Behind the Firewall

Behind the Firewall

Episode #573: “I brought you here to the United States not so you could forget our homeland,” Salih Hudayar remembers his father telling him, “but so you could become educated and one day return to liberate our people and our country from the Chinese occupation.” Hudayar, now Foreign Minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, traces his political life to that instruction. Born in 1993 near Kashgar, he grew up amid tightening state control and left for the United States as a child after his father fled repression. He situates the current crisis within a longer history that includes two short-lived East Turkistan republics before Communist consolidation in 1949. He describes a post-2009 escalation of surveillance, detention, and forced labor under the banner of counterterrorism. Citing Chinese government documents and satellite imagery, he argues that mass internment, religious repression, family separation, and demographic engineering amount to genocide. Now based in Washington DC, Hudayar presses U.S. lawmakers to move beyond condemnation. Recognition of genocide, he says, is not enough without confronting what he calls the root problem of colonial rule. Running a government in exile, dispersed across continents and sustained by diaspora donations, requires coordination, discipline, and constant vigilance against external pressure. Myanmar surfaces repeatedly in the interview as both comparison and caution. Hudayar draws parallels between the Rohingya genocide case and his own effort to bring a complaint before the International Criminal Court, noting that the Rohingya precedent shaped the jurisdictional argument he pursued. He also references Myanmar’s strategic importance to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, particularly access to the western coast and energy corridors that could reduce Beijing’s vulnerability in the Strait of Malacca. At a broader level, he frames the Uyghur and Myanmar struggles as linked by geography and power politics—both situated along China’s periphery, both affected by Beijing’s economic leverage and security influence, and both navigating how global powers respond when human rights concerns collide with strategic interests.

Let Them Eat Cake

Episode #572: “The government will survive for as long as it can feed the people,” says Christopher Lamb, former Australian Ambassador to Myanmar, distilling what he believes defines the country’s political fate more than any ideology. He reflects on a relationship with Burma that began in the early 1970s, when the generals were drafting a Socialist Constitution and creating a surveillance state, and evolved through the 1988 uprising, which began not as an idealistic revolt but as a desperate reaction to hunger and daily indignities. Years later, he reconnected with Myanmar around humanitarian work in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, and then academic engagement in 2013, when he co-founded the Australia–Myanmar Institute as a platform for academic and civil-society exchange Lamb situates Myanmar’s politics within a wider regional frame, drawing on Shan history, federalism debates, geography, and Chinese influence to show why the struggle against the junta cannot be reduced to a simple clash between dictatorship and democracy. He also contrasts the current military leadership with earlier eras, noting that Min Aung Hlaing lacks the ideological projects—whether national unity or the “Burmese Way to Socialism”—that once guided previous generals. Instead, Lamb sees today’s junta as driven largely by personal ambition, with Min Aung Hlaing positioning himself to transition into a civilian presidency through a tightly controlled electoral process. Without this sort of guiding ideology, Lamb believes the regime’s future becomes harder to predict and possibly more brittle. Myanmar remains close to Lamb’s heart. It shaped him as a diplomat, it shaped his curiosity and it shaped his friendships. When asked whether any memory stays with him above all others about the country, he references a remark offered by the senior Burmese official decades earlier over tea: “The government will survive for as long as we can feed the people.”

Class Dismissed

Episode #571: “For students living through uncertainty, I think online learning and online education becomes a lifeline rather than simply an alternative.” Eaint Thet Hmu, a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) student at Parami University, came to education through disruption rather than continuity. COVID-19 interrupted the expected path after matriculation; the 2021 coup closed off the university future she had imagined in Yangon. Online learning became the route through which she found Parami, community work, and a new way of reading Myanmar. At Parami, Eaint’s Bamar-majority background was unsettled by studying with classmates from ethnic nationalities she had rarely encountered before. She began to understand what it meant to move “from being the ethnic majority and becoming a minority in the classroom.” That shift shaped her interest in civic education, gender equality, and the kind of learning that does not stop at theory. For one thing, she came to understand that “the role of the student isn't to save the community but is to learn with them.” Her youth-led Project PyitTineHtaung brings sexuality and gender education to underserved secondary students, including monastic education students in Magway and Mandalay. Eaint sees this work as part of survival in a country where misinformation spreads more easily than accurate guidance about their bodies, gender, and safety. “Restrictions are not always the solution,” she says. Her research on the Civil Disobedience Movement extends the same question into the political sphere. After the coup, students who refused military-controlled universities were refusing more than classes; they were refusing legitimacy. Among twelve higher education students she interviewed, all said the decision came at once: “they decided immediately, they didn’t hesitate for a moment.” Eaint’s account keeps returning to education as a contested space. A degree is not the whole of learning. In Myanmar now, learning means recognizing power, resisting false legitimacy, and continuing to think when the official institutions meant to teach have become part of the pressure.

