Let’s get this out of the way: U.S. companies have caved in to Chinese interests. You can see it in the NBA kowtowing to its large Chinese viewership when the backlash from their nation’s basketball association force Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey to apologize, or when fans in Philly are kicked out of a game between the 76ers and the Guangzhou Loong-Lions (a Chinese b-ball team) because they either wore “Free Hong-Kong T-Shirts” or held up signs with the same message. Chinese censorship has come to America, setting a very dangerous precedent.
Keep in mind that China was named one of the worst places in the world for human rights abuses by Amnesty International. This is the same country that up until 2015 forced women to have abortions if they had more than one child under any circumstance, harvests organs from living donors, on top of their ongoing and barbaric torture of Christians, Uighurs and other Muslims who try to follow their faith there.
More recently, Hong Kong’s judicial independence has been endangered by that government proposing a bill, known as the “Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019.” This would create a mechanism of transferring fugitives not only for Hong Kong, but also for mainland China, Macau and Taiwan which are thankfully excluded in current laws.
Because the people of Hong Kong don’t want to be ripped out of their country and charged in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and be at their mercy afterward, the latter has been viciously attacking anyone who protests this corrupt policy. Extradition, by the way, means that mainland China can arbitrarily do as they wish with a Hong Kong citizen accused or convicted of a crime, a clear violation of the “one nation, two systems” agreement signed by both Hong Kong and the PRC 1997. It seems that the mainland is too powerful to care whether rights are violated or that people die in the name of another dollar.
Now, their censorship is making its way to the United States of America.
The fact that companies like the NBA eject fans over their opinions on China’s barbarism and ActivisionBlizzard bans professional “Hearthstone” player Ng “Blitzchung” Wai Chung after simply chanting “Free Hong Kong!” is not the worst of it. Apple removed an app called HKmap. live, which provided a crowdsourced map service on the Hong Kong Protests and Google pulled an app called ‘The Revolution of Our Times’ where players control an HK protester, citing “(endangerment) of law enforcement and residents” and “(violations) of company policy related to ‘sensitive events’” respectively, according to the Wall Street Journal. Why are American companies licking China’s boots?
One can expect corporate apologies in the wake of it all, but as sterile and limp as these often are, they ignore the damage already done. These “apologies” wouldn’t make a scribble on the sign of a real act of contrition.
Corporations are not people, so stop treating them that way.