Knicks · I never liked Lebron James but now I do. He is a hero and not afraid to speak out.Hears why. (page 1)
Lebron was a player I didn't like and he played games with New York. I didn't like him. Then I saw the things he has done for poor kid and being a comunity activist got my attention. The man cares about social injustice in this country. He speaks out about this and don't care if he looses fans. It reminds me of Kareem,I won't mention Ali yet but he is getting there. He put up money for ex prisoners to pay their fine and vote. If he continues down this path it wont matter it he don't get 6 rings he will be a hero for the right of those who can't speak for themselves. Now I don't want this to be a race issue like that fat puff face Charles Barkley. But just food for thought.
by the way check out my new video 
Papabear wrote:Papabear SaysLebron was a player I didn't like and he played games with New York. I didn't like him. Then I saw the things he has done for poor kid and being a comunity activist got my attention. The man cares about social injustice in this country. He speaks out about this and don't care if he looses fans. It reminds me of Kareem,I won't mention Ali yet but he is getting there. He put up money for ex prisoners to pay their fine and vote. If he continues down this path it wont matter it he don't get 6 rings he will be a hero for the right of those who can't speak for themselves. Now I don't want this to be a race issue like that fat puff face Charles Barkley. But just food for thought.
by the way check out my new video
https://youtu.be/hn9sowb_BWo
Good song. I thought the video was gonna turn into a Pornhub viral at some point, but you guys didn't cross the line hahahaha
Papabear wrote:Papabear SaysLebron......If he continues down this path it wont matter it he don't get 6 rings he will be a hero for the right of those who can't speak for themselves.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/14/us/lebron...
But on Monday night, the vocal NBA star sided with silence as he criticized Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey as "misinformed" over Morey's tweet supporting Hong Kong protesters."I just think that when you're misinformed or you're not educated about something -- and I'm just talking about the tweet itself -- you never know the ramifications that can happen. We all see what that did -- not only for our league but for all of us in America, for people in China as well," he told reporters on Monday. James' comments threatened to undermine his reputation as perhaps the foremost social justice advocate in popular culture.....
James' criticism came while the NBA is embroiled in a standoff with China after Morey tweeted his support for the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Morey quickly apologized and deleted his original tweet, but the league's Chinese partners suspended ties, state broadcaster CCTV halted all broadcasts of preseason matches, and the Chinese government said the NBA needed to show "mutual respect."The rift, and the NBA's rapid attempts to salvage its massive Chinese market, have sparked broader questions about the influence of China on free speech in corporate America.
Speaking to reporters before a game in Los Angeles Monday, James called it "a very delicate situation, a very sensitive situation."When asked whether Morey should be reprimanded for his tweet, James responded, "I think when we all sit back and learn from the situation that happened, understand that what you could tweet or could say, and we all talk about this freedom of speech -- yes, we do all have freedom of speech, but at times there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you're not thinking about others and you're only thinking about yourself."
"I don't want to get into a word or sentence feud with Daryl Morey, but I believe he wasn't educated on the situation at hand and he spoke. So many people could have been harmed, not just financially but physically, emotionally, spiritually. So just be careful what we tweet and what we say and what we do, even though yes, we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too."
James, who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, added that he and his teammates had stayed silent about the situation because they were "not informed enough" about it, and that "I'm not here to judge how the League handles the situation."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nb...As impasse over pro-Hong Kong tweet simmers, what's at stake for the NBA in China?
Jeff Zillgitt Mark Medina
USA TODAYIn the late 1980s, when the NBA began making inroads into China, the league sent CCTV NBA games on videotape and told the state-run TV station it could air games at no cost. By 1992, the league had opened an office in Hong Kong, and by 2004, the NBA was playing preseason games in China.
Today, the NBA has billion-dollar deals in China.
And its business relationships are in tumult after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey sent a pro-Hong Kong tweet that offended China and ignited a geopolitical crisis between the league and the communist country. As commissioner Adam Silver has apologized while underlining the league's stance on free speech, CCTV has pulled the plug on showing the Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Lakers preseason games in Shanghai and Shenzhen.
