Mighty American companies, one after the other, bow down and sell their soul to China in exchange for a fistful of dollars. The latest being the NBA’s acquiescence to China’s demands as noted in The New York Times, “American Basketball,” October 13.
How sad it is that American companies are so hungry for ever greater profits from ever greater sales that they will sacrifice their principles in order to please the Chinese Communist government and thus have access to the huge Chinese market.
The Chinese government is not evil on the scale of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But they are every much as totalitarian. Anyone in China who dares to buck the Chinese government is treated like a criminal and taken into custody by the government with no rights.
The fate of a democracy activist, or a religious activist, or a persecuted minority such as the Uighurs, is not that different in today’s China from what it was in fascist Germany or Russia. They perhaps don’t fear death, but imprisonment at will is the norm.
Our opening up to China has in retrospect been a huge mistake. We thought that exposure to Western products and ideas and increased prosperity would slowly bring a soft revolution in China; that people would demand not just economic freedom but political freedom.
But while China has embraced a type of capitalism, our role in the economic transformation of China has created a monster that threatens our economy and our geo-political interests around the world. American companies and farmers have become enablers of China’s totalitarian government.
It is past time to rethink our engagement with China, not for the reasons given by Trump, but because we are enabling a totalitarian government. The dream of a soft revolution is just that. What to do at this point is a huge question that requires careful and knowledgeable thought, so I am not going to make any suggestions, except to say that Trump's trade war is not the answer.
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