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On Valentine’s Day, President Obama hosted Chinese heir apparent, Xi Jinping in Washington. When the President of the United States invites a future dictator from a brutal regime to the White House he tacitly endorses China’s illegitimate succession process. This publicly undermines Chinese aspirations for freedom and devalues democracy for everyone on Earth.

During the White House visit, I took the opportunity to address the growing crowd of Tibetans protesting in front of the White House while many puzzled tourists looked on.  The average American is unwilling to stand up for Tibetan rights because they are unable to connect the dots between this far away and mysterious places with their own self-interest.

However, there is only one degree of separation between our current national misery and that of Tibet, because both of our problems stem from the same source: an unethical Chinese Communist Party hell-bent on exploiting anybody it can get its claws into. The brutal occupation of the peaceful Himalayan kingdom and the accompanying ethnic cleansing and religious repression is simply another manifestation of the lying, cheating, and tortured manipulation of trade rules that has left millions of Americans out of work and millions more stranded in low-wage, retail jobs.

Mr. Xi represents a government that only a large, multinational corporation could possibly love. Companies like WalMart and Apple have booked outsized profits for years by taking advantage of products made cheap through ill gotten control of the raw materials expropriated from China’s colonial victims like Tibet, Mongolia, and East Turkmentistan as well as the laborers kept under control by China’s jackboots. Meanwhile the 30-40 percent cost advantage these firms have obtained from China’s currency manipulation has closed some 57,000 factories in America since China joined the WTO in 2001. The fact that China has invested a disproportionate amount of its profits from this operation into advancing its brutal police state and building up a high-tech military to target its neighbors and American families need not concern folks like Jeff Imlet. Each year CEO of General Electric piles ever more $billions of hard earned American capital into Communist China despite the disappointing returns for his shareholders. And it obviously does not concern Mr. Obama, who in a particularly perverse act, appointed this master outsourcer to be America’s “job’s czar.”

It is therefore altogether fitting that Mr. Xi’s delegation visited an American business school –  the Graziadio School of Management at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. Having taught and studied for many years at another California business school, I’ve always been puzzled whenever American’s express surprise at the lack of ethics demonstrated by some top business leader caught with his pants down or stuffing his pockets with other people’s money. What should we expect when the faculties of our schools believe ethics is something you give a nod to with a one-quarter elective class and then go back to equations that maximize profits?

In academia, ethics is often presented as some fuzzy headed, politically correct affair that rejects objective standards of right and wrong, suggesting folks like China’s next brutal dictator might just be operating under “different cultural standards” that we must be sensitive to. Let us not offend China by suggesting Western standards – like the belief that the repression of labor is wrong or free speech is desirable – are superior to Communist ideals. Anyway, such qualitative discussions seem archaic to students once they’ve been convinced that all valuable business research can and should be reduced to econometric models and that real stories about actual people are of questionable value.

If you have any doubts about just how clueless and amoral academia has become consider this quote from Graziadio Dean, Linda A. Livingstone, “We are honored to host Vice President Xi Jinping’s delegation at the Graziadio School in the hope that our discussion and interaction will increase business opportunities and cooperation between our two countries.”

“Honored” to host the future leader of the political movement that has killed more people than any in the history of mankind. “Interaction” with the regime that has denied reproductive rights to 1/5 of the world’s women and induced hundreds of millions of coerced and sometimes even forced abortions and sterilizations. “Opportunities”  with a government that jails, beats and kills those who attempt to organize for higher wages or better conditions. “Cooperation” with the nation that is building a hidden nuclear submarine fleet specifically designed to pull up to the coast of Malibu and incinerate the rest of the U.S.

When Xi’s entourage visited the Port of Los Angeles after hanging with Pepperdine’s academic fifth column I had the opportunity to join a small group of Syrian’s protesting the disgusting fact that China had sold its UN Veto to support the brutal regime that is killing thousands of their friends and family. Of course, China has done this many times before to back up other customers of its hugely profitable weapons biz; folks like the crazy nuclear kings of North Korea, Zimbabwe’s brutal Mugabe, and the perpetrators of the Darfu massacres in Sudan. Apparently none of this presented a moral dilemma for the mayor of LA and the governor of California, both of whom could not wait to join in the love fest with the Middle Kingdom’s dictator in waiting and hand over more American jobs to China – while naturally claiming to be doing just the opposite. These guys have learned a lot about perception management from the communists.

Congratulations President Obama and Dean Livingstone. Please give my regards to your “honored” guest and pray that the Buddhists are flat out wrong about that Karma thing or you could be spending your next life in one of Xi’s many reduction through labor camps.

– Greg Autry has Business Strategy and Macro Economics at the Merage School of Business, UC Irvine and is the co-author, with Peter Navarro, of Death by China. He holds a MBA from UCI and is completing a Management PhD in the area of public policy and economics. Greg serves as senior economist with the American Jobs Alliancel. More info can be found at www.gregautry.us

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