Wal-mart and Tibet

Some time last year I watched a documentary titled “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” as part of my regular Net-flix rentals. The documentary was very well done and I was quite surprised there wasn’t a flurry of lawsuits surrounding its release. Perhaps the legal team at Wal-mart thought very few people actually watched documentaries and it would be cheaper to let it die an obscure death. Perhaps that logic holds true when you have to pay $8 to rent a single movie, but with a flat monthly rate to watch as many as you want keeping only N movies in your possession at any given time, a lot of people will toss in documentaries which wouldn’t otherwise get a viewing.

What really struck me about the documentary wasn’t how much work went into it, although they did so much homework for it the thing was almost too long to watch. No, what really struck me was the segment they filmed in China. My first thought was that they bought a camera when they arrived and smuggled the film out. That thought quickly went away when I noticed the police and other officials they caught on film with a quality that could not have been a hidden camera. China, a country famous for that scene in Tienam Square of tanks rolling over their own citizens, obviously let this documentary be filmed. It bothered me like a toothache which doesn’t come from a cavity and the dentist can’t fix. Had I known what was in the works at the time, as we all do now, it would have made perfect sense. China was bidding to host the Olympic games.

How could those two events possibly be related you ask?

Step back. See the whole board.

What was going to happen as soon as China started issuing travel visas to reporters? The thing which did happen recently, Tibet. They knew this was coming, and they planned for it years in advance. Tibet was inevitably going to spill over into an international human rights campaign. They knew this. In part, I believe the Olympic committee knew this as well. It would leave one with a generally good feeling if they came out and said China was awarded the games so the human rights issue could be addressed on the world stage. I might even watch some of the games if they said such a thing publicly.

How, oh how, was China going to redirect a PR disaster away from how it treats some of its citizens?

Had you watched this documentary, made in 2005, you would understand. They are going to play the Wal-mart card. You get the sense watching this video, even more so now in retrospect, that the Chinese police were standing right beside the camera crew, getting them access to the Wal-mart “company towns” in China. People telling the stories of how they are trained to lie to government officials about how many days and hours per week they work. Telling stories of having to pay for living in the dormitory even if they don’t live there, but soon not making enough money to live anywhere else.

No, as soon as the Tibet and human rights issues hit the media frenzy level, the Chinese government is going to pull this documentary out of their local video store and use it to launch a criminal human rights case against Wal-mart. This will create a PR disaster for Wal-mart and divert the story for months. The entire world will talk about Corporate Oppression instead of Communist Oppression, and the games will go on.

This entry was posted on April 1, 2008 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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