In Pushing Back against China, U.S. Finds Few Allies

By Dmitri Solzhenitsyn

Friday, July 31, 2020

 

As the Chinese Communist Party continues the process of enforcing its restrictive “security” law, barring pro-democracy candidates in Hong Kong from participating in the September legislative election and arresting protesters, dissenting academics, social-media influencers, and even a 15-year-old banner-waving schoolgirl, it would appear quite challenging to speak in an equivocating, wishy-washy manner about the evils this government is perpetrating. Still, some manage. Several weeks ago, German chancellor Angela Merkel — the most powerful figure in Western Europe — promised that she would “continue to seek dialogue and conversation” with the Chinese government. Andreas Fulda, a senior fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the University of Nottingham, offers a theory behind the chancellor’s words: “Angela Merkel is not able, in my view, to understand the gravity of the challenge of continued one-party rule, whether it’s COVID-19 or the treatment of minorities or the suppression of Hong Kong or the military threats against Taiwan. . . . If the German Government doesn't take the threat of the CCP seriously then, by extension, the EU will not be able to make progress in terms of developing a more coherent China policy.”

 

That Merkel is simply misguided on the threat China poses, as Fulda believes, is certainly possible. However, given the political climate, there is likely a graver impulse behind Merkel’s placating remarks: fear of retribution. After all, Merkel is far from the only prominent politician to skirt the issue of the CCP’s atrocious human-rights record — far from the only politician to pretend that the Chinese government is a fair party on which one can count to honor its agreements and to act with benevolence.

 

Last month, representatives of Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Croatia, Poland, and the Czech Republic on the U.N. Human Rights Council, among others, refused to condemn China for its encroachment on Hong Kong’s autonomy — a serious blow to a unified Western countermovement against the CCP’s actions. In all, just 27 governments expressed criticism of China’s oppression law, with 53 in favor and the rest staying silent. Just as it is hard to believe that Angela Merkel is oblivious to the crimes China is committing, it is hard to believe that only 27 governments actually found fault with an effective ban on free expression and self-determination for Hong Kongers. (Granted, fewer governments around the world are democratic than one accustomed to Western laws might believe.) Rather, history has likely taught many nations that it is more expedient to keep their mouth shut than to take a firm stance on the global superpower with the world’s second-largest economy.

 

Consider Spain, one of the countries that remained silent throughout the U.N.’s vote. In 2013, a Spanish court issued arrest warrants for a former Chinese president, a former Chinese prime minister, and other important Chinese Communist officials for allegedly bringing about genocide in Tibet. Just days later, a Chinese spokesperson was expressing Beijing’s dissatisfaction with the warrants, warning the Spanish “not [to] do things that harm the Chinese side and the relationship between China and Spain.” Fearing harsh retaliation from a country holding a fifth of Spanish bonds and consuming many Spanish exports, Spain’s government quickly passed a reform limiting the use of universal jurisdiction.

 

Though the motive behind this reform was relatively open, it would not be shocking if much other action and rhetoric surrounding China from freedom-loving nations were similarly induced by a fear of economic retaliation. This may help explain why Canada refused to request an independent inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 in May. Or why New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, unlikely not to share President Trump’s personal outrage at China’s activity, nevertheless is reportedly “seeking to be less confrontational than the Trump administration” with regard to the CCP. Even U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson, who has taken very strong action against China by offering a path to citizenship for Hong Kong natives, suspending the U.K.’s extradition treaty with Hong Kong (so as not to be obliged to send back Hong Kongers at Beijing’s whim), and extending the U.K.’s arms embargo on China to Hong Kong, nevertheless has felt the need to send something of a mixed message in assuring that his government is “going to be tough on some things but also going to continue to engage” with China. One imagines Boris Johnson putting China in a timeout for bad behavior but giving it a pat on the head and a cookie to munch on.

