CHA$ING THE DRAGON
Long before the NBA, US institutions have been complicit in China's evil
LeBRON James may lecture others on the need to be “educated on the situation” in China, but he’s the one who’s living in a bubble. Despite making almost two dozen trips to the Communist giant — trips that probably earned him tens of millions of dollars all told — he seems to have no idea just what kind of monster his paymaster is.
The people of Hong Kong — whose struggle for freedom LeBron prefers to ignore — know better. They understand that what the Communist Party of China runs across the border is not just a police state but the world’s first hi-tech virtual prison whose goal is literally to monitor all of China’s 1.3 billion people all the time.
They know that the party runs the world’s largest network of concentration camps, whose millions of political prisoners and ethnic minorities are forced to produce cheap goods for export.
They know that the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has warned them that any attempt to divide the country will end in “bodies smashed and bones ground to powder.” Finally, they know that any sign of American indifference to their plight makes Xi even more likely to act on his vicious threat.
Of course, it’s not just LeBron James and the NBA who kowtow to China. American individuals and institutions — even the wealthiest and most prestigious — have been bowing and scraping to China since the very beginning of US-China relations.
In the pursuit of profit, American companies have collaborated with the Beijing regime since the 1980s. Hundreds of US companies opened factories to take advantage of the cheap labor that China was willing to supply under slave-like conditions, selling out American workers in the process.
Even today, American hi-tech companies are continuing to help China set up its surveillance state to the detriment of freedom there. Google’s continuing collaboration with China in developing artificial intelligence is just one example.
Successive presidential administrations have encouraged American investment in China, while largely ignoring rampant human-rights violations there. Even the deliberate massacre of 10,000 students in the streets of Beijing in 1989, for example, was not enough to convince then-President George H.W. Bush to abandon his proChina policy.
Anyone who got in the way of America’s decades-long appeasement of China — like Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey recently did by tweeting support for Hong Kong — had to be sacrificed.
Ask me. I know. I was the first to be sold down the river. And by no less a prestigious institution than Stanford University. I was finishing up a Ph.D. in anthropology there when I was selected to be the first American social scientist since 1949 to do research in China. I arrived just in time to become an eyewitness to the horrors of the country’s newly announced one-child policy.
My “crime” was calling out China in print for arresting, imprisoning and aborting young, pregnant moms.
China construed this as an “attack on the Chinese people,” and demanded that I be “severely punished” by the university. And Stanford — one of the leading universities in the world — caved, denying me that Ph.D. I had earned, and sending me packing.
What was the threat that brought Stanford to its knees?
Though Stanford claimed it was worried that my informants had been put in jeopardy and this contravened anthropological ethics, I knew the real reason for my expulsion: China had threatened to ban all Stanford scholars from China indefinitely.
The cowardice concerning my case extended all the way to the top of the Carter administration. Even Carter’s National Security Council urged Stanford to comply with China’s demand.
It turned out that China was threatening to cancel the entire US-China scholarly exchange program.
Just like they threatened to ban the NBA. Do you see the pattern here? The bully of Asia’s default behavior — when it sees something it doesn’t like — is to issue threats.
Fortunately, we now have a president who is not accustomed to taking a knee. With the help of trade adviser Peter Navarro and US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, the Trump White House is calling for an end to appeasement, urging both lawmakers and corporate boards to stand up to China — and to stand for the quintessential American values of liberty and freedom of expression.
And if you don’t believe that is a very good thing, just ask the protesters in Hong Kong.