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Israel warns Hamas leaders of action ‘wherever they are’ as Qatar hosts Arab-Islamic emergency summit
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You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on the 15th of September, 2025 on Monocle Radio.
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Qatar invites regional leaders to further condemn Israel over last week's airstrike. Romania becomes the latest EU and NATO state visited by Russian drones. And why do the tech giants still think they can just steal people's stuff? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts. Hello, and welcome to the Monocle Daily, coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Erin o' Halloran and Yossi Meckelburg will discuss today's big stories. And we'll hear from the reporter Barbara Demick about her new book reflecting on the consequences of China's one child policy by looking at what it meant for one family in particular. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily.
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Foreign.
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This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Dr. Erin O', Halloran, historian at Cambridge University and author most recently of east of Empire, and Yossi Meckelburg, senior consulting fellow at the Middle east and North Africa program at Chatham House. Hello to you both.
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C
Hello.
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B
Hello, Erin. First of all, your first time on the Daily. So as is traditional, you are wearing the owl costume. It looks good on you, I must say. If you can make yourself heard through the headpiece. Could you please explain to your listeners who you are and how you got here?
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I'll do my best. How I got here, I think, was that you interviewed me about the book.
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B
I did. That went well, we thought.
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A
Oh, well, I'm delighted that you think so. Yeah. So the book, the subtitle of the book, east of Empires, Egypt, India and the World between the Wars. So it covers the period between the 1920s and the 1940s, which were somewhat eventful in the Middle east and South Asia. And one way of kind of pitching the book is as a prehistory of the partitions of India, Pakistan and Palestine, Israel. So everything that happens prior to those rather fateful lines in the sand, and.
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B
That is as opposed to bring you in your seat to all those uneventful decades in the Middle east which you have spent your career researching, but you have mostly recently been in Scotland.
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I've been in Scotland, in Edinburgh. I don't know if it's luck, but my daughter and her husband live in Edinburgh, so we have the opportunity to visit Edinburgh quite often, which it's nice to be north of the border, so to speak. Speak. The weather can be tricky Especially if.
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You cycle, you've been. I think you've managed to get there on one of the last tolerable weekends they're going to have until about June.
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C
Yeah, I mean the festival is actually fantastic.
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B
It is.
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Two years ago we spent a week during the festival and all the idea of jumping from one event to another, the bigger one, the one that you have four people in the audience with some stand up comedian and everyone gives you a leaflet, why won't you come to my show? I have the best stand up comedian comedian from the United States handing you this leaflet while you are in the supermarket. It's a great atmosphere, but since this time went a week after that, it feels really empty.
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Everybody doubtless at home sleeping it off. We will start the show. In the Middle east, which appears to be wondering if there might be anything to be said for another summit. Various potentates and panjandrums from across the region and the wider Islamic world are gathering in Doha to where they were summoned by Qatar following last week's airstrike by Israel on a residential compound being used by Hamas officials. At the same time, and doubtless not coincidentally, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been visiting Israel affirming US support for its ally, but nevertheless stressing that the US was unhappy about the raid on Qatar, also a close US ally and host of US Central Command. Yossi, this summit, first of all, do we expect any. I mean there will be the usual pro forma harrumphing one would think. But is anything more significant going to come of it?
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We haven't seen yet. But the condemnation, I think the tone when the president of Egypt, Assisi is talking about you put under risk the peace agreement. This is, you know, edging towards a crisis and a work crisis. And a certain point we are looking at Jordan as well. At one point this country won't be able to continue the kind of relations maintaining the peace agreement or countries like the uae, Baha and Morocco that normalized relation a few years ago. At what point they are pushed over the edge in this sense? So you see the kind of the language but it's all part of a bigger package here. We saw that On Friday the UN voted 142 to 10 to have the French Saudi draft and recognize the Palestinian state to end the war. And and something there was a very bizarre speech by Netanyahu today that usually he talks about Israel. It's the best ever position internationally. And all of a sudden today prepare for international isolation and we should become super Sparta. I mean this is worry how, you know, the gap, how the world sees Israel as a result of what has happened in the last two years and how the Israeli government led by Netanyahu because they think we need to go until after the last Hamas person. And really I think what happened in Doha last week was really cross red line. I don't think there are red lines anymore to cross. But if there is one to bomb, not an enemy country, a mediator in a ceasefire try to kill the people that actually discussing a ceasefire. And were the US the main ally as the biggest US base that's pushing it to the very limit.
