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Elon Musk is back in the headlines this week. Tesla’s founder and CEO contributed to China Cyberspace, an official publication of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the government’s cyber censorship arm. This is a big deal, and it shows that Musk is at odds with a regime that opposes free speech and the people’s human rights at large.
Worse, Musk’s closeness to China’s cyberspace administration raises important questions about whether Musk, who owns a gigafactory in China and has taken out more than $1 billion in loans from the country, has fallen victim to China’s military-to-civil war disclosure laws. And the stakes are high: Is Musk providing China with classified information from working with the US space program and other projects affecting national security?
Not only does China’s governance control cyberspace and often suppress data coming in and out of the country, it also provides data security to Tencent, the Chinese Communist Party-controlled logistics giant that owns 5 percent of Tesla.
Musk’s scale of activity in China makes him vulnerable to intimidation by the Communist leadership and makes us wary of a pending deal to buy Twitter. Do we want the owner of Twitter to be someone who is closely tied to the most repressive governments on Earth, with a long history of forcing private companies to serve his interests?
Twitter is banned in China, along with many other media companies, for not toeing the party line. But some Chinese dissidents have been able to use the same platform at home to organize protests as they do abroad. Musk initially a Freedom of speech expertOn April 27, he Explained. That it respects government laws that limit free speech.
By “freedom of speech,” I simply mean that which conforms to the law.
I oppose extrajudicial censorship.
If people want freedom of speech, they will demand that the government enact laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is against the will of the people.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2022
Of course, Mook is far from the only tech magnate to raise concerns. Amazon has more directly catered to the Chinese Communist Party’s demands for censorship by partnering with the government’s propaganda arm to market a collection of President Xi Jinping’s speeches and writings published on Chinese websites in 2020. He started publishing unedited reviews of the collection, the Chinese government ordered the reviews to be removed, and not only that feature of the review, but all products sold in China were disabled.
Moreover, CCP cooperates with Amazon on a project called China Book, which offers 90,000 Chinese books for sale, but generates little revenue. The project is widely seen as a ploy to appease the government to get Amazon to operate. The company In an internal document in 2018, he said, “Ideological control and propaganda is an integral part of the Communist Party’s toolkit to achieve and maintain its success. It is not something we judge as right or wrong.”
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for the Met Museum/Vogue
Meanwhile, Google is running a China-only search engine that blacks out websites and blocks search terms the government deems dangerous — like human rights, democracy and religion.
And Twitter has worked with the Chinese Communist Party to whitewash the Chinese government’s abuse of Uyghurs. According to reports, Twitter introduced more than 50 tweets Global TimesA Chinese-run media outfit deliberately misleads users about the treatment of Uyghurs in detention camps.
Every day, we see corporations making the choice to engage in everything from censorship to gross human rights abuses to maintain access to China’s lucrative market of 1.3 billion people.
Fortunately, the days of ignoring this problem are coming to an end. Already, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla) and Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) are working to learn more and possibly pass legislation governing these exchanges.
Stewart wants a hearing on what classified information could end up in China’s hands as a result of Big Tech’s scaremongering, and Rubio wants to overhaul contracting processes to ensure we don’t do business with companies aligned with the Chinese Communist Party.
There can be different ways. But one thing is clear: It is long past time for us to learn more about what it means for an American corporation to operate in sensitive industries in China. We will be amazed at what we found.
Jianli Yang is the founder and president.Citizen Power Initiative for China And the author For Us Living: A Journey to Shining the Light of Truth.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author.
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