Some of some mega-corporations, however, such as Coca-Cola and Visa, are willingly and publicly choosing profits over political prisoners (pictured above) who angered the CCP.
Citing human rights abuses in China is like counting grains of sand, since the Chinese Communist Party routinely arrests and tortures everyone from church pastors and pregnant women to political troublemakers. Authorities recently snatched up a popular tennis star after she accused a prominent CCP official of sexual assault.
An estimated 1 million Uyghurs, a Muslim minority who live in northwestern provinces, have been arrested at their homes and shipped off to concentration camps in an attempt to “re-educate” them through torture and pro-communist propaganda, American Family News has reported in numerous stories.
And that long list of documented abuses is the point: China is two months away from hosting hundreds of nations within its borders, where its own people are not free to worship and speak without punishment.
Sam Brownback, the former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, tells American Family News that China is engaging in an “ongoing genocide” of its own people while U.S.-based companies willingly ignore it and instead cooperate with the CCP.
“This is wrong. They ought to be ashamed of it,” Brownback (pictured at left), who now leads Open Doors USA, says of those corporations. “They ought to pull their advertising dollars if these concentration camps are not shut down.”
To highlight China’s abuses, Open Doors has joined human rights group China Aid to do its own marketing: Telling the stories of 18 political prisoners who have been subjected to arrest, torture, illegal trials, and long prison sentences.
China Aid, which calls the campaign “China 18," documents the "offense" and the punishment of those 18 people, and many more, on its website.
'Shameful' fear of offending CCP
Brownback says the purpose of the "China 19" campaign is to demand Winter Olympic advertisers ask the CCP when it will shut down the concentration camps, a request that is certainly unlikely at this point.
According to The Epoch Times, prominent Olympic sponsors Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Visa are set to pour millions into the upcoming winter games. That brazen plan comes after their corporate representatives shrugged off China’s human rights abuses at a fiery U.S. Senate hearing held during the summer.
“As long as the governments are allowing the athletes to attend the games,” Andrea Fairchild, a Visa senior vice president, told senators, “we will be there to support and sponsor them.”
Some senators pointed out that a Coca-Cola executive, who was refusing to acknowledge China’s human rights abuses at the hearing, works for a corporation that is a top sponsor of Beijing's upcoming games but vowed to punish the state of Georgia for passing voting laws.
“You are afraid of [China’s communist leaders] in a way that you are not afraid of critics in the United States. I think that’s shameful,” Sen. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) told Paul Lalli, a Coca-Cola executive whose title is global vice president for human rights.
Coca-Cola's Olympic-related website touting its support can be found here.
Sen. Tom Cotton, an outspoken critic of China’s repressive regime, told the corporate executives they were sent by their bosses “with orders not to say anything that could offend the Chinese Community Party.”