At stake in the standoff: billions of dollars for both sides and a strong four-decade-long relationship that began with a Washington Bullets exhibition game in 1979. It is a relationship that has multiple layers including Chinese-related business partnerships with NBA players in the millions, a friendship with Basketball Hall of Famer and former NBA All-Star Yao Ming, who is the president of the Chinese Basketball Association and is a vital goodwill ambassador for the NBA in Asia, and millions of fans.
“If all of a sudden China decided it was no longer going to broadcast the NBA, clearly that would hurt CCTV and Tencent [an Internet conglomerate offering multiple e-services], but it would hurt the NBA more,” Syracuse University professor John Wolohan, who specializes in sports law and U.S.-China sports relations, told USA TODAY Sports. “If one of these sides is going to lose, it’s going to be the NBA.”
NBA revenue from China -- and a conservative estimate puts that at $500 million annually based on deals that are publicly known -- is part of basketball-related income which impacts the salary cap and how much money is available to players on an annual basis.
In July, China’s Tencent reached a five-year, $1.5 billion deal to remain the league’s exclusive digital partner in China, and it is the NBA's largest partnership outside of the U.S. CCTV has a lucrative financial partnership with the NBA televising multiple games live each week, including coverage of the playoffs.
NBA China, a separate business arm of the NBA, was valued at $5 billion by Sports Business Journal last month.
Separate from the NBA’s partnerships in China, players are invested in the country, too. Several of them, including stars LeBron James and Steph Curry, make annual visits to sell apparel products from Nike and Under Armour.
Chinese apparel companies have also signed NBA players to endorsement deals: Klay Thompson and Gordon Hayward with Anta, CJ McCollum with Li-Ning and Lou Williams with Peak. Thompson's deal with Anta could reach $80 million over 10 years, according to ESPN. Williams has said he earns more from his endorsement deal than he does playing.
This controversy comes against the backdrop of a much larger issue: the trade war between China and the United States and human rights abuses in China.
On Monday, the U.S. blacklisted 28 Chinese entities because they have been “implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in the XUAR,” according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
The NBA is not alone when it comes to China's heavy-handed negotiating tactics. Gaming company Activision Blizzard banned an e-sports player for a year on Tuesday after he expressed support for Hong Kong, and in August, high-end fashion brand Versace apologized for making a T-shirt that listed Hong Kong and Macao as separate countries rather than part of China.
Silver understands the inherent issues for a global company doing business in countries that may not share the same political values. Before Game 1 of the NBA Finals, he was asked about the potential for problems amid the trade policy rift between China and the U.S.
“I am not concerned at this time. Of course we are not immune from global politics,” Silver said.
The fallout from the Morey tweet has been swift and harsh. Chinese celebrities have withdrawn from NBA-related events this week, a visit to a local school by the Nets has been canceled and there is concern the games could be scratched.
“For CCTV to all of a sudden pull the plug on them that shows how serious it is,” Wolohan said.
The NBA and basketball are entrenched in China.
The league has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong, and nearly 500 million fans watched NBA programming on Tencent during the 2018-19 season and 21 million fans watched Game 6 of the 2019 Finals, according to NBA data.
The league also has more than 200 million followers on social media in China. In March, the league opened the second-largest NBA store outside of North America in Beijing.
A growing middle class with expendable income and massive technological growth that allows fans to stream games on phones and watch live on TV has allowed the NBA to thrive in China.
“It’s hard for us in the United States to imagine how much the NBA is involved in China and how much the people of China really like the NBA,” Wolohan said.
Silver conceded the economic impact-- as Chinese companies suspend business ties with the league and the Rockets -- is dramatic.He is trying to salvage relations in China, where more than 300 million people of the nation's 1.4 billion play basketball, according to the Chinese Basketball Association.
“I’m a realist as well, and I recognize that this issue may not die down so quickly,” Silver told reporters in Tokyoon Tuesday.
Already in Asia for preseason games in India and Japan, Silver will visit China this week and plans to meet with Chinese business leaders and Yao, who is "hot" right now, according to Silver. But Silver’s in a difficult position, trying to placate mainland China, which wants Morey fired, and championing U.S. and NBA values, such as free speech.
