To Confront China, America Needs Wokeism

The Chinese government has imprisoned, tortured, enslaved or forcibly sterilized over a million million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. American billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya's response? “Nobody cares.” 

For the most part, Palihapitiya’s statement rings true for most American businesses. They don’t care to offend China — not when there’s profit on the line. Consider Apple: “[T]o quash a sudden burst of regulatory actions,” the giant struck a $275 billion deal with the PRC. Then there’s JPMorgan, which found that jokes about the Chinese Communist Party are no laughing matter. The Magic Kingdom capitulated to the Middle Kingdom when, in its recent film Mulan, Disney praised the security bureau running several Uyghur internment camps.

As a liberal democracy, America’s vulnerability is her market, and China has stabbed deep. To uphold her values, the US must seek beyond plain liberalism, to wokeness. 

To understand why, consider American political scientist Francis Fukuyama and his book, The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama predicted 30 years ago the selfishness that hamstrings our Indo-Pacific strategy today. His book describes how liberal democracy spawns the eponymous “last man” — that is, one whose values have been reduced to materialism alone. The last man, says Fukuyama, is “content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame in himself for being unable to rise above those wants.” And that includes shame for disregarding an ongoing genocide.

American corporations have personified the last man, kowtowing to China and her billions of customers. Nike, Coca-Cola, and Apple reportedly lobbied against a bill targeting Uyghur enslavement. After the law passed, China attacked Intel for merely mentioning its legal compliance. With American businesses as new vassals of the Chinese tributary system, the US has no effective China strategy. 

To engage China, the U.S. must instill in her corporations motivations superseding profit — and this is where wokeism can help. Chamath Palihapitiya may not care about the Uyghur genocide, but his firm Social Capital dedicated, in their latest letter to investors, a 284-word paean to Black Lives Matter. Nike, Coca-Cola, and Apple may have stymied justice for the Uyghur people, but Nike won an Emmy for its ad celebrating activist Colin Kaepernick. Coca-Cola required its workers to “be less white,” and Apple pledged $100 million to a brand-new “Racial Equity and Justice Initiative.” 

As Tyler Cowen argues: “Wokeism is an idea that can be adapted to virtually every country: Identify a major form of oppression in a given region or nation, argue that people should be more sensitive to it, add some rhetorical flourishes, purge some wrongdoers (and a few innocents) and voila — you have created another woke movement.”

What anti-China woke movement could we create? If China cancels Intel until it removes a reference to Xinjiang from its letter to investors, Americans could cancel Intel until it restores the text, perhaps with an additional paragraph promoting Taiwan’s sovereignty. Public figures’ interviews, Twitter feeds, and Tik Toks could be scrutinized for pro-CCP, anti-Uyghur statements. Historians and journalists could be furiously penning the 1755 Project — the year China cleared Xinjiang for Western Expansion by genociding 480,000 native Dzungars, some 80% of the population. 

We already see hints of woke foreign policy. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has declared that “the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.” In that other leader of the free world, Germany, Anna Baerbock, leader of the progressive Greens, spearheads the nation’s anti-China response. These days, even the CIA is woke. 

A woke movement would be costly. Here, perhaps, the last man has a point. After all, we are in the wealthiest and safest time in human history; why should we give that up? Our current trade war with China costs us $57.1 billion and 176,800 jobs; escalations will hurt more, when America already suffers supply-side inflation. Not to mention how confrontation with the People’s Republic could further agitate anti-Asian hate. 

And perhaps wokeism does not only threaten China, but liberal democracy as well. Ironically, excessive wokeness will make America look more like China. Contrary to Western perception, though the China state is undoubtedly censorial, her infamously repressive political climate relies greatly on non-state, social forces. China has its own cancel culture, its own army of keyboard warriors who attack the insufficiently nationalistic, dramatically escalating in fervor as participants jostle to be the truest believer. Grassroots fanaticism is no less dangerous, as the Chinese learned during the Cultural Revolution, a mass movement of political violence that killed hundreds of thousands.

On its homepage, Palihapitiya’s Social Capital states proudly “our mission is to advance humanity by solving the world's hardest problems.” Palihapitiya’s comments spotlight the hardest problem for America today. Without wokeism, America is doomed to pusillanimity and venality under the last businessmen. With wokeism, America will weaken the very advantage it holds over the People’s Republic: an open, tolerant society.

Joe Huang is a software engineer in the Bay Area. He has a BS in computer science and math from Vanderbilt University.