Why Should We Care About China’s Human Rights Abuses? | with Luke de Pulford
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And welcome once again to Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific, brought to you by our producer, IEJ Media, and our sponsor, Bauer Group Asia. We'll tell you more about them in due course. I am Ray Powell, the former military officer. That's Jim Caruso, the former diplomat. Jim, it's our pod-iversary. What did you get me? The usual, nothing. You know, that's why, all right, we'll work this out later.

In the meantime, I got you, Luke DePulford, a British human rights campaigner, the founder and executive director of the Interparliamentary Alliance on China, a prominent advocate against modern slavery and human rights abuses, and especially in China. So, Luke DePulford, thank you for joining us this morning or this afternoon from London. And what is the Interparliamentary Alliance on China, and why should we care about it?

Well, first of all, thank you very much indeed for having me. It's a great pleasure to be on the show. IPAC, the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance from China, is essentially a group of lawmakers on a cross-party basis around the world who are concerned about the behavior of the current Chinese government, or particularly the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping.

And the idea behind it is to create the conditions for collaboration and coordination across different countries and across political ideologies to push their own governments to reform their policies on China.

So this grew out of, I think, growing frustration that many governments were not taking the steps that they needed to, to defend the rules-based system, to defend their own sovereignty, to defend against mass human rights abuses and many other categories of activity, partly because they were so exposed economically to China. So where lawmakers felt that governments were failing, they wanted to step in and do something. And that was the idea, the

behind the foundation of IPAC started as eight countries. It's now in 40 parliaments and growing. And why should we care about it? Well, I think we should care about it because it demonstrates that the challenges posed by the contemporary government of the People's Republic of China are beyond political party, are beyond geography, are almost existential to the way that we live our lives. And we don't have much time to face up to them.

IPAC is a bulwark against that and is doing everything it can to frame the debates on China so democracies don't allow their freedoms to slip away. That's why people should care about it. So, Luke, the goal is to put pressure on your governments to take a more proactive stance on human rights abuses in China. Is it also meant to pressure China?

That wasn't the principal purpose. We hope that if governments adopt a more assertive stance, then yes, we would hope that Beijing would change its behavior. One of the reasons...

that Beijing has been able to get away with what they have is that governments have not been forthcoming in pushing back. Let's consider, for example, Taiwan right now. So the military exercises we've seen over the last couple of days are only possible, in my view, because governments have allowed the status quo to be eroded without doing anything about it. There is no coordinated, internationally agreed deterrence package to stop that kind of thing from happening. So the

Beijing pushes and it pushes and there is an inadequate response. So it pushes more. It tests the water and then it pushes more. Now, we would hope that if IPAC were successful in pushing governments to actually do something about escalation in cross-strait tensions, then we would be in a situation where Beijing would change its behavior. But they're not the principal focus for us. The principal focus is our own governments who we believe are failing to confront the challenge.

So here in the United States, we have something called the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which would seem like the kind of thing that maybe IPAC would have a relationship to or collaborate with. And perhaps there are other such bodies in other countries. Is that the case? Is there a lot of collaboration that happens with bodies like this? Yes. Yes, indeed. So IPAC is not intended to be thought of as like an NGO. It isn't really that. It's

And it's a sort of gathering place for people who share similar concerns. So the chair and ranking member of the Select Committee on the CCP in the US are both members of IPAC. Indeed, other committees on China, the legislators involved in those in the United States are also members of IPAC. Similarly, there are like 10 or 11 chairs of foreign affairs committees in different countries that are also members of IPAC.

It's supposed to be a place where like-minded lawmakers can come together and think together. The only people who can't be in IPAC are those who have gone into government. So although then Senator Rubio was one of our co-founders, he's now Secretary Rubio, and that means that we can't have him in IPAC anymore. We have to kick him out. So yeah, it's supposed to be non-governmental lawmakers, and that preserves its integrity as a body which is about pushing governments, not a body which is of government.

So governments tend to react first and foremost to pressure from their electorate. Does IPAC seek to mobilize populations in the country on these causes, or is it strictly focused on parliamentarians pressuring government? It's a great question because both are necessary in order to make the economy of a political campaign work well.

I mean, IPAC, just so we're clear about the constitution of it, it's owned by the lawmakers. They make the governance decisions and they determine the consensus when it comes to campaigns. That isn't done by me. We wanted the lawmakers to own the project. It's theirs. It's a project for lawmakers, really by lawmakers. But if you really want lawmakers to care about stuff, you have to use their constituencies. I'll give you an example.