“We’ve seen how Adam Silver operates, and if both sides want something done, you’re going to find a compromise,” Isaac Benjamin, a crisis communication strategist at PRCG Sports, told USA TODAY Sports. “That might not mean you go around touting a win, but it means you’re going to have a beneficial partnership moving forward.”
After the NBA’s vague statement regarding Morey’s tweet fell flat and drew criticism in the U.S. and China on Monday, Silver left no ambiguity in a statement Tuesday.
“It is inevitable that people around the world – including from America and China – will have different viewpoints over different issues. It is not the role of the NBA to adjudicate those differences,” Silver said.
“However, the NBA will not put itself in a position of regulating what players, employees and team owners say or will not say on these issues. We simply could not operate that way.”
He also acknowledged there is a cost to that position that the NBA is willing to absorb.
“I understand that there are consequences from that exercise of, in essence, his freedom of speech. We will have to live with those consequences,” Silver said.
While the NBA is at risk financially, so is China and its companies that are willing to spend money on the NBA to make money.
“The NBA is a big product to China,” Benjamin said. “China has been able to grow its basketball presence, and China wants to be associated with the NBA. There won’t be easy conversations. But there are plenty of organizations that get into these issues with China.”
There’s no denying basketball’s popularity in China. The game is huge and has been played there almost as long as it has been played in the U.S. Dr. James Naismith, who invented the game, helped introduce it to China on a missionary trip in the late 1800s.
Now, the NBA and its stars are on a similar mission, this time trying to preserve the lucrative relationship the love of basketball has brought both countries.
While some NBA players have prided themselves on refusing to shut up and dribble, will they follow that philosophy regarding China and Hong Kong and risk alienation and dollars?
“The players are already starting to look disingenuous,” said David Carter, a sports marketing consultant and executive director of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. “On one hand, they are social justice warriors of a certain bend. But at the same time, they are quick to come out and talk about the support of China, which means Beijing and others view as the oppressors in this case. They are walking a fine line.”
Rockets star James Harden apologized to China in a press conference on Monday and on Tuesday, Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo, who has an endorsement deal with Nike, said he believed the sides would "find a way to solve'' the situation. Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers, Golden State coach Steve Kerr and National Basketball Players Association president Chris Paul declined to comment on the situation until they knew more about it.
However, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich weighed in, as he often does on political topics.
“It wasn’t easy for him to say,” Popovich said of Silver. “He said that in an environment that is fraught with possible economic peril. He sides with the principles that we all hold dearly – or most of us did until the last three years – so I’m thrilled with what he said. The courage and leadership displayed is off the charts by comparison."
https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/coro...
Coronavirus: NBA, Knicks, Nets work with Chinese official to donate 1M surgical masks to New YorkBy: MIchelle Ewing, Cox Media Group National Content Desk
Updated: April 5, 2020 - 4:41 AMNEW YORK — The NBA and two professional basketball teams are working with a Chinese official to provide 1 million surgical masks to “essential workers” in New York.
According to Reuters, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the donation – a collaborative effort involving the league, the New York Knicks, the Brooklyn Nets and Chinese Consul General Huang Ping
“New York thanks you,” Cuomo tweeted Saturday afternoon. “We are beyond grateful for this gift of critically needed PPE.”
"Andrew Cuomo
@NYGovCuomo
NEW: The @NBA is contributing 1 million desperately needed surgical masks for New York's essential workers in collaboration with @nyknicks, @BrooklynNets and China's Consul General Huang Ping.New York thanks you.
We are beyond grateful for this gift of critically needed PPE.
12:08 PM · Apr 4, 2020"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nba-needs...It has been widely reported that the league’s global revenue is closing in on $10 billion per year, which puts it very close to Major League Baseball’s $10 billion and change, and still a distance from the NFL’s $15 billion.
Within that, revenue coming from China is now nearly 10% of the pie, Yahoo Finance has learned. (Other reports have placed the NBA’s China revenue at 15%-20% of the global pie, but that range is overstated.)
More importantly, its business in China is growing at a faster rate than in the U.S., and only smaller emerging markets such as India, Africa, and Latin America have faster revenue growth rates, since they are building from a low base.
