Category: Free Speech

“Maverick” Chinese Entrepreneur Zhou Hang Dares Criticize Zero Covid Policy

(p. B1) China’s entrepreneur class is grappling with the worst economic slump in decades as the government’s zero Covid policy has shut down cities and kept would-be customers at home. Yet they can’t seem to agree on how loudly they should complain — or even whether they should at all.

. . .

Their approach, the equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand, doesn’t make sense to Zhou Hang. Mr. Zhou, a tech entrepreneur and a venture capitalist, has questioned how his peers can pretend it’s business as usual, given the political and economic upheaval. Stop putting up with the ridiculous reality, he urged. It’s time to speak up and seek change.

Mr. Zhou is rare in China’s business community for being openly critical of the government’s zero Covid policy, which has put hundreds of millions of people under some kind of lockdowns in the past few months, costing jobs and revenues. He’s saying what many others are whispering in private but fear to say in public.

“The questions we should ask ourselves are,” he wrote in an article that was censored within an hour of posting (p. B4) but shared widely in other formats, “what caused such widespread negative sentiment across the society? Who should be responsible for this? And how can we change it?”

He said the lockdowns in Shanghai and other cities made it clear that wealth and social status meant little to a government determined to pursue its zero Covid policy. “We’re all nobodies who could be sent to the quarantine camps, and our homes could be broken into,” he wrote. “If we still choose to adapt to and put up with this, all of us will face the same destiny: trapped.”

. . .

Mr. Zhou, 49, is known as a maverick in Chinese business circles. He founded his first business in stereo systems with his brother in the mid-1990s when he was still in college. In 2010, he started Yongche, one of the first ride-hailing companies.

Unlike most Chinese bosses, he didn’t demand that his employees work overtime, and he didn’t like liquor-filled business meals. He turned down hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and refused to participate in subsidy wars because doing so didn’t make economic sense. He ended up losing out to his more aggressive competitor Didi.

He later wrote a best seller about his failure and became a partner at a venture capital firm in Beijing. In April [2022], he was named chairman of the ride-sharing company Caocao, a subsidiary of auto manufacturing giant Geely Auto Group.

A Chinese citizen with his family in Canada, Mr. Zhou said in an interview that in the past many wealthy Chinese people like him would move their families and some of their assets abroad but work in China because there were more opportunities.

Now, some of the top talent are trying to move their businesses out of the country, too. It doesn’t bode well for China’s future, he said.

“Entrepreneurs have good survivor’s instinct,” he said. “Now they’re forced to look beyond China.” He coined a term — “passive globalization” — based on his discussions with other entrepreneurs. “Many of us are starting to take such actions,” he said.

For the full story see:

Li Yuan. “A Solitary Critic on ‘Zero Covid’.” The New York Times (Saturday, June 11, 2022): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 10, 2022 and has the title “A Chinese Entrepreneur Who Says What Others Only Think.”)

“Quiet, Unassuming” Dr. Zelenko Got Twitter Suspension and Death Threats for Speaking on Hydroxychloroquine

Dr. Zelenko was stricken with a rare form of lung cancer in 2018, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic. I wonder if that increased his personal sense of urgency to find a cure for Covid-19?

(p. A21) Vladimir Zelenko, a self-described “simple country doctor” from upstate New York who rocketed to prominence in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic when his controversial treatment for the coronavirus gained White House support, died on Thursday in Dallas. He was 48.

. . .

Like many health care providers, he scrambled when the coronavirus began to appear in his community. Within weeks he had landed on what he insisted was an effective cure: a three-drug cocktail of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, the antibiotic azithromycin and zinc sulfate.

. . .

“At the time, it was a brand-new finding, and I viewed it like a commander in the battlefield,” Dr. Zelenko told The New York Times. “I realized I needed to speak to the five-star general.”

On March 28, [2020] the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization to doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine and another antimalarial drug, chloroquine, to treat Covid. Mr. Trump called the treatment “very effective” and possibly “the biggest game changer in the history of medicine.”

But, as fellow medical professionals began to point out, Dr. Zelenko had only his own anecdotal evidence to support his case, and what little research had been done painted a mixed picture.

Still, he became something of a folk hero on the right, someone who offered not just hope amid the pandemic but also an alternative to the medical establishment and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who insisted that months of research would be needed to find an effective treatment.

. . .

