Following President Joe Biden’s and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s summit on Wednesday, the communist dictator, whose government has perpetrated extensive, well-documented crimes against humanity, was warmly received with multiple standing ovations at a lavish dinner that evening in San Francisco attended by prominent U.S. business executives and government officials.
The dinner, which was hosted by the U.S.-China Business Council and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, was attended by about 300 people. General admission to the dinner cost $2,000, and a group of “Corporate Sponsors” sat at the “Guest of Honor’s” table for a $40,000 fee. The business executives at the table included:
- Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
- Stephen Schwarzman, chairman and CEO of Blackstone
- Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock
- Stanley Deal, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes
- Merit Janow, chair of Mastercard
- Milind Pant, CEO of Amway
- Darius Adamczyk, executive chairman of Honeywell
- Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom
- Robert Goldstein, chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands
- Joseph Bae, co-CEO of KKR
- Daniel O’Day, chairman and CEO of Gilead Sciences
- Ming Hsieh, chairman and CEO of Fulgent Genetics
Video of the event reveals a parade of three executives and a U.S. official introducing Xi and showering the communist dictator with praise, including Ambassador Craig Allen, president of the USCBC; Marc Casper, CEO of Thermo Fisher Scientific; U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo; and Evan Greenberg, CEO of Chubb Insurance.
As Xi entered the Hyatt Regency banquet hall, the guests stood and applauded for almost a full minute. Then, after 20 minutes of laudatory introductory remarks, the crowd gave another standing ovation to the authoritarian that lasted over 40 seconds. A third standing ovation at the end of Xi’s remarks lasted another half minute.
While the executives presumably attended the dinner to curry favor with the head of the world’s second-largest economy, they were likely disappointed.
“[Xi] offered no hints of concessions to business or even interest in more investment in the Chinese economy,” a senior American business executive who attended the dinner told The Wall Street Journal. “The speech was propaganda at its finest.”
Meanwhile, the laundry list of egregious human rights abuses that have occurred in China under the 10-year rule of Xi’s dictatorship is extensive and well-documented. Since he assumed office in 2013, China has “seen a strong reduction in freedom in all sectors of society,” according to the religious freedom advocacy organization Open Doors.
Most infamously, a tribunal has determined the communist regime has forcibly cut open tens of thousands of people—while still alive—in order to harvest their organs. The victims are mostly adherents to disfavored religious groups such as Falun Gong, but also others such as the Uyghurs. It is estimated that at least 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been killed for their organs since 2001, but the number is likely much higher as of today.
In addition, China’s “one-child policy,” in which the communist regime forcibly sterilized and aborted the unborn children of women who did not comply, lasted for three years into Xi’s tenure until 2016.
The government has since instituted a “two-child policy,” followed by a “three-child policy” in 2021, but the government still imposes restrictions on the number of children families can have. The Chinese Communist Party revealed in 2013 that 336 million abortions were carried out under the one-child policy since 1979.
Under Xi’s government, China has seen a drastic increase in persecution of religious believers. For Christians, this has included the demolition of churches, the raiding of house churches, the use of facial recognition technology, mass incarceration, and forced indoctrination of atheistic allegiance to the CCP.
For ethnic Uyghur Muslims living in the Xinjiang region, Xi’s government has engaged in a level of persecution so drastic that the U.S. government, in a parting move by Donald Trump’s administration, declared in 2021 that the regime is committing genocide.
Since 2017, up to 2 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have been arbitrarily detained in “re-education” camps. As has been reported, detainees are subject to forced indoctrination and renunciation of their religious beliefs, sterilization, rape, torture, and execution, often in order to have their organs harvested.
Once they are allowed to leave the camps, these ethnic minorities are often compelled into forced labor. As has been documented, over 80 corporations from all over the world have been linked to the factories in which this forced labor occurs, including American companies such as Apple, Nike, Patagonia, Polo Ralph Lauren, Gap, L.L. Bean, and many others.
Seamus Bruner, director of research at the Government Accountability Institute, further explained how the corporate world has partnered with China to gain enormous financial profit during Thursday’s edition of “Washington Watch.”
“Whether it’s Apple computers, whether it’s Nike with their factories over in China, whether it’s Jeff Bezos [at] Amazon, they have all built enormous fortunes for themselves and for their companies at the expense of the Chinese people,” he observed. “ … [I]t is a deep partnership. Men like Bill Gates have helped the Chinese Communist Party censor journalists … with Skype, which is a Microsoft company. … So the partnership seems even more than financial. … And in exchange, [they get] cheap labor.”
Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, also expressed grave concern over the willingness of U.S. business leaders to openly applaud the authoritarian leader of a communist regime that continues to commit atrocities on a mass scale.
“This was a shameless display by American corporate executives,” she told The Washington Stand. “It demonstrates what we always knew to be true about most American corporations. They really don’t care about what atrocities are currently going on in China, as long as they can cash in on their ties to the Chinese economy. This doesn’t benefit the United States, and it certainly doesn’t benefit those suffering from forced labor as a part of the Chinese supply chain.”
Del Turco continued, “The U.S. officially determined in 2021 that the Chinese government was committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims. That is still in effect, which means that American business leaders were applauding an authoritarian leader who is still responsible for an ongoing genocide, according to the U.S. government. Genocidal rulers don’t deserve standing ovations.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
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