Marriott refused to host Uyghur conference, citing “political neutrality”
axios.com
axios.com
From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense, but moralistically, it does not.
It is very disappointing that even I, as an Asian individual living in Canada, am disincentivized from expressing even my own opinion on China and HK/Taiwan, etc. due to the perceived threat of "consequences" from a government whose reach I cannot easily quantify.
Marriot do have a spotty history on such issues, but I think we should commend them when they attempt to do the right thing. Yes this shouldn't have happened in the first place, but given that it did they do seem to be doing their best to make it right.
I'm not going to post this reply to every single other comment ragging on 'Marriot' here, which is all but one top level comment, but come on people. Read the article. Oh, and now that top level comment that was actually informed and provided useful context is getting downvoted into oblivion. We can do better than this.
It's easy to give into a pessimistic spiral; I always wanted these kinds of issues to become well-known, but it seems like the response is often some kind of "yeah, figures.", foregoing the conclusion.
In a similar, but lesser vein; John Cena's apology video didn't once mention what he was apologizing for, and still got lots of flak from mainland Chinese because of that. It was plain to everyone involved what the video was aimed to do, but it's the kind of fence-walking that we miss.
It usually doesn't matter, but on policy questions there can sometimes be some friction between owner preferences & Marriott corporate preferences.
Usually this is over things like "Your food and service isn't up to Marriott quality, because you're under investing." But I imagine politics is also a sensitive point too. Regardless, Marriott corporate usually wins, as a hotel-without-the-Marriott-name prints less money.
Edit: Although in this instance, from the scarce details, it sounds like it was divergence from corporate policy by local management. Which, if you're putting management teams in ~7,900 properties, is probably a thing that happens.
Basic summary: https://marketrealist.com/2014/10/why-marriotts-hotels-have-...
Marriott Intl page for franchisees: https://hotel-development.marriott.com/
According to a recent SEC filing, they own 20 properties internationally, lease another ~40. They manage 2,149, and franchise 5,493.
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001048286/0...
Also note that their apology doesn’t explicitly condemn the hotel’s behavior, it just says that they’re providing training. Definitely riding the fence.
Maybe it's due to my bad English, but I'm not able to find any sign of actual "overrule" of this decision. Is the WUC was finally accepted at this Hotel?
Where are you seeing this?
> The Marriott spokesperson clarified in a statement to Axios that hosting the conference would not have violated any "political neutrality" policy, and said the reference to "corporate management" in the email referred to "hotel-level management."
> "We are working with the hotel team to provide additional training and education on our longstanding practices of inclusion," she said.
And that is our fault, to a great extent.
By "we", here I mean citizens of western countries that put up with this bullshit. When one of "our" companies engages in this shameful authoritarian appeasement we should boycott them to oblivion. If we fail to do so, we are enabling this behavior.
There's not much that we can do about human rights abuses in other countries. But there's a lot that we can do in our own countries to local companies that participate or validate the abusers. In that particular case, it would be feasible for Austrian people to stop all Marriott operations on the whole country, with a targeted human-rights campaign.
What's the difference between what you're promoting and the knee-jerk cancel culture that's as bad as what it punishes? I like to think we can influence and change behaviours without "boycotting companies into oblivion", even if that was realistic or likely. There's a large distance between your aggressive post on the internet and an entire country of people coordinating a campaign against specific business.
I don't sense our news-media wants to fight this fight.
Nike and Apple do have some leverage that the government can work with. However, American imports tend to be intermediary goods, so doing so would mutually damage both sides. We barely have enough on the table to negotiate trade, so no politician is going to enter a war of attrition for humanitarian reasons, especially if it's one that they have been preparing for, and we have not.
1. People don't have enough motivation, knowledge, and free time to find and keep track of which companies behave ethically. Also, people are generally selfish and will buy from unethical companies if it saves them money or time. (I did this yesterday.)
2. Liars deceive large groups of people and escape punishment or cause wrong punishment of a competitor.
In a modern society, we need people with specialized skills to do the work of holding companies accountable. We should train them, pay them, and hold them accountable for how they do their jobs. USA has a law forbidding US people from paying bribes to anyone anywhere in the world. The FBI enforces this law.
How about adding a law forbidding US people from discriminating in business based on political or religious affiliation? I think we don't have this because a lot of US people wish to run their businesses with bigotry. See the gay wedding cake controversy [0].
Such laws would be terrific. Example: Gofundme will not be permitted to ban Kyle Rittenhouse's fundraising.