A quiet, unassuming man, Dr. Zelenko seemed unprepared for the attention he received, which included harassing phone calls and even death threats. In May 2020, a federal prosecutor opened an investigation into whether he had falsely claimed F.D.A. approval for his research.

. . .

After the F.D.A. rescinded its approval of hydroxychloroquine as a Covid treatment, he founded a company, Zelenko Labs, to promote other nonconventional treatments for the disease, including vitamins and quercetin, an anti-inflammatory drug.

And while he claimed to be apolitical, he embraced the image of a victim of the establishment. He founded a nonprofit, the Zelenko Freedom Foundation, to press his case. In December 2020, Twitter suspended his account, stating that it had violated standards prohibiting “platform manipulation and spam.”

. . .

In a memoir, “Metamorphosis” (2018), Dr. Zelenko wrote that he grew up nonreligious and entered Hofstra University as an avowed atheist.

“I enjoyed debating with people and proving to them that G-d did not exist,” he wrote. “I studied philosophy and was drawn to nihilistic thinkers such as Sartre and Nietzsche.”

But after a trip to Israel, he began to change his mind. He gravitated toward Orthodox Judaism, and in particular the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

He graduated from Hofstra in 1995 with a degree in chemistry, and he received his medical degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2000.

. . .

In 2018, doctors found a rare form of cancer in his chest and, in hopes of treating it, removed his right lung.

For the full obituary see:

Clay Risen. “Vladimir Zelenko, 48, ‘Country Doctor’ Who Pushed Unfounded Covid Remedy.” The New York Times (Saturday, July 2, 2022): A21.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date July 1, 2022 and has the title “Vladimir Zelenko, 48, Dies; Promoted an Unfounded Covid Treatment.”)

Dr. Zelenko’s pre-Covid-19 memoir is:

Zelenko, Vladmir. Metamorphosis. Lakewood, NJ: Israel Bookshop Publications, 2019.

A highly credentialed Yale academic presented evidence of the promise of hydroxychloroquine for early outpatient treatment in:

Risch, Harvey A. “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients That Should Be Ramped-up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis.” American Journal of Epidemiology 189, no. 11 (Nov. 2020): 1218–26.

Chinese Communists Censor Tiananmen Ice Cream Tank

Tweeted screen capture from a Weibo posting by Li Jiaqi, a posting that was then censored by the Chinese Communists.

(p. A9) HONG KONG—One of China’s biggest online influencers stepped on a political land mine while promoting an ice-cream product on Friday. In the process, he set off a wave of curiosity about the government’s bloody 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters among hordes of fans too young to remember it.

. . .

Mr. Li was promoting Viennetta, a British brand of ice cream made by Unilever, around 9 p.m. on Friday [June 3, 2022]. He and a co-host presented a layered ice cream decorated with round cookies placed along its sides, and topped off with what appeared to be a chocolate stick. Almost immediately, the live show went offline.

To some viewers, the reason for the cutoff was obvious: The dessert sculpture resembled a tank—a sensitive symbol of the Chinese military’s killing of pro-democracy protesters on June 4, 1989, made all the more potent by the iconic image of an anonymous Beijing man facing down a line of them in the wake of the massacre.

. . .

To large numbers of Mr. Li’s other 170 million followers, many of whom were born after 1989 and talk vastly more about shopping than politics, the show’s suspension was puzzling.

. . .

Some of Mr. Li’s fans stumbled upon a 1989 document posted on the central government’s website describing the event as a violent riot that caused the deaths of many soldiers, and posted a link to it online. Many ended their posts with an endorsement of the Communist Party.

Several fans complained that their Weibo accounts were frozen after they posted information that they had dug up about Tiananmen Square.

For the full story, see:

Wenxin Fan. “Ice Cream Sets Off China’s Censors.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, June 6, 2022): A9.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 5, 2022, and has the title “Chinese Influencer’s Ice-Cream Pitch Inadvertently Introduces Fans to Tiananmen Square Massacre.”)

WHO Scientists Say China Should Release Data and Reports on Origin of Covid-19

(p. A9) In its first report, a team of international scientists assembled by the World Health Organization to advise on the origins of the coronavirus said on Thursday [June 9, 2022] that bats likely carried an ancestor of the coronavirus that may have then spilled over into a mammal sold at a wildlife market. But the team said that more Chinese data was needed to study how the virus spread to people, including the possibility that a lab leak played a role.