NBA China, the separate company the league set up in 2008 to manage its deals there, is now valued by the league at $5 billion, a figure first reported this month by Sports Business Journal and confirmed to Yahoo Finance by multiple sources. That’s a valuation akin to the ones that investment firms apply to private tech startups, not to be confused with the revenue the league is bringing in from China.
$5 billion is what the NBA thinks it could fetch if it ever spun that business off. Just one year ago, the valuation was $4 billion.
The league’s two biggest partners in China are Alibaba (BABA) and Tencent (TCEHY), China’s two largest tech companies by market cap. The NBA re-upped its existing deals with both of those partners this year—before the Morey tweet happened.
The new deal with Alibaba includes licensed NBA merchandise on Alibaba’s ecommerce sites (Alibaba had been selling licensed NBA merchandise on Tmall since 2012), plus a dedicated NBA section with original content and game highlights across Alibaba’s networks Tmall, Taobao, and Youku. That deal puts NBA content in front of 700 million Chinese consumers.
Alibaba executive Joe Tsai’s purchase last summer of the Brooklyn Nets (the 51% stake he did not already own) put a $2.35 billion valuation on the Nets, and likely boosts the price tag other teams can sell for as well. It also brought Alibaba even closer to the NBA, since Tsai is now a full team owner. (Tsai published a public letter on Facebook criticizing Morey’s Hong Kong tweet.)
Tencent has been the “official digital partner of the NBA in China” since 2015. The extended deal with Tencent includes live game broadcasts (Tencent is the exclusive provider of NBA League Pass in China) plus additional video content on Tencent’s extensive list of sites and apps, including QQ, WeChat, and Weishi (Tencent’s version of Vine). As part of the renewed deal, Tencent promised to “help the NBA expand its fanbase in China and provide the league’s global fanbase with new, customized interactive services.”
The league has said 490 million Chinese fans watched NBA games on Tencent during the 2018-2019 season, “nearly three times” the number that watched just four seasons earlier. That gives a rough sense of how fast the NBA’s fanbase in China is multiplying.
The Tencent deal has been widely reported as being worth $1.5 billion over the next five years, or $300 million per year, a number that sources close to the league confirm. That is more than twice the value of the previous deal signed in 2015, which was $700 million over five years. But the new Tencent contract has not actually kicked in yet, which makes the squabble prompted by the Morey tweet especially unlucky timing for the league. The value of the Alibaba deal to the NBA has not been reported.
The NBA also announced a content deal last year with ByteDance, the parent company of the wildly popular video app TikTok. That’s three new partnerships with Chinese tech names in the last 12 months.
NBA front office leadership and individual team executives see China as the most crucial growth market for the league to keep up its financial momentum.
“If you think about the revenues in America, the majority of revenues are fixed,” says one former NBA team executive speaking not for attribution. “The TV contract [with ESPN and TNT, extended through 2025] is set for another six years. Every team can grow its business organically with tickets and sponsorships, but only really at a modest clip. So when you think about the enterprise of the NBA, the growth potential is international, and within that, China stands the tallest.”
Indeed, NBA teams were just recently given a longer leash to make their own sponsorship deals in China thanks to a rule change just this year that freed up teams to sell sponsorships outside the U.S. Teams can now sell sponsorships in other countries (think China) for its team logos and marks, though they cannot do so domestically. (So, the New York Knicks can’t do a big marketing push with team signage in Texas, but can in Beijing.) The Washington Wizards were the first to act on the new rules, signing the first NBA team sponsorship deal in Japan.
A decade ago, Stephon Marbury was the singular example of an NBA player who had achieved mega-stardom in China. Now Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Kevin Durant and many more have obsessive followings there. Klay Thompson and Gordon Hayward have deals with Chinese sneaker brand Anta; Dwyane Wade, CJ McCollum, and Michael Carter-Williams have deals with Chinese sneaker brand Li-Ning. Those deals bring personal revenue separate from the league, but the league loves and encourages them, since it boosts exposure for all. “There are tremendous opportunities for the players in China, and that trickles to the teams,” says the former team executive.
And the NBA’s China push isn’t just about the teams and leagues boosting revenue, it’s also about the individual players as global brands.
