{"id":230173,"date":"2021-04-19T04:13:38","date_gmt":"2021-04-19T01:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/is-your-iphone-worth-chinas-tyranny\/"},"modified":"2021-04-19T04:13:38","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T01:13:38","slug":"is-your-iphone-worth-chinas-tyranny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/is-your-iphone-worth-chinas-tyranny\/","title":{"rendered":"#Is your iPhone worth China\u2019s tyranny?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Is your iPhone worth China\u2019s tyranny?<\/strong>”
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To understand the troubled relationship between America and Communist China, it helps to tell the story of two App<\/a>les.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first story begins on a fishing boat, where a 12-year-old boy named Jimmy Lai hid as a stowaway to reach Hong Kong from Guangzhou, China, in 1951.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Beginning as a child laborer earning $8 a month, Lai became fluent in English, founded a garment empire called Giordano, then established a publishing giant that \u00adincludes Hong Kong\u2019s largest independent news<\/a>paper, The Apple. A staunch defender of free speech and democracy, Lai is now in jail, facing a likely life sentence on trumped-up charges.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second Apple is the company that probably manufactured your smartphone. Tim Cook, the tech giant\u2019s current CEO, was born in Alabama in 1960. After earning a master\u2019s degree in business from Duke, he joined Apple as vice president for worldwide operations in 1998 \u2014 and quickly \u00adbegan planning to shift the company\u2019s production operations to locations near Guangzhou, Jimmy Lai\u2019s birthplace.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a result, Apple shed labor unions, US wages and strict environmental and safety regulations while winning investment subsidies from China. In the bargain, Cook \u00adbecame one of the world\u2019s richest men, wielding enormous political influence. Yet the American Apple\u2019s entanglement with China would soon work to the detriment of the other, pro-democracy Apple.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fall 2019, massive demonstrations broke out in Hong Kong in support of rule of law and against the extradition of citizens to mainland China.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Apple newspaper owner Lai was among the demonstrators. Apple, the US tech giant, had an app in its store that helped dissidents by showing where they and the police were in real time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This drove the Communist bosses in Beijing crazy. They called on obedient mainland news publications to call for the app\u2019s deletion from Apple\u2019s store. Cook\u2019s Apple got the message \u2014 and did just that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Worse, Cook\u2019s firm said it had done so voluntarily, when everyone knew that, with all its production capacity located in China, Apple was scared of what would happen if it didn\u2019t comply. The world learned how much of a hostage Apple Corp. really is to the Chinese Communist Party.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cook and his Apple loudly tout liberal values and minority rights in the West. But when it comes to China\u2019s imprisonment of a million Uighurs in concentration camps, the repression of Tibet, the killing of Hong Kong\u2019s free society and the stifling of international probes into the origins of the novel coronavirus, Cook\u2019s Apple keeps curiously mum.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The silence is damning. And it mirrors the corrupt bargain the West has struck with the Chinese Communist Party, which is open about its hostility to our values.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Article Nine of the resolutions of the Communist Party\u2019s Congress in 2013, dealing with the \u201cideological sphere,\u201d China\u2019s leaders told the world exactly how they felt. They declared complete opposition to Western values, to constitutional democracy and to the Western understandings of universal human values, freedom of the press, human rights and civil society.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They likewise declared war against the Western conception of rule of law and against any checks on the power of the party.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In other words, the West\u2019s China problem, encapsulated by the two Apples, won\u2019t be solved with better trade and climate deals. Rather, the growing conflict between the Free World and the Chinese Communist Party is fundamentally ideological.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The crux of the problem is that Beijing will do business with the Free World, and even allow capitalists to make money in its marketplace, but only if they at least tacitly accept Communist values and live by them in their dealings with China.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the question American and Western elites must answer: How many Apple iPhones \u2014 or any other cheaply manufactured products \u2014 are worth the freedom of not just Jimmy Lai, but oppressed Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Clyde Prestowitz served as a senior trade official and economic adviser in the Obama, Clinton and Reagan administrations. He is the author of \u201cThe World Turned Upside Down: America, China and the Struggle for Global Leadership\u201d (Yale, 2021).<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Is your iPhone worth China\u2019s tyranny?” To understand the troubled relationship between America and Communist China, it helps to tell the story of two Apples.\u00a0 The first story begins on a fishing boat, where a 12-year-old boy named Jimmy Lai hid as a stowaway to reach Hong Kong from Guangzhou, China, in 1951.\u00a0 Beginning as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":230174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/04\/apple.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[102528,5029,4973,74105],"class_list":["post-230173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-4-18-21","tag-apple","tag-china","tag-communism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}