Baseball is – or at least once was – America’s national pastime. But the leaders of professional baseball in the U.S. are following the lead of their counterparts in the NBA.
They’re cozying up to the Chinese communists.
According to a recent report by the Washington Free Beacon, Major League Baseball has quietly expanded its “partnership” with China to include 100 teams spread across 20 cities. American baseball, which was first introduced in China in 2007. now claims more than 20 million Chinese fans.
But this isn’t just some kind of goodwill outreach.
As the Free Beacon reported, “quality U.S. jobs are also at stake.”
The website noted that Miken Sports, a baseball equipment firm that does business with MLB, recently shuttered a production plant in Minnesota and shipped the nearly 70 jobs there to China.
One Republican lawmaker is fighting back.
U.S. Rep. Jim Hagedorn of Minnesota, whose district includes the closed Miken plant, offered a resolution last week that ripped MLB for doing away with American jobs.
”Baseball is considered to be America’s national pastime, so it is completely outrageous that the MLB has decided to shut down the Miken Sports plant in Caledonia and outsource American jobs to communist China — directly defying the MLB’s position as an American sports league,” Hagedorn said.
“Miken has been one of the largest employers in Caledonia for decades, and this community will face major hardships and job losses due to this closure. We are urging the MLB to reverse this decision, purchase products that are made in America, and work to keep these jobs at home.”
Additionally, MLB also has partnered with the Chinese tech firm Tencent to help grow its brand in China. This year, Tencent and MLB reached a deal for the company to stream baseball games throughout Asia. Yet Tencent is likely best known for its “surveillance activities, human rights abuses, and ties to the [Chinese] military,” the Free Beacon pointed out.
And such an agreement only highlights the hypocrisy of MLB.
The same league that moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta to protest the alleged abuse of minorities in a tough, new Georgia election-integrity law has embraced Chinese government partners who surveil their own citizens through a social-credit system and have imprisoned an estimated 1.5 million Uyghur Muslims who, according to the United Nations, have been subjected to torture and human rights abuses.
Michael Sobolik, a fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, told the Free Beacon that MLB seems to be running a “cynical PR campaign.”
“It’s telling that Major League Baseball pulled out of Georgia for the All-Star Game over concerns with voting legislation, but is entirely comfortable with operating in a nation with an ongoing genocide,” Sobolik said.
“If your corporate values abroad don’t match your corporate values at home, you aren’t standing on principle; you’re just running a cynical PR campaign. The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] routinely exploits this inconsistency in U.S. companies eager to access China’s market. Every time American businesses choose their own economic wealth over human rights, they write the Party’s propaganda for them.”
U.S. Rep. Drew Ferguson, a Georgia Republican, told the Free Beacon the MLB has joined other big corporations who “do business according to the whims of the woke mob.”
“Unfortunately, when it comes to issues of real human rights and genocide, they fall silent,” said Ferguson.
“It’s time to hold American organizations and companies accountable for their roles in propping up communist China on the global stage. Congress must set aside partisan politics and stand united against the CCP’s malign influence and activities at home and abroad.”
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