Back in 2021, we were running a very bruising campaign in the United Kingdom to amend something called the Trade Act, or it became the Trade Act, then the Trade Bill. And the idea was that we wanted to make it illegal for the United Kingdom to enter a free trade agreement with a country that was perpetrating genocide. And it was pretty clear that we had in mind who we meant by that. We had in mind China, and we had in mind what was happening in the northwest of China. So this was a very bruising campaign.

And a lot of MPs did not want to act on it. Very uncomfortable issue. We had to get people to vote against the government, more or less be willing to sacrifice their political careers for the sake of doing this. They would not have done that in many cases had it not been for constituency pressure. So yes, it was necessary in order to get some people to

to help us out. But IPAC is not principally about mass mobilization. It's about lawmakers doing what lawmakers can do using what's in their toolbox to shift the debate, sometimes shifting the debate through very sharp edge, like parliamentary guerrilla warfare.

So you brought up what's happening in the Northwest of China, and that's a great opportunity for us to talk about this because it's not something that we've spent time on yet in our year of podcasting. So this is, let's go there. You have said in the past, I'll bring up a quote, in the absence of a judicial opinion and from my reading of the evidence, I believe there is the intent to destroy in whole or in part the Uyghur and other ethnic Kazakhs in Northwest China. What is going on in Northwest China?

Well, it is accurate, I believe, to speculate, and it is speculation because we don't have a court determination, but on the basis of the available evidence and in the absence of a court, I think we can speculate that the party state is genocidal regarding Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, particularly in the Northwest.

And the reason for that is that most people think about genocide in the wrong way. They think about it in terms of mass killing. And that isn't the way that the Genocide Convention is constructed.

You have to have the intention, the difficulties proving the intention to destroy a certain group in whole or in part. So that's what I was talking about there. But you have to have done certain actions as well. And one of those prescribed actions is the intention to prevent births among that group.

So as a result of the Chinese government's own data, and Dr. Adrian Zenz was very heavily involved in this research, we know that there was a program of prevention of births, of forced sterilization, particularly targeted at ethnic minorities in the region.

So on that one limb of the Genocide Convention, because we also have policy documents showing that it was an intention of the party to perpetrate this, to meet this out.

on ethnic minorities, you can legitimately argue that a genocide has taken place there. And that's not just my finding. The Uyghur Tribunal, which was chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice Casey, very eminent international lawyer who prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic, led a totally exhaustive

examination of the evidence with an independent tribunal. And that is what he found. He found on that limited limb of the Genocide Convention, forced prevention of births, that there was the intention to destroy in whole or in part ethnic minorities in the region through the forced prevention of births, through the forced sterilization of Uyghurs and other minorities. So for that reason, I believe that there was genocidal intent and genocidal action

And what is happening now? Well, you've seen the situation morph. It's changed quite considerably from where it was a few years ago.

For example, the large, what people would refer to as, or have referred to as, concentration camps, they are largely closed. But this mass program of forced labor transfers, mass extrajudicial internment continues. And the surveillance state and the repression that we've become familiar with in Xinjiang continues too.

So it's certainly the case that there is very, very heavy repression which continues. And I think that it's more than arguable that what has happened, certainly in the past decade, meets the criteria for genocide. Unfortunately, with China not being a party to the Rome Statute and almost certainly vetoing a referral to the International Criminal Court from the Security Council, this isn't going to get to a court. It's highly unlikely that it ever could. So we won't have that determination.

But we have our own eyes and we have the evidence. And from that, we can make our own judgment. So it's pretty well accepted that the Uyghurs are being killed off culturally, are under great pressure, and Han Chinese are being moved to minimize Uyghur rights in their own territory.

You also mentioned that governments aren't doing a lot about it, and you implied it was because of economic pressure. In fact, trade and investment between China and other countries has increased over the period of Uyghur oppression. So is that because governments minimize human rights over economic issues? I think the simple answer to that question is probably yes, but it is a crude oversimplification because these things are complex.

I mean, I think for a government to take a view on the human rights abuses of another country is an aggressive thing to do, diplomatically speaking. Most people don't like doing it. They hold back from doing it and they find excuses not to do it. The one exception to this would be the United States regarding China, who did determine that Beijing was perpetrating a genocide in Xinjiang.

And they did so on the basis of their own legal analysis. And they did so unilaterally and without a court decision. Most other countries will sort of shrug in the direction of the international courts that can't work. That'll be their policy. The policy will be, well, we don't do governmental determinations of genocide. We don't do that unilaterally. We let the courts do that. To which our answer was always, well, what court is going to be able to hear the case about the Uyghurs? The answer to that is none. There isn't one.