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And yet, Erin, these countries do now have, in a way that they didn't 40 or 50 years ago, relationships with Israel. They have vested interests in maintaining relations with Israel. One thing we have heard from the summit is that Iran surprise, their big idea is for Muslim nations to sever relations Israel with Israel afresh rather. But is anyone actually going to do that?
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It's a great question. I think we're still in a phase where, you know, I've been updating my phone and I think I'm not the only person and that, you know, leading up to this broadcast wondering are we going to have any concrete proposals on the table or is there going to be any actions? Is there going to be any sort of resolution coming out of this conference? I don't think it's a surprise that the Iranians and the Pakistanis are the two that have made statements ahead of the conference about what their positions are going in. These states are a little bit on the fringe of the summit compared to the Arab Gulf states who we might see as more of the core alongside like Yossi mentioned, Egypt and Jordan. So we've got a core of Arab states who are being very tight lipped and not kind of giving any of their cards away. And that to me is very interesting because actually it means that there's potentially substantial negotiations actually taking place behind closed doors and we might see something come out of it. We might see a resolution. Whether or not there's any announcement today, I think probably not at this point. But that to me indicates that actually something might have happened. Whereas the Iranians and the Pakistanis, they're able to make their positions clear ahead of the conference because they know that they're kind of coming in playing to a domestic audience more than being really decisive at the table.
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One thing we have heard floated by the hosts, Yossi specifically Kataz Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani is trying to refloat the Arab Peace Initiative. This has been floating around now for 23 years or so and it is your basic everyone, 1967 borders, two state solutions, etc, etc, etc. Does anybody really take that seriously at this point? Even though even the people who might actually want that to happen, do they really think that's still an option?
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I think they should take it seriously because beyond the mess that we are in, we also need to have a vision where it all ends, where it all leads to. Because one option is what we see now, never ending war. All this idea of building an AI Gaza Strip with expelling Palestinians. And you know, if Anyone saw the 38 page brochure about building Gaza, which basically ends with Gaza without Palestinians and maybe annexation, the same goes in the West Bank. So I think it's important more than ever to provide an alternative vision of some sort of a two state solution. Not the one that's the Oslo Accord, probably envisage, probably not, as you say all these years after 2002 with the Saudi peace initiative, but along these lines because it recognized the need to deal with the root causes of the conflict when it comes to recognition of Palestinian self determination, addressing the refugees, Palestinian security for everyone, Jerusalem is the capital. So I think it's actually important, this context, while we are dealing with the sheer madness that we see now, where is the destination, where we are going to lead all of this? So I think it's important, if you ask me, if the sides are ready for that at the moment, not before we have a ceasefire, not we think about the reconstruction of Gaza, not before we stop with all this background noise of building Gaza without Palestinians.
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Just finally on this one, Erin. And to bring it back, I guess, to where everybody came in, which was with Israel's strike, attempting to wipe out Hamas leadership in Qatar. And Netanyahu has been saying again today, well, he won't rule out having another crack at some point. Obviously the aim here is even if you can't kill Hamas leadership, it's just to make their lives completely impossible and also the lives of anybody still hosting them. That said, so all that taken into account, is there any chance, do you think that Qatar will, perhaps they'll wait a while, but just quietly suggest to Hamas that they relocate.
