America Second: How America's Elites Are Making China Stronger by Isaac Stone Fish

Author:Isaac Stone Fish [Fish, Isaac Stone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

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In a Shanghai airport in September 2019, I saw a Chinese edition of Bloomberg Businessweek. I wondered to myself if they eliminated sensitive words in their translation of stories—in other words, if they censored their Chinese edition. I debated buying it and comparing it with the original, but then I stopped myself. My mind turned to Bloomberg TV: I don’t have a financial relationship with the studio, but I regularly appear as a commentator on their shows, and I would be delighted if they paid me. Bloomberg producers never once told me to change the way I spoke or to tone down my criticism of Beijing: the closest they came was when they booked me to discuss a Chinese company’s ownership of Grindr and asked me not to use the phrase “dick pics.”

I consoled myself by thinking that my workload was too heavy and that the story was unimportant. But it’s hard not to call it a moment of intellectual cowardice.

I self-censor. Sometimes I temper my criticisms to avoid offending people more supportive of the Party. I’ve also taken money from organizations linked to the Party and consulted for corporations that strive to maintain access to China. As is true with many of the targets of this book, my worst crimes were sins of omission rather than commission. What key stories did I shy away from because I wanted to preserve my access? What truths did I not uncover out of fear or greed? What crucial questions didn’t I ask powerful people because I feared offending them?

Many people I interviewed about censorship mentioned a 2002 New York Review of Books article by Perry Link, a noted China scholar at the University of California Riverside who hasn’t been able to enter mainland China since 1995.[40] Link said he doesn’t know exactly why he was blacklisted, but that his work on the Tiananmen massacre cemented his status as unwelcome. In the article, Link compared China’s censorship to an anaconda in a chandelier. “Normally the great snake doesn’t move,” he wrote. “It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant silent message is ‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments—all quite ‘naturally.’ ”

Perhaps my biggest conflict of interest comes from the World Economic Forum, the much derided and envied convener of an annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. For the last several years, I’ve written reports for it, attending sessions at Davos and taking notes for the forum to publish. It pays well and allows me both a free trip to Davos and access to prominent global officials. Do I hold my tongue about the sycophancy with which the forum addresses the Party leadership, allowing them to appear as a paragon of globalization and development while overlooking their crimes against humanity in Xinjiang? Yes. In January 2020, I attended a session with Rao Yi, a brilliant neurobiologist who spoke eloquently about renouncing his American citizenship after hearing of the horrors in Iraq and in Guantánamo Bay.

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