What the rich, the powerful, and the influential in the West do vis-à-vis Beijing may look astonishing.
Xi Jinping’s China seems unstoppable in its capability to unleash one abomination after another. Carrying out genocide in Xinjiang and Tibet, militarily threatening its neighbours, letting loose virus that has killed millions of people all over the world, propping up rogue states like Pakistan and North Korea, indulging in nuclear and missile proliferation, suppressing the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong—and now extinguishing some of the last flames of independent journalism. Its action against Hong Kong’s most ardent pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily, thus forcing its closure, highlights this fact.
“Apple Daily’s support for democratic rights and freedoms has made it a thorn in Beijing’s side since owner Jimmy Lai, a self-made tycoon who was smuggled from mainland China into Hong Kong on a fishing boat at the age of 12, started it in 1995,” Reuters reports. “It shook up the region’s Chinese-language media landscape and became a champion of democracy on the margins of Communist China. Its demise leaves only a handful of small online outlets on that side of politics, including Stand News and Citizen News.”
What the Communist Party of China does is not surprising, for communism is a vile ideology that is oriented around the suppression of the individual and infinite empowerment of the state; massacres, mayhem, genocide, and disasters are the inevitable consequence of the implementation of communism. However, what the rich, the powerful, and the influential in the West do vis-à-vis Beijing may look astonishing.
The tech billionaires who have become censors, the Davos men and women, the virtue-signalling celebrities, the liberal politicians who claim to be the votaries of freedom and human rights, the Wall Street hawks who have profited by industrializing China, the liberal-dominated academic and media realms, the global thought leaders who often take on the mantle of moral guardians—what have they been doing all these years (that is, apart from maligning former US President Donald Trump and blaming him for every possible ill)? The answer is simple: compromising.
The New York Times recently reported that to make their company the world’s most valuable, Apple Inc. bosses succumbed to the Chinese government’s pressure “to make compromises that flout the values they espouse.” In response to a 2017 Chinese law, Apple agreed to move its Chinese customers’ data to China and onto computers owned and run by a Chinese state-owned company, the NYT report said.
Further, Apple has created an internal bureaucracy that rejects or removes apps the company believes could run afoul of Chinese rules. “In 2018, China’s internet regulators ordered Apple to reject an app from Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire who had broadcast claims of corruption inside the Communist Party.” Apple followed the order.
“Since 2017, roughly 55,000 active apps have disappeared from Apple’s App Store in China, with most remaining available in other countries, according to a Times analysis,” the report added.
Twitter and other social media giants banished any view other than the natural origin of the coronavirus for over a year, thus helping the CCP.
Then there are Western politicians who don’t want to get tough with Beijing. Armin Laschet, leader of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the reported frontrunner to succeed her, is one of them. “I support the government’s China strategy… We must talk about our concerns [on human rights] but there is no need to turn our China policy on its head,” Laschet told a conference this week. Starting a new Cold War with China was not the right approach, he added.
In plain English it means just keep mouthing homilies about human rights and do nothing against China.
Big Finance is another support for China. It was determined to remove Trump, so it donated the challenger Joe Biden 2.5 times more. The reason is simple: the guys wearing expensive suits and talking glib helped industrialize China at the expense of America; they want to keep it that way. They felt threatened by Trump’s announcements and actions to reverse the trend.
According to a write-up in Foreign Policy, “since the 1970s, more than 7 million American manufacturing jobs have evaporated—over a third of the country’s entire manufacturing workforce. In the first decade of the 21st century, more than 66,000 manufacturing facilities closed down or moved overseas. America’s share of the world’s printed circuit board production has dropped 70 percent since 2000; China accounts for around half of global production today. The high-tech industry is hardly exempt: As of 2015, Chinese factories produced 28 percent of the world’s cars, 41 percent of ships, more than 60 percent of TVs, and a staggering 90 percent of the world’s mobile phones. Indeed, Apple’s Elk Grove plant is now an AppleCare call center”.
Obviously, Wall Street biggies never wanted Trump, the greatest statesman of this century who had the vision and the gumption to take on the deadly dragon, to get the second term. They were helped by mainstream media, pinkish academics, and public intellectuals who savagely vilified Trump, thus ensuring his defeat. Seldom before did capitalists and socialists acted in such unison.
The unholy alliance between Big Tech, liberal Western politicians, Big Finance, the MSM, and thought leaders continues unabated. For the benefit of the CCP.
Ravi Shanker Kapoor is a freelance journalist