A sobering bit of sermon translated from Chinese appears in today’s New York Times. Ai Weiwei writes from Berlin where an encounter with a surly casino clerk led both to a lawsuit (against him) and an op-ed on how humans use “cultural differences” to justify oppression, slavery, and genocide.
Western businesses deluded themselves into thinking exploiting cheap, plentiful Chinese labor would build a middle class there that, in time, would demand freedom and democracy and absolve their cooperation with the government. Instead, China’s rulers are richer and more powerful than ever, and western democracies weaker.
In the northwestern region of Xinjiang, authorities have sent perhaps a million Muslim Uighurs to reeducation camps, Ai explains, to “denounce their religion and to swear fealty to the Communist Party of China.” Ai himself spent nearly 20 years there in the 1960s and 70s, banished along with his poet father. The government detained the artist for months in 2011.
In Xinjiang today, western businesses including Siemens, Unilever, Nestlé and Germany’s Volkswagen boost their bottom lines using cheap, ethnic minority labor. Not the first time for Germany, Ai notes, only more distant. “China and Russia have shown how legacies of Communist authoritarianism can combine with predatory capitalism to build new political structures of daunting power,” Ai writes. Instead of democracy supplanting authoritarianism, western democracies “sense themselves falling behind or, worse, beginning to fit in.”
Ai concludes:
The great challenge facing German and other Western governments is whether they can find a way to exit the carnival of profit making with their moral integrity intact. So far we have seen little on this score other than craven diffidence. The crux of the matter is not ignorance of the moral alternatives but a failure of will. Pursue greed? Do what is right? We shyly select the former. When Western governments come to realize that liberal democracy itself is at stake, this balance might tip the other way.
It is no accident Ai published his exegesis on greed trumping principle in America’s newspaper of record. The business class has long justified exploiting cheap and near- slave labor by how it would raise living standards for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable. The notion that black people in America were better off in the Old South persists even today. Slavery was a win-win for both slaveholders and slaves, some conservatives still argue with straight faces. In public.
But a broader, albeit indirect, indictment of this dynamic came last week in Rolling Stone from former Republican and conservative strategist Steve Schmidt. Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign manager, Schmidt had up-close opportunities to observe McCain pal Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. In the wake of McCain’s death, Graham’s transformation from conservative virtue-signaler to fawning Trump sycophant led Schmidt to this unsettling analogy:
“The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”
Ai’s view of predatory capitalism is not so different. Business cozies up to oppressive regimes for the chance to feed off the detritus of the neighborhood apex predator. It profits from cheap labor and underdeveloped protections for workers. In that sense, we are all Lindsey Graham. We participate in that system for the chance at cheap consumer products. We tell ourselves those producing them will get jobs and a higher living standard. With Xinjiang, distance, internet commerce, and globalism cast the entire system in the blandest, most inoffensive shade of beige. “What is it about this remote place, to which the emperors of old banished criminals in lieu of sending them to prison, that makes it so attractive?” Ai asks.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.