Do Corporations have a Moral Requirement to help Hong Kong’s Protestors?
It began on 9 June 2019, like Tiananmen Square, thousands of young adults protesting in the name of democracy, behaving fearless in a frightening world. 12 June came, and so did the teargas. 16 June came, and so did the largest protest in its history. After weeks of clashes between police and protestors, members of gangs, wearing white shirts and masks, attacked protestors returning home from their demonstration, injuring 45 people, and putting several in critical condition. Police arrived slowly and made no arrests. From August onward, violence between protestors and police has escalated; over 2,000 have been injured by the hands of police brutality and 2,000 have been arrested. Hong Kong is on fire.
The protests began after Hong Kong’s Legislative Council considered passing a bill that would allow its citizens to be extradited to China – currently notorious for, among other things, its treatment of Uighur Muslims, who have been systematically arrested in secret and sent to concentration camps, where torture is rampant.
The protestors demands include: an end to officials’ description of the protests as “riots,” an official pardon for all arrested protestors, a fair investigation into police brutality, universal suffrage, and withdrawal of the extradition bill, the last of which has already been met. Overall, the protests aim to remove the oppressive laws currently in place, to protect the liberties currently afforded to its citizens, and to establish full sovereignty from China, which Hong Kong is technically still a part of.
How have corporations been involved?
In October 2019, a finalist in the professional video game tournament, “Hearthstone GrandMasters,” by the username “Blitzchung” was interviewed after winning an important match. After the discussion, he expressed support for the protests by exclaiming “Liberate Hong Kong; revolution of our times!” Blizzard, the company that owns Hearthstone, subsequently stated they would withdraw his earned prize money from the match, and would ban him for a year. Seen as bending to the Chinese government, the company faced significant backlash, eventually deciding to still award him the money, and temporarily suspend him. Nevertheless, the instinctive move to side with China was odd.
In his 2007 political science text, “Why Would Corporations Behave in Socially Responsible Ways? An Institutional Theory of Social Responsibility,” John Campbell explains that large companies tend to behave in social unjust manners when their economic health is deteriorating. Thus, a glance at Blizzard’s stock price history is valuable. On 1 September 2018, the company’s stock price peaked at 84.18, its highest value in years. By 11 February 2019, the stock had reached its lowest price in years at 39.85, which it has hardly increased since. Blizzard is not Bitcoin or some startup looking to fuel Mars rockets with essential oils, its prices do not often fluctuate so violently, so the low it has hit is indicative of the company’s economic illness, and thus, as Campbell observes, its attempts to appease dictators abroad. However, it is also important to remember that Tencent, China’s largest video game company, quietly bought 5% of Blizzard’s shares in 2016, which could indicate its move was partially backed by a desire to appease the shareholder.
Apple also caught heat recently when it was caught sending browsing data, including IP addresses to Tencent, which would provide the Chinese conglomerate with Apple users’ physical locations, be it at home from their Mac desktops, or on the go through Apple laptops and mobile devices. The practice has apparently been underway for the past two years.
The decision that companies such as Apple and Blizzard are currently confronted with is not dissimilar to one BMW had to make in the 1930s, when the Nazi party rose to power in Germany. People demanded the car manufacturer separate itself from the German government’s operations, but BMW chose to profit from the Holocaust’s slave labour and help Adolf Hitler’s administration identify Jews.
Blizzard and Apple might find some financial security with their decisions to bend to Xi Jinping’s Communist Party, but history will not favour them well unless they change course soon.