The team, appointed by the W.H.O. in October as the organization tried to reset its approach to studying the pandemic’s origins, said that Chinese scientists had shared information with them, including from unpublished studies, on two occasions. But gaps in Chinese reports made it difficult to determine when and where the outbreak emerged, the report said.

. . .

Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity researcher at King’s College London, praised the latest report for noting the lack of published findings from China’s own origin studies. But she said that its proposals for future pandemic origin studies did not adequately account for investigations into “accidental or deliberate events,” which she said would require expertise outside of public health.

Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said that the report made clear that mitigating future pandemic threats required considering both animal and laboratory origins.

“Both of these things are sufficiently serious possibilities that they need to be thought about together,” he said.

For the full story, see:

Benjamin Mueller and Carl Zimmer. “Scientists Say More Chinese Data Is Needed to Trace Covid’s Origins.” The New York Times (Friday, June 10, 2022): A9.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 9, 2022, and has the title “Mysteries Linger About Covid’s Origins, W.H.O. Report Says.”)

Which Country’s National Anthem Ends by Questioning Its Citizens’ Bravery and Freedom?

(p. 9) Mark Clague knows everything about “The Star-Spangled Banner,” . . . .

. . .

The lyrics were composed by the lawyer, politician and amateur poet Francis Scott Key while held prisoner by the British in Baltimore Harbor during the War of 1812.

. . .

Clague even creates a detailed military map of the engagement to demonstrate how “perilous” that fight really was. The first verse, the only one now sung, ends, as every child knows, with a question:

“Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave/O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?”

In the complete version, Key details his relief at finally seeing the flag, and rejoices in the promise of future victories. But those three verses are rarely sung, and leaving the question unanswered might be the secret to the song’s hold on the American public. It is not an anthem that, like “La Marseillaise,” calls for our enemy’s “impure blood to water our fields.” Rather, it’s a song for a country that is still in the fight, for its existence and its ideals, and it offers an invitation to any and all — the “you” of the first line — . . .

. . .

. . ., Clague has no patience for anyone who demands . . . reverence from others, . . . . But he reveres the anthem itself, and he makes the strongest case for the song in his detailed analysis of what he calls its most successful modern rendition, Whitney Houston’s performance at the 1991 Super Bowl.

Houston’s version, though, is transformed by artistry and personality and musical genius. She has changed the time signature to 4/4, and imbues the melody with the ornamentation of jazz, blues and, most important, gospel. By the time she gets that highest “FREEEE” she not only reaches but goes above it, expressing ownership of the word and the gesture. While the lyrics may remain as written, the meaning of a crucial word in the first line — “you” — has been wrenched from past to present to be addressed, at last, to all of us.

So: Does that star-spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and home of the brave? Not yet, perhaps. But listening to a descendant of the enslaved claiming the song of a slaver, you want to believe it someday might.

For the full review, see:

Peter Sagal. “High Notes.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, July 3, 2022): 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated June 22, 2022, and has the title “Our Flag Was Still There.”)

The book under review is:

Clague, Mark. O Say Can You Hear?: A Cultural Biography of “the Star-Spangled Banner”. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.

“We Approach Complete Leftist Saturation Among Professors”

(p. A13) The current left-right campus faculty ratio is probably about 15 to 1, but new appointments are being made at a rate of about 50 to 1. As we approach complete leftist saturation among professors, college campuses will become even more intolerant, irrational and politically aggressive.

More important still, academia’s influence on society will intensify as the number of people who have graduated from radicalized campuses increases and the number of those who graduated with a conventional college education declines. A generation—students from about 2000 to now—has graduated from one-party campuses. Where will we be when two generations have done so and another generation has died off?

. . .

Parents and students feel a need for credentials, even while the credential of a college degree has been corrupted. A more important factor is that public perception hasn’t caught up to the reality of academia. Older adults cherish memories of their time at college. Campus buildings are as impressive as ever, and the names of the institutions like Harvard and Yale are still magical, but a stream of poisonous ideology flows daily from academia into American culture.

For the full commentary, see:

John Ellis. “Can Politics Get Better When Higher Ed Keeps Getting Worse?” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Jan. 15, 2022): A13

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 14, 2022, and has the title “Can Politics Get Better When Higher Education Keeps Getting Worse?”)