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This is such an interesting sort of aspect of what has happened because the reason that the Hamas negotiators are based in Qatar is because they were kicked out of Syria in the context of the Syrian civil war. And it was suggested by the Obama administration amongst other parties that they should relocate to Qatar because the US Administration in recent memory preferred to have a sort of location where there was a possibility of back channels, not just to Hamas, but to other regimes with whom they don't have formal ties. So in this sense, Qatar has been serving for some time as a sort of Switzerland of the Middle east, where various regimes that are in the black books of other Western governments were able to have backdoor conversations and backdoor channels. This was considered good for international peace and security until roughly five minutes ago. And this is something that the Israelis also benefited from. And, you know, they've used Qatar and they've used Qatar's relationships with Hamas to their own ends, the Netanyahu government included. So it's kind of a shock to see how quickly the tables have turned on this point. The question of where they should go next is, you know, sort of absurd if this is going to be what it costs a government to hope. And I think that's sort of the point. Right. I think that that's very much the point that the Israeli administration is attempting to make, is that all of a sudden there's no safe quarter. But if we zoom out and just think about the consequences for international peace and security of there's nowhere where Israelis, Israeli negotiators can sit down at a table across from Hamas officials, or the United States can negotiate with Iran or the Taliban or, you know, the list go, creating essentially a world where dialogue can't happen. And I think that's actually quite dangerous.
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Well, to Romania now, which has become the second country in recent weeks to have unwillingly hosted an overflight of Russian drones. Romania, unlike the previously visited Poland, did not instruct its pilots to shoot the intruders down, but did summon Russia's ambassador in Bucharest to one of those meetings at which biscuits are not offered. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, declared the incursion an obvious expansion of the war by Russ, and with due acknowledgement that Zelenskyy does have a cart to push. In this respect, a pattern does seem to be emerging. Yossi. Romania's Ministry of Defence and Air Force have been yelled at a bit in the popular prints in Romania for not shooting the drones down. They say they didn't because of collateral risks. Presumably the worry that bits of drone could land on buildings or people. Was that a reasonable decision?
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Do we think you need to look exactly where the drones were? It might be, from an operational point of view, reasonable not to do. But in the long run, if this kind of incursions continue, they will have to act militarily. It's put Ukraine in a very precarious situation because if you know where the drones are coming from, the right, you know the direction, it's easier for you to deal from an air defense point of view. But if they try to come from all sorts of direction, including in violating the airspace of NATO countries, that puts Ukraine in a very difficult situation. But also from, you know, the bigger picture, no one respect. We talk about Doha now we talk about Romania and Poland. No one respects sovereignty anymore. This is dead, you know, collective security. All what we thought is the basic international law, the basic standards of behavior in international law completely out of the window. So if I want to breach your airspace, I just do it. I send drones. And this makes it more complicated because leaders don't of the kind of Putin, you can say in this day, Netanyahu, don't respect international law, don't respect the rights of the sovereignty of other countries. And it's risky because it will lead more countries that will be dragged into the war.
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Erin, if we try to look at this, and this is always fun to think about why Russia does the things it does, is there any particular purpose to this? Because it does rather look like it might be the geostrategic equivalent of knocking on someone's door and then running away.
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So this is interesting. I actually saw a really, I thought a really interesting piece in the Independent by Mark Almond, who is at Oxford, and he was pointing out that this is sort of an encouragement potentially to harden the borders of NATO and that that actually does suit Russia's interests fairly well. Because as we see, Poland and Romania essentially maybe have to tighten up their security and, and potentially NATO moving more assets into those countries to create a thick red line for Putin. That leaves Ukraine out of the equation. And now we have a situation where Ukraine is exposed and the NATO countries are protected behind some kind of barrier. I think that that's actually a relatively convincing argument for why Russia might be doing what it's doing.
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I mean, there's also the aspect of this, Yossi, that if you're Russia, this is kind of a win, win proposition. If Romania or Poland doesn't shoot your Dr. Get it back. If they do shoot your drone down, they've shot down a drone, which at the absolute top end cost you $50,000. They have had to go through all the hassle and expense of scrambling jets and then actually shooting the thing down with a missile, which almost certainly cost a multiple of what you paid for the drone. So when you start thinking about it like that, there's really no reason why Russia wouldn't do it especially is because Russia will just always say anyway, no, that was nothing to do with us. I don't know whose drones they are.