So it's a sort of recipe for doing nothing. It's a policy of inertia when it comes to mass human rights abuses. And that's convenient for them, to your point, Jim, because there are lots of good reasons not to hold China accountable for its human rights abuses. And a lot of those are around trade and investment issues.

But not just the degree to which we're already dependent on China. It's also Beijing's coercive tendencies around economics. I mean, look at the way that they behaved with Australia when Australia in 2020 had the temerity to say, hey, we should have an investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

And Beijing responded by saying, well, here's a list of grievances we've got against you and see how you cope with 220% tariffs on wine. You think that Trump's tariffs are bad. 220% on Australian wine, which is a serious thing to have done. And that, I think, is indicative of that point. What happens when countries seek accountability of China? China coerces them. And we've seen that in a few cases. We saw that in Lithuania's case too.

And we've seen it with Taiwan. So it isn't just the fact that people are dependent, that countries are dependent. It's the fact that they fear economic blowback through coercion. Yeah. So interestingly, I was in Australia at the time working at the embassy. So speaking of the Uyghurs, one of the things we've seen recently is this effort by Beijing to repatriate

who are in other countries by putting tremendous pressure on their governments to send them back to China, people who have escaped China because of the repression. Of course, we saw that recently play out in Thailand. Clearly, a

A ton of pressure was put on the Thai government. And there was pressure coming from the other side, too. The United States put pressure on the Thais not to do this. But in the end, they did do it. So I guess from the IPAC perspective, what actually took place there? Why does China need to have these people back? Couldn't it just forget about them? I think those are excellent questions.

First of all, from our perspective, when we learned of what was happening in Thailand, we tried to apply the usual kind of IPAC criteria, which is what do we have? You know, what can we do here? And that will normally involve members trying to pressure their own governments to be involved. And that certainly took place. And there were a number of governments that did get involved, some of which were already involved before our legislators started to put pressure upon them.

And representations were made, and a number of countries, in fact, even offered to take those 40 Uyghur men who ended up being repatriated to China, or in fact, refilled to China in contravention of international law. So there was some movement, but AIPAC wasn't alone in that. There were loads of civil society organizations engaged, doing as much as they could. But it wasn't enough. Why wasn't it enough?

I mean, I would argue that given that there was a state visit from Thailand to China in the week preceding the reformment of those Uyghur men, it's pretty clear to me that this was raised as a diplomatic priority. And goodness knows what other coercive pressure was put upon Thailand in order to make that happen.

When they will have known, the government of Thailand will have known this was not going to be good for them in terms of how they would be perceived, particularly in the West or in democracies more broadly. But they made the clear choice that it was going to be easier to annoy us than it was to annoy China. And I think that's why they did it. To your other question, why would Beijing want them back? Well...

Through a program of what people call transnational repression, which is basically just extraterritorial bullying from China, you can see that there's a very strong desire in Beijing to control and to silence dissent in other countries. In the case of these Uyghur men in Thailand, it wasn't as if they were dissenting and taking to the airwaves to denounce China. They just wanted to get out. And they'd been in prison for a long period of time, a decade, in Thailand.

So that wasn't the risk there, but it's the need, the impulse to control, which I think is dictating a lot of Beijing's activities here. It's risky for them to have lots of diaspora groups going around speaking negatively about them. And it seems to be just one of those triggers that Beijing can't cope with. I mean, look at the way they've been dealing with Hong Kongers who've had the temerity to speak out. They impose bounties on them in different countries.

Look at the way they've dealt with foreign legislators who've been speaking about human rights abuses in China. They've sanctioned them. So imagine they're dealing with people that they think are their own. These are Chinese people. We do not want them to be behaving in a way that we don't like. Let's do everything we can to exert our control, including getting them back.

So it's partly control, and I think it's partly making an example of those people, showing the long arm and influence of Beijing in other countries. All of those things are relevant. But the outcome here was absolutely tragic for those men. We don't know where they will end up. And, yeah, efforts to try to help them are ongoing. But we all were pretty crestfallen when that happened. You mentioned Hong Kong, Luke, and China.

When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China, certain guarantees were made about freedoms in Hong Kong, including freedom of association, press, speech, and they've all been violated. So is IPAC looking at this, and does Britain have any special responsibility about this? Yeah, thank you for that question. Well, I say we, certainly I am extremely upset with the UK because the United States has done a lot more

to hold Beijing accountable for its treatment of Hong Kong than the UK has. And the reason that's such a scandal is that the UK with China were the duty bearers of the promises made in that treaty, the joint declaration, the Sino-British joint declaration, in which both China and the UK promised to uphold the autonomy of the people of Hong Kong and their way of life.

