Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event at Big Grove Brewery and Taproom on May 1, 2019 in Iowa City, Iowa. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Biden Slammed for Dismissing Threats Posed by China
May 2, 2019 Updated: May 3, 2019
Recent remarks by former Vice President Joe Biden shrugging off the threats posed by China has drawn criticism from politicians on both sides of the aisle.
Biden, who recently announced his bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, said at a campaign rally in Iowa on May 1 that China, the world’s second-largest economy, is “not competition” for the United States.
His comments quickly drew criticism from Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), as well as fellow Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Touting the United States’ preeminence on the world stage, Biden said he didn’t know of a “single, solitary” world leader who wouldn’t want to trade places with the U.S. president.
“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man!” Biden said at a campaign event, arguing that the Chinese regime had enough on its hands dealing with domestic problems.
“They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system,” Biden continued. “They’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.”
Biden’s dismissal of China as a competitor to the United States drew a swift reaction from Romney, who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.
“This will not age well,” Romey said in a Twitter post on May 1.
Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.) also called out Biden’s comments in a tweet.
“I was just at a manufacturing plant that is being threatened by China’s corrupt trade practices,” Byrne wrote. “Not to mention the national security threats they pose. Joe is plain wrong. China is absolutely a threat.”
Meanwhile, self-identified socialist Sanders also hit out against his top rival for the Democratic nomination, writing in a tweet, “It’s wrong to pretend that China isn’t one of our major economic competitors.”
Sanders added that since the passage of the 2000 bill normalizing trade relations with China, “America has lost over 3 million manufacturing jobs.”
Biden’s campaign spokesperson responded on May 1, saying that the former vice president “underscored that, whatever challenges we face as a nation, including those posed by a rising China, they pale in comparison to the structural and social challenges that confront China itself,” The Washington Post reported.
Biden has made similar remarks in the past. In a November 2017 speech at Chicago Council on Global Affairs, he said: “I want China to succeed. … The idea that they’re going to eat our lunch? They don’t have enough energy, they don’t have enough water.”
Alleged Links With China
Shortly after Biden announced his presidential bid, former White House strategist Steve Bannon called on the former vice president to disclose his and his family’s links to the Chinese communist regime.
“Joe Biden’s gotta come 100 percent clean on his relationship and his family’s relationship with the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” Bannon said at a conference in New York City on April 25, hosted by the Committee on Present Danger: China.
“We need to know every piece of involvement that Joe Biden has had with the CCP, the Bank of China, and all the financial institutions in China.”
Bannon was referring to revelations detailed in the 2018 book “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends” by author Peter Schweizer, which alleges a deal took place in 2013 between the now-defunct investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners—co-founded by Biden’s son Hunter Biden—and the state-run Bank of China.
“In December of 2013, Hunter Biden flies on Air Force 2 to Beijing, China, with his father. His father meets with Chinese officials, he’s very soft on Beijing. The most important thing that happens, happens 10 days after they return,” Schweizer said in a March interview with the Fox News.
“And that’s when Hunter Biden’s small private equity firm called Rosemont Seneca Partners gets a $1 billion private equity deal with the Chinese government, not with a Chinese corporation, with the government.
“And what people need to realize is Hunter Biden has no background in China, he has no background in private equity, the deal he got in the Shanghai free-trade zone, nobody else had. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Blackstone, nobody had this deal.”
At the time, a Biden aide disputed the claims in Schweizer’s book. The aide told The Wall Street Journal, in response: “We aren’t going to engage on politically motivated hit pieces based on a series of demonstrable, factual errors from a Breitbart-affiliated author and his financial backers.”
Bannon also challenged the presidential hopeful to explain the Obama administration’s foreign policy track record on China.
“Joe Biden was there for eight years. We had the Munich [Olympics, hosted by Nazi Germany] of the 21st century [which] was allowing the CCP to build those islands [in the South China Sea],” he said. Beijing has built artificial islands to bolster its territorial claims there, which are disputed by a number of Asian countries.
Bannon added that in 2015, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and then-President Barack Obama signed a cyber agreement promising not to conduct economic espionage on each other—only to find Chinese cyberattacks targeting U.S. firms continuing with more sophistication.
“Having President Xi come in the Rose Garden, look him [Obama] in the eye, and on world TV, shake his hand and say, ‘No more cyber attacks, no more cyber theft.’ … Joe Biden has to answer the question: ‘What did you know, when did you know it, and how much money has your family and you personally taken from the most murderous regime of the 21st century?'”
