Belongs,” Ms. Hoja describes her Uyghur childhood, her career as the host of a Chinese state-run children’s TV program, and her path to becoming a journalist.  

While on a trip to Europe in 2001 at age 28, she came across internet reports from Uyghur dissidents, who told of ongoing oppression of the Uyghur people, their language, and their culture. Ms. Hoja decided she could not return home and continue with life as usual. She applied for a job at Radio Free Asia. She was hired and moved to Washington, despite threats from the Chinese government. 

In 2018, Ms. Hoja’s extended family was detained by Chinese authorities. In 2020, Ms. Hoja won the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award. She spoke with the Monitor recently.

Who are the Uyghur people?

Uyghurs are Turkic-speaking people in East Turkestan. We call our country East Turkestan. We prefer that because our country was occupied by the Chinese government in 1949. Uyghurs are a very cultural, very dynamic culture, a mixture of people living in the Uyghur region because of the geographic location. It’s in the middle of Asia and is bordered by eight different countries. 

What has happened to Uyghurs in recent years?

Millions of people, especially Uyghur people, have no political or human rights in China. The identity of the entire people is being wiped out and their existence is threatened. Today, what Uyghurs are facing is genocide. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has ordered to break their lineage and break their roots. To implement [this] the Chinese government has established a network of concentration camps where Uyghurs and other minorities are facing torture, brainwashing. ... The Chinese government is doing all of these crimes to ensure all of their policies in the region. 

As a young journalist who didn’t speak English, how did you find the courage to move across the world and come to America? 

I was being used by the Chinese government as a propaganda tool. The guilty feeling started to irritate me, and I thought I cannot continue to do that. I need to do something beneficial for my people. And I love journalism. That’s why I decided to call RFA [Radio Free Asia]. I know this decision is not easy to make because I never thought I would desert my family. That’s a very big decision. The Chinese government will target my parents. I know this, [and] I don’t know what will happen to them. But I need to make this decision because freedom is everything. So I did it, for my freedom of speech. My parents, my colleagues, and my friends all paid a heavy price. 

What was the most impactful moment for you as a journalist?

Every day for me is an important day. We are working so hard to explain who we are to the world. I spoke to the first concentration camp survivor who’s openly talking to the media, and during the whole interview, I was crying more than him. Because at that moment, my own brother had already been in the camp for three months. During that interview, he explained what’s behind the wall. What kind of treatment is in those camps. I was thinking about my brother. Of course, I’m a human being. I couldn’t focus, and I was crying so much I had to end the interview. And the next day, I interviewed him again and we published the news. 

What gives you hope?

I’m Muslim. We don’t lose hope. So I’m still living with my hope. Someday I will return to my home country. I will hug my people, my parents. All my loved ones. I will never lose this hope because the only thing left for Uyghur people is hope right now. 

What message would you like readers to take away from your story?

Uyghur people are a very peaceful people, very friendly. ... We are going to bloom again, we know. Even if the Chinese government vanished all of us in the world, in the Uyghur region. I believe we are like seeds. We are like flowers.

AP

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, presidential candidate of the six-party main opposition alliance, visits earthquake survivors in Nurhak, Turkey, March 11.

Turkey has never seen anything like it. In a country where political parties proliferate like pomegranate seeds, six parties have formed an alliance and agreed on a joint presidential candidate for the May 14 elections. Just as remarkable is what unites them.

Despite issues like high inflation and a weak government response to recent earthquakes, the opposition bloc – which includes Islamists, secularists, nationalists, and leftists – has rallied around the restoration of rule of law and constitutional liberties. This is a result of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s steady erosion of democracy through controls on the media, the judiciary, and the electoral process. 

The new bloc – dubbed the “Table of Six” – is leading in almost every poll. “This is the first time that an alliance has been formed that unites almost all political currents in Turkey,” wrote political scientist Vedat Demir at the Free University of Berlin for Turkish Minute.

In a global context, the newly woven Turkish carpet of disparate parties may not be so unusual. Elevating the issue of democracy itself – above bread-and-butter issues, social policy, or national security – has become more common in countries where elected leaders have altered the mechanics of democracy to keep themselves or their parties in power. Nearly half of the world’s population lives in a democracy of some sort.

In Israel, for example, hundreds of thousands have protested for weeks to prevent the clipping of judicial independence by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mexicans were out on the streets in February against government attempts to undermine the electoral authorities. In Brazil’s recent election, the winner, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, made clear to voters that democracy itself was at stake.

Democratic backsliding has evoked protests or new political alignments in countries from Tunisia to Thailand. In Turkey, the odd-bedfellows coalition shows just how much people can put aside disputes over everyday policy when the best way to resolve those disputes – democracy – is in jeopardy.