It isn't just China that's failed on that score. China violated that treaty, of course. But the UK has failed to one of those promises and will not do anything to hold China accountable for the violation of those promises. So whereas we've seen the US impose I don't know how many sanctions now on Hong Kong officials. I mean, it's got to be 20 at least, including six just two days ago.

The UK has sanctioned not a single person, not one in Hong Kong. And we were the people who signed the treaty, not the United States. And that makes no sense to me. And I think it's a dereliction of duty.

So we didn't just have like a moral duty to Hong Kong having colonized the place and occupied it for a very long period of time. We had a legal duty to them and we've defaulted on those promises and we won't do anything to hold China accountable because I think we're fearful that if we do, it'll impact our position towards China when it comes to preferential trade and investment agreements.

And that we might be coerced as a result. I think it's deeply pathetic, actually, and a betrayal of the people of Hong Kong. So IPEC has certainly been active on that. I don't know how many statements and activities in parliaments there has been within IPEC on Hong Kong, but it's been a lot. And there was a bit of movement in 2020 and 2021. Our members pushed for the suspension of extradition treaties to Hong Kong.

on the basis that we had loads of Hong Kongese dissidents living in our countries. And there were extradition agreements with Hong Kong and Hong Kong authorities were making very clear they were going to go after them. So those were suspended. There's been a lot of debate, a lot of parliamentary activity, but honestly not that much movement. And as time moves away from the sort of apex of the 2019 movement and everybody gets used to the repression in Hong Kong,

I guess the prospect of getting political movement there diminishes, sadly. So that's been a cause of great sadness, not just to the many politicians around the world who had a strong personal connection with Hong Kong and who saw Hong Kong as the sort of fault line between two different value systems and therefore the need to protect it. It wasn't just that. It's the fact that the people of Hong Kong

were really relying on international help and they didn't get much of it beyond the United States. So you mentioned the coercion, particularly the coercion of Great Britain. Of course, you have been very involved recently in an issue that is in Great Britain involving what many are calling the mega embassy proposal for China. I've seen videos of you out protesting with other people.

Why are you protesting this mega embassy? What are you concerned about? And why do you think China wants a huge embassy in Great Britain? So taking the last question first,

China wants a huge status symbol and one which I think consolidates the influence in Europe at a time that Europe really ought to be saying, hang on a second here, all of the naivety that we labored under during the so-called golden era after the so-called opening up, all of that ought to necessitate a different posture towards China now, particularly given its behavior in the last few years.

And what China is doing very assertively is saying, well, we've done all of that. You know, this is who we are. We've unmasked the true face to the CCP. And we are going to consolidate that power by developing a huge status symbol embassy, the biggest in Europe, in a really important location, smack bang in the center of London. Not only that.

We're going to build it with 230 move-on flats for state officials to come in where there can only be an associated increase in interference and transnational repression activities. So we don't want this.

But that isn't the only reason that we were protesting there. I don't want to go too deep into the planning arguments because when it comes to this kind of thing in planning law, it's easy to be sort of waylaid and to not see the wood for their trees. But one of the arguments that was running against the embassy is there isn't sufficient space outside for protest.

Initially, the Metropolitan Police said, we don't think there's space here. These are really major arterial roads in the centre of London. And if more than a couple of hundred people gathered there, they're going to spill into the roads. It's going to be unsafe. So that was their position. But then a month passed and then the police changed their minds. We suspect that somebody put pressure on the police to change their minds because there was a meeting between Xi Jinping and Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, yesterday.

where Xi Jinping raised this as the very first issue, like we need to sort out this embassy, which is a weird thing to do, right, between leaders of two nations. But it's very clear that this is a diplomatic priority for China. So we suspect that as a result of that, somebody might have put pressure on the police to change their minds because the police objecting is a big problem for planning law. So the police changed their minds and they said, well, we're not going to have that many people protesting. We think it's going to be okay.

So to prove that a lot of people wanted to protest, we organized two protests, one on the 8th of February and one on the 15th of March. The first one had 4,000 people in it and the second one about 6,000 people and completely blocked the roads. So we made the point and that's why we were all there. But that's kind of tinkering at the edges. You know, it doesn't touch the real reason that we're opposed to this thing.