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I mean, there is something called international relations plausible deniability, but it's become less and less plausible. So no one believe in that.
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But Russia surely doesn't believe anybody ever believes it when it denies things.
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Exactly. So you know, where the drones appeared all of a sudden, you know, as Switzerland starts sending drones over Romania and Poland. So the working assumption of everyone, whatever Russia would say that those are Russian Dr. So yes, there is the financial issue also the cost of war because of drones are cheaper to send F16, F15 or definitely the F35 that are expensive. But this is an escalation and the more they escalated and that's why, you know, the thing of hard borders, I'm not so sure this argument would work because if you start pushing more and more countries that are members of NATO, it must actually drag into this conflict. Other countries said how far Russia is going to push is next the Baltic, if you get Romania and Poland. So I think it will might have exactly the opposite result of this, of toughening the position of NATO. And we see it also from the State of the Union address last week in the EU that there is a toughening of the language when it comes also with Russia escalating it by violating their space of members of NATO. That's something, you know, there we'll have.
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To push back because just finally on this one, Erin, there's also the whole all fun and games until someone loses an eye aspect of this because the more Russia does things like this, the greater the chance that whether by accident or design, something gets damaged or somebody gets hurt on NATO soil and then we are potentially in quite a difficult area.
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Yeah, I think I really appreciate the point that Yossi made about the comparison between what happened in Qatar last week and these drone attacks, because I do think that we can see a parallel between Putin and Netanyahu's behavior in terms of sort of floating a lot of tests and just to see how far they can get, just to see how far they can push it before there is a real response. And this all kind of comes back, I think, to the more logic of the mafia that we see the Trump administration pushing where international law is meaningless to them. The so the order of international society doesn't carry weight in the same way that a strongman logic does. And this is empowering, enabling, encouraging more and more of this type of Behavior both in the Middle east and increasingly on European soil.
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Well, to the United States now, the president of which is not known for his appreciation of subtlety and is therefore in grave danger of missing a joke at his expense by Swiss horological endeavor. Swatch, Mr. President, if you're listening, will be quick by way of passive aggressive swipe at the 39% tariffs Trump has imposed on Switzerland, Swatch has trailed a new model on which the 3 and 9 are reversed from their traditional places on the clock face. This watch, however, will not be subject to the tariffs, as it will only be available in Switzerland. Swatch have threatened to keep selling it until the tariffs are lifted. Erin, I would pay money for a recording, if anybody knows how to get hold of one, in which, ideally cash Patel explains this to Donald Trump. Are you at all confident that this extremely subtle satirical jab will have any effect whatsoever?
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All right, so as a Canadian, I have lots of thoughts about the industries that have grown up around opposing tariffs, because in Canada, the elbows up industry is in full effect. But I actually, there's a couple of things about this that I think are really important to note. First of all, it's actually intended as a jab at the Swiss government more than at the Trump administration. It's an effort to get the Swiss government to do something about the tariffs. It's only being sold in Switzerland. It's not for the US Market. It's very much intended as tapping into Swiss domestic sentiment to try and generate some momentum around the negotiations. So ultimately, what they're trying to do.
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But it is dreadfully undermining the premise of my hilarious introduction.
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A
I'm sorry, but it's like, I mean, what they're actually trying to do is encourage their government to negotiate with the Trump administration. And Rolex. Last week, Rolex had a similar sort of ploy where they invited Trump to the Rolex box at the US Open as a way of trying to, like, you know, get a deal done. So there's an aspect of this that's actually about how to get the Swiss government to kowtow or to somehow kind of like curry favor with the Trump administration, as opposed to a way of actually lampooning or satirizing Donald Trump himself.
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B
All of which is completely correct, Yossi. And it does seem like something Switzerland should be working maybe a bit harder to fix. The US Is the biggest customer of Swiss watches that was worth five and a half billion dollars last year. And my question is, is it clear to you? And, you know, I think anybody's guess is as good as anybody else's, which is always the fun part of these, why Switzerland has been walloped like this. 39% tariffs on Switzerland versus 15% for the EU animus does Trump have against Switzerland? Was there a mishap with an alphorn then?