Obama Adviser Downplays Biden’s Ukraine Corruption as ‘Conservative Oppo’ by Peter Schweizer
3:35
One of former President Barack Obama’s most senior advisers, Dan Pfeiffer, is downplaying reporting by the New York Times on former Vice President Joe Biden’s Ukraine corruption, as the scandal widens and severely threatens Biden’s 2020 White House chances.
On Wednesday, the Times published a piece that details how Biden faces “conflict of interest questions” with regard to the Ukraine that President Donald Trump and his allies are promoting as political attacks on Biden.
The Times’ Ken Vogel and Iuliia Mendel wrote on Wednesday:
It was a foreign policy role Joseph R. Biden Jr. enthusiastically embraced during his vice presidency: browbeating Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt government to clean up its act. And one of his most memorable performances came on a trip to Kiev in March 2016, when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine’s leaders did not dismiss the country’s top prosecutor, who had been accused of turning a blind eye to corruption in his own office and among the political elite.
The pressure campaign worked. The prosecutor general, long a target of criticism from other Western nations and international lenders, was soon voted out by the Ukrainian Parliament. Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.”
In response to the report, former New York City Mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani tweeted it out, calling for an investigation into Biden’s activities in Ukraine.
nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/… via @nytimes. Biden conflicts are too apparent to be ignored and should be investigated quickly and expeditiously. But the more important question is how deep and how high did the alleged Ukraine conspiracy go?
In response to someone else highlighting that tweet, Pfeiffer tweeted out a dismissive message of the contents of the report from the Times.
He specifically suggested that the entire report is based on “oppo research funded by conservative interests” put together by Breitbart News senior editor-at-large Peter Schweizer–the president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI)–and then published by the New York Times and pushed by Trump’s team.
“It’s happening all over again,” Pfeiffer said, a reference to how a lot of the information in Clinton Cash came out in the 2016 presidential election demonstrating corruption by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Notably, however, Pfeiffer did not address the actual facts in the Times story or the facts about Biden’s push as vice president to engage in activities in Ukraine that benefited his son’s business interests.
Vogel and Mendel wrote in the Times:
The broad outlines of how the Bidens’ roles intersected in Ukraine have been known for some time. The former vice president’s campaign said that he had always acted to carry out United States policy without regard to any activities of his son, that he had never discussed the matter with Hunter Biden and that he learned of his son’s role with the Ukrainian energy company from news reports. But new details about Hunter Biden’s involvement, and a decision this year by the current Ukrainian prosecutor general to reverse himself and reopen an investigation into Burisma, have pushed the issue back into the spotlight just as the senior Mr. Biden is beginning his 2020 presidential campaign. They show how Hunter Biden and his American business partners were part of a broad effort by Burisma to bring in well-connected Democrats during a period when the company was facing investigations backed not just by domestic Ukrainian forces but by officials in the Obama administration. Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma prompted concerns among State Department officials at the time that the connection could complicate Vice President Biden’s diplomacy in Ukraine, former officials said.
Vogel made clear in his own tweets on the matter that the Times has been investigating Biden’s corruption in Ukraine for many years, and has published stories on it dating back to 2015.
JUST POSTED: @RudyGiuliani solicited information from Ukrainian officials that he intended to use to undermine the MUELLER report, & to try to damage @JoeBiden.
Rudy briefed TRUMP on the effort.
Now both are suggesting @TheJusticeDept should investigate. nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/…
TO BE CLEAR: Independent of @RudyGiuliani's efforts, the intersection of @JoeBiden & HUNTER BIDEN in Ukraine warrants scrutiny.
The @NYTimes 1st noted the intersection in '15 (nytimes.com/2015/12/09/wor…), & today's story reveals OBAMA admin officials were concerned about a conflict.
Schweizer, too, told Breitbart News that while he is glad the New York Times is following up on this and investigating the Bidens, he had no contact with the Times reporters on it ahead of publication–and they did this investigation on their own.
“This is a story—corruption that must not be ignored–not oppo research,” Schweizer said. “Very glad to see the New York Times is reporting on this, but I had no contact with Vogel while he was working on this story and we never discussed it.”
1. it's called investigative journalism not oppo research. What facts to do dispute?