We're opposed to it because China doesn't need a massive status symbol embassy in London. We don't want them to be projecting their power to the rest of Europe from London. We don't want increased interference activities. And moreover, and this is something which doesn't get spoken about nearly as much as it should, it was reported that there is sensitive cabling running directly underneath the building they've bought, the old Royal Mint, which feeds the city of London. So financial services basically in the UK.

This cabling is called a sort of nicknamed dark cabling. And what was reported was that the previous time the Chinese had applied to develop the site, our security services had objected on the basis that the site is directly over these cables. And that seemed like a pretty stupid thing to do when China has shown itself willing to

to hack major infrastructure in the United States twice in the last year alone. And positioning them directly over the backbone of the entire UK economy didn't seem like a very wise idea. Anyway, so that's another reason that we would strongly object to it. So for all of those things, partly because it represents

Partly because of what it represents. It represents a consolidation of the PRC's influence in Europe and in the United Kingdom. Partly because it presents a real and pressing national security threat in terms of interference. And partly because it violates the rights of people who want to be able to protest the CCP and stand outside the place. There simply isn't enough room for them. So for all of those reasons and more, we don't want it. So you've mentioned a couple of times China's ability to coerce other countries, other economies economically. Yes.

We're speaking the day after Trump announced his new tariffs. Are you concerned, and I apologize for the leading question, are you concerned that by the US basically withdrawing a bit from international trade, it gives China an even bigger stick? I think what we can be sure about is that Beijing will exploit these tariffs to the maximum possible extent.

And you can see rhetorically that they already are speaking about the end of an era in terms of free and open trade between democracies. Clearly, that's what they're going to do and to try to exploit that gap. What I would say is in some ways, from my point of view, more worrying is that fissures and in some cases, like real divisions seem to have appeared in countries

alliances, particularly transatlantic alliances that we thought were very solid. And that's worrying. I think that there is an onus upon lawmakers who are not governments to make sure that those ties remain.

and that those conversations continue. Regardless of how oppositional governments might seem at the moment, our values unite beyond that. We can do that. That's one of the big arguments for IPEC right now. We can hold open this space for dialogue between the United States and everywhere else, and they can be agreeing on China, and they'll continue agreeing on China.

But to be completely frank with you, yes, it is concerning to a lot of our legislative members that there seems to be a sort of disaggregation of transatlantic alliances. That's not making life easy, I would say, and not helped by the tariffs, which I think have entrenched governments more. You've seen the response from European governments, I'm sure.

Well, you mentioned Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was a founding member of IPAC. So in this environment where you have, for example, the U.S. much more focused on economic and trade issues and maybe not as focused on human rights,

How helpful is it to have a founding member of IPAC in a position of great influence? You talked about the fact that he recently announced sanctions on some people in Hong Kong related to human rights.

You've got in Australia, they're getting ready to have an election. It's very possible that one of the people who could end up in leadership is Andrew Hastie, who is another founding member of IPAC. Are you starting to see this graduation of people from parliamentary positions up into higher positions that they can even have greater influence? Yeah, there's a kind of maturing of the network.

So when we began, we were obviously just dealing with what we call in the UK just backbench legislators, so non-governmental lawmakers. And now, yes, there has been a progression into government for quite a lot of members. And in fact, it's been especially useful in Japan because the LDP co-chair and the guy who was co-chair before him both went into government, one as the defense minister and one as the special advisors to the prime minister. Very influential, very helpful positions.

A few years ago, Jan Lipavsky, who was a founding member, became foreign minister of the Czech Republic and still is. Dovii Lešakalien recently became the defense minister in Lithuania. Another member, Andrius Kabilius, has become the defense commissioner in the European Union. And obviously, we've now got Secretary Rubio. So yeah, there's a kind of maturing of the network where all of these figures who know what AIPAC's about have progressed into government.

And that brings with it the usual thing that government brings. You've got far less room for maneuver, far less autonomy in terms of your decision making. We expect all of that. But the great thing is that I think it means that the kinds of representations we might have struggled to make before, members can make much more effectively now. And you know that you're going to get a receptive audience. So even if they can't deliver, they're going to listen to you.