 

This sort of diplomatic behavior is understandable. It is difficult to summon the moral courage to openly condemn a global superpower such as China, especially when large GDP growth and stable diplomatic relations are on the line. In any case, it would appear that the United States, in enacting sanctions against Chinese officials for abusing Uighur Muslims, terminating trade benefits for now-CCP-controlled Hong Kong, closing the Chinese consulate in Houston, and imposing export controls on corporations enabling China’s activity, stands virtually alone on China.

 

To be sure, there is an occasional discontinuity between the Trump administration’s official policy and the president’s rhetoric. As Trump himself has admitted, he had little desire to press China on its treatment of Uighur Muslims in the middle of trade negotiations with the nation in late 2018, even though top White House officials were already viewing the situation with concern. And as late as February 29, weeks after the CIA had already warned that China had vastly underreported its coronavirus infections and that its information was unreliable, Trump stated in a COVID-19 briefing: “China seems to be making tremendous progress. Their numbers are way down. . . . I think our relationship with China is very good. We just did a big trade deal. We’re starting on another trade deal with China — a very big one. And we’ve been working very closely. They’ve been talking to our people, we’ve been talking to their people, having to do with the virus.” But despite occasional confusion, the commitment to a solidly anti-Beijing foreign policy has been perhaps clearer in the Trump administration than in the government of any other country besides India and Taiwan. This is reflected not only in the U.S.’s recent policies but in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s denunciation of Xi, last week, as a “true believer in a bankrupt, totalitarian ideology” and in his insistence that the United States “induce China to change” lest Communist China “surely change us.”

 

Of course, even within the United States, there is not a unanimous consensus that China constitutes a major threat. As National Review’s Zachary Evans reports, Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California had some flattering things to say about China yesterday. Speaking in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, she remarked: “We hold China as a potential trading partner, as a country that has pulled tens of millions of people out of poverty in a short period of time, and as a country growing into a respectable nation amongst other nations.” Senator Feinstein’s statement came in the context of a debate over whether U.S. citizens should be allowed to sue the Chinese government for damages caused by the coronavirus — an idea that Feinstein argued could “launch a series of unknown events that could be very, very dangerous. . . . A huge mistake.”

 

Encouragingly, however, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill in late June condemning China’s oppression law; Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi spoke eloquently of the bill as “an urgently needed response to the cowardly Chinese government’s passage of its so-called national security law, which threatens the end of the ‘one country, two systems’ promised exactly 23 years ago today.” Moreover, Pew Research reports that sentiment against the Chinese government is at an all-time high since U.S. adults have been polled: Sixty-six percent say they view the government unfavorably.

 

In all, it would appear that, barring a massive change in European attitudes and in the fragile economic positions of nations such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the United States will not have many reliable allies in the fight against China’s most egregious abuses. The courageous pro-democracy residents of Hong Kong, as well as a few nations including Taiwan, India, and Israel, are notable but rare exceptions.

The NBA Prostitutes Itself for the Politburo

By Cameron Hilditch

Thursday, July 30, 2020

 

Uighurs in concentration camps don’t buy sneakers, but the Communists who put them there do. When push comes to shove, that’s all that really matters to the National Basketball Association, an organization led exclusively, it seems, by protoplasmic, invertebrate robber-barons who put in their work days sucking greedily on the teat of the Chinese Communist Party. There’s simply no other conclusion to be reached after reading yesterday’s excellent ESPN investigation into the NBA’s activities in the Middle Kingdom.

 

The red flags signaling the league’s craven propensity for self-abasement were first flown at full-mast last October, when Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted his support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, touching off a firestorm. Morey was forced to apologize, and a slew of basketball stars across the country rushed to profess their epistemic shortcomings with regard to Chinese history when pressed, as if a nuanced understanding of how the tributary system worked during the Qing dynasty was a necessary prerequisite for determining whether or not democracy is a good idea. I’m sure that before Joe Louis enlisted in the United States Army in 1942, he took care to educate himself about the Bismarckian unification of Germany, lest his moral evaluation of Hitler be impeded by a lack of informed historical empathy for the Nazis.

