A congressional panel’s hearing on the upcoming Beijing Olympics makes China-enabling executives famous.
A congressional panel’s hearing on the upcoming Beijing Olympics makes China-enabling executives famous.
C orporate America’s breathless courtship of the Chinese Communist Party was given five public faces during a hearing hosted yesterday by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on corporate sponsorship of the Beijing 2022 Olympics.
“This is one of the most pathetic and disgraceful hearings in which I have participated in my eight years in the Congress,” said Senator Tom Cotton, in one of the most explosive moments of the two-hour affair, ripping into Coke’s global vice president for human rights, Paul Lalli.
Lalli and his counterparts from other prominent U.S. companies — Airbnb’s David Holyoke, Intel’s Steven Rodgers, Procter & Gamble’s Sean Mulvaney, and Visa’s Andrea Fairchild — became overnight the living embodiments of one of the most disturbing new trends in American capitalism. Each of their companies is sponsoring the Beijing Olympics in some capacity. And each of them went to great lengths to avoid criticizing the government in Beijing, which presides over perhaps the most lucrative market in the world for their companies.
Of course, that government is also guilty of some of the most disturbing assaults on human dignity this century. Other examples abound, but the Uyghur genocide, the focus of the CECC hearing, is emblematic of this, encompassing mass detention, rape, torture, and other heinous crimes.
The party’s defensive attitude about its atrocities has seeped into the U.S. business community, as large companies with operations that touch China have been forced to toe the communist Party’s line or else face consequences. Over the past couple of years, Delta has apologized after listing Taiwan and Tibet as countries on its website; the NBA and McKinsey each operated various events and facilities near Xinjiang concentration camps; Hilton even constructed a hotel on top of a demolished Xinjiang mosque; and Eastman Kodak just issued its own craven apology for obliquely treading into the Xinjiang debate.
So the five companies with representatives at the CECC hearing are merely a cross-section representing Beijing’s capture of American capitalism. But they are prominent examples that nonetheless deserve censure as they are sponsoring the Beijing Olympics, seemingly without hesitation.
This is no surprise, as these companies have made headlines in the past for their nonchalant attitude toward the Chinese Communist Party’s malfeasance. Just before the hearing started, news broke that some Airbnb listings in China explicitly banned people of certain minority ethnicities, including Tibetans and Uyghurs, from making bookings (that story wasn’t even the first time that this problem had come to light).
Conservative politicians have ripped into “woke capitalism’s” hypocrisy — the combination of outspoken political activism at home and silence concerning Chinese human-rights abuses — for years. What was notable about yesterday’s hearing is how their Democratic colleagues assisted in applying the pressure (though without the focus on these companies’ left-leaning politics at home).
During his own questioning of Lalli, juxtaposing Coke’s public opposition to a Republican-backed voting law in Georgia with his company’s refusal to condemn the CCP’s crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, Cotton referred back to earlier questioning by Representative Jim McGovern.
The Democrat had asked the executives, each representing a different sponsor of the 2022 games, if their companies would ask the International Olympic Committee to postpone the games to “allow time for the Chinese government to stop its atrocities and relocate if they do not.”
Their evasive answers won’t come as much of a surprise to keen observers of corporate America’s pivot to China, but the exchange might just be the most public, direct accounting of these companies’ acquiescence to China to date:
Fairchild: As a sponsor, we have no role in the site selection process of where they look.
Mulvaney: We respect all human rights all around the world, and Visa said we don’t have a role in site selection. So I don’t believe that we would be in a position to tell the IOC to move the games.
Rodgers: Good morning, Mr. Chairman, the answer to the question is yes. We have stressed with the IOC the importance of human rights to Intel and encourage them to take these matters most seriously.
Lalli: We do not have a say on the host-city selection, on whether the games are relocated or delayed. We follow the athletes. But we work through the center to strive for a responsible event, including embedding human rights in any of the mega-sporting events.
