Delete TikTok. Stand With the Disappeared.

A Plea to AOC, Goldman Sachs, and the Pope to Confront China's Genocide - and the Silence Enabling It

Imagine you are a 22-year-old woman shackled in the back of a windowless police van.

You don’t know what time it is. It’s even hard to tell how long you’ve been there, because when they handcuffed you, you felt something sharp prick your thigh just before your limbs grew heavy and you slipped into a black pool of unconsciousness. Now the fog is starting to lift. Your breaths are shallow because of the black canvas bag over your head, yet you can still smell the acidic, chewable stench of vomit and urine.

You are a kindergarten teacher, and are worried that there will be no substitute available for your kids for however long they detain you. You don’t know why they took you, but you did download WhatsApp a week ago to congratulate your cousin who lives abroad and recently got married. You suspect it was related to that. You begin to worry about your mother. When she learns of your arrest, she will collapse in agony, and will now be alone in caring for your younger brother with a congenital heart defect.

At first, you are hopeful your lockup will be short. But soon you find your hands bound, feet in stirrups, as a cold, metal clamp pinches your cervix and yanks downward. You scream. The pain is unbearable, shocking your central nervous system. As you writhe in pain, a poster of Xi Jinping smiling benevolently catches your eye – Obey the Law. Reform Your Mind. Become Useful – read the words etched in red just below his face.

With the IUD inserted, you are led into a dark room and then gang-raped by several men – you’re not sure how many because you are blindfolded – but believe it was at least three. But they don’t just rape you; when they are done, one of them penetrates you with an electric baton. You pass out from the pain.

Within a few weeks, your mind dissociates from your body. You are aware that your mother, brother, and students are haunted by your disappearance, but you don’t miss them. Because you’re not you.

This is a common story among the Uyghurs. They are a Turkic ethnic group of Muslims in northwest China that the government calls Xinjiang but the Uyghurs refer to as East Turkistan, though few dare to speak that name aloud anymore. It lies nestled between China, Russia, and several Central Asian nations like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan – a frontier where empires have long collided. The Soviet Union and China once sparred bitterly over these borders, and the scars of those disputes still shape the terrain, as Beijing tightens its grip on this ancient crossroads.

Crucially, Xinjiang is rich in natural resources and serves as a critical trade corridor for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s strategy to expand its geopolitical influence. Launched in 2013 by Xi Jinping, the BRI resulted in significant infrastructure development, helping them secure trade routes and deepen economic dependencies. As the BRI and China’s broader global dominance grew, they increasingly viewed the Uyghur’s distinct ethnic, religious, and cultural identity as a threat to national unity. Although there had been systematic oppression for decades, the Uyghur genocide began to pick up noticeably in 2017, when reports of mass internment, surveillance, and forced assimilation began to emerge with harrowing clarity.

The region has become the most advanced surveillance state the world has ever seen. Uyghurs live under a web of cameras equipped with facial recognition designed to detect ethnic features, while data from their phones, medical records, and even electricity usage is fed into predictive policing systems. What was once science fiction – technology used to forecast and punish thought – is now a grim reality. Beyond the cameras, the intrusion is even more personal: Communist Party cadres now live inside countless Uyghur homes, alongside the women whose husbands they have imprisoned, turning kitchens and bedrooms into sites of surveillance, coercion, and often sexual abuse – a grotesque betrayal of the very idea of a safe place. Worse still, China now exports these tools abroad, empowering regimes from Iran to Venezuela to adapt them for their own repression.

There are only around 10,000 Uyghurs living in the United States, most of them concentrated in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Among them is Rushan Abbas, the founder of Campaign for Uyghurs, a nonprofit dedicated to grassroots activism and educating key decision-makers in the U.S. government and beyond. As part of the CCP’s brutal campaign of transnational repression, Abbas’s own family has been targeted. “Every Uyghur’s neck is being held by China’s long black arm – because they have our family members as hostages,” she said. “My husband’s entire family went missing.” In April 2017, her husband, Abdulhakim Idris, lost all contact with 24 immediate and extended family members in Xinjiang. The following year, when Abbas first spoke publicly about her husband’s devastation during a panel at a Washington think tank, her own sister – Dr. Gulshan Abbas – was disappeared. She still campaigns as a full-time activist.

