China is so weak it disappears a tennis star who dissents

 Bari Weiss:

China is ruled by an increasingly totalitarian regime that uses technology to spy on its citizens. It is, at this moment, carrying out a genocide against its Uyghur Muslim population. It regularly vanishes people who dare to dissent. And it wants to control the terms of debate, politics and business worldwide.

Having disappeared doctors and scientists who tried to blow the whistle on Covid-19, the Chinese Communist Party has now targeted Peng Shuai, a tennis star who accused a former top Chinese government official of sexual assault. “Even if it is like an egg hitting a rock, or if I am like a moth drawn to the flame, inviting self-destruction, I will tell the truth about you,” she wrote on the social media platform Weibo. Then her message disappeared. And so did she.

These are facts discoverable to any American with an internet connection, which the hedge fund investor Ray Dalio surely has in his Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion.

Smart guy, one imagines, to be trusted with managing $150 billion of other people’s money, as his company Bridgewater does. But when Dalio was asked yesterday on CNBC about China’s human rights record, and how he thinks about it with regard to his investments, he feigned ignorance.

“I can’t be an expert in those types of things,” he told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. “I really have no idea.” He went on to compare China’s government to that of a strict parent, and offered some mush of moral relativism about how the United States does bad things, too. This from a man who wrote a book called “Principles.”
...

I imagine that Dalio’s indefensible answer might have something to do with the fact that he just raised his largest China fund ever. Money has trumped his basic morality on the question of China. But it’s not just Dalio and Bridgewater. Most of America’s managerial elite has shown itself keen to invest in China for its cheap labor and even slave labor (I’m thinking of Nike, here). And for potential high profits, but entirely at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party (paging Marriott, AirBnB, Apple, Daimler, Volkswagen, Coca-Cola, Tesla, you get the point). The cravenness is by now quotidien.

But now some are standing up to the CCP—and they have a lot less raw power than America’s corporate and financial elites.

As head of the Women’s Tennis Association, Steve Simon earns a fraction of what most corporate CEOs take home, but he has demonstrated more courage in a matter of weeks than others have in decades.
...

There are not many profiles in courage in the business world.  There are a few basketball players and executives willing to stand up for the oppressed in China but not many. Simon appears to be a stand-up guy.  It is too bad others are not that courageous.