The number of folks on the right being discriminated against outnumber the folks on the left by several orders of magnitude.
Now they’ve obligated themselves (morally) to refuse Chinese political meeting bookings as well, but we won’t see that happen
Opinion: Due to Chinese human rights abuses AND the threats against American business, the US should not attend the upcoming Beijing Olympics
In a vacuum, I fully agree with protesting China to the fullest extent; however, if scientists are to be believed, these things (human rights, trade, etc violations) trifle in comparison to the climate change threat, and China has all of humanity by the throat here. We need a cooperative relationship with China for the coming decades, since we can't just move our manufacturing (and thus its pollution) out of China overnight and the climate can't wait for a more gradual approach.
EDIT: Looks like I struck a nerve. Folks, believe me, I don't like the idea of letting China off the hook in the short term for its violations, but if anyone has ideas for holding China accountable while also getting it to meet emissions targets, I'm all ears.
Ah yes, the old "murdering a few people now is less of a problem than potentially murdering more people down the road" argument.
But again I ask: what is your solution?
It's certainly easy to brush it off if you're not a murdered Uyghur.
This is meaninglessly abstract. Anyone can offer trite platitudes. Concretely, how do we meet climate targets by the end of the century without China's participation? What additional burden does that put on the rest of the world, and how are we going to meet that when no one is on track to meet their current obligations?
> It's certainly easy to brush it off if you're not a murdered Uyghur.
1. No one is brushing anything off.
2. What's the Uyghur death toll, approximately?
3. I can similarly imply that you're being too cavalier about the people who will die of starvation, disease, and poverty, but I don't think these sorts of ad hominem are very productive.
I see no direct evidence that trying to help the Uyghurs necessarily inhibits our ability to pressure China to slow their climate destruction.
And when has this strategy ever worked? We did the same thing with Poland in WWII and look where that got us. You can't make deals with despots.
That’s not my claim.
(No, I do not think the US should go to war with China. But if you think that China's climate abuse is an existential threat to humankind surely it has to be considered as a possible solution).
* Which is worse in your mind? China's treatment of the Uyghurs or global civilizational collapse?
* Does holding China accountable for its treatment of Uyghurs increase or decrease the likelihood that China will cooperate on climate?
1) the treatment of the Uyghurs, hands down. Sometimes standing on your principles is what you have to do. Justice be done though the heavens may fall.
2) neither. China will do nothing that makes it harder for them to become the dominant economic, social and military force on earth. If burning coal gets them there that's what they'll do, and if lip service buys them time that's what they'll do.
In case you haven't noticed, nobody is holding their feet to the fire on climate change. Turning a blind eye to genocide is not about climate change, it is about access to the lucrative Chinese middle class.
Luckily, it does not. Manufacturing is already shifting out of China to multiple other countries, and with increasing automation, might even end up back in the West.
We’ll almost certainly have to do a combo of the following anyway:
- limit emissions as much as possible using nuclear and solar
- scrape carbon et al out of the atmosphere somehow
- take a certain amount of warming on the chin and roll with it… again, somehow
Luckily, our species is incredibly resourceful at coming up with hail-mary’s when our lives are on the line (past examples are global trade, fertilizers, vaccines, WW2)
I'm nearly certain that it's not moving out of China into significantly greener countries, and certainly not at a rate that allows us to meet climate targets.
> We’ll almost certainly have to do a combo of the following anyway:
Yes, we will have to do those things anyway, but we in the west aren't even on track to hit targets that are based on the assumption that China and others will do some reasonable share. Unless the west kicks it into gear, we need China.
> Luckily, our species is incredibly resourceful at coming up with hail-mary’s when our lives are on the line (past examples are global trade, fertilizers, vaccines, WW2)
No, our civilization is incredibly resourceful. We've never had an advanced civilization until global temperatures stabilized within a few degrees. And we're threatening that because we're worried about the moral implications of allowing China to save face in order to save the world. Ironically you mention WWII, which involved far more, far worse moral tradeoffs than the one I'm proposing: firebombing and nuking civilians in Germany and Japan, starving the Indian subcontinent, etc. To be clear, those may well have been the right tradeoffs to make, but they cost far more lives and saved far fewer than what we're discussing here.
If we take this far enough, and we will, it also takes power out of China’s hands, meaning we don’t really need them to have the warm and fuzzies when we ask them nicely not to pollute. We tell them to stop polluting or we pull a boycott, divest, and sanctions on them.