To call on conscience, I will address key leaders in our institutions. I selected ones who understand that moral clarity, by definition, involves confronting evil, even at personal cost, on behalf of those who can offer nothing in return. In other words, the ones whom I believe may answer me:

To Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez – whether your MAGA colleagues acknowledge it or not, you are a hero to most citizens our age; the others grudgingly admire you. You have already demonstrated courage by confronting some of the worst elements of corporate excess, including by co-sponsoring the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Yet the gulags in Xinjiang are still filled with broken mothers who strain to remember their children’s faces, and with shadows of men who lost their wives to forced marriages. The children – if they ever reunite with their parents – will struggle to find the words to express their trauma in the language once sung to them. Most have forgotten it.

Clearly, UFLP’s scope must be expanded and its enforcement prioritized until this cruelty ends. I call on you by name – not the President – because leadership comes not from title or wealth but from moral authority. There is no moral gray here, Congresswoman. The forced sterilization of women and the indoctrination of children are not culturally complex – they are evil. This is why if you lead, others will follow – they are just not strong enough to speak first.

To David Solomon and the Goldman Sachs Board of Directors – contrary to the vivid “vampire squid” metaphors once printed in Rolling Stone, what I saw inside the firm was not a beast of greed, but the opposite: I worked alongside principled professionals of the absolute first order. The partners and managing directors I knew there radiated decency, and ran our business with integrity and seriousness of purpose. When I was at the firm, Goldman set the standard – and the rest of Wall Street took notes. I don’t imagine this has changed in just a few years. This is why I believe Goldman is uniquely positioned to lead, and to set a moral precedent by ensuring that no part of our financial system is complicit in the machinery of this genocide.

Since you are a lead underwriter on a $66 billion IPO later this year for Shein, a Chinese fashion retailer known for evading customs scrutiny, 2025 could be a perfect opportunity to show the world that Goldman Sachs not only talks about their business principles, but lives them. I hope that the firm that once quizzed me on them demands that Shein executives answer the important question of whether their cotton is sourced from Xinjiang forced labor.

To His Holiness Pope Leo XIV – I am a Catholic father and husband – one whose conscience has been gripped by the suffering of the Uyghur people in China. I am also a veteran of the United States Army, and a parent to a seven-year-old son with nonverbal autism. I know what it means to serve. I know what it means to love someone who cannot speak for themselves. And I know what it means to watch powerful institutions look away when the moment calls for moral courage.

You are a son of the Midwest, a land where faith is not merely professed, but lived; where the dignity of the individual and the strength of the family are sown in the soil. You carry the spirit of those who believe in the power of the humble to change the world, and in the call to stand with the voiceless. As you begin your papacy, guided by the light of St. Augustine, I urge you to remember his words: “What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.”

Yours is the voice that can break the silence, or risk becoming part of it, as millions vanish into the shadows of a digital iron curtain. Pope Francis once went to a juvenile prison, knelt, and washed the feet of twelve inmates – including two women and two Muslims – shattering centuries of tradition with a basin and a towel. His silence on the Uyghur genocide was not born of apathy, but marked the terrifying reach of the regime he could not name.

As we enter an era of global uncertainty, I pray you will be the pope who embodies not only holiness, but the strength to tell the Uyghurs that the Vicar of Christ sees them. That God has not abandoned them. That their suffering is remembered in the eyes of heaven – and must be named on Earth.

To all of us – know that history shows us great societies are built by ambition, but only endure under virtue. We step through the AI threshold at our peril if we allow technology to evolve faster than our ethics. If you work for or support a company profiting – directly or indirectly – from slave labor or mass surveillance, your voice can save lives.

Help not by bellowing performative outrage into the digital ether. Instead, delete TikTok – the mirror that flatters your vanity while gutting your soul – for data, for control, for silence. Remember: when we smile at an iPhone camera lens, it may have once stared back, unblinking, into the eyes of the disappeared. And for every dollar you spend, choose not to fund a regime that erases entire families to punish the one who dared to speak their truth.

Tell the world that, even in our imperfection, Americans still strive to stand where the light is – not on the side of convenience, but of human dignity. On the side of Rushan Abbas, and of all the Uyghur people. Lead with this light, and others will follow.