THE GOOD FIGHT
Americans need to launch aBDS campaign against China
LIKE most conservatives, I haven’t been a big fan of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement. Not that I am opposed to putting pressure on governments that violate international norms of human rights. Far from it.
But it has never made much sense to me that we should BDS the only democracy in the Middle East, especially one which happens to be surrounded by terrorist regimes that target its civilians.
But there is one country that Americans across the entire political spectrum — liberal or conservative, progressive or libertarian — can perhaps now all agree needs to be BDS’ed right up the Yangtze River.
Let’s say you’re a SJW concerned about colonialism? I offer you a country which not so long ago absorbed two neighboring countries with ancient civilizations, Tibet and Western Turkestan, and which even now, in an act of cultural genocide unfolding in real time, is seeking to rob the Tibetans and Uyghurs of their language, their culture and their very identity as a people.
Let’s say you’re a Christian? I offer you a country whose officials — in the middle of a pandemic, no less — still find time to tear down churches and arrest believers. Nor is it enough for them to persecute Christians in life, it now seems to persecute them in death as well. Earlier this month, photos on Twitter showed party members despoiling the graves of Christians whose crime was having a cross engraved on their grave markers.
Let’s say you are a labor union activist? I offer you a country where politically connected factory owners often cheat workers out of their wages and then, when they rise up in protest, summon the police to beat up the demonstrators. Any effort to organize a free labor union is met with the catch-all charge of “stirring up trouble” and a prison term.
Let’s say you are a civil libertarian concerned about privacy rights. I offer you a high-tech digital dictatorship without equal in the history of the world, where the unblinking eyes of millions of surveillance cameras are always watching, big data is always storing and AI is always mindlessly hunting for signs of subversive activity.
For those concerned about their health, I give you a country that by suppressing whistleblowers and withholding vital information has allowed a plague to proliferate on the planet, one which has already killed hundreds of thousands of people and which threatens to infect and kill hundreds of thousands more.
Finally, who doesn’t share the pain of the free people of Hong Kong as the dragon next door threatens to arrest anyone at any time for unspecified subversive activities, terrorism, offenses against the motherland?
So what would a BDS movement against China look like?
First would be a leveling of sanctions against all companies with ties to China’s military, to weapons of mass destruction, and to its persecution of Uyghurs and other minorities.
The good news is that this effort is already well underway, with 33 more firms and institutions added to an economic blacklist just last week.
Existing sanctions have been tightened as well, including, most importantly, a ban on Chinese tech firm Huawei’s use of US technology and silicon. Let’s see them make phones without chips.
Sanctioning alone is not enough, however. Divestment must follow. We must ensure that America’s pension funds, college endowments and personal savings are not used by China’s proliferators and humanrights violators to continue doing business.
Believe it or not, while it is illegal to do business with Chinese companies that have been sanctioned, it is still legal to invest in them. In fact, the federal retirement trust was poised to invest in Chinese securities just this month. It required pressure from the Committee on the Present Danger: China, and the personal intervention of the president himself, to stop this travesty.
Far better than this piecemeal approach would be kicking Chinese firms off the NYSE and NASDAQ altogether. There is ample reason to do so, since such firms uniformly refuse to abide by US securities laws and accounting regulations that are binding on everyone else.
Allowing Chinese Communist Party-controlled enterprises to raise trillions of dollars in our capital markets simply makes no sense. Why are we enriching and emboldening our enemy in this way?
Thirdly — and arguably most importantly — we need a consumer boycott of Chinese-made goods.
Here I have some good news to report. Forty percent of Americans now say they will never again buy a product “Made in China.” Like me, they would prefer to “use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without,” rather than fatten the coffers of the regime that has unleashed so much havoc across the world.
The other half of America needs to join in as well. Do it for the millions imprisoned in re-education camps by the CCP, for the tens of millions it murdered over its 71-year history, or for the hundreds of millions of women it forcibly aborted in the one-child policy.
Do it for any one of a dozen reasons.
And once we start, let’s continue to say “No” until the people of China, in their righteous anger, rise up against their political masters and demand their unalienable rights as human beings.
Let’s all BDS the Hell out of China.