The Expanding Frontier of Tyranny

D ammit, another one. This time Eastman Kodak, makers of film and other gear for photography. Another what? Another American company that has decided to treat the hysterical screaming of the Chinese Communist Party as if it were the wailing of an innocent child — a child whose wound it has sought to heal.

Recently, Kodak’s Instagram account featured work from a forthcoming collection, Dust, by Patrick Wack, a Parisian photographer who has been working in western China and now resides in Berlin. Wack has been photographing the changing life of western China for the better half of a decade. His photographs document the decline of the old, often romanticized Islamic civilization on China’s frontier. And its gradual replacement by the new hulking, modernized construction and development that is meant to entice Han Chinese settlement.

Oddly enough, Wack’s work can be as discomfiting to Americans as to the Chinese. Half of that collection is dedicated to a very haunting series of photographs, in which Wack uses the landscapes of the old Silk Road to make obvious and beautiful visual allusions to imagery of American settlers and the American West. The modern roads wind and disappear into ancient, mountainous landscapes. Uyghur Muslims and other Turkic people are portrayed as haunted, sad, and bewildered, while the incoming members of the Han civilization are shown as contingently hopeful for the new life they have begun on the frontier.

If there is a political comment in his work, it is ambiguous. Is Wack pulling the moral opprobrium heaped on the Chinese Communist Party and pointing out that it also belongs on the American project of Manifest Destiny? Or is he pointing out that the kind of cataclysmic destruction wreaked on Native American cultures is being repeated again? Or do these photographs draw our attention to the awful reality of life on frontiers — where the technologically advanced inevitably triumph over those whose civilization cannot adapt itself to resist incursion? The artist himself is admirably frank that he had documented Xinjiang’s “abrupt descent into an Orwellian dystopia.”

After deleting Wack’s photographs from their account, Kodak was frank as well, but not admirable. Kodak blamed “management loopholes.” The company stated:

For a long time, Kodak has maintained a good relationship with the Chinese government and has been in close cooperation with various government departments. We will continue to respect the Chinese government and the Chinese law.

We will keep ourselves in check and correct ourselves, taking this as an example of the need for caution.

We respect censorship. We respect the government sterilizing and imprisoning Uyghurs. Our respect for genocidaires is just the glorious free market at work!

One of the reasons the United States didn’t do a great deal of open trade with the Soviet Union was that we wished to avoid embarrassments along these lines. If we had traded, perhaps there’d be statements in the historical record in which George Romney praised the great leadership of Nikolai Bulganin before sending the latest Rambler station wagons on a slow boat to Vladivostok.

Altering or deleting photographs in the hope of hiding the truths contained in them is just the sort of paradigmatically evil thing that totalitarians do. And China is the kind of country that gets mad at you for liking the wrong tweets.

We have to be clear-eyed about how communist parties can forge political and moral corruption out of the profit motive. American companies such as the Marriott hotels are the kind of lickspittles for power who fire their employees to appease China’s absurd rage over a liked tweet.

Kodak can argue to itself that it’s not really bending the knee for the Chinese Communist Party, it’s just protecting shareholders. But what we actually see in its groveling are the frontiers of Chinese political power, extended into America through not only the commercial vehicles of Chinese state-owned enterprises such as Huawei but also our own storied American companies.

What this teaches us is the primacy of the political. Human nature and the laws of economics shape and limit what states can do. But the American state must also be on guard for the ways in which simple greed and the protection of shareholder value can introduce a powerful foreign tyranny into our lives.