The Chinese Threat to American Speech

American companies have an obligation to defend the freedom of expression, even at the risk of angering China.
The New York Times

China’s assertive campaign to police discourse about its policies, even outside of its borders, and the acquiescence of American companies eager to make money in China, pose a dangerous and growing threat to one of this nation’s core values: the freedom of expression.
The Communist state is becoming more and more aggressive in pressuring foreign companies to choose between self-censorship and the loss of access to what will soon be the world’s largest market. 

An old list of taboo topics, sometimes described as the “three Ts” — Tibet, Tiananmen and Taiwan — has been joined by newer subjects that must not be mentioned, including protests in Hong Kong and China’s mistreatment of its Muslim minority.
This month, China responded to a tweet by Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, in support of the Hong Kong protesters — a message he posted while in Japan, on a website that is not even accessible in mainland China — by demanding Mr. Morey’s firing and by canceling broadcasts of N.B.A. games, a histrionic display intended not just to punish the N.B.A. but also to intimidate other foreign firms into censoring themselves.
The Constitutions of China and the United States both enshrine freedom of speech, but China’s totalitarian regime has long taken a narrow view of that freedom — and American companies have long accepted those restrictions while doing business in China. 

Now, however, China is seeking to control not just what is said in China but what is said about China, too. 

If China has its way, any topic it deems off limits will be scrubbed from global discourse.
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the United States finds itself in a contest of ideas and principles with a country in its own weight class. 

But this time is different. 

The United States and China are economically intertwined.

But China is engaged in the kind of cultural imperialism it often decries.
China insists that its national interest is at stake. 

So is the national interest of the United States and other free nations. 

China has taken a hard line, and it’s time for the United States to respond in kind. 

The United States and American businesses have a duty to not appease the censors in Beijing — even if the price of insisting on free expression is a loss of access to the Chinese market.
The N.B.A., to its credit, is standing firm. 

After an initial round of obsequious apologies prompted widespread criticism in the United States, the league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, said that the league was committed to free expression and that players and other league personnel remained free to speak their minds despite what he described as “fairly dramatic” financial repercussions from lost business in China.
“We wanted to make an absolutely clear statement that the values of the N.B.A., these American values — we are an American business — travel with us wherever we go,” Mr. Silver said on Thursday in New York. 

“And one of those values is free expression.”
But far too many American companies have shown that their values are for sale. 

They don’t even haggle much over the price. 

Last year, the Chinese government demanded that foreign airlines remove references to Taiwan from their websites, because China views Taiwan as a renegade province. 

The four American airlines affected by the order — American, Delta, Hawaiian and United — present themselves to the world as representatives of the United States. 

The American flag is painted on the outside of their planes; the interiors are American territory. 

But instead of standing up for American values, the airlines complied with China’s orders. 

Other recent examples of capitulation include the fashion retailer Coach destroying T-shirts that read “Hong Kong,” rather than “Hong Kong, China,” and Marriott firing a social media manager in Omaha for “liking” a tweet posted by a group that backs Tibetan independence.
Increasingly, China doesn’t even need to raise an eyebrow for global businesses to blink: American companies are engaged in proactive appeasement. 

In the new animated movie “Abominable,” released by DreamWorks, a subsidiary of Comcast, one scene includes a map of China with a boundary line encompassing most of the South China Sea. 

The United States does not recognize that line; neither do the other nations that border the sea, including Vietnam, which pulled the film from theaters. 

ESPN, a Disney subsidiary, displayed a similar map of China — showing what is known as the “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea — on a recent broadcast.
Comcast and Disney are, of course, free to advocate for the Chinese Communist Party’s position, and against the American and global consensus, in the continuing dispute over China’s international boundaries. 

But by all appearances, the decisions were both less principled and more pernicious: The companies acquiesced in China’s view of the world simply because that was the path of least resistance.
Some companies have tried to evade the issue by insisting they want to avoid politics altogether. Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of the California video game maker Activision Blizzard, banned a user for shouting “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” during an online tournament earlier this month, and confiscated $10,000 in winnings. 

