Miranda Devine: We should all fear the US’s capitulation to China
With the NBA falling over itself to apologise and Hollywood rescripting franchises, it seems the will of the Chinese government now reigns supreme in the US, writes Miranda Devine.
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The craven capitulation of America’s mighty basketball industry to Chinese bullying yesterday proves corporate cowardice is a national security issue.
China’s belligerent reaction to a single tweet by Houston Rockets basketball boss Daryl Morey in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters set off a bout of kowtowing by the National Basketball Association which is desperate to hang on to market reportedly worth billions, where 500 million people watched at least one NBA game last season.
We are seeing a communist dictatorship increasingly willing to use its market power to subvert freedom in the West. The pathetic response of the NBA shows it works.
As all hell broke loose, Morey deleted his tweet “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong” and issued an abject apology.
“I did not intend my tweet to cause any offence to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China … I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.”
The NBA damned Morey’s “regrettable” sentiments which had “deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China”.
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But the contemptible brownnosing wasn’t enough for Beijing’s bullies, who want Morey to serve as an example to anyone in the West who dares side with Hong Kong’s brave, outgunned democracy protesters.
All day the ritual retaliation rolled in. The Chinese Basketball Association suspended its relationship with the Rockets. Chinese state television announced games would no longer be broadcast. A Chinese sporting goods company said it would no longer do business with the Rockets and a sports news website declared it would not cover the team.
Billionaire Joe Tsai, boss of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and owner of the Brooklyn Nets, weighed in with an open letter demanding more respect for China. Relations “will take a long time to repair”, he said.
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The NBA wheeled out Rockets star James Harden to try to repair the damage: “We love China. We love playing there. … They show us the most support and love … We love everything they’re about.”
This is a game so woke it once banned the word “owner” for being racially insensitive. It cancelled a playoff in Charlotte, North Carolina, to protest that state’s anti-transgender bathroom legislation. It’s railed against Donald Trump’s immigration policies, campaigned for Black Lives Matter and championed diversity and inclusion on steroids.
But now America’s most politically correct sport is apolitical and morally neutral when it comes to standing up for actual human rights in Hong Kong, where just last week China celebrated 70 years of Communist Party rule by shooting a protester in the chest.
While the NBA grovelled, jewellery company Tiffany & Co issued its own pathetic apology to China and deleted a tweet of a model with her hand over her right eye. The image was suspected to be a sly nod to Hong Kong protesters because a young volunteer medic was blinded in her right eye in August after being shot by police with “bean bag” bullets during protests in Kowloon.
“We regret that it may be perceived as such,” said a Tiffany spokesman yesterday, “and in turn have removed the image from our digital and social media channels and will discontinue its use effective immediately.”
Hollywood also has capitulated, censoring material Beijing doesn’t like, from removing Taiwanese patches on Tom Cruise’s jacket in Top Gun: Maverick, to deleting a Tibetan monk character from Doctor Strange.
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Last week, after South Park bad boys Trey Parker and Matt Stone mocked the studios for kowtowing to the Chinese government, in an episode titled ‘Band in China’, every mention of the show was deleted from China’s internet, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Coming on the eve of the latest round of trade talks in Washington this week, China’s ramped up aggression seems sinister.
Asked on Tuesday if he has linked the Hong Kong protests to trade negotiations, Trump said: “Well, we’d like to see a very humane solution … If anything happened bad, I think that would be a very bad for the negotiation … But hopefully they can work out something that’s amicable …
“As to whether or not we make a deal, I don’t know … They’re down three and a half million jobs since we started [applying tariffs] and their supply chain is really cracked and broken. They want to make a deal. We’ll see what happens.”
Michael Pillsbury, author of The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, a Trump favourite, told Fox News this week that if the Chinese trade delegation has “nothing new to offer and the talks are at an impasse then it’s time for escalation … [Trump] could inflict a lot of pain on China”.
Pillsbury described a “new bellicosity and imperial nationalism” in China, which now describes America as “yesterday’s hegemon”.
He praises Trump for standing up to Beijing but impeachment proceedings could not have come at a worse time.
“The Democrats are undercutting him and whether he can be credible to the Chinese [is unknown].”
While Washington obsesses about Ukraine, a new book shows how high the stakes are with China.
Matt Stoller, author of Goliath, the 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, writes that the collapse of manufacturing means the US is dependent on China for everything from vitamin C and nylon products to optical scanners, consumer robotics and electronics. Most ominously, he claims China is the only supplier of specialty chemicals used in munitions and missiles.
We can see where the siren song of China’s market leads.
Miranda Devine will be based in New York through 2020 covering current affairs for The Daily Telegraph.