OPINION:
When American corporate titans stood and clapped to honor Chinese dictator Xi Jinping at a Nov. 15 dinner, the scene showcased just how submissive they are to a man who is trying to subvert the United States by cheating, drugging and ruining children.
It has to be a symbiosis unique in modern history. China is sabotaging America wherever it can; its leader comes to the United States and basks in sustained applause from our country’s richest industrialists.
As Mr. Xi entered the banquet hall as the U.S.-China Business Council’s guest of honor, the Chinese-owned TikTok social platform was promoting murderous Osama bin Laden and Hamas while bashing U.S. ally Israel, its citizens raped and murdered by Hamas. American children and Generation Z soaked it all up.
How many computer hacks Mr. Xi’s military unleashed that night will emerge with time, as will the number of Chinese fentanyl chemicals shipped to Mexican drug cartels for forwarding up north. The dictator is also busy forming a nefarious alliance with U.S. enemies Russia and Iran.
But there is a more important thing for America’s tech, finance and manufacturing chiefs to think about: profits.
China’s consumers spend over $6 trillion each year on retail sales, an amount that has more than doubled in 10 years.
China cast off the stupidity of Marxism as a guiding economic principle in favor of communist police-state control of capitalism. Communism stinks at creating innovation and wealth. But it is a great way to take and hold power, as the Chinese Communist Party has brutally demonstrated.
All that money is why Tim Cook of Apple, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stanley Deal of Boeing, Robert Goldstein of Las Vegas Sands and other American corporatists applauded on Nov. 15. It is why U.S.-China Business Council President Craig Allen, a State Department alumnus, commanded “Please rise” when Mr. Xi entered the room.
To me, the dinner shows that these rich globalists no longer really represent corporate America. Their real allegiance lies with Mr. Xi and his China and their massive buying power and the fact that all those profits could crumble if you say the wrong thing or fail to clap for the man who poisons us and steals from us.
Mr. Cook’s Apple, for example, generated $74 billion in revenue from China last year, nearly one-fifth of its global take for phones, Macs and laptops.
Tech giants can say anything they want about a free USA. But don’t dare offend China or its quest for global dominance or access ends.
The NBA, for example, discourages any critic who would jeopardize pro basketball’s Chinese cash flow via TV broadcasts. The NBA is home to a number of America bashers and China apologists.
Media oligarch Michael Bloomberg, a Democratic megadonor and former presidential candidate, does significant business in China via Bloomberg LP’s financial data services. In a 2019 interview on PBS, he said Mr. Xi “is not a dictator” because “he has a constituency to answer to.”
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, with his $100 billion fortune, is a cheerleader for China. It helped him become so rich that he spends money on persuading us to eat insects and fake meat and sends money to journalists to write his press releases.
“I tend to see China’s rise as a huge win for the world,” Mr. Gates gushed to Australia’s Lowy Institute this past January. With Mr. Xi buttered up, he visited the man six months later. As he visited, China was hacking Microsoft email services in an apparent attempt to penetrate the State Department.
Cable provided Comcast’s Universal subsidiary owns NBC and thus MSNBC, a hard-edge leftist channel where some anchors took Hamas’ side after its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Comcast Corp. is in China, working closely with the Communist Party on projects that bring in about $1 billion in revenue annually.
“Comcast is literally in a business partnership with the communist government,” said a National Legal and Policy Center staff report in June. “Comcast subsidiary NBC is supposed to be an objective journalistic organization, but it is anything but, with a broad and deep reputation for liberally slanted reporting and advocacy,” the right-leaning watchdog nonprofit said.
The U.S.-China Business Council’s fantasy league has a new reality check in Washington: the House Select Committee on the Communist Chinese Party and its outspoken chairman, Rep. Mike Gallagher, Wisconsin Republican.
Mr. Gallagher sent an open letter to the business council and fellow host, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, chastising them for hero-worshiping Mr. Xi.
“Beyond the standard price to attend the event, USCBC and NCUSCR are also selling $40,000 tickets to Americans and American businesses to sit at Xi’s table,” he wrote. “It is unconscionable that American companies might pay thousands of dollars to join a ‘welcome dinner’ hosted by the very same CCP officials who have facilitated a genocide against millions of innocent men, women, and children in Xinjiang.”
The two hosts should have heard, perhaps through an invitation, from FBI Director Christopher Wray.
In 2022, Mr. Wray delivered a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that Reagan himself would have heartily endorsed because it exposed America’s chief enemy today: China.
“The Chinese government steals staggering volumes of information and causes deep, job-destroying damage across a wide range of industries,” Mr. Wray said. “Here in the U.S., they unleash a massive, sophisticated hacking program that is bigger than those of every other major nation combined.”
As the Nov. 15 Xi-honoring banquet displayed, corporate America shrugs. China simply has too many consumers and too much money not to let Beijing methodically destroy us.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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