For now, China political tension is not something other U.S. pro leagues like the NFL have had to deal with; the NBA got there first, and is now navigating the benefits and the consequences. “The NBA, more so than any other league, is poised to continue its international growth” in China, says USC sports marketing professor David Carter. “The NBA and China will find a way to continue working together, even if doing so remains delicate.”
All of the financial metrics reinforce why the NBA can’t walk away from China, and why Silver must continue to play the friendly ambassador, even amid President Trump’s trade war and even as politicians have scored points by slamming the league for its chummy business ties in China.
Vice President Mike Pence this month said the NBA is “acting like a wholly owned subsidiary of China.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, in an interview with Yahoo Finance, dinged the league for its initial handling of the Morey tweet: “It was not the NBA’s finest hour, putting out one profuse apology after another,” though he conceded, “They have gotten better… after the first prostrations.”
The NBA is hardly the only American business trying to thrive in China while also navigating potential political blowback for being there. Apple, Nike, and Starbucks sales are booming in China. Apple CEO Tim Cook has taken heat multiple times over the past few years for actions aimed at pleasing Chinese regulators.
Gordon Chang, author of the book “The Coming Collapse of China,” says it’s no surprise that the NBA and other businesses are doubling down on China, but warns a reckoning is coming. “The Chinese economy is slumping fast, certainly not growing at the 6% pace they claimed in Q3,” Chang says. “When the Chinese economy falls apart, people are going to say, ‘Why the hell was the NBA in China in the first place?’ It’s a militant state, and anyone who touches that militant state is doing so at their own risk. So there is a reputational risk for the NBA, but financial gain in the short term. Businesses make decisions based on their pocketbook, and anyone who expects the NBA to stand up to China is being unrealistic.”
The Morey tweet situation unfolded amid the NBA preseason, and days before the Los Angeles Lakers played a preseason game in China. The regular season tipped off on Oct. 22, and since then, players have widely gone silent on the China issue. (After LeBron James criticized the Morey tweet and was roundly slammed, he said he would not comment further). As Bob Dorfman of Baker Street Advertising says, “The strategy seems to be, Let’s just keep quiet and the situation will go away. It’s freedom of speech vs. the power of the dollar. And right now, the power of the dollar seems to be winning.”
China has 1.3 billion people, and the NBA has said 500 million of them are NBA fans; the league is set on converting the rest.
The league is targeting India, with a population of 1.37 billion, as its next growth market. But building that business is far more challenging than growing in China, since India has a per capita income of $150 per month and does not have a long history of loving basketball. On the other hand, the NBA counts India as its largest Jr. NBA program (a partnership with the Reliance Foundation) in the world.
The NBA is building in India using the blueprint in Africa, where it first opened an office in 2010 and played its first games in 2015. This year the NBA announced it will launch Basketball Africa League (BAL), in partnership with the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) in 2020; the league will start with 12 African teams.
Nike (NKE) is already on board as the BAL’s official apparel outfitter—because American sponsors see the same potential dollars in these emerging markets as the NBA does.
"That's why I don't have a sneaker deal. 'Cause if you say something people don't like they take your fuckin' shoes off. If Martin Luther King had a sneaker deal, we'd still be on the back of the bus. It's true, the Nike execs would come up like "Hi, Martin. Uh...we need you to tone down the civil rights talk and the stuff about black people being humans. It's upsetting our Southern distributors." [Chappelle, speaking as Martin Luther King, Jr.] "But I don't understand. I thought that's why I had a sneaker deal in the first place!" [Chappelle, speaking as a Nike executive] "Not quite. Really it's a walking shoe and we like the marching, but the...try to understand."
Papabear says.... I pray for the people of China for their human rights but before we or I can do anything we will have to get these shackles off of me...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall...
Even if you're stuck in the bottom 5% of the US income distribution your standard of living is about equal to that of the top 5% of Indians. Even if you're in the bottom 10% your standard of living is about the same as that of the bottom 10% in other rich countries (which, so we are told, care so much more and do so much more) like Sweden and Finland. And when we sweep everything together into some sort of quality of life measure the American poor are better off than the French or German poor.Maybe it's true that the US doesn't do enough for the poor in the US. That's rather a judgement call based upon your own morals. But it's very difficult to see in the actual figures that the US doesn't do enough. The poor in the US are richer than around 70% of all the people extant. The poor in the US are about as poor, perhaps a bit richer, than the poor in other rich countries. It is true that there is more inequality in the US: but this isn't because the poor are poorer. It's because the rich are richer.