 

Moreygate alone sufficed to expose the NBA as an amoral money-grubbing cult. But if we needed more evidence, it has now been amply supplied by Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada in ESPN’s new report, which is based on interviews with former NBA employees involved in the league’s player-development programs in China. The market for the NBA in China is worth about $5 billion, and was built on the success of the now-retired Chinese player Yao Ming. According to two of the former NBA employees who spoke with ESPN, the league’s player-development academies in China had one salient mandate from the powers that be: “Find another Yao.” Sold to the world as an altruistic, bridge-building venture that offers a holistic education and opportunities for self-improvement to young Chinese men, the academies are in fact little more than human basketball farms designed to breed the next native cash cow for NBA executives.

 

One of these farms was in Xinjiang, the Western province of China where over a million Uighur Muslims are currently being detained in concentration camps. In many respects it was quite similar to all of the NBA’s other Chinese camps: Young boys were physically beaten by the native Chinese coaches, ten athletes were piled into dormitories made for two, the promised academic schooling never materialized, and so on and so forth. The crucial difference is that most of these boys were Uighurs. Corbin Loubert, an ex-NBA strength coach who worked for the league in Xinjiang for a year, tweeted last fall that “one of the biggest challenges” of working in the province “was not only the discrimination and harassment I faced, but turning a blind eye to the discrimination and harassment that the Uyghur people around me faced.” According to the report, another of the league’s ex-employees who worked there compared it to “World War II Germany.” The NBA acknowledged for the first time last week that its basketball camp in Xinjiang is now closed. The boys who attended it, and who were promised a brighter future by one of our nation’s most iconic companies, are now, in all likelihood, in a camp of an altogether different kind.

 

One person who seems positively nonplussed about this situation is the NBA’s deputy commissioner and COO, Mark Tatum, who comes across in the report as a desiccated ruin of a human being. This is not to say that the authors describe him as such; they merely relay his own words, which are more than enough to paint a picture of his character. “When pressed,” Fainaru and Fainaru-Wada write, “Tatum declined to say whether human rights were a factor” in the closure of the Xinjiang academy. And when he was willing to speak about what the league has done in China, he did so in disgustingly euphemistic terms. “We do need to have more direct oversight and the ability to make staffing changes when appropriate,” he said. That’s corporate-speak for “maybe we should try to hire some Chinese coaches who won’t beat the living daylights out of children, but we’ll have to see if the commies allow us to.” Elsewhere in the story, one of the NBA’s ex-coaches said it better: “Imagine you have a kid who’s 13, 14 years old, and you’ve got a grown coach who is 40 years old hitting your kid. We’re part of that. The NBA is part of that.” But when the reporters presented Tatum with this information, he pleaded the same lack of expertise in matters of elementary morality that NBA players did last year when confronted with similar inconvenient truths:

 

My job, our job is not to take a position on every single human rights violation, and I’m not an expert in every human rights situation or violation. I’ll tell you what the NBA stands for: The values of the NBA are about respect, are about inclusion, are about diversity. That is what we stand for.

 

The book of Ecclesiastes tells us that “there is a time for every purpose under heaven.” I would submit that among these purposes is that of the American people, rising together as one nation to cry out in patriotic unison, “F*** you, Mark Tatum.” “Respect?” “Inclusion?” “Diversity?” These are the words that the NBA sanctimoniously hurled at conservative Americans when it moved the 2017 All-Star game out of North Carolina because of a law requiring transgender people to use the bathroom of their biological sex. Similar progressive chest-thumping was on display when the league announced that players will henceforth be allowed to wear messages of social justice on the back of their jerseys, so long as these messages have nothing to do with Hong Kong, Xinjiang Uighurs, or anything else that might annoy the Chinese politburo. The breathtaking double-standard, the sheer hypocrisy of taking a “moral stand” against gender-specific restrooms but not against cultural genocide reveals that there was never any moral stand to begin with; there was only economic calculation. If the former stand had the potential to actually hurt the NBA’s profit margins, it surely would not have been taken. We know this because the league has bent over backward to avoid speaking out about Communist atrocities in a transparent attempt to protect its bottom line. The only alternative explanation is that the powers that be at the NBA really do believe that gender-binary restrooms are more morally objectionable than calculated ethnocide, and not even they are that ethically illiterate. The truth, on the contrary, is that “the values of the NBA” are simply money, money, and more money.