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C
I think with Trump, it's never personal. He had this formula. In this case, he had this formula about the difference of the trade, and then you cut it by half. So I assume it was 39 twice. It's 78 if my math is right. So just cut it and you get the 39. There is no logic. You're working with Trump. We are trying to attack logic when logic doesn't exist. And, you know, I'm worried about the Swiss because they're always so prompt and on time and they have these watches and all of a sudden Swiss trains won't arrive on time. But I think with Trump, we have different approaches. The one that we are really opposing and we are really upset with him, and we say, you know, this terrible and it will ruin the world. Then there is the extreme, like with the Rolex one. Let's pander to him like his own cabinet that stands behind him and, you know, the great men doing. And one way is, you know, the satire. What do you do with. You said, we have four years of this. You know, let's use humor to address it. And to be honest, none of this really work. The only thing with humor, it makes us feel a bit better, but it doesn't really change because the next day, if almost, we talk about Ukraine, we talk about the Middle east, we talk about tariffs, we talk about all of this, but nothing really improves. So what you need is Switzerland again. You see the power balance between the country, it's tough. So you need to respond and to develop policies accordingly.
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B
I mean, Erin, the watchmakers are obviously concerned because they do do or did do enormous business with the United States. But is there maybe an argument that what the Swiss government appears to be doing about this, that is nothing, is actually a sensible move where Donald Trump is concerned? Because I think Yossi's kind of right that there's only so much you can do to try to adapt to whatever or anticipate whatever Donald Trump is going to do next, but no one's got any idea. He might wake up tomorrow and decide to invade Legoland. He might wake up tomorrow and decide. Switzerland, 39%. I love the Swiss. They're great. Abolish the tax. So is there actually something to be said for just like, let's Just do nothing and hope this doesn't last any longer than it has to.
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A
In truth, I think it's a really interesting position that not just Switzerland, but most Western countries, not just Western countries actually, but most countries that have really close relationships, whether trade relationships or diplomatic relationships with the United States are faced with. Of what do they do with the fact that the center of political and economic gravity around which they've organized all of their policies is suddenly being run by a madman who is completely unpredictable and who neither compliments or brib or threats seem to work. Right. I mean, Qatar gave him a plane and look what happened to them last week. It's not working out right. So I think that actually the most sensible policy would be for all of these countries to get together and arrange themselves around a different economic and political center of gravity, potentially a multilateral one that wasn't concentrated on any one state. But we haven't actually seen countries kind of work up the courage or the creativity of the imagination to actually disentangle themselves, themselves from this sinking ship in the United States. And so instead everyone is trying to hold the balance between keeping their domestic audiences happy, which requires in most cases being seen to somehow stand up to Trump and on the other hand back behind the scenes trying to placate that regime and to do whatever they imagine the Trump government wants them to do.
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B
Well, to now a commendable rebellion against one of those technological innovations which nobody asked for and which if you about it for even five seconds, is obviously going to make things only worse. We speak naturally of those annoying, stupid and very often inaccurate AI overviews which now appear at the top of Google searches. Example from real life, this broadcaster was recently informed by one such that Leo XIV is a fictional pope invented by the media, huge if true, etc. Anyway, Penske, which owns Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard, is suing Google claiming that the overviews cannibalize original journalism and strangle traffic to the sites which actually paid to create the original journalism in the first place. Yossi, do we wish them all the best with this lawsuit?
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I think you want the answer.
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B
Yes, I do, very much. That was a leading question.
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C
Well spotted and I fully agree with you. Why would we develop anything original, creative and someone that is going to steal, you know, you wrote a book and then AI will take all of it and pretend that after all your years of research about empire, then. And then it would just steal it? No, something they need to pay for it. There must be a way in which those who create something new in the original novel are actually going to be compensated. Not everyone can cannibalize still, basically. And then the other thing, there won't be anything original anymore. They take and they quote something and pretend that it's, you know, what is AI is basically stealing from other people and put it in different order. So yes, the answer if they will win this case, I won't shed too many te.
