On June 16, Xi Jinping met Bill Gates in Beijing. "I am very happy to see you," China's ruler said to the Microsoft co-founder, whom he called "an old friend of ours." The seating arrangements for Gates confirmed Xi's sentiments and showed the businessman-turned-philanthropist was held in high regard by the Chinese regime: Gates and Xi sat in chairs next to each other.
This was not the case when it came to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. When Blinken met Xi in a meeting granted at the last minute, the Chinese ruler sat by himself in a horseshoe arrangement, with Blinken located far away. The message was clear: America's top diplomat came as a supplicant.
The distinction speaks volumes to the difference in how China views the U.S.—and how it views our most financially successful corporations. In recent months, China's regime has laid out the welcome mat for Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Laxman Narasimhan of Starbucks, and JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon, perhaps the most influential figure in the global business community.
"We do business in 100 countries," Dimon told Fox News's Maria Bartiromo in August of 2021. "And we do it under the laws of those lands and under the law of America as they apply." Then he delivered the punchline: "Foreign policy is set by the American government. It is not set by J.P. Morgan."
Dimon has a point. The Constitution confers the power to make foreign policy upon one individual, who at the moment is not Jamie Dimon. And yet, it is also true that business leaders such as Dimon are using the law as cover while making billions in a country engaged in the worst atrocities since the Third Reich.
Recall that the Third Reich, too, was a magnet for American business. IBM's Thomas Watson helped the German regime count Jews with leased Hollerith tabulating machines and punch cards, increasing the Nazis' ability to identify Jews and round them up for extermination.
Watson was assisting in the commission of grave crimes. IBM, after all, was working for Germany as late as 1940. This cooperation continued, incredibly, even after Hitler's forces had invaded France and during the bombing of England. As the Atlantic's Jack Beatty points out in his review of Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust, Watson made "damnable choices," engaging in "unrighteous commerce."
Today, the state run by the Communist Party of China is committing genocide in what it calls the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the home of Uyghur Muslims, Kazakhs, and other Turkic minorities. That determination was made in 2021 by both the Pompeo and Blinken State Departments.
The Chinese regime is also committing crimes against humanity by detaining millions in "vocational education and training centers," which are in reality concentration camps. It is torturing and killing detainees: Beijing built a crematorium between two of those camps in Xinjiang's Aksu City late last decade. The regime is forcibly aborting and sterilizing minority women, imprisoning children, and institutionalizing rape. Uyghurs and others minorities have been forced to provide labor to American multinationals, such as Nike, in conditions akin to slavery.
Foreign companies have also participated in China's determined efforts to surveil and control the Turkic minorities. Artificial intelligence researchers from Microsoft, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Michigan State University delivered keynote speeches at the Chinese Conference on Biometric Recognition in Xinjiang in August 2018 on facial recognition. Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and others have been accused of deep and continuing involvement in that region.
U.S. companies insist they have a responsibility to act on social issues in America. Does it not follow that they have the responsibility to act morally when far graver crimes against humanity are being perpetrated, as they are in China?
Apparently not. Instead you get Dimon and Musk bending the knee to the Chinese Communist Party.
There is only one way to end this. The president of the United States must cut off the flow of cash to China with the sweeping authority contained in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917.
Moreover, President Biden must enforce the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act of 2021, which puts teeth in the forced and slave labor provisions of the Trade Act of 1930.
China is not only committing genocide and other crimes against humanity. It is also threatening the security of America and its allies and partners.
All Chinese companies, whether state or private or military or civilian, should be considered connected because of Xi Jinping's "military-civil fusion" policy, which allows the People's Liberation Army to have access to any technology civilian companies possess. Moreover, in the Communist Party's top-down system, no company can refuse Xi's orders.
The corporate distinctions that mean something in our society have far less relevance in China's. Business relations with any Chinese company, even a private one in the civilian sector, enables the ambitions and the crimes of the party-state.
America at this crucial time needs its businesses on its side, not on China's side.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