The company, which later returned the money and commuted the ban to a six-month suspension, said it would have taken the same action if a player had shouted in opposition to the Hong Kong protesters. 

A rival company, the Los Angeles-based Riot Games, announced its own ban on political speech, warning players to “refrain from discussing” political issues, including the Hong Kong protests. (Tencent, a Chinese conglomerate, holds a 5 percent stake in Activision and owns the entirety of Riot.)
Companies face particular pressure on the internet because deference to physical geography is no longer a viable standard. 

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” has lost its meaning. 

On the internet, one is always at home and always in Rome, too. 

But there is, or should be, a critical point of difference between American and Chinese internet businesses. 

Corporations are the creatures of a particular state, however much their executives prefer to think of their operations as multinational. 

American companies choose to operate under the laws of the United States and to reap the benefits of life in the United States — and they ought to be held accountable for upholding the values of the United States. 

American companies should feel a responsibility for maintaining the right to free expression in the internet spaces they create and operate. 

Otherwise, they risk becoming the enforcers of a corporate regime of global censorship that takes its marching orders from Xi Jinping.
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, which is banned in China, said this week that the character of the internet must not be taken for granted. 

“Today, the state of the global internet around the world is primarily defined by American companies and platforms with strong free expression values. There’s just no guarantee that will win out over time.”
Facebook’s role as the private manager of the nation’s public square generates constant controversy, most recently over its refusal to prevent politicians from disseminating clear falsehoods. 

And the debate over its policies highlights the challenges and contradictions of America’s commitment to free expression. 

Yet Mr. Zuckerberg is undoubtedly correct that his imperfect company, along with other American tech giants, are the guardians of free expression on the internet. 

The responsibility of American companies is to maintain that commitment to free expression even if the price is not doing business in China.
It is a price The New York Times, and several other media companies, already pay.
Donald Trump has weakened the ability of American companies to stand up for American values, including free expression, by making clear he does not share those values and by failing to firmly oppose China’s demands. 

A White House spokeswoman last year described China’s order to airlines as “Orwellian nonsense,” but the administration, which has been so quick to threaten China with harsh consequences for its trade policies, did not defend the airlines by warning of similar consequences for China’s efforts to suppress free speech. 

If American companies are to stand up for American values, their own government should be in their corner.
Back in 2009, North Carolina State University canceled an appearance by the Dalai Lama, whom China regards as an enemy of the state. 

The explanation offered by the school’s provost, Warwick Arden, was memorably frank: “China is a major trading partner for North Carolina.” 

What Arden and the many Americans in positions of authority who have since followed him down that disgraceful path seem to forget is that North Carolina is also a major trading partner for China. 

Those fearing the loss of what the United States gets from China would do well to consider that China fears the loss of what it gets from the United States. 

And the government can buttress American companies by making clear that penalties for free speech will be met in kind. 

The proper response to a Chinese threat to prevent American planes from landing in China is to make clear that Chinese planes would not be allowed to land in the United States.
America also can strengthen its hand by making common cause with other nations that value free expression. 

China has placed similar pressure on the Italian company Versace; German companies, including Mercedes-Benz; and airlines from around the world.
America’s commitment to human rights, including the freedom of expression, has always required careful tending and firm resolve. 

It now faces an especially stern test. 

The world is watching — and talking.

Rogue Nation

How China forces American companies to do its political bidding
By Josh Rogin 

As China’s economic might grows, Beijing is leveraging that power to coerce foreign companies to advance its political narrative and punish them when they step out of line. 

The Chinese Communist Party’s treatment this month of hotel giant Marriott after a minor website error takes the effort to a new and dangerous level.
In Washington, the Chinese government’s overreaction to Marriott listing Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau as “countries” on an emailed questionnaire has sparked alarm. 

Trump administration officials, lawmakers and experts said the Communist Party is escalating how far it is willing to go in enforcing strict adherence to its political positions among foreign actors.
After a Marriott Rewards employee “liked” a Jan. 9 tweet by the “Friends of Tibet” group praising the questionnaire, Chinese authorities called in Marriott officials for questioning, shut down their Chinese website and mobile apps, and demanded an apology. 