The commentary quoted above is related to the author’s book:

Ellis, John M. The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done. New York: Encounter Books, 2020.

Elon Musk Is a “Free Speech Absolutist”

(p. A1) Twitter Inc. accepted Elon Musk’s bid to take over the company and go private, a deal that would give the world’s richest person control over the social-media network where he is also among its most influential users.

. . .

On Monday [April 15, 2022], a day after The Wall Street Journal first reported that a deal was close, Mr. Musk tweeted to indicate that he wants the platform to be a destination for wide-ranging discourse and disagreement.

. . .

(p. A6) Mr. Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” said in a recent interview at a TED conference that he sees Twitter as the “de facto town square.”

For the full story, see:

Cara Lombardo, Meghan Bobrowsky and Georgia Wells. “Musk Strikes Deal to Buy Twitter.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 26, 2022): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 25, 2022, and has the title “Twitter Accepts Elon Musk’s Offer to Buy Company in $44 Billion Deal.”)

In 2020, After Deploring “Dark Money,” Democrats Spend $600 Million More Dark Money Than Republicans

(p. 1) For much of the last decade, Democrats complained — with a mix of indignation, frustration and envy — that Republicans and their allies were spending hundreds of millions of difficult-to-trace dollars to influence politics.

“Dark money” became a dirty word, as the left warned of the threat of corruption posed by corporations and billionaires that were spending unlimited sums through loosely regulated nonprofits, which did not disclose their donors’ identities.

Then came the 2020 election.

Spurred by opposition to then-President Trump, donors and operatives allied with the Democratic Party embraced dark money with fresh zeal, pulling even with and, by some measures, surpassing Republicans in 2020 spending, according to a New York Times analysis of tax filings and other data.

The analysis shows that 15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with the Democratic Party spent more than $1.5 billion in 2020 — compared to roughly $900 million spent by a comparable sample of 15 of the most politically active groups aligned with the G.O.P.

For the full story, see:

Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher. “Denouncing Dark Money, Then Deploying It in 2020.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, January 30, 2022): 1 & 22.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 29, 2022, and has the title “Democrats Decried Dark Money. Then They Won With It in 2020.”)

Chinese Communists Are Extending Covid Controls to Use Against “Hostile Political Forces”

(p. 1) The police had warned Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer, not to go to Shanghai to visit the mother of a dissident. He went to the airport anyway.

His phone’s health code app — a digital pass indicating possible exposure to the coronavirus — was green, which meant he could travel. His home city, Changsha, had no Covid-19 cases, and he had not left in weeks.

Then his app turned red, flagging him as high risk. Airport security tried to put him in quarantine, but he resisted. Mr. Xie accused the authorities of meddling with his health code to bar him from traveling.

“The Chinese Communist Party has found the best model for controlling people,” he said in a telephone interview in December. This month, the police detained Mr. Xie, a government critic, accusing him of inciting subversion and provoking trouble.

The pandemic has given Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, a powerful case for deepening the Communist Party’s reach into the lives of 1.4 billion citizens, filling out his vision of the country as a model of secure order, in contrast to the “chaos of the West.” In the two years since officials isolated the city of Wuhan in the first lockdown of the pandemic, the Chinese government has honed its powers to track and corral people, backed by upgraded technology, armies of neighborhood workers and broad public support.

Emboldened by their successes in stamping out Covid, Chinese officials are turning their sharpened surveillance against other risks, including crime, pollution and “hostile” political forces. This amounts to a potent techno-authoritarian tool for Mr. Xi as he intensifies his campaigns against corruption and dissent.

For the full story, see:

Chris Buckley, Vivian Wang, and Keith Bradsher. “China’s Strict Covid Controls May Outlast Covid.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, January 30, 2022): 1 & 14.

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “Living by the Code: In China, Covid-Era Controls May Outlast the Virus.”)

The Walt Disney Company Censors Homer Simpson’s Calling Mao “A Little Angel That Killed 50 Million People”

June 3, 2022 was the 33rd anniversary of the massacre of pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese Communists.

(p. A4) HONG KONG — An episode of “The Simpsons” that ridicules Chinese government censorship appears to have been censored on Disney’s newly launched streaming service in Hong Kong, adding to fears about the shrinking space for free expression and criticism in this city.

Other episodes of the show are available on Disney+, which made its much-anticipated debut in Hong Kong this month. But in season 16, the archive skips directly from episode 11 to episode 13, omitting episode 12, “Goo Goo Gai Pan,” in which the Simpson family travels to Beijing.