WW2 was a last resort to stop a very nearly unstoppable madman, but we pulled together and we did it. The insane tradeoffs made was only needed because it was during wartime. Pressuring China need not lead to WW3 (perish the thought) nor need it involve death on a large scale. What’s needed is an intelligent 5-10 decade economic strategy. We did this to scuttle the USSR and it worked, with minimal total deaths.
Regarding the Uyghurs: a million-person concetration camp isn’t about “saving face”. Human civilization isn’t worth saving if we just let this slide because it’s easy and convenient to do so.
Maybe given enough time, but there's no way this is happening fast enough to meet climate targets.
> The insane tradeoffs made was only needed because it was during wartime.
This is cyclical reasoning. "We only needed to resort to warfare because we were in a war". Typically we justify warfare by something like, "if we didn't go to war, many more lives would have been lost". And if you can firebomb and nuke entire cities to save millions, can we not withhold a rebuke on Uyghurs to save hundreds of millions?
> Pressuring China need not lead to WW3 (perish the thought) nor need it involve death on a large scale.
If we can pressure China on Uyghurs without risking climate, then great. I'm not confident considering the tenuous relationship between China and the West.
> What’s needed is an intelligent 5-10 decade economic strategy. We did this to scuttle the USSR and it worked, with minimal total deaths.
We had a functional government and a more politically united population in the second half of the 20th century. Today we have one party that largely thinks climate change is a hoax and the other does little more than lip service.
I agree. One of many disconnects.
> It’s worth pointing out that all doomsday prophesies so far haven’t come true, not just about climate change but nuclear warfare, asteroids hitting the earth, over-population, etc.
Of these, I think only "nuclear warfare" was an alarm bell widely raised by scientists and it was precisely that alarm bell that led to nuclear disarmament and anti-proliferation policy (which averted the disaster). "We should do nothing because it always works out" is kind of silly when it has only worked out because people have done something. See also Y2K.
> overstating the immediate risks of climate change will lead to ignoring clear abuses like what China is doing to the Uyghurs.
Climate change isn't about the immediate risks (wealthy nations can largely live with a little drought, flooding, and wildfire), it's about the next century and beyond. But yes, I do think we should let this existential threat affect our decisions about Chinese human rights abuses, as a special case. Personally, I would love for the world to have invested heavily in nuclear 50 years ago to the extent that we don't have to worry about China's ego threatening all of civilization, but that's a reality we sadly don't inhabit.
This is not even a remote possibility, or indicated in the IPCC reports.
What makes you think that you’ll be able to talk about climate change if the Chinese Communist Party decides doing so is against their interest?
Set aside the reporter question - surely she has some colleagues, friends, and family for whom it would not be unexpected for them to stop by?
Also, getting even a tourist/any kind of visa if your occupation is "journalist" is hard enough, I think they'd probably google you and see what you've written about China...
Because China is willing to play dirty. If they hosted it, they would see Marriot executives arrested for "corruption", or Marriot hotels closed for "environmental damage" or similar things, like how they arrested two innocent Canadians as retaliation for the Canadian arrest of the Huawei executive.
This is why Nike, NBA, Hollywood, ... bow down to China, including inside the US, they know they will be crushed if they don't.
[1] https://canadianpatriot.org/2021/09/29/michael-kovrig-and-sp...
[2] https://twitter.com/csiscanada/status/1441576564374769665
> Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news site founded in 2019. He has written about Canadian imperialism, federal politics, and left-wing resistance to colonialism across the world.
Site mission:
> With the emergence of China’s New Silk Road (One Belt and One Road Initiative) as a force for global progress, poverty eradication, and peace, Canada has been confronted with an existential choice: Either continue to abide by the rule of monetarism, post-industrialism and war which have become signature features of the Anglo-American system dominant since World War two and run through the City of London and Wall Street, or embark upon a new mission of “win-win cooperation”, respect for the sovereignty of each nation while working in harmony with a community of share interest vectored around long term goals, great infrastructure programs and scientific discovery. This latter system is empowered by the force of new institutions such as the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Eurasian Economic Union. New credit generating institutions have been created to advance the expanded New Silk Road vision have come online such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the New Development Bank and the Silk Road Investment Fund to name a few.
Prasing Donald Trump approach to Russian and China:
> European nations are now deliberating whether they should continue to sit in the failed Euro cage, or embark on this project which openly welcomes all sovereign countries as partners in development. Donald Trump’s United States, having broken with the Neo-Conservative paradigm of war with China and Russia, also increasingly moves towards a new collaborative relationship with Eurasia and the New Silk Road. The question is what will Canada do in the face of this historic opportunity?
