Corporations are supposedly entering a new phase of caring about social justice. If the executives do care about what’s right and wrong in this world, then Hong Kong is currently on your mind.
The people of that small enclave, historically prosperous and free under a British common law system similar to our own, have taken to the streets in recent weeks. Badly outnumbered, they are now desperately resisting the broad-daylight theft of their civil liberties by a Communist government.
China’s Communist dictatorship, the wanton brutality and misrule of which have produced a domestic body count exceeding those of the Hitler and Stalin regimes combined, respects neither its own written domestic laws nor its promises to other nations. But that regime, backed by the world’s largest standing army, is just around the corner from Hong Kong. China now threatens Hongkongers’ free speech rights, their access to accurate information, their ability to communicate with the outside world, and their rights as criminal defendants, should they ever fall afoul of fickle Communist Party bureaucrats.
In Hong Kong, the forces of right and wrong, of democracy, freedom, and individual rights versus murderous state oppression, are as clearly arrayed and cleanly defined as one could hope. There is certainly none of the ambiguity or gray-shading that everywhere suffuses the safe confines of America’s domestic politics.
Yet many American corporations, the same ones happy to frame themselves as brave truth-tellers when there is no price to pay and no real moral issue at stake, now find themselves spineless when the fight actually matters. Terrified of losing out on potential future profits from 1.4 billion Chinese consumers, Hollywood and Silicon Valley have bowed again and again to Chinese censors, both in important and unimportant matters. This week, the National Basketball Association did even worse. After Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey showed support for Hong Kong protesters, the Chinese Basketball Association suspended cooperation with the team. The NBA released a craven, disgraceful response explicitly condemning Morey’s comments as “inappropriate” and implying that his position was simply misinformed. Other NBA figures, including Joseph Tsai, owner of the Brooklyn Nets, are outing themselves as agitators for the Beijing regime, whereas still others, such as the oft-outspoken Steve Kerr, have proven to be useful idiots when it matters.
The notoriously “woke” ESPN, increasingly eager to inject a left-wing domestic political agenda into American sports, followed the same cowardly path. Deadspin reports that in corporate memos, the network has instructed its anchors and commentators to tiptoe in their coverage around the explosive political situation in China that underpins the entire dispute.
The same cowards running these companies, who hold Hongkongers’ human rights in such low esteem, are the ones eager to speak out in favor of taking away guns if they think their outspokenness will make them a few extra dollars.
This is perfectly consistent in one regard: Consistently, Big Business supports government power over individual liberty.
There is nothing wrong with making or pursuing profit, in China or anywhere else. After all, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” as Adam Smith explained, “but from their regard to their own self-interest.” The profit motive, the self-interest of others, has also made possible the innovations that allow us all to travel around the planet, communicate instantaneously with people anywhere, and to live longer and healthier lives.
The pursuit of profit makes the world go round. But that doesn’t mean the myopic pursuit of profit at any cost is a good thing in the long or even the short run. The market does not reward companies that make extra money by cheating their customers, for example. Consumers abandon untrustworthy and dishonest business partners when their practices are exposed.
And this is exactly how consumers should approach companies that sacrifice American values while hypocritically pretending to the philosophically dubious ideal of corporate social responsibility.
Consumers have every right to demand contrition and change from the institutions that are increasingly kowtowing to the butchers of Beijing. If Hollywood, the media, the NBA, ESPN, or anyone else wants to lay up treasure in mainland China, you should probably reconsider where your entertainment dollars go.
