00:00:08.000Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, I have an exclusive conversation with Chris Fenton, who is the author of Feeding the Dragon, who is able to expose America's insidious relationship with the Chinese Communist Party through sports, through Hollywood, and other multimedia.
00:00:22.000It is a very informative and important conversation, especially if you are using Disney and other companies that are in bed with the Chinese Communist Party.
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00:01:34.000Chris is a very important person on the political landscape right now.
00:01:39.000I don't even want to call it a political landscape, just on the cultural landscape.
00:01:42.000And he has a phenomenal book called Feeding the Dragon.
00:01:45.000And Chris has a very unique set of, he has a very unique life experience to be able to talk about China's infiltration in Hollywood, NBA, and American business.
00:01:56.000Chris, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:01.000So you wrote this book, Feeding the Dragon.
00:02:03.000Can you just first just give us a big picture of in American business, how infiltrated the Chinese Communist Party is, and especially in Hollywood?
00:02:14.000There's a lot of young parents that listen to our podcast that probably subscribe to Disney Plus, that might be thinking of watching Mulan sometime soon.
00:02:24.000How entrenched is the Chinese Communist Party in American business and the American way of life?
00:02:30.000Well, the amazing thing is, when I embarked on writing my memoir about the last 20 years, I never really even considered how integrated they are into everyday business between the two superpowers.
00:02:44.000It wasn't really until the Darryl Maury tweet, the Houston Rockets GM back in October, where I woke up to my complicity in it.
00:02:53.000So it's sort of a fascinating journey that I had because the idea of writing the book was just to tell this really colorful story of the chaos and the craziness of trying to get cultural and commercial exchange done between the two countries.
00:03:11.000And primarily, I was focused in the music business, in the NBA, and various sports businesses.
00:03:18.000And then obviously we moved into the movie business, where at the end of the main part of the story, I talk about our journey with Iron Man 3.
00:03:28.000Now, looking back post-Daryl Maury, and as I look through my memoir and the writings of it, it's obvious all the different pandering and kow-towing we were doing even back then.
00:03:40.000I mean, the story takes place between the years 2000 and 2014.
00:03:45.000And then I rope it into a congressional delegation trip with three House members that I brought over in late August of last year, where we met with Kerry Lamb and protesters in Hong Kong and then went up and met with the MPC and the CCP.
00:04:01.000And when you look back with the fog of the war taken away from you after seeing this Daryl Maury tweet and how it woke up the American public, you start looking at it all differently.
00:04:12.000I don't know if you ever saw the Sixth Sense movie, but obviously as you're watching that movie, you're seeing one version of a story.
00:04:19.000And then at the very end, there's that twist, and then you have to rethink it all in your head.
00:04:24.000So to answer your question, it's very integrated in today's capitalism between the two countries.
00:04:30.000Can you remind our listeners what the Daryl Maury tweet was and why that was such a telling moment for yourself and for others?
00:04:39.000So in early October, I actually had gotten back.
00:04:43.000And what's interesting is that my agent told me because I was embarking on a story about the integration and the journey of capitalism between the two countries, particularly in the Hollywood business, that I would have a really hard time finding a publisher that Lean left to pick up the book.
00:05:05.000And that was because a lot of that publishing side was trying to protect what was obviously going on between Hollywood and China.
00:05:15.000When Daryl Maury tweeted out his support for the Hong Kong protesters, I saw that tweet in the colored lens that I had prior to the tweet, which was, oh my gosh, I said to a soccer dad on the sidelines as we were watching our kids play soccer, I said, that tweet is going to really hurt the NBA in China.
00:05:38.000And I said, I don't even know who this Daryl Maury guy is, but he's supporting Hong Kong protesters.
00:05:43.000And he's the GM of the Houston Rockets, which is the biggest branded team in the China market because of Yao Ming and his playing days there.
00:05:52.000And what was interesting is that was the only thing I thought of.
00:05:55.000And I was 100% accurate on that forecast.
00:05:58.000It really decimated the NBA's business in China.
00:06:01.000What I didn't see happening was all the fumbling and bumbling of responses by other NBA personnel and various people around the NBA business in regards to whether they supported Daryl Maury's freedom of speech and First Amendment rights, or whether they weren't on board with him and they wanted to distance themselves.
00:06:24.000It was all kinds of craziness that was going on with a very misdirected and misguided various forms of responses to it.
00:06:32.000And the American public woke up to that and they said, wait, what is the NBA doing here?
00:06:58.000So essentially, and I've said this before, the Chinese Communist Party is almost, they have the final stamp of approval on so much of the social type of content that is produced from Hollywood and from the National Basketball Association.
