COLLUSION: Biden the Preferred Dem on China Trade Policy, Chinese State-Owned Firm Says.
A Chinese state-owned securities conglomerate singled out Joe Biden for praise as a “rare candidate” who supports trade policies favorable to the country’s Communist government, according to a translated copy of a company research report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The analysis, drafted by Guotai Junan Securities and posted publicly on its website during the U.S. primaries, identified Biden as the best candidate out of the major Democratic contenders on China trade policy. The report provides a glimpse into Beijing’s assessment of Biden and other U.S. political leaders, as well as a list of U.S. states that China perceives as battlegrounds for its national policy interests in the 2020 election.
“Former U.S. vice president Biden, who currently ranks first in the Democratic Party’s approval rating, is a rare candidate who opposes the Sino-U.S. trade friction,” said the report. “Biden has expressed his opposition to Sino-US trade frictions on multiple public occasions and believes that ‘all the wrong methods’ have been used to deal with Sino-U.S. trade.”
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE: Hickenlooper Calls China a ‘Great Nation.’ Colorado Dem once met with CCP-linked influence operation.
Colorado Senate hopeful John Hickenlooper praised China as a “great nation” deserving of American respect and told voters that the Chinese do not seek global dominance.
The former Democratic governor ignored China’s recent military saber-rattling, crackdowns in Hong Kong, and role in the coronavirus outbreak to laud the regime’s lack of ambition.
“They do not want to rule the world,” Hickenlooper told supporters on a Zoom call on Monday. “They don’t want to dominate. They want to be safe and be respected as one of the great nations of the world, which they are. And we should–I think that’s what we should recognize.”
Hickenlooper’s remarks are at odds with a bipartisan consensus emerging on Capitol Hill, as well as Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s own rhetoric. Since the coronavirus pandemic’s onset, Democrats and Republicans have targeted China’s malignant behavior and global ambitions, with both parties issuing reports on dangerous Chinese statecraft tools just this week. Xi has explicitly said that he hopes China will be “a global leader in terms of comprehensive national power and international influence” by 2049. Experts assert this amounts to a call for a China-led world order.
Hickenlooper has maintained close ties with China over the course of his career. He previously met with the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls “the public face of the Chinese Communist Party’s official foreign influence agency.” The former Colorado governor has also interviewed with multiple Chinese state media outlets in the past few years, lauding the virtues of cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party, especially as it comes to reciprocal trade. Millions of dollars in American intellectual property theft comes from China, and yet Hickenlooper told Chinese state media that Washington should use a “thumbtack” to manage the Sino-American relationship, rather than a “sledgehammer.”
COLD WAR II: Public University Professor Routinely Writes Articles for Chinese Propaganda Outlet.
“Grand Valley State University (GVSU) professor Joel Wendland-Liu has written multiple articles for China Global Television Network (CGTN), which is owned and operated by the Chinese government. According to detailed reports from the Guardian, Beijing has purchased several media outlets to ‘tell China’s story well’ as part of a larger worldwide propaganda campaign. CGTN is one of them. It pushes an anti-capitalist, anti-American narrative that many experts believe advances the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence.”
Force the CCP to divest.
THAT’S WHAT XI SAID: The New York Times Publishes a Defense of the Hong Kong Crackdown.
The New York Times published an op-ed by Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing politician widely known for her ambition to become chief executive of Hong Kong. The piece is entitled “Hong Kong Is China, Like It or Not.” (She seems to like it.)
Ip, a longtime apologist for Chinese Communist Party control over the city, led the charge on anti-subversion legislation that spurred mass protests in 2003. What does she think of democracy? “Adolf Hitler was returned by universal suffrage, and he killed 7 million Jews,” she said at the time.
So naturally, the Times is publishing this esteemed figure, whose comments on an issue of international concern are apparently more reliable than what a sitting U.S. senator has to say. As far as the implications of Ip’s argument are concerned: The Chinese government’s crackdown in Hong Kong has obliterated the remaining freedoms that its residents once enjoyed, and provided it a thin veneer with which it targets free people everywhere, including U.S. citizens. But don’t expect much outrage from the NYT’s newsroom about this piece.
It’s a PR coup for the dictatorship that’s snuffed out the remaining elements of democratic governance in the city. The only reasonable argument for publishing it would have been to expose the CCP’s aims — but these are already widely known.
And to think, this was the paper which had a mass case of the vapors over Tom Cotton’s op-ed in June on the use of the military during the Biden Riots, with some of their crybully staffers actually tweeting, “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” Do Hong Kongese lives matter also?
h/t Ed