To understand the troubled relationship between America and communist China, it is useful to tell the story of two apples.
The first story begins on a fishing boat, where a 12-year-old boy named Jimmy Lai hid as a passenger to reach Hong Kong from Guangzhou, China, in 1951.
Starting with a $ 8 a month worker, Lai became fluent in English, founded a clothing empire called Giordano, and then founded a publishing giant that includes Hong Kong’s largest independent newspaper, The Apple. A staunch defender of freedom of expression and democracy, Lai is now in prison and facing a possible life sentence on subordinate charges.
Apple’s second is the company that probably made your smartphone. Tim Cook, the current CEO of the tech giant, was born in Alabama in 1960. After earning a master’s degree in business from Duke, he joined Apple as vice president of global operations in 1998 – and quickly began planning. moving the company’s production operations to locations near Guangzhou, Jimmy Lai’s birthplace.
As a result, Apple eliminated unions, US wages and strict environmental and safety regulations, while earning investment subsidies from China. In business, Cook became one of the richest people in the world, with enormous political influence. However, Apple’s American connection with China will soon work at the expense of Apple’s other pro-democracy.
In the fall of 2019, massive demonstrations took place in Hong Kong in support of the rule of law and against the extradition of citizens to mainland China.
Apple newspaper owner Lai was among the protesters. Apple, the American technology giant, had an application in the store that helped dissidents by showing where they and the police were in real time.
This drove the communist leaders in Beijing crazy. They turned to obedient continental news publications to demand the removal of the application from the Apple store. Cook’s Apple got the message – and it did just that.
Worse, Cook said he did it voluntarily, when everyone knew that with all its production capacity located in China, Apple was scared of what would happen if it did not comply. The world has learned how much Apple Corp. is being held hostage. for the Chinese Communist Party.
Cook and his Apple loudly support liberal values and the rights of Western minorities. But when it comes to China’s imprisonment of a million Uighurs in concentration camps, the repression of Tibet, the killing of free society in Hong Kong and the suppression of international probes at the origin of the new coronavirus, Apple keeps Cook’s mother curious.
The silence is cursing. And it reflects the corrupt business that the West has struck with the Chinese Communist Party, which is open about its hostility to our values.
In the ninth article of the 2013 Communist Party Congress resolutions on the “ideological sphere,” China’s leaders told the world exactly how they felt. They declared a complete opposition to Western values, to constitutional democracy and to Western understandings of universal human values, freedom of the press, human rights and civil society.
They also declared war on the Western conception of the rule of law and against any control of party power.
In other words, the problem of Western China, encapsulated by the two apples, will not be solved with better trade and climate agreements. Rather, the growing conflict between the Free World and the Chinese Communist Party is fundamentally ideological.
The bottom line is that Beijing will do business with the Free World and allow even capitalists to make money in its market, but only if they at least tacitly accept communist values and live in their relations with China.
Here’s the question the American and Western elites have to answer: How many Apple iPhones – or any other cheap product – deserve the freedom not only of Jimmy Lai, but of oppressed Hong Kong and mainland China?
Clyde Prestowitz has served as a senior sales official and economic adviser to the Obama, Clinton and Reagan administrations. He is the author of “The Upside Down World: America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership” (Yale, 2021).