The Jan. 11 apology from Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson parroted the language the Communist Party uses to describe groups that stand opposed to Chinese repression or advocate for Tibetan autonomy. 

“We don’t support anyone who subverts the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China and we do not intend in any way to encourage or incite any such people or groups,” Sorenson wrote.
Marriott has more than 300 hotels in China, its second-largest single market, after the United States. While it began disciplinary proceedings against the employee who “liked” the offending tweet, Chinese netizens scoured the Internet and found dozens more foreign corporations that had listed as countries territories that are claimed by China. 

Chinese Internet bots fueled the purportedly popular outrage.
Corporations including Delta Air Lines and Zara rushed out apologies of their own. 

But the Chinese government didn’t stop there. 

Dozens of companies were told to scrub their websites for any related content or face severe consequences. 

The state-run media organ China Daily piled on with an op-ed headlined “No flouting of China’s core interests will be tolerated.” 

Chinese government officials even threatened the family of a Chinese student in Canada who responded favorably to the Friends of Tibet tweet.
By combining government power, manufactured public outrage and negative state-sponsored media coverage, the Chinese government can place massive pressure on American companies to tow the party’s political line. 

That aggressiveness is now becoming an issue in the U.S.-China relationship.
“Everyone should be deeply concerned by the PRC’s growing comprehensive campaign to exploit trade and commerce to advance its global Communist agenda,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) told me. 

“For decades the Communist Party has limited speech within China on topics and opinions that threaten their one-party rule, and we are now seeing this form of information warfare influence the way American companies conduct business.”
For example, by parroting the Communist Party line on Tibet, Marriott helps the Chinese government whitewash its systematic and brutal repression of Tibetans. 

As the International Campaign for Tibet wrote in a letter to Sorenson, Marriott could have changed the emailed questionnaire without endorsing China’s political position on Tibet.
“China has been continually attempting to silence international public debates on the issue of Tibet, and your statement unfortunately furthers their efforts,” the group wrote, pointing out that the Chinese propaganda machine can use Marriott’s statement to further undermine Tibetan human rights.
The question for Washington policymakers is: Where does this end? What if a Tibetan group wanted to hold a conference at a Marriott hotel in Washington? Would Marriott be within its rights to prevent that? Does official Washington have a role to play?
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) told me that as China becomes more brazen in its efforts to coerce or control American businesses, the United States must devise a comprehensive public-private effort to push back.
“This is only the latest in a long pattern of the Chinese government leveraging access to its marketplace to extract painful concessions from foreign businesses,” he said. 

“Our actions, or lack thereof, can influence their behavior. To this end, we need to stand firm in defense of American interests, both security and economic.”
For now, Marriott is more concerned with how it is viewed in Beijing than in Washington. 

A Marriott spokeswoman said the company had no response to the concerns of lawmakers or human rights groups about its behavior.
Marriott International Asia Pacific President Craig Smith turned down an interview request from me but gave an interview to China Daily, in which he called the incident probably one of the biggest mistakes of his career. 

In fact, the biggest mistake that American corporations can make is allowing themselves to be used as tools by the Chinese Communist Party to advance illiberal norms.
Washington is awake to the threat of Chinese economic coercion of American companies for political objectives. 

Now policymakers must persuade corporations to ask themselves if there is a larger interest at stake than their bottom line.

It's time to stop Chinese theft

• According to a 2015 estimate, China steals some $360 billion annually from American companies through hacking
• Trump must implement policies that deter cyberattacks and penalize Chinese companies for their theft

By Claudia Tenney
According to Claudia Tenney -- a Republican Congresswoman for New York's 22nd Congressional District -- Trump must implement policies that deter cyberattacks and penalize Chinese companies for their theft

China's Dirty Five

By selecting Iowa Governor Terry Branstad as US Ambassador to China, President Donald Trump chose a man who Xi Jinping considers a "friend." 

But as a friend, Branstad will be the messenger to deliver the hard truth that the days of America bowing and scraping at China's feet are over.
To start, Trump and Branstad should put a quick end to China's economic espionage and outright theft. 

