Journalist Gulchehra Hoja on the ‘Incredibly High Price’ of Reporting on China’s Uyghur Oppression | PRO Video

Syrian journalist Yakeen Bido and Uyghur American journalist Gulchehra Hoja, two recipients of the 2020 International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award, joined TheWrap’s Power Women Summit Thursday to discuss the personal and professional risks they take reporting on atrocities carried out by repressive authoritarian states. The discussion, “Journalists on the Front Lines,” was introduced by IWMF executive director Elise Lees Muñoz and moderated by Nima Elbagir, CNN senior international correspondent and a past IWMF Courage award recipient. Elbagir kicked it off by asking about the “cross-section” female journalists occupy: harassment from “malevolent actors” and misogyny within the industry and beyond it. “If you are a female journalist exposing the crimes of an authoritarian state in China, you will definitely pay an incredibly high price for your work,” said Hoja, who extensively covers China’s brutal repression of its Uyghur population. “Anonymous threats and your family members in the hands of the state are taken hostage to force you to give in.” She explained that her family has faced surveillance and harassment because of her work and that her own relatives — including children — “disappeared” into what, she says, the Chinese government calls “re-education camps.” She said that though her family is suffering because of her work, she feels compelled to continue because her employer, Radio Free Asia, “is the only voice for Uighur people,” a Muslim minority in China facing detainment. Watch Yakeen Bido and Gulchehra Hoja’s full interview, presented by the IWMF, above.