Joseph Tsai, the billionaire philanthropist and Nets owner, is trying to whitewash his pro-Beijing apologism with a new foundation.
The billionaire philanthropist Nets owner is trying to whitewash his pro-Beijing apologism with a new foundation.
Y ou could be forgiven for viewing Joseph Tsai, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba, as a model citizen. He’s a philanthropist — the main benefactor of a neuroscience institute at Stanford and of a Chinese-law center at Yale — and now, amid the recent spate of violent crimes targeting Asians, an outspoken advocate for Asian Americans.
During a CNBC appearance this week, Tsai expounded on his 2017 purchase of the Brooklyn Nets. “It’s a social institution, you’re doing it for the fans, you’re doing it for the broader population,” he told the network’s Andrew Ross Sorkin during an interview at the Barclays Center, calling the stadium “a location for people to gather and focus on whatever social cause that they want to focus on.” He ticked off its many pandemic-era roles: food bank, vaccination site, polling location, and the site of some of New York City’s most notable racial-justice demonstrations last year.
But Tsai’s work is not worthy of celebration. Sorkin arranged the interview ostensibly to discuss Tsai’s work on the Asian American Foundation, a new group he founded amid the current wave of racially motivated attacks, but when he pressed Tsai on China’s human-rights violations, the Alibaba exec first evaded the question, then peddled falsehoods about the Hong Kong pro-democracy protest movement, as the Chinese Communist Party’s draconian crackdown reaches a new apex and the first anniversary of its authoritarian national-security law approaches.
Tsai’s apologism for the Party line is a tiring, old tactic. As he did in 2019 following the uproar over a tweet by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey (“fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong”), Tsai in his interview advocated deference to nationalistic Chinese sensitivities. “This is a very scarring kind of history of China having foreign powers come in and carve up your territories,” he said, adding, “If you’re a Chinese citizen, I look at this history, I want to make sure that we prevent foreign powers from carving up our territories. I think Hong Kong ought to be seen in that context.”
His articulation of the farcical insinuation that foreign powers in 2021 are trying to carve up China makes sense when viewed as a broader business strategy. The Taipei-born Canadian citizen and Yale graduate (of the college and law school) makes a point of associating himself with the mainland. The Wall Street Journal found this out during an interview amid the Morey furor: “When a reporter mentioned his ‘Taiwanese’ heritage over coffee in September, well before Morey’s tweet, Tsai stopped the conversation and said: ‘I’m Chinese.’”
If that makes for good corporate practice, so too do his accusations that the Hong Kong protest movement brought about violence. “There’s a lot of criticism of, you know, the democratic freedoms or freedoms of speech” being “suppressed,” he told Sorkin. “But overall, since they instituted the national-security law, everything is now stabilized.”
“Stabilized” is a funny way to describe the situation. Earlier this month, the city’s authorities blocked an annual public commemoration of the Tiananmen Square demonstration, and just a day after Tsai’s interview they arrested the editor of the defiant Apple Daily, which has refused to back down in the face of the authoritarian onslaught, despite the jailing of its owner, Jimmy Lai. The most prominent figures of the pro-democracy movement have been either arrested, forced into hiding, or pressed to flee the city for foreign democracies. The once ubiquitous demonstrations have been snuffed out.
Despite his professed support of social-justice work in the United States, Tsai seems more motivated by the significant business interests at stake in China. He noted in a Facebook post rebutting Morey’s message, “The hurt that this message has caused will take a long time to repair,” referring to the offense caused to Chinese NBA fans. He was right about that in more ways than one: Morey’s tweet was damaging to the NBA’s brand in China. The league’s roots in China are deeply embedded — so much so that, like many other corporate giants today, it has turned a blind eye to the Party’s human-rights atrocities against Uyghurs, operating a basketball camp in the Xinjiang region. Morey’s tweet put at risk preseason games that were supposed to take place in the country, including one that would be played by Tsai’s Nets. After his Facebook post, however, the game did go on, albeit without corporate sponsorship messages on the courts, likely as a warning against future misbehavior.
That, of course, was two years ago, and although Tsai’s comments on Hong Kong in the CNBC interview did not deviate much from his previous comments, much has obviously changed. Beijing has all but absorbed Hong Kong into its authoritarian jurisdiction faster than expected, but Tsai’s message about Hong Kong stays constant.
Another major development since 2019 explains why Tsai might feel more pressed than ever to double down on his defenses of Chinese Communist conduct in Hong Kong. The Party’s mainland crackdown on China’s corporate mammoths has been punishing, leading Alibaba CEO Jack Ma to eschew the public role that he once had. “He’s taken up painting as a hobby,” said Tsai, avoiding CNBC’s questions about the antitrust investigations and record fines with which the Party has asserted its dominance over the corporate empire.
Despite his pro-China commentary, Tsai remains accepted by polite society. Defending the Party’s actions is not too grave a sin in American public life today, and particularly not for a business leader. There are few costs currently to deter such behavior by a prominent entrepreneur and philanthropist, and that person can whitewash his support of a brutal regime with his extracurricular activities anyway.
He told Sorkin that he started the Asian American Foundation with a whopping $125 million donation and that most of the money will be spent on backing other Asian-American organizations that fight racism and mobilize voters. By dint of some mix of Tsai’s pull and the genuinely commendable goals to which his Asian American Foundation aspires, the group has attracted an all-star board across hedge funds, the entertainment industry, nonprofits, and more. It counts the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, TV star Daniel Dae Kim, and the first lady of Maryland among its advisers and board members.
As it is currently conceived, though, the foundation, like the rest of his philanthropy, obscures Tsai’s backing of an authoritarian regime and his thereby undermining the commendable goals to which the new foundation aspires. Sorkin deserves some credit for pushing Tsai on his defenses of Chinese human-rights abuses, but Tsai is still getting away with the indefensible here.
The whole shtick seems to be a façade to keep a business empire, and a fortune, temporarily safe from the predatory regime that hopes to exert dominance over it. The tragedy is that the Party’s politics are then given voice in the United States, where Tsai’s influence is celebrated and barely condemned.