Any country that has ever taken on debt from China would like to have a talk with you.
It's okay to try to understand the world beyond conventional discourse. No one should be afraid of analyzing an issue with skepticism.
Canadian Patriot Review Editor’s note: On September 24, 2021, an agreement was reached to free Meng Wanzhou who had been illegally held captive in Canada since December 2018 . . .
There was nothing illegal about Meng Wanzhou's arrest. The U.S. made a request under a long extant extradition treaty. As for being "held captive," she was released on bail and lived in a home that she owned in Vancouver: very different to the conditions of the "two Michaels." In the end, the extradition hearing was never completed as the arrest warrant was eventually dropped by the U.S.. It was, by no means, a foregone conclusion what the outcome of the hearing would have been. Whatever you think of U.S. motives in all of this, the process was legal.
>Edith Terry: Michael Kovrig is a friend, and I am very conscious of the privations he has endured. And while his background is complex and possibly included intelligence gathering for the Canadian government during his diplomatic career, he was very open about his research interests and contacts. [0]
At end of day, billionaire who commited alleged fraud gets treated like billionaires while Spies who commited alleged espionage get treated like spies. This shouldn't be shocking, it's how the game is played. Canada excuting US foreign policy (China Initiative) because US found a paper loophole to kidnap Meng legally doesn't change the fact Canada kidnapped Meng in terms of diplomatic norms in the same way "enhanced interrogation" is still torture. Nevermind that Canada had legally right to drop extradition if case is sufficiently politicized as well. But laws are subservient to politics.
[0] https://www.chinafile.com/conversation/will-i-return-china
This one one seems particularly political, given her crime was trading with Iran against U.S. law. Funny that she is not a U.S. citizen, though.
I wonder how would the U.S. feel if China arrested a U.S billionaire in a third-party country because they broke a Chinese law. File this under "might makes right", I guess.
I also agree that the U.S. most likely took advantage of the Canadian legal system to push a political agenda. That does not mean that the Canadian justice system did anything wrong. An extradition request was received, and so the process has to be followed in order to give a fair outcome under Canadian law. It is possible that extradition would have been refused and Meng Wanzhou would have been released. A big part of the reason that it dragged on for so long is that it was not an obvious straightforward case like most extradition hearings (though coronavirus certainly didn't help).
As for the claim that the Michaels actually were spies, well, I will keep an open mind, but I have not seen any credible evidence of that.
EDIT:
Nevermind that Canada had legally right to drop extradition if case is sufficiently politicized as well. But laws are subservient to politics.
You are seriously misunderstanding the Canadian legal system and the rule of law if you believe this. Laws generally are not subservient to politics except to the extent that Parliament can change the law. The law applies to everyone, politicians included. Yes, extradition can be refused if the motive for the request is determined to be political, BUT the court case must play out in order to determine this. Yes, the foreign minister can block any extradition if they believe there is a good reason to do so, but this would be a highly unusual thing to do as politicians avoid interfering in the legal system. It would be a very controversial thing to do.
The Chinese government don't actually do these things, they don't really need to, this sounds more like options for the American government.
“A Marriott refused” vs “Marriott refused”.
The text of the article makes it clear that there is no evidence that Marriott as a corporate entity had anything to do with this, ans a corporate spokesperson actually denied that this was policy and as much as said that the local hotel manager screwed up.
> "Thank you very much for your visit today. Unfortunately, I have to inform you that we are not able to offer the premises. We consulted the whole matter with our corporate management. For reasons of political neutrality, we cannot offer events of this type with a political theme. Thank you once again for your time and understanding."
If they meant Marriott, I would think they would explicitly say Marriott since it gives them an out for the blame. If it wasn't a Marriott decision, it would be dumb to explicitly say Marriott but they know they have a good chance to dodge blame with just the generic "corporate management".
> It does not make much sense for a single hotel to be so worried about wider damage to the brand.
It does make sense if the franchisee has multiple hotels with some of them being in China. Don't know if that is the case, but it could be.
"The Marriott spokesperson clarified in a statement to Axios that hosting the conference would not have violated any "political neutrality" policy, and said the reference to 'corporate management' in the email referred to 'hotel-level management.'"
IOW, it sounds like the local hotel said to themselves, "it's late, and I don't need this shit right now. Tell them 'corporate' says we can't do it."
I’m not saying they’re lying, but I also think it would be naive to simply assume that their statement is definitely true.