00:07:15.000You call this the trillion-dollar dilemma.
00:07:18.000Is it really that big of an issue for the biggest business, especially Hollywood and the National Basketball Association, a trillion-dollar dilemma?
00:07:27.000If you look at the amount of trade going on between the two countries and the amount of growth that our corporations are essentially riding on in regards to what their stock market values are, you can add all that up and it's billions and billions of dollars and well surpasses the trillion dollar mark.
00:07:49.000So the idea of decoupling fully from China is a major hit to American corporations and one that has to be really thought about before we really embark on going full blown in that direction.
00:08:01.000But the fact of the matter is, there's lots of, there are lots of issues in regards to how corporations do business in China.
00:08:10.000That's a real issue that we need to address because there's all kinds of pandering and kowtowing to that CCP that's control and narrative to their 1.4 billion people.
00:08:50.000Well, the best way to do that is to keep people just happy enough that they don't revolt.
00:08:55.000They don't want another Tiananmen Square incident.
00:08:57.000And the reason I say just happy enough is because there's not enough resources on earth to make them all happy.
00:09:03.000So they have to give them all of what they need and some of what they want, and then also provide this messaging that they can aspire to to get more of what they want if they keep working in regards to the group mentality of communism.
00:09:18.000So under the CCP or under the standing committee of the CCP, which obviously Xi Jinping runs, there's seven party members there.
00:09:28.000And then below that is obviously the party itself, the Politburo, which meets several times a year.
00:09:34.000And then the main force that we talk about in regards to controlling narrative is the Ministry of Propaganda.
00:09:42.000And their goal is to do pretty much the most important thing, which is to keep people just happy enough.
00:09:49.000So if the Communist Party can't provide all the middle-class jobs for 1.4 billion people, which they can't, they brought about 600 million into the middle class, then they have to control a narrative that keeps envy away from the rest and keeps the people that are not a part of that middle class or higher feeling like the government's doing everything they need in order to make them feel comfortable with what their leadership is.
00:10:55.000Yeah, so Mulan is a really interesting example and one where I was in initial meetings for back in 2015 when the project first got started.
00:11:05.000And what's interesting about Mulan is Disney said, hey, look, we have this great Western IP that we develop in the movies and it works in China.
00:11:14.000It's actually helped us pave the way to open up this Shanghai theme park, which they opened in 2016.
00:11:21.000The idea behind Mulan was what if we take Chinese IP and we create it in this huge Hollywood tentpole movie type of way and bring it to the Chinese to further ingratiate us and our company into that nation.
00:11:39.000And the idea was, here's this great mythology.
00:11:43.000Let's create a lot of things that allow the Ministry of Propaganda to be able to promote that are objectives that the CCP has that are being taken care of.
00:11:54.000For instance, if you're shooting a movie like Mulan, you want to incorporate on the ground Chinese resources.
00:12:01.000You want to create skill set exchanges between best-in-class people in Hollywood with the fledgling film industry there in China.
00:12:11.000Because the more people you bring up to speed with experienced skill sets, the more people you can bring into the middle class, right?
00:12:19.000And the more you can showcase backdrops of China and showcase artists in China, like different actors and different players in the background, and also bring in below-the line crew, the more that generates that narrative that the Ministry of Propaganda wants, which is, hey, we're creating middle-class jobs.
00:12:40.000We're creating skill sets to bring more people into the middle class.
00:12:44.000We're showcasing China as this magnificent backdrop and something that's really special for the world to know about.
00:12:51.000And we're utilizing various other resources and infrastructure that China has that's also allowing more money to be spent on the ground in that nation.
00:13:02.000So it's all about satisfying that Ministry of Propaganda directive, which ultimately is about keeping 1.4 billion people just happy enough that they don't revolt.
00:13:13.000Now, what is the controversy around the movie, though?
00:13:15.000Some people are saying to boycott Mulan.
00:13:21.000One is there's the boycott Mulan sort of initiative that took place around the Hong Kong protest starting a year ago and moving all the way until now, even though the protesters have been pretty much shut down by the encroachment of China.
00:13:37.000But two of the main, the two main stars of the movie came out in support of the CCP and the way they were policing and cracking down on the rights of the protesters in Hong Kong.
00:13:52.000So the Hong Kong freedom movement really started pushing that boycott Mulan message, and they were trying to get the globe to actually follow it too, especially democracies around the world, like the West.
00:14:06.000And Darrell Maury was one of those people that started to follow that movement.
00:14:11.000The second controversy is where they shot some of the movie.