 

All this is to say that the next time any representative of the league tries to lend his voice to the latest domestic social-justice crusade, Americans should politely tell him where to shove it. In the past, the activism of American athletes has actually cost them something — that, after all, is the only real proof we have that their convictions were real in the first place. Muhammad Ali’s objections to the war in Vietnam cost him not only his world heavyweight title but some of the peak physical years of his career. The activism of the NBA and of other latter-day sporting saints has cost nothing. Colin Kaepernick, for example, now has a multi-million endorsement deal with Nike, not for playing football but for making grotesque generalizations about police officers. Nice work if you can get it.

 

The social-justice kitsch of the American sports world is sanitized, focus-grouped, and fundamentally unthreatening to the actual perpetrators of historic injustice in the world. While multi-millionaire basketball players ponder which corporately approved virtue signal to plaster on the back of their jerseys, young men to whom this pathetic organization made promises are now wasting away in labor camps. During his famous “Evil Empire” speech, President Reagan quoted C. S. Lewis’s magisterial Screwtape Letters to warn against the temptation toward drawing a false moral equivalence between America and her enemies. Today, his words fit the NBA’s board of executives to a tee:

 

The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result, but it is conceived and ordered; moved, seconded, carried and minuted in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

 

The conspiracy between NBA executives and the Chinese Communist Party against the soft-power projection of American values across the globe is a national scandal. There is always a temptation in the current media climate to fixate on the loudest and most conspicuous manifestations of evil. This is important, laudable even. But it often prevents us from asking the most important question to be asked of the powerful, which is not the question of what they shout at us, but of what they whisper to one another, and why.

At the University of North Texas, the Mob Comes Calling for a Music Theorist

By Samantha Harris

Friday, July 31, 2020

 

Chances are you have never heard of the music theorist Heinrich Schenker or the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, a publication at the University of North Texas (UNT) devoted to “all facets of Schenkerian thought, including theory, analysis, pedagogy, and historical aspects.” But that journal, and, in particular, the UNT music-theory professor Timothy Jackson, who oversees it, are now at the center of a controversy that goes to the heart of whether we are truly a free society. Can people speak their minds, or will those who express dissenting opinions be destroyed by a mob they can neither challenge nor resist?

 

In the most recent issue of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, Jackson published a critique of a plenary address given by the music theorist Philip Ewell to the Society for Music Theory. Ewell posited “a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and institutionalized.” In particular, Ewell accused Schenker (1868–1935) of being racist, therefore suggesting that his work in music theory is tainted.

 

For Jackson to have questioned Ewell’s thesis and defended Schenker against the charge of racism was seen as nothing short of heresy. UNT graduate students and faculty, as well as music professors across the country, are now demanding that Jackson be investigated, his journal shut down, and his position eliminated. A group of graduate students in UNT’s Division of Music History, Theory, and Ethnomusicology issued a statement calling on the university to “hold accountable every person responsible for the direction of the publication” of the journal. “This should also extend to investigating past bigoted behaviors by faculty,” they wrote, “and, by taking this into account, the discipline and potential removal of faculty who used the [Journal of Schenkerian Studies] platform to promote racism. Specifically, the actions of Dr. Jackson — both past and present — are particularly racist and unacceptable.” A group of UNT faculty piled on, circulating a petition “endors[ing] the call for action” by the graduate students.