2. This is from amazon.com/Secret-Empires…, which also hits Repubs
3. I had no contact with @kenvogel on this story--get your facts straight. He did his own reporting
4. Next time @ me ;)
Schweizer has been working on exposing the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine and in China and elsewhere for years. He has uncovered many details, and provided many reports on it–including his latest book Secret Empires.
Paramilitary policemen stand in front of the skyline of the Lujiazui Financial District in Pudong in smog in Shanghai. (Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)
The CCP Uses Lies to Conceal Its Trade Wars
May 2, 2019 Updated: May 2, 2019
Commentary
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, state subsidies, tariffs, and manipulations of the legal system for decades to give Chinese companies an unfair edge over foreign companies. Behind this is its publicly stated goal to “catch up fast” and “surpass” the United States.
Now that the Trump administration is meeting the challenge head-on to stop the CCP’s unfair trade practices, legacy news outlets have portrayed the idea of the “trade war” with China like it’s a new phenomenon. In reality, it’s a war that has been taking place for decades, but the United States has only now begun doing something about it.
This historical amnesia has strategic value. For the CCP, it can use the public’s forgetfulness or lack of a clear understanding of its past to frame itself as the victim of a “Trump trade war.” And some of the legacy news outlets, which have a policy of absolute opposition to anything done by Trump, have been willing to play along with China’s charade to eliminate historical context.
On April 28, the CCP pulled out a tactic to capitalize on the lack of clarity on its history of trade war: It simply denied it ever happened.
Shen Changyu, head of China’s National Intellectual Property Administration, said that critics of the CCP’s intellectual property policies “lack evidence.”
“Some countries’ criticisms of China’s IP protection lack evidence and are nonspecific,” he said, according to South China Morning Post.
Of course, there is plenty of evidence. Estimates of the cost of China’s intellectual property theft against the United States range from $13 billion to $400 billion a year. Some estimates place the loss of economic value in the trillions.
The CCP has used a massive system—including military hackers, spies, researchers, students, and businesses—to steal intellectual property from U.S. companies. This includes the infamous CCP military hackers in Unit 61398, who were indicted during the Obama administration for stealing U.S. intellectual property.
While the CCP has since reorganized the military operations under its new Strategic Support Force, at the time, Unit 61398 was just one of 22 known operational bureaus dedicated to similar operations. It was under the Third Department under the CCP’s warfighting department, the General Staff Department. The Third Department, which focused on cyber operations, worked with the Second Department that ran human spy networks.
Since 1986, the CCP’s Project 863 has directed its policies for economic theft. Additional programs, such as its Torch Program, its 211 Program, and its 973 Program, directed similar operations. According to the book “China’s Industrial Espionage” by William C. Hannas et al., “Each of these programs looks to foreign collaboration and technologies to cover key gaps.”
The CCP has since added to the mix its China 2025 policy, which builds on Project 863. The program outlines 10 tech-related sectors for the CCP to dominate—by hook or by crook.
After intellectual property is stolen, the CCP reverse engineers it through its National Demonstration Organizations, also known as China’s National Technology Transfer Centers. According to Hannas et al., the CCP launched these operations in 2001 and directed them more heavily in 2007 through its National Technology Transfer Promotion Implementation Plan.
The CCP runs 202 of these transfer centers as “models for emulation by other transfer facilities.” These include the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs under the State Council, the Science and Technology Office under the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, and the National Technology Transfer Center under the East China University of Science and Technology.
“Their charters explicitly name ‘domestic and foreign technology’ as targets for ‘commercialization,'” the authors state in “China’s Industrial Espionage.”
In addition to these operations, the CCP also runs large-scale networks for overt espionage under its United Front Department, which includes tapping networks for economic theft. It runs student groups, such as the Chinese Student and Scholar Associations, to strategically place Chinese students in targeted positions and industries.
And the CCP has used state subsidies, legal punishments of foreign firms, and industrial espionage to undercut and disable foreign competition. An example of this is the CCP’s “Operation Night Dragon” cyberattacks, uncovered in 2013, which the CCP was using to spy on competitors in the energy industry, enabling it to under-bid them on contracts.
The CCP’s strategy to alter perceptions of the scope and impact of its aggressive intellectual property theft is simple yet effective. Its operations for economic theft use a “death by 1,000 cuts” approach and have a massive state system behind it. It’s a crime that has been perpetrated against the United States for decades.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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