00:14:16.000Now, it's debatable how much they actually shot there, but there was a lot of below-the-line activity in regards to location scouts, getting what they call plate shots, which are background shots of various scenes that they might shoot, say, in New Zealand or somewhere else.
00:14:32.000So there was a lot of activity on the ground in China, and it happened to be in Xinjiang province.
00:14:37.000And the problem with Xinjiang province, as we know, is there's a major Uyghur issue that is quite atrocious.
00:14:46.000And the players that were involved from the government standpoint in regards to supporting what was going on in that movie on the ground there were also the same members and the same entities that are also involved with the atrocities in regards to the Uyghurs.
00:16:09.000It drove my mission in regards to opening that market any way possible as I could as a cog in the wheel and the system that I was a part of.
00:16:19.000And I think it's still very much impressed upon all C-suite executives and all the people that work in Hollywood, all the people that work in the sports industry, all the people that work in the tech industry, all the people that work at Starbucks, et cetera, is open that market at all costs, sell our products and services there.
00:17:12.000We need to protect what's special about it and protect our principles and values and our national security interests.
00:17:17.000And quite frankly, our rights, like the First Amendment right and various others that are encroached upon by the Chinese, that needs to come first.
00:17:25.000And then after that, yes, I'm all for capitalism.
00:17:28.000Like we should sell products and services into that country.
00:17:45.000I mean, it's as simple thing as make America great again to death panels, to whatever the different, you know, sort of slogans are for movements, Black Lives Matter.
00:17:56.000Patriotism before capitalism is pretty simple.
00:18:17.000Now, I mean, that almost goes into the Hong Kong theory of why'd we do a 50-year deal or why did the UK do a 50-year deal to turn over Hong Kong to China?
00:18:26.000Well, the idea was over 50 years, China would become more like the West and Hong Kong would maintain essentially the same way it had always been.
00:18:34.000Obviously, we found that wasn't the case, and they went in there 23 years into a 50-year deal and sort of took it over.
00:18:41.000The same thing is sort of what we're seeing now in regards to this soft power influence of Western culture, Western products, the ability to sort of win over China to become a democracy.
00:18:54.000Now, I will say, having been in China a lot, the Chinese people, a lot of them I love.
00:19:04.000And a lot of them really are, you know, there's an aspirational quality of American products and services.
00:19:12.000They want to be a lot like us, and they actually have been won over by time.
00:19:17.000The CCP, on the other hand, which runs the country, has not.
00:19:22.000So the question is, if we completely decouple, we give up on this idea of winning over that country into the world of democracy at some point down the road.
00:19:33.000Now, granted, I think it's a very, very long shot that we can do it, but it is possible.
00:19:39.000And the reason it's possible is not because we're ever going to win over the CCP.
00:19:43.000It's because we can win over enough of the 1.3.1 billion people there that will aspire so much to be a part of democracy that they will no longer be just happy enough.
00:20:00.000So I guess my fear, though, is because of American tech companies and the new social credit system, will their totalitarianism coupled with technology actually make that less possible than it might have been 50 years ago?
00:20:15.000What makes it really difficult, and it's a great question.
00:20:18.000What makes it really difficult is that you have one narrative, one party line there.
00:20:23.000Yes, there's a certain amount of people that VPNs and can get around firewall and get information various other ways.
00:20:31.000But the majority of people, the vast majority of people hear one story, one party line.
00:20:36.000It's as if you had MSNBC and CNN and Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and everybody else all on the same page saying the same thing every day.
00:20:55.000So it is a real difficult problem in regards to overcoming that power of narrative, that power of messaging, because they're so good at flipping a switch away from some attention on something that threatens their leadership onto something that creates a nationalistic fever, right?
00:21:14.000A perfect example is in 2012, when the Uyghur stuff first started, there were massive stabbings at bus stops.
00:21:24.000There was a car that drove through Tiananmen Square and killed a bunch of people.
00:21:29.000There was a lot of terrorist activity, and it was creating a bit of a boiling moment.
00:21:33.000And immediately, the Ministry of Propaganda flipped the nationalistic switch and started a quasi-war against Japan around these rocky islands in the South China Sea.
00:21:45.000And amazing, everybody just pushed all their attention towards I hate Japan rather than, wow, look at all this uprising that's going on around me.
00:21:58.000Well, yeah, and I fear, though, also because they're instituting this social credit score, they're instituting mass artificial intelligence and technology.
00:22:06.000This actually might be the first time that totalitarianism can be made easier because it doesn't have to be deployed by human beings.
00:22:13.000And also, I see the CCP becoming so militant to the West, and they're using our capital flows to do that.
