American leaders should never minimize, make excuses for, or enable human rights abuses around the world--no matter where such abuses occur, and no matter if a nation committing abuses is a "strategic partner" of the United States. That includes China, whose human rights abuses are well documented.
Unfortunately, more often than not American leaders' critiques of foreign governments are hypocritical, self-serving, mindless, and ignorant. This is especially true when the critiques are bipartisan. Post-World War II, bipartisan agreement on the evil of a foreign adversary is typically a grotesque form of groupthink benefiting not the cause of freedom as much as bottom line military-industrial-complex interests. When foreign policy stupidity reigns in Washington, we should remind ourselves of George Washington's Farewell Address admonition to "guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism."
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| The new Cold War with China is bipartisan; Wisconsin Republican congressman Mike Gallagher (right) and Illinois Democratic congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi lead the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Gallagher seeks "ideological warfare" with China, which he claims is a "lost art." |
The new bipartisan Cold War with China does not feature a morally upright United States Congress standing tall for global democracy and human rights. Rather, this Cold War is primarily an inane and paranoid theater of the absurd in which lightweight congressmen from safely gerrymandered districts think they are sounding tough when they "boldly" call for a Tik Tok ban. Remember, these were the same characters (especially the Republicans), who told us during election time they were going to be "laser focused" on inflation and jobs. Most of them worry about the Chinese Communist Party using nefarious digital means to dumb down our youth and undermine the future of democracy. But the same people either minimize or have nothing to say about an actual attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, 2021.
One of the main offenders in the New Cold War era is Wisconsin congressman Mike Gallagher. The new Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, whose name appropriately enough is "McCarthy," appointed Gallagher as Chair of the "Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party." If you had a dime for every time Gallagher says "Chinese Communist Party," you would be quite rich. Gallagher refers to "ideological warfare" as a "lost art" and longs for a return to the Reagan era with big military budgets backed up by black v. white views of the world. (Note: We are already approaching a trillion dollar a year defense budget.). At a time when the United States and China should be working together on climate mitigation initiatives, poverty eradication, helping to negotiate peace in the Russia v. Ukraine war, and other initiatives that might actually benefit humanity at-large, our new Cold Warriors are getting us prepared for a new arms race.
Gallagher opposes President Biden's budget because it fails to (you guessed it) "combat the threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party." He's upset that the budget allegedly "increases spending on domestic progressive priorities at more than double the rate of defense . . . and shortchanges the Pentagon at the worst moment possible." At the same time, he introduced a bill to "ban Biden from cancelling student loans."
While Gallagher's Select Committee on China called to mind the worst of the red-baiting Congressional excesses of the 1950s, for pure comedy it was no match for a recent hearing held by the Energy and Commerce Committee. Chaired by Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, the hearing was called "Tik Tok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children From Online Harms." Listening to and watching the hearing, you would think that Tik Tok is uniquely awful in the big tech world, or that surveillance of private data is something invented by the Chinese Communist Party. As noted media law scholar (and my former student) Chris Terry might say, "I know journalism is hard," but someone should ask Edward Snowden if the Chinese Communist Party invented private data surveillance.
The most hysterical part of the hearing, in a pathetic way, was congressman Dan Crenshaw's (R-Texas) questioning of Tik Tok CEO Shou Zi Chew. Crenshaw's comments, like so many of his colleagues that day on both sides of the aisle, represented what digital rights activist Evan Greer calls "Xenophobic Showboating." Crenshaw started off his remarks by sarcastically thanking Chew for "bringing Democrats and Republicans together." At one point Crenshaw clearly was trying to "own" Chew by pointing out that under China's 2017 national intelligence law, Chinese citizens must cooperate with Chinese intelligence and are bound to secrecy. Chew interrupted to say, "Congressman, first, "I'm a Singaporean." Did Crenshaw know that Chew was from Singapore? I don't think he did, and he tried to cover it up by suggesting that it did not matter. Crenshaw closed with a paranoid rant about Tik Tok being part of a Chinese Communist Party conspiracy to weaken America from within, through controlling our youth. A full transcript of this mostly shameful hearing can be found here.
Only a handful of members of congress, including Wisconsin's Mark Pocan and New York's Jamaal Bowman, had anything rational to say about Tik Tok. They rightly condemned the "hysteria" over Tik Tok, and argued--correctly in my view--that discussions about the platform should be placed in a larger context of data manipulation by Big Tech in general. These points are reinforced by investigative journalist Julia Angwin:
But when you dig into the national security allegations against TikTok, it is telling that most of the charges could just as easily be levied against the U.S. tech giants. And most of the tech companies’ exploitation of data has not been curbed by the government . . . [Yet]securing data from internal threats has been a problem for all the Big Tech companies. Google has fired dozens of employees for data misuse, including obtaining user data. Microsoft admitted to snooping in a blogger’s Hotmail account to see who was leaking internal documents. At Twitter, internal controls were so lax that an ex-employee was convicted of using his access to spy on Saudi dissidents, and a whistle-blower said that the company had hired an employee in India who had used his access to spy on Indian dissidents.
Evan Greer argues that the red scare is no substitute for better data privacy laws: “TikTok uses the exact same surveillance capitalist business model of services like YouTube and Instagram. Yes, it’s concerning that the Chinese government could abuse data that TikTok collects. But even if TikTok were banned, they could access much of the same data simply by purchasing it from data brokers, because there are almost no laws in place to prevent that kind of abuse. If policymakers want to protect Americans from surveillance, they should advocate for strong data privacy laws that prevent all companies (including TikTok!) from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in what amounts to xenophobic showboating that does exactly nothing to protect anyone.”
What is the role of big media in the New Bipartisan Cold War? Not surprisingly, but still tragically, big media are allowing xenophobic nonsense to be put forth as a legitimate political position. What we need from big media (and from all media, actually) is an independent spirit that calls out human rights abuses on all sides, and refuses to be the stage on which xenophobic showboating performs. As I've written about before, during the McCarthy period of red baiting in the 1950s, only a small group of journalists and commentators (especially Edward Murrow of CBS, Bill Evjue of the Madison Capital Times, and independent journalist George Seldes) had the backbone to take on McCarthy and his enablers throughout the government. We need a new generation of principled journalists and commentators to do the same today.
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