Lincoln Center made a slightly startling announcement today: the auditorium at David Geffen Hall, which reopens in the fall, will be called the Wu Tsai Theater, after the business couple Claire Wu Tsai and Joe Tsai. The proliferation of naming opportunities in the arts-donor world has meant that in many places the auditorium bears a different name from the building itself, even when there is only one performance space. But the Geffen / Wu Tsai case is an especially odd one because the word "theater" usually denotes a site for dramatic performances, not concerts. It's as if the building on Lincoln Center Plaza now has competing identities.
It also bears mentioning that Joe Tsai, the co-founder and executive vice chairman of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, is a figure of some controversy, especially in the world of professional sports, where he owns the Brooklyn Nets, the New York Liberty, and the San Diego Seals. Some paragraphs from an April 2022 ESPN story are worth quoting:
In the United States, Tsai donates hundreds of millions of dollars to combat racism and discrimination. In China, Alibaba, under Tsai's leadership, partners with companies blacklisted by the U.S. government for supporting a "campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-tech surveillance" through state-of-the-art racial profiling.
Tsai has publicly defended some of China's most controversial policies. He described the government's brutal crackdown on dissent as necessary to promote economic growth; defended a law used to imprison scores of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong as necessary to squelch separatism; and, when questioned about human rights, asserted that most of China's 1.4 billion citizens are "happy about where they are." ...
Alibaba is "effectively state-controlled," according to a recent study on the company by Garnaut Global, an independent research firm that analyzes the Chinese Communist Party structure and China's technology footprint.
Under Tsai's leadership, Alibaba funded companies that helped China build "an intrusive, omnipresent surveillance state that uses emerging technologies to track individuals with greater efficiency," according to a 2020 congressional report.
Those technologies have been used widely in the western region of Xinjiang, where the government has forced more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities into barbed-wire "re-education" camps, policies that have been described as cultural "genocide" by the United States, several other countries and human rights organizations.
The matter merits further discussion.