00:22:21.000And so my fear is that if we continue trade as normal with them, they're just going to continue these multi-trillion dollar flows of trade in their favor to build the largest navy, which they now have, to hack our cyber grid, infiltrate our institutions of higher learning and the universities.
00:22:40.000And so it's a very difficult challenge for us in the West because half of our country, quite honestly, doesn't really care.
00:22:49.000They think America is a much bigger evil than China, and that's the Democrat Party.
00:22:53.000They think that America is the ultimate evil and that China is going to help us take down America and our image are happy to partner with anyone in that name.
00:22:59.000And then the other half, I would say the Republican conservatives, most of the Republicans and leadership are bought completely by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which should be called the U.S. Chamber of crony capitalism via China, or crony corporatism, I should say.
00:23:13.000And so I guess my concern is if we don't have, it's been incredible to me, the best way I can say this, is how little Chinese backlash there has been in our country, Chinese Communist Party backlash, just from this virus.
00:23:27.000I mean, there's some people that are angry here and there, but it's so obvious what this country has done to us.
00:23:33.000And do you think that, do you think there's a collision point coming between the CCP and the U.S.?
00:23:38.000Or do you just think, how do you see this playing out absent any sort of dramatic action?
00:23:44.000Yeah, well, that's a very complicated question with a lot of layers to it.
00:23:48.000I mean, if you want to simplify it, it comes down to the buck.
00:23:52.000I mean, that's really what it comes down to.
00:23:54.000And as long as capitalism is running rampant in this country and that's what the first priority is of all Americans, it's going to be very difficult to tackle the China challenge.
00:24:04.000I am definitely not saying that we should just keep trade the way it is.
00:24:09.000I mean, there's a lot of really big problems that need to be completely changed.
00:24:14.000For instance, why are they still considered a developing nation?
00:24:19.000That would put them at least on some sort of a level playing field with us, number one.
00:24:23.000It's ridiculous we haven't changed that.
00:24:25.000Number two is why do they have access to our capital markets, like you say, in the way that no one else does?
00:24:32.000They hide behind state secrets laws, which allow them to not have the same standards of accounting practices that we require of every other company around the world to have access to our public exchanges.
00:24:44.000It's ridiculous that we haven't changed that.
00:24:46.000We also allow them forced JV privileges, where if we want to sell products and services in that country, they say, great, we'll give you access, but you got to let us own 51% of it, and you need to build it on your dime.
00:25:02.000On top of it, they're still using, I mean, granted, we did this at the beginning of our Industrial Revolution where we had protectionist policies and various other pro-America trade policies that allowed us an advantage against the European Union or the Europeans when we were trying to get caught up to speed with them.
00:25:19.000But they didn't put up with it very long.
00:25:21.000Once we got caught up, they said, okay, we're changing.
00:25:26.000We should take the same tactic with China right now.
00:25:29.000I mean, the fact that we allow tariffs the way they do, where a car costs three times what it would here, or the fact that they have quotas, even in the Hollywood system, of how many movies are allowed in that market, completely outside of the free market capitalistic system we're used to and the way we allow them into access to our country, it's ridiculous.
00:25:50.000Even on the journalism front, something that both you and I touch upon quite a bit, they're allowed full access to our platforms, our social media platforms, whether it's Facebook or Snapchat or Twitter.
00:26:03.000Over there, our journalists aren't allowed access to any of those platforms.
00:26:07.000In fact, most of the stuff that we report in that market, we can't even report in the market.
00:26:13.000So there are a lot of things we need to change.
00:26:15.000I am not saying for the same, you know, keep trade the same way.
00:26:19.000I'm just saying there are advantages not to fully decouple, and there's advantages for us to rebalance this and start getting our money out of that country.
00:26:28.000What's been really disappointing for me to see is people like LeBron James and the elites in our country just go out of their way to complement the Chinese Communist Party.
00:26:38.000And I think that you're probably right that it is a, it is, it is a desire to just maximize their own earnings.
00:26:47.000And I think that it would probably be a mistake to look beyond that.
00:26:50.000However, someone like LeBron James, he really doesn't say very much.
00:26:54.000He doesn't really say nice things about our country anyway.
00:26:56.000So for him, it's a perfect harmony, right?
00:26:58.000It's I get to insult America and make a bunch of money while doing it.
00:27:01.000And then the National Basketball Association puts BLM on their court.
00:27:06.000Meanwhile, they're piping this into the Chinese mainland where a million Muslims are in concentration camps and they oppress the rights of citizens there.
00:27:15.000So, can you just talk a little bit more about your book and what you think?
00:27:21.000It faces Hollywood, faces the NBA American business.