“It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.”
― Anatole France
“On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact.”
― Gore Vidal
“Knowledge is responsibility, which is why people resist knowledge.”
― Stefan Molyneux
Uptown wrote:.....I didn't bother to read.....
https://qz.com/1811305/nike-apple-linked...
Companies still can’t stop labor abuses at Chinese factories
A guard tower and barbed wire fences are seen around a facility in Xinjiang
By Marc Bain
March 3, 2020Members of China’s Uyghur ethnic minority are being used as forced labor in factories far from the so-called reeducation camps that have held them for years in Xinjiang, according to an extensive new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a think-tank founded by Australia’s government.
Between 2017 and 2019, ASPI estimates the Chinese government relocated at least 80,000 Uyghurs from Xinjiang in western China to factories across the country where they work “under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour.” What’s more, it says the manufacturers using these transported Uyghurs supply at least 83 international companies making everything from footwear to electronics.
The list of well-recognized names includes Apple, Nike, Amazon, Samsung, Zara, H&M, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Uniqlo, and more. The report did not document factories using Uyghur labor supplying every one of these companies directly. In many cases, it only established that the factory’s owner—sometimes a large parent company that might own several factories—was listed as a supplier by the company or claimed to be a supplier itself.
Even so, it suggests a failure among companies of all sorts to monitor the partners making their products, even if they often claim to have robust programs in place to prevent these types of abuses. Factory audits became widespread in the 1990s, after the child-labor scandals involving Nike and the clothing line of television host Kathie Lee Gifford. Today they’re often carried out by large, for-profit firms that constitute a multi-billion dollar industry.
Yet problems continue to crop up, raising questions about the effectiveness of audits. Research has shown they often fail to catch labor abuses, and a report by garment-industry watchdog group Clean Clothes Campaign criticized the auditing industry last year as doing more to protect company reputations than workers.
“Clearly the auditing methodology is flawed,” says Dorothée Baumann-Pauly, research director at the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern school. She describes it as a top-down system where companies check in on supplier factories in search of violations but often miss the systemic causes leading factories to skirt the rules in the first place.
Many corporations—if not all those listed by the ASPI—have supplier codes of conduct prohibiting the use of forced labor. Nike’s states (pdf), for example, “The supplier does not use forced labor, including prison labor, indentured labor, bonded labor or other forms of forced labor.”
Yet one direct link documented in the report involved Nike. As of January, about 600 workers from Xinjiang were employed at one of its largest suppliers: Qingdao Taekwang Shoes Co. Ltd., which produces more than 7 million pairs of shoes for Nike annually, according to ASPI. In a story tied to the research, the Washington Post reported the factory makes shoes from Nike’s signature Air line and eight other styles. Located in Laixi to the north of Qingdao in eastern China, it’s far from Xinjiang. The transported workers—mostly young Uyghur women—did not elect to go there. There are cameras and barbed-wire all around the factory, and in the evenings they attend night school where they learn Mandarin and receive “patriotic education.”
ASPI says these and other workers were transferred out of Xinjiang and assigned to factories elsewhere under a government policy called “Xinjiang Aid.” Xinjiang’s regional government even pays private middlemen and local governments to organize the work assignments. One advertisement from a labor-dispatch company offered Uyghur workers still in their teens. “The advantages of Xinjiang workers are: semi-military style management, can withstand hardship, no loss of personnel … Minimum order 100 workers!” said the ad translated by ASPI. Employers could add Xinjiang police officers to stand guard 24 hours a day.
In another instance, the report cited a local government document from September counting 560 Xinjiang laborers transferred to factories in Henan province, including the Foxconn facility in Zhengzhou. Foxconn is the world’s biggest contract manufacturer of electronics. ASPI notes the Zhengzhou factory is dubbed “iPhone city” because of the quantity of iPhones it produces for Apple. Yet Apple’s supplier code (pdf) prohibits involuntary labor of any sort, which it defines as including workers transported by others under threat or force, as well as “payments to any person having control over another person for the purpose of exploitation.”