Holyoke: We’ve had numerous conversations with senior leaders at the IOC about the importance of human rights, and we’ve continued to stress to them the importance of being transparent and engaged with host governments about this matter.
At this point, McGovern reminded Holyoke that the question was whether his company would ask the IOC to postpone the Olympics; he responded, like his counterparts, that his company is not involved in the selection of host cities.
McGovern then asked another yes-or-no question: whether their companies could commit to declining to send their CEOs to the games. Again, here, Holyoke and Lalli answered that their companies’ partnerships are empowering and following what the athletes do (the others mostly hedged, saying that they hadn’t decided on whether to send anyone).
Nury Turkel, a prominent Uyghur-American human-rights advocate and Hudson Institute senior fellow, told National Review that he sees through the corporate smokescreen here.
“Everyone who goes to China, those athletes, if they start criticizing or expressing their disapproval of the Chinese human-rights record, then they will be retaliated against, punished if they speak up,” said Turkel, a commissioner at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Others, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have also warned of this possibility, given Beijing’s imposition of a National Security Law in Hong Kong that effectively criminalizes any speech that the Party dislikes, whenever and wherever it takes place in the world.
“The dodging questions, pushing the responsibility to someone else, playing nice, to me is dishonest behavior for these guys,” Turkel said, hitting the executives for declining to endorse the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. (The New York Times reported last year that Coca-Cola is one of three companies that lobbied against the bill, which recently passed the Senate).
A bit later, questioning by Representative Michelle Steel elicited an interesting answer from Lalli. The Coke executive defended his company’s “industry-leading due-diligence program” covering Coke’s operations around the world. But, he added, “we are founded and headquartered in one [country], and that’s the United States.
“While we are concerned about allegations of human-rights abuses anywhere in the world, we will always be most active and engaged in policy issues here at home,” he said, citing Coke’s support for voting rights.
That opening led to Cotton’s exchange with Lalli, which questioned the contrast between Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey’s open opposition to the new Georgia voting law and refusal to withdraw funding for the Beijing Olympics.
Cotton noted, “You are spending millions of dollars to sponsor the genocide Olympics, yet you will not opine on any matter about it, yet you will stick your nose in the Georgia legislature’s election-reform laws. Can you explain to me the contrast?” (Lalli could not, falling back on the points he raised during McGovern’s questioning.)
Then, Cotton asked the executives if they agreed with the State Department’s conclusion that the Chinese party-state is committing genocide against the Uyghur people. Only Intel’s Rodgers — the sole witness to say that his company would raise Beijing’s human-rights atrocities with the IOC — agreed with the determination, saying that Intel didn’t even do business in Xinjiang before a State Department report on the matter; everyone else demurred.
Rodgers and, by extension, Intel, deserve credit for not throwing up the same evasions as the others. But even Intel’s record is not squeaky clean.
While it’s possible that Rodgers’s comments are technically true, Intel chips power the Urumqi Cloud Computing Center, a supercomputing behemoth that bolsters the Xinjiang mass-surveillance state, the New York Times reported last year. Intel said it wasn’t aware of the sale to Chinese authorities, and the sales preceded Trump-era regulations that would have rendered the transaction illegal. At the time of the Times report in November, however, Intel still sold “lower-end” chips to Sugon, a Chinese supercomputing company implicated by the U.S. government in the Xinjiang atrocities.
None of this — the obfuscations, the refusal to condemn mass atrocities, and a willingness to stick to China no matter what — is new, or even unusual. Still, Intel, Airbnb, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Visa stood out for sponsoring an international sports competition that in less than seven months will be used to grant a brutal regime undue international legitimacy. In the process, they associated a terrible corporate trend with faces and names, rather than just brands.
Despite increasing U.S. government pressure on U.S. business activity in China, these five companies seem likely to remain sponsors of the next Olympic Games. That’s a stain on their brands, and on the reputations of anyone involved in defending these practices.