And make no mistake: China is stealing from the U.S. economy on a staggering scale.

Bill Evanina, a top deputy to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, estimated last year that the Chinese steal about $360 billion annually from American companies through hacking alone. 

That is more than three times the value of all US exports to China in 2015 -- and roughly equal to the entire trade imbalance between the United States and China. 

In fact, it is more than three quarters the value of US exports to all of Asia.
Add in how much intellectual property the Chinese steal the old-fashioned way, with spies embedded in American companies, and the figure climbs by many more billions of dollars per year. 

Half of the 165 private companies surveyed by the FBI were victims of economic espionage or theft of trade secrets. 

Those companies suspect that China was to blame for 95% of the attacks. 

And the problem is only getting worse, with industrial spying and sabotage up 53% in 2015 over 2014.
Then there's China's huge industry of counterfeit goods like knock-off watches, handbags, DVDs and smartphones. 

That costs foreign companies, many of them American, another $20 billion every year.
So in many ways when Trump says that China is "killing us" on trade, he's right.
Trump's rhetoric has been criticized as anti-free trade. 

But free-market economists champion property rights, and conservatives and classical liberals view protecting those rights as one of the primary purposes of government. 

In this sense, Trump's promise to stop the theft is more free-market than the approach of his do-nothing skeptics.
There's nothing virtuous about a government that is passive when foreign entities, linked to militaries and sovereign states, steal from private businesses.
Of course, as the President points out, when we talk about the theft of intellectual property, we are also talking about the theft of American jobs -- not just high-skilled jobs, like designers of the iPhone or developers of solar technology, but also the millions of low-skilled jobs that intellectual property supports. 

Indeed, intellectual property theft deprives low-skilled workers of some of their best employment opportunities.
According to one recent study, industries that rely on intellectual property pay low-skilled workers 40% more than industries that are not reliant on I.P., and hire them even during economic downturns. The Department of Commerce estimates that 45 million American workers -- almost one in three US jobs -- rely on intellectual property protections.
Chinese intellectual property theft also robs American companies of the incentive to innovate. 

For example, the last of the great American steel manufacturers, U.S. Steel, announced in April that it had discovered Chinese-backed hackers stole decades' worth of research on advanced steel-production technologies and turned those discoveries over to Chinese competitors. 

This raises the question: why pour millions into developing technologies only to have the Chinese steal them and undercut your prices?
Worse yet, much more of this theft is unreported and largely unknown to the authorities, let alone to the public, because embarrassed and victimized companies have little recourse and only see downsides to revealing that they were robbed by the Chinese.
The US government must act to protect American jobs, innovation and national security against these abuses. 

A good start would be to send a clear signal that there will be real consequences for any entity, state-backed or otherwise, that steals from American companies.
In Trump's cybersecurity speech during the campaign, he outlined a plan to deter potential aggressors with just such a signal. 

The United States, Trump said, "must possess the unquestioned capacity to launch crippling counter-attacks."
"America's dominance in this arena must be unquestioned," he continued. 

"Cybersecurity is not only a question of developing defensive technologies but offensive technologies as well."
Degrading and disrupting our attackers' offensive capabilities would show that there's a cost to attacking American businesses.
We can respond to attacks by imposing serious consequences outside cyberspace as well. 

For instance, the US Treasury and the Department of Commerce should sanction recipients of stolen intellectual property. 

The International Trade Commission is considering such sanctions in the U.S. Steel case, but offenders should be banned from doing business with American companies and be prohibited from importing products to America until they can prove they have reformed.
Another smart proposal comes from the American Enterprise Institute's recent report on cyberspace strategy, which suggests that we impose penalties when the Chinese blackmail American companies into turning over intellectual property.
Beijing must learn that the United States will defend American jobs and businesses from outright theft through cyberattack and industrial espionage, and Donald Trump appears committed to communicating that message as president.
The damage such crime does to the US economy is real, and Trump is right to focus on it. 

In a world where our second-largest trading partner is stealing from us more than it buys from us, we must be a lot tougher than scolding it for stepping out of line.