There, they visit the embalmed body of Mao Zedong, whom Homer Simpson calls “a little angel that killed 50 million people.” In another scene, the family passes through Tiananmen Square, where a plaque says “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened” — a jab at the Chinese government’s attempts to suppress public memory of the massacre, in which the army opened fire on students and other pro-democracy protesters.

. . .

. . . Disney pre-emptively censored itself, said Grace Leung, an expert in media regulation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

“Disney obviously sent out a clear signal to the local audience that it will remove controversial programs in order to please” the Chinese government, Dr. Leung said. “Their credibility will definitely be hurt.”

. . .

In Hong Kong, the “Simpsons” episode is not the only creative work to come under scrutiny for touching on Tiananmen Square.

Ahead of the opening this month of M+, a major new art museum in Hong Kong, lawmakers called for a ban on a photograph by Ai Weiwei, perhaps China’s most famous artist, who is now living in exile. In the photograph, which the museum has since removed from its online archive, Mr. Ai is raising his middle finger in front of Tiananmen Square.

The University of Hong Kong has ordered the removal of “Pillar of Shame,” a sculpture commemorating the massacre that has stood on campus for over 20 years.

For the full story, see:

Vivian Wang. “‘Simpsons’ Trip to Beijing Is Missing in Hong Kong.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 30, 2021): A4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 29, 2021, and has the title “A ‘Simpsons’ Episode Lampooned Chinese Censorship. In Hong Kong, It Vanished.” Where there is a slight difference in wording between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

Mamet Was Opened to Friedman, Hayek, and Sowell by a Guy Who “Wasn’t Strident or Arrogant”

I often wonder what sort of person, making what sort of argument, is most able to convince those who start out disagreeing. My mentors Ben Rogge and Deirdre McCloskey exemplify the attitude that impressed David Mamet in the passage quoted below. (On the other hand, Murray Rothbard, Karl Marx, and Ayn Rand convinced a lot of people, and each of them could sometimes be strident. I wonder still.)

(p. A11) . . . I received a galley copy of the playwright David Mamet’s “Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of Free Lunch,” published Tuesday. The book is a collection of essays written over the past two years on an array of cultural and political topics: pandemic zealotry, Donald Trump, terrorism, California’s punitive tax code, Christianity and Judaism, Broadway and the movies. The essays are by turns witty, insightful, affecting and cryptic. What struck me most about the book, though, was how superbly out of place its author must be in the eminent environs of his chosen industry.

. . .

Mr. Mamet announced a turn to the political right in a 2008 essay for the Village Voice, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal,’ ” but he was a black sheep long before then. His 1992 play “Oleanna,” for instance, features a male academic whose life and career are ruined by a calculating female student’s spurious accusation of sexual harassment.

Was there a moment when he decided to break ranks altogether? “I met a guy at my synagogue here maybe 20 years ago,” he says. “He was talking about Milton Friedman and [Friedrich] Hayek and Thomas Sowell. It didn’t make any sense to me, but I was impressed by his attitude. He wasn’t strident or arrogant. It was that guy’s attitude that impressed me.”

The man lent Mr. Mamet some books by these authors. “I said to him, ‘Good, I’ll read them. But,’ I said, ‘when my friends come over, I’ll have to hide them.’ He said: ‘I don’t.’ And that changed my life. What was I saying? Did I really think I had to hide books from my friends? How sick was I? It was a Road to Damascus moment.”

. . .

Woke signaling, blind compliance with public-health authoritarianism, deference to theater critics and tyrannical city officials—Mr. Mamet doesn’t play along. I’m reminded of the line spoken by Richard Roma, the aggressive and highly successful real-estate salesman in “Glengarry Glen Ross” played by Al Pacino in the 1992 film adaptation. “I subscribe to the law of contrary public opinion,” Roma says. “If everyone thinks one thing, then I say bet the other way.”

For the full interview, see:

Barton Swaim, interviewer. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; A Defiant Scribe in the Age of Conformity.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 9, 2022): A11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date April 8, 2022, and has the title “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Opinion: David Mamet Is a Defiant Scribe in the Age of Conformity.”)

Mamet’s recent book, mentioned in the interview above, is:

Mamet, David. Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. New York: Broadside Books, 2022.