Why audits can failBaumann-Pauly notes that audits can easily miss sensitive problems, such as cases of abuse that aren’t happening out in the open. If an auditor interviews a worker, the worker may be reluctant to speak openly, especially if a manager is near. She says it’s a common issue in cases of sexual harassment or assault among female workers. It would likely be a similar situation trying to speak to a worker from Xinjiang working against her will.
https://nypost.com/2020/07/25/nike-shoul...
Nike should quit lecturing on social justice — and atone for using slave labor in China
By Steven W. Mosher
July 25, 2020 | 8:36amWoke companies are constantly hectoring America on its failings.
The Social Justice Warriors who run Nike, for example, pompously inform us that they are fighting “against discrimination in communities worldwide.” Not only that but they are “work[ing] every day to erase the stain of racism and the damage of injustice.”
Really, Nike? Then why do you have your shoes made by an oppressive, morally bankrupt regime? China is the ugly poster child, the living exemplar, for all of the evils that you are so quick to condemn America for.
Right now, at this very moment, the Chinese Communists are eliminating the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking people who live in China’s Far West, from the face of the earth.
They’ve locked up over a million Uyghur men in concentration camps, aborted and sterilized hundreds of thousands of the women, and are busy selling the young — in batches of 100, no less — to Chinese factory owners as slave labor.
Secret drone footage has revealed some of the brutality of this campaign. It shows hundreds of Uyghur men, handcuffed, blindfolded and heads shaved, being herded onto a train bound for a secret camp.
But it’s even worse for Nike, the wokest of woke companies.
It turns out that some of these Uyghurs have been slaving away making basketball shoes with the famous swoosh on them.
An Australian Strategic Policy Institute report published this March, “Uyghurs for sale,” found Uyghur slave labor working in factories supplying 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing, shoe and automotive sectors, including Apple, GM, Gap — and Nike.
Nike contracts with a Qingdao company, for example, that as of January of this year had 600 Uyghurs cobbling together its shoes.
Yes, the same company that funds organizations asking for reparations for a practice that ended in the US in 1865 has actually used slave labor in China to make its products — and its profits — for many years.
Like Nike, the pro-sports officials, owners and athletes of the NFL and the NBA who are making big money off the China market have also turned a blind eye to the brutal oppression of minorities there, all the while making woke noises about how racist America is.
The poster child for all of this anti-American demagoguery is NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who in 2018 signed a multi-million-dollar contract to become a megaphone for Nike products.
I wonder if the same man who kneels to protest America’s slave-owning past might one day stand for the freedom of slaves in China. It would only be fitting. It was Uyghur slaves, after all, who might have stitched his Kaepernick brand of Air Force 1 shoes together.
While we wait for that moment of self-awareness to strike the young progressive, we at least have the redoubtable Josh Hawley. The Missouri senator this week tweeted Nike and the NBA to ask them to certify that their products are “Slave Free.”
As for Nike, it has pledged to donate “$100 million over the next 10 years to organizations dedicated to ensuring racial equality, social justice and greater access to education.”But I have a better idea, Nike. Why don’t you take the blood money you have earned from employing slave labor in China and open a factory in the US? Choose a site in the inner city, employ minorities, and provide jobs and a way out of poverty.
That would go a lot further toward ensuring racial equality and social justice, not to mention hope for the future of America, than anything else you could do.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uig...The World’s Most Technologically Sophisticated Genocide Is Happening in Xinjiang
By Rayhan Asat, Yonah Diamond | July 15, 2020, 3:38 PM
Two recent disturbing events may finally awaken the world to the scale and horror of the atrocities being committed against the Uighurs, a mostly secular Muslim ethnic minority, in Xinjiang, China. One is an authoritative report documenting the systematic sterilization of Uighur women. The other was the seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection of 13 tons of products made from human hair suspected of being forcibly removed from Uighurs imprisoned in concentration camps. Both events evoke chilling parallels to past atrocities elsewhere, forced sterilization of minorities, disabled, and Indigenous people, and the image of the glass display of mountains of hair preserved at Auschwitz.The Genocide Convention, to which China is a signatory, defines genocide as specific acts against members of a group with the intent to destroy that group in whole or in part. These acts include (a) killing; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm; (c) deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about the group’s physical destruction; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Any one of these categories constitutes genocide. The overwhelming evidence of the Chinese government’s deliberate and systematic campaign to destroy the Uighur people clearly meets each of these categories.