Sacred Grounds Contested

Episode #570: The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners from around the world, creating a dense, fast-moving environment of panels, conversations, and informal exchange across the full breadth of Asian studies. Within that wider landscape, Burma surfaced as one of several pressing areas of focus, shaped by the realities of its ongoing crisis. Insight Myanmar Podcast was invited by the organizers to work from within the conference itself, setting up an on-site recording space and speaking with participants as they moved between sessions. The result is a series of short, real-time conversations—captured in the midst of the event rather than in hindsight—now shared with a wider global audience. This is the first of a four-part series. Gita reconstructs the return of Buddhism to modern India not as a simple story of rediscovery, but as a struggle over ownership, identity, and political meaning. Beginning with Anagarika Dharmapala’s late nineteenth-century campaign to reclaim the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya, she follows the networks that linked India to Sri Lanka, Burma, Japan, and other Buddhist worlds across the Bay of Bengal. The result is a far wider picture than the familiar colonial tale of British archaeologists unearthing lost Buddhist sites. Her argument is that modern Indian Buddhism emerged through mobility as much as excavation through pilgrims, monks, courts, relics, shipping lines, railways, and reform movements. Burma is especially important in that story. Burmese courts recognized and patronized Bodh Gaya long before Buddhism became newly legible to colonial scholarship, and later Burmese monks and pilgrims helped restore visible Buddhist practice at key sites in India. That revival unfolded alongside a competing effort to absorb Buddhism into a Hindu civilizational frame. As Hindutva thinkers tried to define India as fundamentally Hindu, Buddhism became both useful and inconvenient: useful as proof of India’s past influence across Asia, inconvenient when Buddhists insisted on separateness or when Ambedkar turned to Buddhism as a rejection of caste Hinduism. And then, “Nehru chooses Buddhism,” Gita says, describing how the Indian state later used Buddhist symbols, relics, and diplomacy to project a different moral and geopolitical language after independence. What remains unresolved in her account is the question of what kind of Buddhism has reemerged in South Asia. It is now highly visible, but that visibility can serve very different ends. Her interest finally is less in Buddhism as state identity than in whether an older ethical and transnational imagination can still be recovered.

No Safe Shelter

Episode #569: When Hla Hla Win was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison at age twenty-three, she did not focus on the number. “I decided that in politics, the way things change, I will be released.” She narrowed her horizon to the day in front of her — reading, teaching other inmates’ children, and sleeping without the constant fear of arrest that had defined her underground reporting. A former teacher turned DVB journalist after the 2007 Saffron Revolution, Hla Hla Win was arrested in 2009 for interviewing monks about military killings. During interrogation, she protected a secret Yangon office by answering almost everything truthfully — except the one question that mattered. “They asked ten questions. I answered nine questions true, and then one is false!” After her release, Hla Hla Win refused to return to party politics. “If the government or the NLD party or other people do some mistake, I would report them,” she says. “Everyone!” She rejected campaigns that shielded power from criticism and insisted, “We have to report both sides, [where there are] human rights violation.” Following the 2021 coup, Hla Hla Win resumed reporting despite being a new mother, and with internet blackouts in place, she uploaded frequent livestreams and reports. Eventually the military recognized her voice, and so she had to flee to Thailand. Now based along the border, she repeatedly returns to some of the worst-hit conflict zones, working as both journalist and fixer. Hla Hla Win admits that airstrikes are the one thing she cannot control. “I can’t do nothing,” she says of the twenty seconds between hearing a jet and impact. She has filmed fighters meeting newborn children over video calls and listened to young resistance members shout from mountains, “I want to go home!” The war has expanded, reshaping territory and institutions. The strain is visible — especially among young fighters — yet she does not believe morale has collapsed. “I believe people continue to fight to the end of the military.”