As an ambitious young lawyer, Ashley Yablon wanted nothing more than to become the general counsel for a large corporation, so when presented with his “dream job” opportunity by the Chinese telecom company ZTE, he took it, no questions asked.
However, when he eventually realized that his dream job came at a price he wasn’t willing to pay—his loyalty to his country—the dream quickly became a nightmare.
“I don’t think I’ll ever feel safe,” advised Yablon, who authored the book “Standing Up to China: How a Whistleblower Risked Everything for His Country” after blowing the whistle on ZTE’s schemes for circumventing U.S. export laws.
In an interview for Epoch TV’s “American Thought Leaders” program aired on Dec. 15, Yablon recounted the story of how he came to defy the Chinese company, and by extension, the Chinese Communist Party.
Yablon began working at ZTE in October 2011, after having spent years “rounding out his toolbelt” at various law firms and working his way up the corporate ladder.
“At a law firm, you’re practicing one type of law, but you have many clients,” he noted. “As a general counsel, you have one client, but you’re practicing many types of law. And that interested me—more assisting business versus working at a law firm and just billing business.”
Prior to landing the role of general counsel at ZTE, Yablon worked at McAfee, an antivirus software company, and then Huawei, another Chinese telecom company.
“I thought, ‘What an unbelievable...
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