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B
Aaron, serious question on this because you descend from academia which has for obvious reasons been on the front line of arguments over AI. And again, I speak as somebody who has, among many other examples, been solemnly informed by ChatGPT that John F. Kennedy was President of the United states in the mid-1970s. How much of a difficulty has it become where you work?
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A
Oh my God.
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B
Do we need anything further from you? Where.
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A
How much time do you have? I mean it would be one thing if they were stealing and doing really interesting, exciting things with it, but it's so bad, the lies are so blatant. I mean the misinformation, the garbling of information. I can give you countless examples of completely made up historical facts, political facts, et cetera, that are being submitted in student papers as if this was the God's honest truth. And I think it is a reflection of this kind of broader political and social moment that we're living in where we're having a harder and harder time understanding what is satire versus what is real. Onion headlines are writing themselves these days. I'm perpetually on the verge of throwing my phone in the river and joining a matriarchal tribal society on a desert island. But I do think that there's a broader sort of fight to be had here about intellectual production and really what we're doing at universities. And my argument is that at universities we're not shoving kids heads full of facts, we're teaching them how to think. And that's what AI is really dangerous for, is that it's actually preventing people from being able to do like to learn how to do research themselves, to be able to use critical thinking capacities, to be able to make these kinds of synthetic arguments themselves. And that's why I am very much on the NO AI warrior battalion front lines, et cetera.
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C
So yeah, but there is an opportunity here at universities, for instance, I change my assessments with my students in a way that minimize what AI can interfere with the assessment. So when you do more simulation, more activities in class, because of course if you give them now essays, you'll get on the same topic, almost exactly the same essay with the same references for readings that you never asked them to read and, you know, and made up.
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A
Readings, invented readings, you know, readings by authors that have similar names to some of your colleagues, but they've mashed them together.
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C
I mean, it pushes us into think how we teach. And I agree with the critical thinking, the critical writing and reading is more important than send them, you know, the facts themselves. They'll get it.
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B
But final thought on this one, Erin, Is it fair to say, and this is a leading question for you, that we are looking at, what we are looking at now is the consequences of decades of policy failure by government to actually get a grip on the big tech platforms. They think they can do as they please because nobody's told them they can't.
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A
Yeah, 1,000%. And it's been very beneficial for industry and many countries, but, you know, in the west in particular, it's been very beneficial to industry to allow these monopolies to develop. I mean, one of the reasons why Penske is making this lawsuit is, is because Google search results are 90% of the market. So Penske is essentially in a position where they cannot withdraw their material from Google searches. But Google has made it a condition that if you're going to appear in Google search results, you are also sort of wrapped into the AI summaries at the top, which you rightly point out are full of fallacies. Right. So there's an argument about the monopolization of information and intellectual property. There's an argument to be made about the creativity of individuals. And whether or not that's something that we still value in society and want to take seriously and want to reward financially, like whether people should be allowed to write articles or create music for a living. And if that's the case, then how are we compensating it? I think we're going to see more and more of these lawsuits in the next couple of years. And whether or not they go the way of the creative industries is going to determine the kind of culture and kind of society we live within.
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B
Erin o' Halloran and Yossi Meckelburg, thank you both for joining us. Finally on today's show, all politics policies of all governments have unintended consequences. But few teach this lesson quite so dramatically as the one child policy operated and brutally enforced by the People's Republic of China. Between 1979 and 2015, in a bid to escape the law strictures, many Chinese families gave up children for adoption through channels legal and not. A new book by Barbara Demick, former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, personalizes The ramifications by tracing the lives of identical twins, one raised with her birth family in China, won by adoptive parents in the United States. The book is Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, China's Stolen Children and A Story of Separated Twins. I spoke to Barbara at Midori House earlier and began by asking what compelled her to this story in particular.