 

In other words, these students and faculty are not only calling for Jackson’s head for expressing his views in his journal article, they want the university to launch a witch hunt to see what else they can dig up on him. And today, the dean of the UNT College of Music, John Richmond, announced that UNT is opening that investigation in the name of “reaffirm[ing] our dedication to combatting [sic] racism on campus and across all academic disciplines.”

 

Any professor in Jackson’s position — that of stating a view that goes against prevailing campus opinion — should be terrified. College administrators are not exactly profiles in courage when it comes to standing up to the mob, typically preferring to roll over in the hopes that they won’t be next. (Spoiler alert: They will be next.)

 

It is particularly ominous that Jackson’s critique of a fellow scholar falls wholly within the scope of academic freedom that UNT promises to its faculty. Jackson is not a professor going viral after mouthing off on Twitter, although those professors need protection too. He offered a serious critique of that scholar’s work, based on archival research within his highly specialized field, and after lifelong study of Schenker specifically and music theory more generally. He now has a legitimate fear that he may lose his job and be rendered persona non grata at any other institution. Questioning the current campus orthodoxy even in the context of serious academic inquiry is now considered a capital offense by the growing number of people who, as Daniel Schwammenthal put it earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, “seem to understand George Orwell’s ‘1984’ not as a warning but as a manual.”

 

It is difficult to overstate what an existential crisis this represents for a free society. I worry that people will be fatigued by yet another cancel-culture story, or that this may appear as simply an internal squabble among scholars in an obscure field. But if we do not stand up to this mob behavior each and every time, it will quickly swamp civil society. Simply put, the behavior of those who want Timothy Jackson’s life ruined over his academic critique of an article applying critical-race theory to music theory is not compatible with freedom. And if we do not see our own freedom as threatened by this situation and the countless others like it, that freedom will perish swiftly and silently.

 

Nevertheless, I think this battle can be won. When a similar controversy erupted at Princeton over an article in Quillette by Professor Joshua Katz, the mob clamored for Katz’s head. Katz had dissented from a “Faculty Letter” signed by many of his colleagues demanding that Princeton take illiberal measures to address perceived systemic racism on campus and beyond. Princeton’s initial reaction was predictable: The university publicly denounced Katz and announced it was investigating him. But Katz and his allies refused to cower. Support for Katz poured in from high places, including the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Eventually, realizing that it would actually be held accountable for its promises of free speech and academic freedom, Princeton relented. While maintaining his disagreement with Katz’s article, president Christopher Eisgruber announced that the article was “protected by Princeton’s commitment to the freedom of speech” and that Katz could be “answered but not censored or sanctioned.”

 

I do not believe the victory at Princeton would have happened without a large group of people, Katz included, who were willing to stand up loudly and publicly and say “enough.” While UNT may not be as prominent as Princeton, nor the Journal of Schenkerian Studies as well-known as Quillette or the Wall Street Journal, we need to stand up loudly and publicly now, too. Enough. An attack on one person’s freedom is an attack on everyone’s freedom, and the only possible way to defeat the rising tide of repression on campus and beyond is to fight with everything we have, each and every time.

Joe Biden’s Costly, Radical Race and Gender Agenda

National Review Online

Friday, July 31, 2020

 

Joe Biden says he wants equality. Who could be against that? But if just declaring yourself in favor of equality were enough, we would not still be arguing about equality in 2020. As always, when politicians talk about inequality, watch your wallet. And in this case, watch the Constitution, too.

 

In the past week, the Biden campaign has announced plans of Castro-esque length aimed at racial equality and women’s equality. We suppose we should at least welcome Biden’s continued willingness to use that old-fashioned word “women.” But Biden is so stuck in the past that he would pronounce the Equal Rights Amendment already ratified based on state legislative approvals in the 1970s. The deadline for the expiration of those long-ago votes was so clear, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg considers them dead letters. Biden would go further, demanding Senate ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a radical-feminist 1970s treaty under which even Scandinavian countries get hectored for allowing women to assume the primary role in child-rearing. Biden would also restore the Obama-era unilateral executive fiat under which domestic violence and sexual violence are made the basis for political asylum, a position with no basis in the immigration laws enacted by Congress, and no limiting principle.

