The Wall Street Journal is now canceled because of supposed racism.
“The Chinese people do not welcome those media that speak racially discriminatory language and maliciously slander and attack China,” a spokesman for the foreign ministry stated. This was his explanation for why the government had expelled three reporters from the news outlet.
The explanation is probably disingenuous. China was likely retaliating against the U.S. government’s decision to classify, in effect, China’s state-owned news organizations as arms of China’s government.
But leaders of the Communist Party of China cannot admit that, so they instead decided to adopt the lingo of U.S. campus cancel culture.
People can choose to believe that it’s a racist slur to call China “the sick man of Asia,” the offending headline in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. But China’s next step was to say that such a slur is inadmissible, unforgivable, and justifies banishment. “Free speech” can’t be used to defend racism, they say.
This is exactly the way campus leftists in the United States speak when they try to shut down objectionable views.
@StateDept The @WSJ cannot use freedom of speech as a pretext to publish a discriminatory & insulting article with a racist headline. They cannot refuse to apologize for its mistake under the pretext of freedom of speech, either.
— Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) February 20, 2020
China and its defenders consistently deploy the rhetoric of America’s campus Left in order to justify intolerance and censorship. We saw it when China went after the NBA because one Houston Rockets executive expressed support for Hong Kong’s independence. Billionaire Nets owner Joe Tsai at the time wrote a letter explaining how China was right to be totally intolerant of expressions of sympathy for political rivals because free speech can’t be invoked to defend cultural insensitivity.
“The NBA has been very progressive in allowing players and other constituents a platform to speak out on issues,” Tsai wrote. “The problem is, there are certain topics that are third-rail issues in certain countries, societies and communities.”
Supporting the people of Hong Kong is not an acceptable opinion, Tsai wrote. “This issue is non-negotiable.”
This sounds familiar. Read Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic on a recent survey of college students:
A vocal minority of campus liberals believe that some issues, particularly anything that touches on race, are “non-negotiable” and are not protected by general ideas of free speech.
The only question is whether today’s Communist Party of China learned from the campus leftists — or the other way around.