And I would expect that to only increase as the membership grows, because it's now nearly 300 politicians around the world involved in IPEC. And yeah, they're going to progress into government in various places. And I think that can only be a positive thing. What I would say about the human rights point, I mean, honestly, I don't say this without evidence, I believe, but it would, in my view, be an overstatement to say that

the US would be dropping that commitment around human rights. Because I think we've already seen actually that Secretary Rubio is pretty intent on continuing that. And a number of the decisions that have been taken would seem to underline that. I would expect that to continue and I hope that it does. I hope there isn't a retreat from trying to defend international human rights. Yeah, so that's where I'd be on that. So yeah, a definite maturing of the network.

growing in influence, I would say, because of that. But equally, it's a very different thing being a non-governmental legislator to being in government. The ability of governments to act seems to be constrained. But even more so, the ability to actually effect change in China seems to be very limited. Where do you see that pressure could be applied? I mean, the human rights questions in China are fundamentally economic questions. And it's one of the reasons that I wanted to

start this project in the first place. I mean, I'm a human rights guy. That's my background. I set up an anti-slavery charity before this. And you sort of get to the point where you realize that the fundamental market for, let's call it modern slavery or exploitation,

is businesses that will do it, that will drive that market. And similarly, a lot of the great economic miracle in China has been predicated on, yes, manipulation of the currency, but also massive underpricing of labor. And why have we got such massive underpricing of labor? Because there's a lot of forced labor in China, a huge amount of it. So trying to address that

You know, we can sort of bang on about human rights and decry human rights abuses, but ultimately we're the markets that make it possible and that drive it. So how can we change that behavior? Well, we have to change the bottom line for businesses abroad, particularly, which unwittingly are creating the conditions for it.

So, for example, a couple of big successes, I think, that the IPAC network played a significant role in. Volkswagen withdrew from Xinjiang quite recently, and so did BASF, the chemicals giant. That was largely under pressure from IPAC politicians, but a huge amount of work had gone into that from civil society as well. That's going to hurt. That's really going to hurt. And I think increasingly, with this diversification of supply chains away from Xinjiang,

Repatriation of supply chains, that's going to make a big difference to the PRC. And you can see some of that playing out at the moment in the Chinese economic forecasts. The other big question around that is obviously Taiwan, because escalation in cross-strait tensions means a potential of, according to Bloomberg, $10 trillion worth of impact to the global economy. You know...

Nobody is going to sidestep that kind of impact. We're talking about a global depression on a very serious scale. And on that basis, many businesses are taking advice from consultants all over the place on how to try to protect their supply chains in the event of something like that happening. And that hurts China as well. So my basic argument would be that unless China

let's say democratic countries, can get their heads together and can work out a coordinated reduction of dependency upon China in areas of critical infrastructure and

to work out how they're going to deter potential escalation and cross-strait tensions in Taiwan. Unless they can do that, we've only got ourselves to blame. But this is eminently achievable. It's recognized as a problem across the European Union and everywhere else. And if we can get together and have those conversations, I think we can really move the ball forward in terms of shaping the PRC's behavior. But for as long as they're able to behave completely unaccountably,

divide countries, pick them off from one another, and exploit divisions economically, we will not be able to do that. So ultimately, united we stand and divided we will fall economically, but it is the economy which is going to make the difference with China's behavior, I believe. So thinking about China's

efforts at sort of narrative warfare over these issues, I have a couple of questions. One is, you know, we see these Western or even other foreign influencers who are go to China under various arrangements and come back with, say, glowing reports of how wonderful it is in China, how everybody in Xinjiang is happy and healthy because of the CCP's leadership.

And so one question is, what explains this? A little bit of a leading question, but just from your perspective. And the second is from a personal perspective. I say this as a person who's been targeted by Chinese propaganda himself. How have you been targeted personally? And what effect does that have? Okay. Well, maybe I could do the last question first. Okay.

So I've had quite a lot of stuff, but I always want to preface this and say, okay, you work in the whole China space, you're going to be targeted. And if you're halfway effective, even more so. But it's not to be compared with the crushing transnational repression, which is faced by dissidents and others.

I don't have family in China who can be used as bargaining chips by the state. It's probably upwards of 80% of Uyghurs who are living in this country who've received a phone call or some kind of communication from state police, sometimes just a phone call with the state police in the background with their family video calling them, which is enough to silence them. And what I go through is nothing compared to that. But I've had an impersonator for about five years.

who emails family, friends, colleagues, people that think they're my colleagues. I traced this person to Hong Kong and so did the police. That's just a low-level annoyance, frankly, but there's a lot of that stuff. I get a lot of online harassment, but I don't care about that at all. The whole IPAC network was attacked in a Ministry of State Security-sponsored cyber attack in 2021.

which we didn't find out about until 2024 when the Department of Justice in the States press released it without warning us, which was kind of annoying. And then what else have we had? I mean, there are lots of other approaches. We had a bit of a scare with our previous office where we think that the location of our office was compromised and weird stuff started to happen. And I'm named as a co-conspirator in the trial of Jimmy Lai. So the foreign office here warned me of extradition to China from third countries.

on the basis that the national security law in Hong Kong claims extraterritorial application and they might seek to try to impose a red notice or something like that. I mean, I regard that as extremely unlikely and I think it would be a huge escalation if they did. All of which is to say, you know, there's quite a lot of stuff if you're going to be doing this sort of work. They'll come at you and they're trying to make your life a bit difficult.