Over a million Turkic Uighurs are detained in concentration camps, prisons, and forced labor factories in China. Detainees are subject to military-style discipline, thought transformation, and forced confessions. They are abused, tortured, raped, and even killed. Survivors report being subjected to electrocution, waterboarding, repeated beatings, stress positions, and injections of unknown substances. These mass detention camps are designed to cause serious physical, psychological harm and mentally break the Uighur people. The repeated government orders to “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins”; “round up everyone who should be rounded up”; and systematically prevent Uighur births demonstrate a clear intent to eradicate the Uighur people as a whole.
Ekpar Asat (brother of one of the present authors) is an emblematic example of how Uighurs are targeted regardless of their recognition as model Chinese citizens by the Communist Party. Asat was praised by the government for his community leadership as a “bridge builder” and “positive force” between ethnic minorities and the Xinjiang local government. But Asat still suffered the same fate as over a million other Uighurs and disappeared into the shadows of the concentration camps in 2016. He is held incommunicado and is reported to be serving a 15-year sentence on the trumped-up charge of “inciting ethnic hatred.” Not a single court document is available about his case.
In 2017, Xinjiang waged a brutal “Special Campaign to Control Birth Control Violations,” along with specific local directives. By 2019, the government planned to subject over 80 percent of women of childbearing age in southern Xinjiang to forced intrauterine devices (IUDs) and sterilization. The goal is to achieve “zero birth control violation incidents.” Government documents reveal a campaign of mass female sterilization supported by state funding to carry out hundreds of thousands of sterilizations in 2019 and 2020. This goes far beyond the scale, per capita, of forced sterilization inflicted on women throughout China under the past one-child policy.
To implement these policies, the Xinjiang government employed “dragnet-style” investigations to hunt down women of childbearing age.
Once apprehended, these women have no choice but to undergo forced sterilization to avoid being sent to an internment camp. Once detained, women face forced injections, abortions, and unknown drugs.
And statistics show that the government is meeting its birth prevention goals.
Between 2015 and 2018, population growth rates in the Uighur heartland plummeted by 84 percent. Conversely, official documents show that sterilization rates skyrocketed in Xinjiang while plunging throughout the rest of China, and the funding for these programs is only increasing. Between 2017 and 2018, in one district, the percentage of women who were infertile or widowed increased by 124 percent and 117 percent, respectively. In 2018, 80 percent of all IUD placements in China were performed in Xinjiang despite accounting for a mere 1.8 percent of China’s population. These IUDs can be removed only by state-approved surgery—or else prison terms will follow. In Kashgar, only about 3 percent of married women of childbearing age gave birth in 2019. The latest annual reports from some of these regions have begun omitting birth rate information altogether to conceal the scale of destruction. The government has shut down its entire online platform after these revelations. The scale and scope of these measures are clearly designed to halt Uighur births.
With Uighur men detained and women sterilized, the government has laid the groundwork for the physical destruction of the Uighur people. At least half a million of the remaining Uighur children have been separated from their families and are being raised by the state at so-called “children shelters.”
What makes this genocide so uniquely dangerous is its technological sophistication, allowing for efficiency in its destruction and concealment from global attention. The Uighurs have been suffering under the most advanced police state, with extensive controls and restrictions on every aspect of life—religious, familial, cultural, and social. To facilitate surveillance, Xinjiang operates under a grid management system. Cities and villages are split into squares of about 500 people. Each square has a police station that closely monitors inhabitants by regularly scanning their identification cards, faces, DNA samples, fingerprints, and cell phones. These methods are supplemented by a machine-operated system known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform. The system uses machine learning to collect personal data from video surveillance, smartphones, and other private records to generate lists for detention. Over a million Han Chinese watchers have been installed in Uighur households, rendering even intimate spaces subject to the government’s eye.....
In our interconnected world, we are not only bystanders if we fail to recognize the genocide as we see it. We are complicit.