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D
Well, separated twins, you know, separated at birth. I mean, this is a story that has, you know, entranced everybody from Shakespeare to Lindsay Lohan to the Parent Trap. I mean, it's kind of, you know, kind of of an old trick. And I consider myself a serious human rights reporter. But I stumbled across it. I didn't go looking for it as many stories or accidents. I was reporting on families in China whose babies were taken away because they had violated the infamous one child policy and done a lot of reporting on this. And the very last family I interviewed, actually, I almost didn't interview them because I was on my way back to my office in Beijing to type up my notes. You know, I heard they had toilet and one twin was taken away. I knew enough being a seasoned reporter to know that this was a story.
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B
How enthused were the people at the heart of this story about being reported on?
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D
Actually, they were very enthusiastic about being reported on. I was correspondent in China for seven years and reported there many years afterwards. And I found when I went out to the countryside, as opposed to Beijing or Shanghai, rural people saw the foreign press as sort of champions of the underdog, and they were quite welcoming. And this particular family who I interviewed originally in 2009, actually, it was the mother and the twin who had remained behind, who was 9 years old. They were very friendly, very welcoming, and I spent maybe an hour with them. And then as I left, the mother said to me, thanks for visiting. Next time come back with my daughter. And I was, you know, gave like a. Oh, yeah.
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A
You know.
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B
Was it difficult, though, to thread all these people together? How findable is anybody at this point? Because you have to assume from reading this story that there must be many thousands of stories similar to this. Maybe not involving twins, but a lot of Chinese kids who ended up being raised elsewhere.
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D
There's a lot. There's a lot. I mean, this is maybe getting ahead of the story, but they're very findable. I mean, there were 160,000 Chinese babies adopted abroad, about half of them to the US but all over Europe, Australia, Canada. And at the time they were adopted in, it was, you know, to find your birth family would be, you know, a grain of sand in the desert. China's far away. It's so big, you know, impossible. There were no records. These were supposedly children who were abandoned because their families preferred sons. They wanted boys and Impossible. And in fact, that was one of the attractions of Chinese adoption that, you know, you got a baby who is, you know, tabula rasa, completely pure, starting with their adoption, no background. Everybody is very findable nowadays because of social media and DNA testing. In this case, it was social media.
- [36:36]
B
One of the broader themes that comes out of the book is this idea of the one child policy is just this extraordinary illustration of the law of unintended consequences. And I'm not even sure where you would begin to measure the unintended consequences of this law. But in your reporting on some of those consequences, did you experience any pushback at all from the child Communist Party? Were they delighted about the reporting you were doing on stolen children and other such things while you were a correspondent?
- [37:06]
D
I didn't get any comment from the Chinese Communist Party. I got comments from individual Chinese and some of the people involved with what's called euphemistically family planning. And this was the enforcement agency with tens of millions of enforcers larger than the People's Liberation Army. It was a huge repressive apparatus. When the Chinese enforced the one child policy, they did it with a vengeance. And I won't go into the various methods they used, but it was quite brutal and they defended the policy. They said it was necessary to keep the population down in order for China to grow. They had this kind of mathematical sleight of hand which was per capita income. If you have national income and you have, you have a smaller capita, the per capita income looks larger. This is just, you know, the denominator. So the propaganda had been very powerful. Even the families who were brutalized believed in the law. They didn't want to follow the law, but they believed in it. This was Communist Party gospel.
- [38:13]
B
Just finally, can you let us know how they are both doing? Are they still often in touch with each other?
- [38:18]
D
They're actually both doing great in different ways. Difficult because they don't speak the same language. People always ask me this, but somebody who's adopted when they're a toddler loses their first language, completely loses it. And they've both had their ups and downs. But I wouldn't say that one is that much better off than the other. We Americans have this sense of exceptionalism. Oh, you're so lucky. You're so lucky. And the Chinese twin has had a.
- [38:47]
B
Good life to that was the American journalist Barbara Demick. Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is available now. And that is all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Erin o' Halloran and Yossi Meckelberg. The show was produced by Laura Kramer and researched by Daniella Braw Smith. Our sound engineer was Elliot Greenfield. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
- [39:13]
A
It.