Space entrepreneur, car manufacturer, and social media personality Elon Musk culminated a trip to communist China on Thursday after meeting a parade of China’s most powerful Communist Party officials, including Politburo members, and enjoying a 16-course feast in Beijing that was the toast of the state-controlled Weibo social media site.
Musk is reportedly in China in his capacity as the CEO of Tesla, an electric car company known for its vehicles exploding spontaneously. Last week, prior to Musk’s departure, the company faced a new scandal as an unknown whistleblower leaked a trove of private files showing the company struggling with “phantom braking” and other dangerous glitches.
On Wednesday night, Musk visited his Tesla “gigafactory” in Shanghai, taking a photo with his China team shared on Weibo by Tesla Global Vice President Grace Tao.
#Tesla CEO #ElonMusk arrived in #Shanghai on Wed night and visited the company’s Gigafactory in the city, photos posted by Tesla’s Global Vice President Grace Tao on her Weibo account showed.
Musk’s private jet is scheduled to leave Shanghai on Thu morning and head to Austin,… pic.twitter.com/K9tilJ0xZf— Shanghai Daily (@shanghaidaily) June 1, 2023
The visit to his own company appeared to be the last stop on Musk’s itinerary in China prior to his departure on Thursday morning Beijing time. Musk began his visit to China with a meeting with Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who used his time with Musk to encourage American business leaders to invest in the totalitarian country. He later met with Commerce Minister Wang Wentao and Minister of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) Jin Zhuanglong and, according to Reuters, Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang, one of the most powerful members of the Communist Party Politburo.
特斯拉首席执行官埃隆·马斯克访华, 受到超乎寻常的高调接待 pic.twitter.com/26f1UXNoph
— 自由亚洲电台 (@RFA_Chinese) May 31, 2023
In between these meetings, reports surfaced of Musk stopping by the ritzy Man Fu Yan restaurant in Beijing for a lavish feast in his honor, featuring a menu branded with his Chinese name, 马斯克 (Masike). The Chinese character for “ma” also means horse, so the menu, as circulating on Weibo, included art featuring horses.
📍Beijing, China 🇳
Canciller chino se reunió con Elon Musk. Este fue el menú que disfrutaron en la cena 🇳#China #Asia #Musk #Tesla #Canciller #Beijing #Cena pic.twitter.com/obwNpYf3Po
— DescubriendoChina (@Descubre_China) May 31, 2023
Elon Musk’s family name is “ma si ke” in Chinese, and “ma” means horse. The menu of the banquet welcoming his visit to Beijing on May 30 made sure that fact was given full play. pic.twitter.com/oMZIZ29fsU
— Xiaohui Wang 王晓辉 (@wangxh65) May 31, 2023
The Global Times confirmed Musk’s stop at the restaurant and described his meal.
“After the meeting with Qin, Musk was said to have enjoyed dinner at a high-end restaurant in Beijing, according to photos circulating on China’s social media platforms,” the state-run newspaper relayed. “He was cordially received by the restaurant with a menu elaborately designed to contain the initial of Musk’s last name in Chinese and 16 dishes including geoduck with pickled cabbage and zhajiangmian, a traditional noodle dish topped with a rich soybean paste.”
The Global Times noted that the Communist Party, whose subjects face regular threats of food shortages in areas where elites do not live, similarly feted Musk’s mother, Maye, during her visit to the capital in March.
Weibo users, who face heavy censorship and potential prosecution if they do not echo the propaganda out of their government, have been the primary source of information for Musk’s trip. Musk has not used his own social media site, Twitter, throughout his stay in the country, as the Communist Party banned it long ago. Musk posted once on Weibo, however, applauding the Chinese communist space program.
On the Chinese state-controlled site, a search for Musk’s name in Chinese reveals a flood of laudatory comments, declaring him “comparable to Einstein” and a friend of the Chinese state. One post applauded him for promoting the Chinese-born Tom Zhu, who reportedly accompanied Musk to China, as Tesla’s senior vice president and potential future CEO.
“He’s a global idol,” Reuters quoted on Weibo user as declaring, citing another lamenting, “if only China could have someone like Elon Musk.”
A worker in a Tesla showroom in Beijing, Tuesday, May 30, 2023. China’s foreign minister met Tesla Ltd. CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday and said strained U.S.-Chinese relations require “mutual respect,” while delivering a message of reassurance foreign companies are welcome. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Musk, who reclaimed the title of world’s richest man on Thursday, is one of the most enthusiastic promoters of business with the Communist Party on the planet, repeatedly praising China as a trustworthy partner. The Global Times repeatedly used the word “trust” in its analysis of Musk’s presence in the country.
“Experts noted that Musk’s visit to China not only indicates that solid trade and economic cooperation between China and the US is an irreversible trend,” the state newspaper proclaimed on Wednesday, “but also demonstrates foreign companies’ trust in China’s business environment and promising development prospects, despite Washington’s reckless technology decoupling maneuvers.”
One of those regime-approved “experts,” Wuhan University director Dong Dengxin, told the newspaper that Musk was indicating to other business moguls in the United States that “solid trade and economic cooperation between China and the US is an irreversible trend despite Washington’s ‘decoupling’ push from China.”
“As one of the world’s major high-tech companies, the Tesla CEO’s trip to China shows the trust of foreign companies in China,” Dong continued, “and their optimism about the world’s second-largest economy’s development prospects.”
Musks’s display of “trust” is particularly important after China’s brutal lockdown and quarantine camp policies, implemented during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, led many companies to consider outsourcing business from China to neighbors such as Vietnam and India. The Chinese government announced an end to those policies in late November, but not before the world’s largest iPhone factory suffered rolling riot scenarios, sending Apple supplier Foxconn hunting for new factories in India. Production has yet to recover at the Zhengzhou plant at press time.
China has long relied on Musk to promote its business climate, often while insulting Americans and, in particular, the American working class.
“China rocks in my opinion. The energy in China is great. People there – there’s like a lot of smart, hard-working people. And they’re really — they’re not entitled, they’re not complacent,” Musk said in 2020, “whereas I see in the United States increasingly much more complacency and entitlement especially in places like the Bay Area, and L.A. and New York.”
Twitter CEO Elon Musk speaks at the “Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships,” marketing conference in Miami Beach, Florida, on April 18, 2023. (CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)
“When you’ve been winning for too long you sort of take things for granted,” Musk continued. “The United States, and especially like California and New York, you’ve been winning for too long. When you’ve been winning too long you take things for granted.”
In addition to the “gigafactory” in Shanghai, Musk controversially opened a Tesla showroom in Urumqi, occupied East Turkistan, last year. East Turkistan, which the Communist Party refers to with the Mandarin name “Xinjiang,” is the site of the genocide of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic indigenous communities that began in 2017. The Communist Party has built an elaborate concentration camp system in the region imprisoning as many as 3 million non-Han people, forcing them into slavery as well as subjecting them to forced sterilization, forced abortions, torture, infanticide, and gang rape, among other atrocities.
Last year, the Global Times celebrated Musk for doing business amid the genocide, predicting his move would encourage others in the West to ignore the genocide, as well.