But I just don't think it's comparable to the sort of leverage that can be used against activists who have family in China or who grew up there. So, yeah, I feel a bit insulated by my nationality from it, if you see what I mean. But it doesn't make it any more comfortable. It can be uncomfortable sometimes. So that's that. Remind me of the other question. The influencers. Yeah, so the influencers. This is interesting.

Why, when they go to China, would they come back telling a positive story? I mean, that for me is the interesting question. And it's partly that they're led on Potemkin tours around China, you know, obviously heavily surveilled, told they can only go to particular places. It's partly that very often they're invited on an all-expensive paid trip, you know, so they feel that there needs to be some sort of reciprocity for this invitation and this thing that has been paid for.

And it's partly that they like what they see authentically. And I think we have to allow space for that. It's too...

It's too easy to try to paint a very bleak picture of China. And in some ways, the behavior of the government is extremely bleak. The Chinese people are very industrious. They've done extraordinary things in their country. There's a lot to see and to be impressed by. So I could quite see how people would go, would be deeply impressed and would write a sort of glowing report, particularly if they'd had a very censored and paid for trip.

So you mentioned that you have IPAC members from across the political spectrum, but a criticism from China is you are a bunch of so-called China hawks, implying you are all from the more conservative wings of your political systems. Is that accurate? No. If anything, IPAC leans left.

And particularly now, because a lot of conservative governments just kind of lost their elections and then we lost our members as a result. So we've had to be building up our memberships as a result. But it's never been true of AIPAC, interestingly enough. And what's also interesting is the identification of being a China hawk with being on the right. I think that that is the prevailing narrative, but I don't really know what it means. You know, I get accused of being a China hawk all the time and I'm

I used to defend against it and say, no, I'm not that. I'm somebody who's just trying to deal with human rights abuses. I'm somebody who believes in the international system. I want to try to protect that. And I used to defend against that in that way. And then a friend of mine who's a former member of parliament who was sanctioned by China called Tim Lawton, he said that he was a happy hawk when he was asked about it. He said, yeah, I'm a happy hawk. And they asked him why. And he said, well, look,

If standing up against the kinds of things that Beijing is engaged in now makes me a hawk, then I'm a very happy hawk.

you know, I don't like the idea of genocide. I don't like the idea of the cultural erasure of Tibet. I don't like the idea of the detonation of international law over Hong Kong. You know, I don't like the buying up and exploitation of large swathes of Africa and Latin America and the Middle East through the Belt and Road Initiative. I don't like massive interference and hacking of foreign countries, undermining of the way that foreign legislatures run. Um, I don't like the United Front Work Department. I'm a happy hawk. And, um,

I tend to agree with him. So I think that we can run scared of these labels. I think there should be a bit of an effort to either reclaim this or to recast it in a different way because the alternative to it is not to be a person who stands up against those things. And what's the point in that? I mean, what do you stand for if you don't stand against those things would be my question. The other response I would have to it is that, well, I think everybody's a hawk now, aren't they? By the standards of about 10 years ago.

Because the sorts of things that people like Andrew Hastie was accused of five, six years ago, you know, you're a maverick. You're an absolute China hawk. That is the center ground of politics now. The debate around China has moved. So everyone's a hawk now and happy hawks at that. Well, Luke de Pulford, you've been very generous with your time. I want to give you a chance on the way out here to explain that graphic there behind you. What does it say and who is the person in the picture?

Okay, thank you for that. It's a sad story. The person in the graphic behind me is a man named Andy Lee. Andy helped to set up IPAC's website, Hong Konger, and he was arrested under the national security law in 2020. He then tried to escape Hong Kong with a group of 11 others to get to Taiwan. And he was apprehended in Chinese waters, taken to Shenzhen prison in China, and he was tortured. And he was coerced into becoming a prosecution witness in the case of Jimmy Lai.

So he's now cooperating with the authorities in that case. And it's for that reason that I'm named as a conspirator, because all of the correspondence between myself and Andy has now been dragged into that trial. I mean, none of it had anything to do with Jimmy Lai.

