A kind of right-wing character who exalts the genocidal Chinese regime and bemoans the United States’ raison d’être has come into existence in recent years. I’ve dubbed this cohort “ChiCons,” in spite of the fact that little about these people can be called conservative, in the American sense.
Sohrab Ahmari, a founder and editor of Compact, is a charter member of the ChiCon Club. Last October, he wrote a column for the American Conservative that decried American individualism while downplaying the genocide China is perpetrating against its Uyghur population. Before that, he had professed to be “at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century.”
“Late-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower,” he explained. “Chinese civilization, especially if it recovers more of its Confucian roots, will possess a great deal of natural virtue.”
Now, Ahmari has produced another instant classic. At a conference held at Franciscan University of Steubenville earlier this month, he pontificated that “if China treated workers the way Amazon does, American elites would be outraged.”
Is it possible that Ahmari really thinks Amazon — which began to voluntarily pay every single U.S. employee a minimum of $15 an hour, more than double the federal minimum wage, in 2018 — treats its employees worse than China does its workforce?
China, which locks its workers in dormitories for months at a time? Where workers, including Uyghurs (apologies, I know Ahmari thinks mentions of human-rights abuses are tedious), are forced to work against their will? Whose international Belt and Road Initiative is “based on forced labor”? Where labor organizations are subjected to “regular rounds of repression and harassment, including tax audits, mafia violence and continual interrogation by security officials”?
I suppose it is possible that Ahmari believes this because he lacks sufficient subject-matter knowledge, or basic awareness of the world around him. If so, he might want to educate himself further before defending such a tyrannical regime.