OTTAWA — Rushan Abbas, co-founder and executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs and author of the memoir Unbroken, joined The Bureau Podcast from Istanbul, in the middle of a tour that has carried her from the Oslo Freedom Forum to the halls of the U.S. Congress — where, she says, countering Beijing is now one of the only things uniting Republicans and Democrats.
In this conversation, Abbas delivers a direct warning to Prime Minister Mark Carney: that Canada is on what she calls a “suicide mission,” repeating a mistake Washington took decades to correct. She argues that Beijing is the hidden hand behind a long roster of the world’s crises — Russia’s war in Ukraine, Iran’s proxies, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela — and that its real target is the Western democratic order itself.
She explains why she recognized that strategy at once: because she was raised inside it, taught as a child that this would be China’s “century of retaliation” against the West. She recounts why a sitting Liberal member of Parliament sounded, to her ear, exactly like a Chinese official. And she predicts that the scale of foreign infiltration inside Western governments — Canada’s included — is about to be exposed.
It’s a hard-hitting and deeply personal conversation about genocide, transnational repression, the price of speaking out, and her determination to “fight harder” against an amoral regime.
