Why Are Coke and Airbnd sponsoring 2022 Beijing Olympics

By Kenneth Rapoza: Coca-Cola took a lot of heat for being against the Georgia election law that requires voters to present a valid ID in order to vote. But they are sponsoring, happily, the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. There’s no voting there. Airbnb proudly plastered its website with Pride Month images in June. They’re sponsoring the Beijing 2022 Olympics. Maybe they can sponsor the Shanghai Pride Parade next month, too. Oh wait … there is no such thing as the Shanghai Pride Parade. In fact, the mobile messaging app WeChat, owned by Tencent, recently banned accounts owned by openly gay Chinese. Tencent is owned by a billionaire named Huateng “Pony” Ma. Pony can sponsor the Beijing 2022 Olympics. China has plenty of billionaires. It doesn’t need Airbnb and Coca-Cola, once an American icon, now joining a chorus of activists calling the U.S. racist while sponsoring the Olympics in a country that holds tens of thousands of Uyghur Muslims in captivity in China’s war on terrorism. Some Uyghur women are sterilized against their will in Xinjiang, China. The State Department calls that genocide. Didn’t the mothers of these executives teach them, “You are the company you keep”? Activist groups, mostly those aggrieved by the Chinese Communist Party, such as those in Tibet, have called on Airbnb to abandon its sponsorship. Coca-Cola won’t abandon the Olympics, no matter where it is. They will say they are doing it for the athletes. If they are serious about doing it for the athletes, then sponsor global athletes or teams of their choice. Beijing is run by smart people. They know all the Western world’s buzz words. They are promoting their Olympics as “inclusive,” and say it will create a “harmonious world” and promote “social progress.” Make no mistake about it, the reason the CCP exists as it does today is because of companies like Coca-Cola, Nike, Airbnb, BlackRock and countless others. CCP would be a real paper tiger without them. Cai Xia, a high-level China defector and former professor at the Central Party School of the CCP now works at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. In a 49-page essay, she wrote China owes much of its success to U.S. engagement policy. That policy was used by the CCP to infiltrate the U.S., steal scientific and technological intellectual property, gather commercial and political intelligence, and “lure some American political, business, academic and technological elites to serve the interests of the CCP,” she said. I asked hedge fund manager and China hawk Kyle Bass in an open Twitter conversation if Coca-Cola should sponsor the Olympics. He said the International Olympic Committee should change the venue or the world should boycott. “We have an obligation under the genocide convention of 1948, under Article 2, to punish incidents of genocide. Entering a glorification of a regime that commits genocide and other crimes against humanity is hideous,” said Gordon Chang, a well-known China pundit. In 1971, Coca-Cola launched its now-classic “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” TV commercial. It was its foray into becoming a truly global corporation. The ad starts off with a trio of Abba-looking singers, then spreads out into a United Nations crowd singing the kumbaya lyrics of “harmony” and “peace”. Coke, go tell that to the Uyghurs, millions of Hong Kongers and maybe even some of the Old Hundred Names of mainland China. See what they think. Kenneth Rapoza is a veteran reporter and a former staff journalist for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. — INsIdEsOurCEs