It's like not wanting to acknowledge climate change because of "neutrality". There is no clearer way to broadcast a political opinion.
Marrott has taken a stance here, just not the respecting civil rights.
“You talk to older people and they’re like, ‘Dude we sell tomato sauce, we don’t sell politics," one millennial entrepreneur told me. “Then you have younger people being like, ‘These are political tomatoes. This is political tomato sauce.'" https://twitter.com/emmabgo/status/1453720130412707849
Everything is political and nothing is political. Only the dose makes something political.
> Prague mayor Zdeněk Hřib, who attended the conference, said in response: "I hear that China is unhappy about this conference being held here in Prague. Well, I am unhappy there's a country in 2021 that has concentration camps."
I don't know why it's so politically incorrect to call out the Chinese communist party on its human rights abuses. It's clearly a highly authoritarian, abusive country -- one of the major blots on the human race at the present time, along with North Korea.
We ought to be brave and speak the truth about it.
To be fair to Marriott, they are saying it was a local hotel management decision and not a corporate decision, and that their corporate policies would not have restricted this conference. Remember, Marriott doesn't actually own or control (the vast majority of) hotels with their name on it.
The US handled it well: the govt stood behind theaters who might have otherwise stopped screenings, and local police were outside theaters. Was it worth it for the entertainment? No. It was worth it for a political message.
I would add developed Western democracies in general.
I will refer to a very insightful description of the state they are in by api (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=api,) I read yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29267217
*> I consider Singapore to be the most dangerous dystopia in the world.
> It's not even close to the worst place to live. That's not the point.
> The thing that makes it the worst is that it is superficially desirable. It's like refined sugar, a poison that rots your teeth and causes dozens of health problems but tastes fantastic and is marketed heavily to children.
> Only a lunatic or an idiot would want to emulate North Korea but many sane intelligent and well-meaning people want to emulate Singapore. That's what makes it so horrible. It's a shining beacon of totalitarianism that advertises that wonderful things can be purchased at the cost of human rights.
> I would rather live, pragmatically, in Singapore than many other countries, but if I were there I'd be fully aware that it's a road to hell.
This is far more significant than the headline.
Marriot could simply have unliked the post. The firing was symbolic and game theoretic.
The point is that now everyone who speaks in the public sphere will need to know, China cares about X, Y, Z. It's about brainshare.
Is there any evidence for this?
I hear it often enough. We used to say that about Russia, but when the cold war was over and everyone got to look at the historical documents it turns out that they were terrified of the U.S., more so than the other way around, and not as much of a threat as we made them out to be.
Historically China has not been as adventurous as Europeans in this regard, although of course they have exerted a lot of influence in their region before the Europeans dominated them, and later the Japanese. They are dominating minorities in Tibet and the Uyghars, similar to how we've screwed native americans and black folks. It seems like they have been expanding their influence in Africa lately.
Or maybe I don't follow what is meant by domination here. Maybe you mean the way the U.S. dominates the worlds oceans and trade?
I assume that China wants to get out from under that, along with a number of other countries. Nobody likes being dominated by others. I assume they, and others, have been saying the same about us.
A reminder that's it's not a good idea to outsource the guardianship of our democracy, ideas about justice, and civil well-being to corporations. That's a role for government.
But, where is the HN free speech brigade? Do they not see a connection here?
In that fragmentation, he can gain considerable leverage like this, without even having to say a word.
One thing that might help even larger businesses is for government to pass legislation banning this kind of activity, i.e. making judgements on who can attend or not, or at very least, passing it off to the local officials.
That way, Marriott can say 'Sorry Xi, our hands our tied, we had to let them have their conference, take it up with Biden or Merkel'.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/05/world-uyghur-congress-us-...
Whether you are convinced by the allegations they have made against the Chinese government or not, it's not inaccurate to call it a political entity. Its name is a bit misleading and makes one think that it represents members of this ethnic group around the world.
The details of how this law could be structured can be debated, but there has to be a way.
Let companies choose between having US and Chinese business instead of always taking the easy way out.
The Court has engaged in a lot of spurious reasoning and wishful thinking over the centuries, and continues to do so.
Treason
Obscenity
Libel
Slander
Certain threats
Incitement
Hiring a hit man
And companies know that, this is why they poured trillions of dollars of investments in an authoritarian regime. They could had invested in any democratic country that respects human rights with labor and environmental laws, but it would not give them the best bang for their buck.
Companies are ran as Monarchies anyway, so authoritative regimes seem better fit for them.