00:27:24.000Can you give us any optimistic news on this front?
00:27:26.000Have you seen any sort of changes, any sort of business decisions that are moving in the right direction?
00:27:56.000I got fired from a company because I didn't get along with my boss.
00:28:00.000And the only client that followed me out the door was this weird Chinese company back in 2000.
00:28:05.000So I took a swing and it turned into what it turned into.
00:28:09.000And the great thing about the book for anybody that's in college or looking to figure out where they're going to go in life, by the way, I'm sorry, but Mulan is causing my phone to ring too much.
00:28:22.000But if anybody's thinking, oh, to become an expert or to do what Chris Fenton's doing, you must have some master plan when you're a young kid.
00:28:33.000Most people fell into what they do and they just live life and they follow the opportunities.
00:28:39.000And that's one of the parts of the book that I really like and I think are great for young readers.
00:28:44.000The number two thing is there's no partisan aspect to it.
00:28:48.000The reason for that is if we're going to address the challenge of China, it needs to be a red and blue, teamed up unity, unified effort.
00:28:59.000They're one party, they're one message.
00:29:02.000In this particular situation, we need to have both Democrats and Republicans and everybody else on board with the fact that we have a common enemy and we got to face this challenge together.
00:29:13.000Part of where I see the hope that you asked for is that a unified approach is key to address any of these issues.
00:29:25.000LeBron James, for instance, I get why there's so much hypocrisy involved with his response towards China, but I also get the fact that he has lots of money riding on China, whereas Senator Marco Rubio doesn't.
00:29:39.000So it's easy to call out LeBron and say, hey, do the right thing.
00:29:43.000But he loses a lot more in that process than, say, a single senator, who, by the way, is calling out an issue that should be called out too.
00:29:51.000Where I see the hope is that China is like an adolescent.
00:30:28.000One is they had a China, the CCP had an initiative called Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, where they were pretty much forcing countries to take on Belt and Road initiatives and also forced them to take this new narrative of the COVID virus and the fact that maybe it was generated in the U.S. or they had nothing to do with it.
00:30:49.000They are actually the ones that tried to find the solution and look at how great they are.
00:30:53.000They pushed that on a lot of countries in Europe.
00:31:16.000And we'll go back to LeBron James and the BLM movement and the civil rights movement here.
00:31:21.000If it was just basketball, it was just the NBA pushing that narrative of we need better civil rights, we need policing to be much fairer and more balanced, et cetera, it might have fallen on deaf ears.
00:31:35.000But what happened with the NBA is they were able to pull in all the other sports league.
00:31:38.000And it actually took a nice movement that took place over the last two weeks to sort of push this agenda even further because there was a unified front on a domestic issue.
00:31:50.000So let's take that to the international issue of China.
00:31:54.000If the NBA wants to stand behind Daryl Maury and his First Amendment rights, they should stand behind it.
00:32:02.000And the rest of the sports leagues and the rest of the celebrities in those sports leagues and all the different players from the Nikes and the Under Armers should stand behind Daryl Maury's free speech rights and say if you retaliate against China, retaliates against the NBA, China, then you're not getting any of our product, any of our service, any of our sports content.
00:33:25.000Like this conversation is going to hit 2 million followers.
00:33:29.000And those followers are going to retweet it to their followers.
00:33:32.000And every time we talk about this, the populace of the United States of America is going to put pressure on our business leaders and our political leaders.
00:33:41.000We're already seeing it on the political leaders, especially on the right.
00:33:44.000And we're starting to see it on the left, too.
00:33:46.000I mean, Isaac Stonefish and Sonny Bunch at Washington Post have brought this to light in the left side of the aisle, which, by the way, the left should be all over this.
00:34:16.000And it's part of the reason why I wanted to get on this show because I knew you had a very strong young base, a base that quite frankly has to live in a U.S.-China world a lot longer than I do at the age of 49.
00:34:32.000And it's super important that the movement of pressure on our leaders is just as strong with the young people in this country as it is with the old.
00:34:42.000And quite frankly, it's going to come from the young because the more pressure we put on what we're doing with China, the more opportunities are going to be created here in the United States of America for the next generation to enjoy.
00:35:00.000The U.S.-China relationship is something that needs to really be addressed.
00:35:04.000And, you know, I agree these conversations can make a very big impact and a very big difference, but it is incumbent on free citizens to stand up against totalitarianism wherever it rears its head.
00:35:59.000Turningpoint USA is fighting on high school and college campuses across the country for freedom, for liberty, for American exceptionalism, and for a strong America for our generation.
00:36:11.000Email us as always at freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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