 

Human rights get rough treatment under the plans. Biden proposes to roll back due-process protections for the accused in campus sexual-assault cases. The secret ballot for union elections is to be replaced by reviving “card check” elections. Biden once posed as a pro-lifer reluctantly supporting legal abortion, while opposing — for four decades — taxpayer-funded abortion. So much for that. He pledges that “his Justice Department will do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that so blatantly violate Roe v. Wade,” and that he will “restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood,” restore U.S. funding to the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund, and “restore the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate” to ignore the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision and restart the government’s assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.

 

Many of the proposals boil down to the same old thing: more federal spending of taxpayer money, more power and goodies for unions, more workplace regulations, more dividing people up by race. The price tag of all these initiatives adds up to some $7 trillion in new spending, most of it permanent. Right off the bat, a $2 trillion “accelerated investment” is pledged in a “clean energy future,” with the restriction that “disadvantaged communities receive 40 percent of overall benefits of spending in the areas of clean energy and energy efficiency deployment” — a telltale sign that this is more about spreading money around to favored constituencies than about “science.” No cause is too local to throw dollars at: Biden pledges he will “update and add air conditioners for elementary, middle and high schools.”

 

Biden proposes a $15 national minimum wage, never mind the difference between labor-market conditions in San Francisco and Mississippi, and would abolish the exemption for tipped workers such as waiters, on the theory that “two in three tipped wage workers are women” and “tipped workers of color are tipped even less than white tipped-wage workers.” He pledges to “expand pay and benefits for jobs disproportionately filled by women,” dropping the pretense that “equal pay” is at all related to equal work.

 

The further one gets into these proposals, the clearer it becomes that the left-wing radicals who were supposedly defeated by Biden in the primary are actually writing them. The euphemisms and acronyms in Biden’s plans, in Orwell’s words, “fall upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details.” For example, Biden pledges to require insurers to cover “gender confirmation surgery.” He pledges to ban “conversion therapy” — did we miss the federal government becoming the primary regulator of therapists?

 

The intense focus on categorizing people by race, channeling government benefits along explicit racial lines, and constructing new federal bureaucracies to obsess about race is numbing. Biden would “ensure all small business relief efforts are specifically designed to aid businesses owned by Black and Brown people,” “require publicly traded companies to disclose data on the racial and gender composition of their corporate boards,” and “establish an Equity Commission” to “focus on the unique jurisdictional and regulatory barriers that Black, Brown, and Native farmers, ranchers, and fishers must negotiate and make sure that processes are streamlined and simplified to promote new and beginning farming and ranching operations by Black and Brown farmers.”

 

You might think the Federal Reserve exists mainly to ensure sound money and a stable banking system; Biden proposes that “the Fed should aggressively enhance its surveillance and targeting of persistent racial gaps in jobs, wages, and wealth.” A government that puts “racial” and “surveillance” in the same job description for an unelected body should be viewed with alarm.

 

Biden proposes to lavish $70 billion on “HBCUs, Tribal Colleges And Universities (TCUs), Hispanic-serving Institutions (HSIs), Asian American And Native American Pacific Islander-serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), Alaska Native-serving Institutions and Native Hawaiian-serving Institutions (ANNHs), Predominantly Black Institutions (PBIs), and Native American-serving Nontribal Institutions (NASNTIs).” Pity the poor Biden speechwriter preparing the candidate to talk about how AANAPISIs differ from NASNTIs.

 

The mask of the Biden campaign is the candidate’s supposed centrism. The reality is more than America can afford.