But if Andy indicates that it might have done, then it enables Beijing to blame the whole democracy movement on Jimmy Lai, which is what they intend to do. I mean, ludicrously, it really is absolutely specious in the extreme to claim that Jimmy was behind, you know, the two million person movement. But anyway, that's what they're trying to do. And Andy is a function of that. So we keep a picture up.

to remember Andy, who's suffered greatly. Well, thank you for that. And that's indeed extremely sad and concerning. Where can people keep track of IPAC and where can people keep track of your work? Thank you. Well, I am fairly active on X. My handle is Luke DePalford and IPACs is IPAC Global. So people wanting to follow IPAC's work can keep track of that either via me or the IPAC handle.

Also, our website is ipac.global for anybody who wants to go and subscribe to the newsletter which we send out and which we try to make as comprehensive as possible. But with 40 parliaments in different languages, let me tell you, that's not easy, particularly because China is such an all-encompassing issue. And if any of your listeners are minded to support this work, they can do that through that link as well. So thanks for that opportunity. I hope

people will see that this is an authentically cross-party international initiative, which has to exist. And who knows if something like it had existed in the days of the Soviet Union, could it have foreshortened the fall of the Berlin Wall? Maybe that's an overstatement, but I'm certainly pleased that this network exists and is doing what it's doing. All right. Well, from your lips to God's ears, as they say, thank you, Luke de Pulford, for joining us. And we hope we'll have you back again sometime. Thank you very much. Thank you.

When once again, our sponsor is Bauer Group Asia, a strategic advisory firm specializing in the Indo-Pacific. Bauer Group, of course, applies our max expertise and experience to help clients navigate the world's most complex and dynamic markets. And Jim Caruso is a senior advisor with Bauer Group. You can visit them at BauerGroupAsia.com.

Well, Ray, it's always reassuring to have a guest who's a legislator in one of our democracies who is erudite and committed to a cause which I think we can all get behind. Yeah, I think so. And it really is a temptation, I think, for every government to sort of shuck human rights in another country off to second place.

Because, frankly, you've got a lot of people saying, you know, and there's some, you know, there's some merit to this. This is not central to our national interest. Right. You know, in order to get to national interest, you kind of have to hit a bank shot and say, well, this is related to our values and we should care about this for all of these reasons. And if you don't have people like Luke, then it's easy to just sort of shrug your shoulders and say, can't do it. Can't do something about everything.

Yeah. But, you know, they work together. They see the benefit of working across countries and trying to find ways to push their governments to push China. It's a worthwhile effort. And with all this going on in the world, we hope it continues to get some attention. Absolutely. Well, we've gone a little long, Jim. So why don't you tell me a quick story? You have anything you can tell me about, I don't know, Great Britain? Well, sure. Especially because Luke has that Oxbridge accent that...

intimidates, we yanks. They always sound so smart, don't they? You see, that's our problem, isn't it? But yes. Why is it our problem? And that's exactly sort of the point of my story. I spent a semester at Oxford when I was in business school. And because they all speak that way, I thought they must be so smart. And I got into the Bodleian Library, which is one of the oldest libraries in the world, this beautiful round building.

And I go up to the librarian. I say, here's the book I'd like to take out of a visiting student. And she said, I'm sorry, sir. You'll have to speak more slowly and distinctly, but I understand you're American.

Well, yeah, I guess, you know, the Brits do. They're, you know, especially these guys from sort of the central, the London area, the Oxford. They have this sort of very deliberate way of delivering these lines. And yeah, it is. You just assume that everybody who speaks that way must be so smart. And about us, they assume the opposite. Well, we'll prove them wrong. Oh, boy.

One guy who is really smart is our producer, Ian Ellis Jones. He's of course owns the IEJ media, which produces our podcast. We're really grateful to have him. Please follow him at, you know, at Ian Ellis Jones. Everybody else does. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us out and hit that subscribe button at the bottom, whether it be on your podcast, your audio podcast, whether that's a podcast,

Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever you're listening on, please hit the subscribe button and give us a few stars. Five would be good. And then if you're watching on YouTube, of course, that's going to be youtube.com at IP Podcast. We do recommend you take a look. You can see that big free Andy poster that Luke was talking about behind him if you watch it on the YouTube.

Finally, you can email us, indopacificpodcast at gmail.com. We do read all of those. We take a lot of your advice and suggestions. And we do want to get out of here by thanking our great sponsor, Bauer Group Asia. Visit them at bauergroupasia.com. For this time, until next time, this is Ray for Jim and Ian saying, please join us again on Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific.