Frank Gaffney, executive chairman and founder of the Center for Security Policy, called for the Trump administration to stop a federally administered retirement fund from investing in Chinese equities, warning of China gaining further leverage over America through the one-party state’s growing control of U.S. finances.
On Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight , Gaffney joined host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) to explain how the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (FRTIB), a federal government agency managing the pension funds of federal employees and military personnel, is moving towards greater investment in Chinese securities.
Gohmert said of FRTIB, “Some Obama appointees are moving very, very quickly to invest tens of billions of dollars in China and, significantly, in countries that do not meet the requirements of the law with transparency and other requirements. And yet, they’re rushing headlong into putting our retirement accounts in Chinese companies, some of whom make weapons that kill our soldiers.”
Increasing interconnectedness between Chinese and American capital markets will soon be “inflicted upon” federal government employees if FRTIB’s intentions are allowed to proceed, warned Gaffney.
FRTIB’s plans are “to have [federal employees’] retirement funds — at least those that are being invested in a diversified international portfolio — compulsorily invested in Chinese companies,” explained Gaffney, “some of which are engaged in building South China Sea islands and proliferating various weapon systems for which they’ve been sanctioned; or oppressing Uighurs and other minorities in China with the so-called social credit system; or building weapon systems to be used against Americans.”
LISTEN :
Gaffney continued, “Now, think about that for a minute. American military veterans and active personnel are being put in the position [where] they will shortly be compelled to invest their money — their retirement funds — in the companies that are trying to help the Chinese Communist Party being positioned to kill them. It’s obscene.”
Gaffney added, “We have already transferred, by some estimates, three trillion dollars from our capital markets to China, and this has enabled all of the bad things that the Chinese are doing. It is the petty cash war that has underwritten so [many] of the threats that we’re now facing from them.”
“They aspire to get another three to five trillion dollars out of [U.S.] capital markets in the near future,” said Gaffney of China, “and people in Wall Street are still determined to do that.”
China’s growing control of America’s retirement funds afford the one-party state leverage over the U.S., warned Gaffney.
He remarked, “When 160 — maybe — million Americans have their retirement funds — and other college funds for their kids, and who knows what else — [and] their investment dollars tied up in China, not because they want them there but because that’s what Wall Street has done through these passively managed indexes, you will have created the largest China lobby in the history of the world, and it will be vastly more difficult for us to make the kind of sovereign and security decisions that are vital to our future freedoms under the circumstances,” Gaffney stated.
Expanding influence over American financial instruments may enable China to halt future national security measures such as a the coronavirus-related travel ban, Gohmert speculated.
FRTIB is run by a five-person board appointed by the executive branch, Gaffney noted. “It’s a five-member board that no one ever heard of,” he said. “ It is a partisan operation. It’s still populated by four Democratic representatives members that were appointed during the Obama years, and there’s a fifth who is a Republican, perhaps in name only.”
Gaddney went on, “About three years ago, they made a decision that they would begin in 2020 to mirror one of these indexes. It’s called the Morgan Stanley National Index, and it’s the all-country world index ex-U.S., which is a real mouthful, but it’s basically an index that incorporates some six — and increasingly, I think, it will be seven — percent of its holdings in Chinese companies, including some that are directly tied into the People’s Liberation Army as well as the Chinese Communist Party doing malevolent things.”
China games globalized capital flows, including U.S. foreign investment via retirement pension funds, to fund its geopolitical ambitions, explained retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, to Breitbart News in September 2019.
Increasing U.S. investment in China-based companies places American investors at risk given China’s weaker transparency regulations relative to America, explained Gaffney.
“This is imprudent from a financial point of view,” Gaffney estimated. “Look at what’s happening to these Chinese companies. One of them, it was announced last year, lost 4.4 billion dollars. It just went missing. How many more of these companies are in similar financial circumstances is anybody’s guess because we don’t require these Chinese companies in our capital markets to meet our requirements under our laws for transparency, for accountability, for governance, [or] for risk disclosure for heaven’s sakes. They’re given a pass.”
Gaffney continued, “I think this was a result of President Obama’s direction, but the SEC — the Securities and Exchange Commission — is continuing this practice, so we don’t really know whether these companies are financially viable, let alone exposing our investors to the reality that they are investing in companies and business and entities that are absolutely inimical to our vital interests, our security interests, among others, our human rights values and the like. This is just insane.”
“This mustn’t be allowed to metastasize further into the $500-or-so billion-dollar Federal Thrift Savings Plan, so we need people on the net to be letting the president know this should not happen,” advised Gaffney.
Mansour asked what can be done to halt China’s growing control of U.S. retirement funds.
Gaffney advised the implementation of an “America First” ethos beyond manufacturing to include federal regulation and policy regarding retirement funds, beginning with FRTIB.
“My best answer is this is an opportunity to invest in an America First program,” Gaffney recommended. “There is an enormous amount that needs to be done. We’ve been talking about infrastructure for years. There’s innovation. There’s research and development — among other things — for our military. But not least, there’s also the simple capitalization of the lead institution of an American industrial sector, so we can manufacture medicines in this country again, and gloves, and masks, and all kinds of other medical gear, and all of the other things that we foolishly allowed to be shipped off by people whose only interest was maximizing their quarterly profits, and the devil take the hindmost with respect to the national interest, especially the national security interest. So I’d like to say we have an opportunity.”
Gaffney added, “I think if the American people get behind this idea that patriotic investing is the alternative — not continuing to invest in our enemies.”
Gaffney invited listeners to visit the committee on the Present Danger: CHINA, an organization of which he is vice president.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
"The
policy agendas of today's leading Democrats including Medicare for All; the
Green New Deal; open borders; and their approach to issues such as social
justice, economic and tax policy, foreign policy, gun control, and energy policy,
plus so many others, are rarely held up to comprehensive public examination and
scrutiny by the mainstream media in any truly meaningful way."
Is today's Democratic
Party deceiving the people?
Bill
Gertz is an author of eight books and an award-winning national security
journalist and currently is the national security columnist for The Washington
Times. His recently published book, Deceiving the Sky:
Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy provides valuable
insights revealing why Chinese communist leaders and their increasing
totalitarian system of government pose such a menacing threat to the world and
how they are actively undermining American democracy and freedom.
While
the book is focused on modern China, valuable lessons can be learned about the
dangers of totalitarianism and political corruption operating anywhere in the
world. Especially noteworthy is material presented in Chapter 1 —
"How Communists Lie," specifically by Guo Wengui, who is a Chinese
billionaire and political exile and former insider who left China in
2014. The first chapter includes quotes by Guo Wengui exposing how
the Chinese communist system operates in deceitful ways.
Guo
Wengui is a controversial public figure operating from his current home in
NYC. He is a leading and well known activist opposing the Chinese
communist government through several different methods, including social media,
public appearances and meeting with prominent Western opinion-makers and
politicians. Opinions today widely differ about his actual status,
his background, and his true intentions. However, he knows the
communist system well as a former political insider and the ideology behind it,
so the ideas offered by him are valuable to consider.
Guo
Wengui starts by reminding us that China is a communist country and that
communism attempts to build a utopian society, therefore the very basis of the
system is false. As a consequence, he persuasively states that in
fact, communists are professional liars, because they will never realize what
they promise. It is in fact impossible to do so. He
states that traditional Western culture is built on the morality of right and
wrong. On the other hand, he asserts that in the communist system,
truth and lies are interchangeable. As an example, if the truth
furthers the ideological cause, it will be used, and when outright lies are
expedient, there is no unwillingness to use them.
Guo
Wengui labels today's Chinese political system as a kleptocracy concerned and
primarily motivated by fulfilling the interests of a comparatively small elite
rather than the well-being of the Chinese people. These
selected few elites are all exclusively high-ranking members of the Communist
Party. Totalitarian systems such as the one that exists today in
China strive to take total control of the everyday lives of their citizens,
including their thoughts and attitudes as well as their daily activities. The
Chinese Communist Party regularly uses its state-controlled mass and social
media to maintain absolute political control, often relying on outright deceit.
As
I read this characterization of the workings of the Chinese Communist Party and
its leaders, it led me to thinking more about current political conditions
closer to home.
In
our country, the most powerful collective mechanism for the people to come
together on a regular basis and have the right to choose the political agenda
and the type of country we want to live in is by voting. The
American voter goes to the polls with the expectation that our elected
representatives will work to deliver solutions to the issues and challenges
facing our country. Since his inauguration, President Trump has
worked tirelessly to implement his agenda and has been exceptionally successful
in doing so. Various positive results have occurred in a wide
variety of areas ranging from the economy, immigration, and trade policy to
national security.
The
most dangerous assault on our system of government today is the orchestrated
efforts by the Democratic Party to actively work in a series of campaigns to
invalidate the results of the 2016 election. Democrats actively
resist, impugn, and call into question without exception any policy initiative
by the Trump administration. The Democrats currently promote an
environment of resistance by outright deception indicating a determination not
to offer any compromise on issues. In addition, they do not seem to
display any regard for the consequences of their actions on our country.
Extending
over more than three years, on December 18, these efforts led to the House
voting along party lines on two articles to impeach President
Trump. The House voted 230-197 to charge Trump with abuse and
229-198 to charge him with obstruction of Congress. A key indicator
of the continued magnitude of their determination to remove the president from
office is that only three Democrats joined in to vote in opposition to one or
both of the charges against the president.
All
of this is occurring within an environment where there is no actual evidence of
any impeachable offenses ever being committed by the president or any members
of his administration. However, there is being uncovered on
virtually a daily basis extensive evidence of unprecedented political
corruption and subversive activities authorized and conducted by high-ranking
members of the Obama administration, with all of them directed at destroying
candidate and then President Trump.
The
move to impeach President Trump is occurring as Democratic Party moves rapidly
left politically openly advocating adopting socialism in America in an apparent
attempt to radically transform the very nature of our country and system of
government. The growing appeal of socialism in this country can be
attributed to many factors. The brand of socialism presented by many
of today's leading Democratic politicians has an alluring and emotional appeal
to many people. It is portrayed as a political system consisting of
fair and equitable solutions to many of our most challenging political,
economic, and social issues.
The
policy agendas of today's leading Democrats including Medicare for All; the
Green New Deal; open borders; and their approach to issues such as social
justice, economic and tax policy, foreign policy, gun control, and energy
policy, plus so many others, are rarely held up to comprehensive public
examination and scrutiny by the mainstream media in any truly meaningful
way.
China
today is on a path under paramount leader Xi Jinping and an increasingly
powerful Communist Party of evolving its political system to be even more
totalitarian, ready and willing to go to greater lengths and measures to
control virtually every aspect of its citizens' lives.
In
our country, is the Democrats' socialist vision and associated policies for
America fake, and can they ever deliver on what they promise, and will their
agenda ultimately be of benefit or detriment to the American
people? Do they threaten our freedoms in an attempt to further
control our lives by implementing a significantly larger government apparatus
that will include much greater regulation of a citizen's daily
activities? Are they moving us on a path toward totalitarianism
similar to the one evolving in China today?
The
difference in our country is that our future can still be determined by the
voters in 2020. At this time in our history and with an increasingly
left-leaning radical Democratic Party and their agenda, the results of the next
election will profoundly define the future direction of our nation and way of
life.
FEINSTEIN
HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS
THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.
SHE HAS
AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD
BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT
OUT THERE!
IN THE
November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And
so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne
Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior
of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own
ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.
“All in all, it was an
incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red
China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon
“Our entire crony
capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN
THINKER.com
Senator
Who Employed Chinese Spy Endorses Joe Biden for President
Win
McNamee/Getty Images
9 Oct 20192,419
5:44
A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to
China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice
President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings
with the communist regime.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a
former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced her
endorsement of the former vice president on Tuesday, claiming to have
witnessed Biden’s “fortitude” and leadership during their overlapping tenures
in Congress.
Feinstein said in a statement:
I’ve worked closely with Vice
President Biden and I’ve seen firsthand his legislative ability, his
statesmanship, and most importantly his moral fortitud. During his time in
Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter for hard
working American families.
The endorsement comes as Biden’s
presidential campaign is besieged by scandal regarding the lucrative business
dealings his youngest son, Hunter, had with foreign governments.
Only hours before Feinstein’s endorsement, the
Chinese government announced it would not
investigate how Hunter Biden ended up at the center of one its top private
equity firms. The Chinese foreign ministry made the decision after President
Donald Trump publicly called for a probe of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Bohai Harvest
RST (BHR). In particular, Trump has noted that the circumstances surrounding
BHR’s creation could have posed a conflict of interest for Joe Biden.
As Peter Schweizer, senior
contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political
Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Hunter
Biden inked the multibillion-dollar deal that created BHR with a subsidiary of
the state-owned Bank of China in 2013.
The timing of the lucrative deal has
been brought into question as it came only 12 days after Hunter visited China
with his father aboard Air Force Two. Officially, the then-vice president
was visiting the country amid escalating tensions over islands in the South
China Sea and decided to bring his granddaughter and son along. In a March
2018 interview with Breitbart News Tonight ,
however, Schweizer detailed the political machinations that preceded Hunter
Biden’s $1.5 billion venture with China:
In December of 2013, Vice President
Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a
visit to Beijing, China. To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have
just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They
basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese
approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly
controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden
is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely
criticized on that trip for going soft on China. For basically not challenging
them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.
Since its creation, BHR has invested
heavily in energy and defense projects across the globe. As of
June, Hunter Biden was still involved with BHR,
sitting on its board of directors and owning a minority stake of the fund
estimated to be worth more than $430,000.
Such dealings at the center of
politics and business, while perhaps not illegal, are not exclusive to the
Biden family alone. As a few noted at the time of Feinstein’s endorsement, the
senator and her husband have their own close ties to the communist country.
During her tenure as mayor of San
Francisco in the late-1970s and early-1980s, Feinstein took advantage of the
newly normalized diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China by
establishing one of the first sister city partnership between San Francisco and
Shanghai. Through that partnership, Feinstein led trade delegations to China in
which she and her husband, Richard Blum, became acquainted with some of the
country’s most prominent political leaders.
As the Federalist noted in August 2018, Feinstein
and her husband leveraged those relationships to boost their own wealth. In
1986, Feinstein and Jiang Zemin — the then-mayor of Shanghai, who would later
ascend to the presidency of the People’s Republic of China — “designated
several corporate entities for fostering commercial relations.” One of those
firms was Shanghai Pacific Partners, which employed Blum as a director. Blum
reportedly had an interest of upwards of $500,000 in a project backed by
Shanghai Pacific Partners.
After Feinstein was elected to the
Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same
time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to
colleagues, even once claiming “that in my
last life maybe I was Chinese.” Through her seat on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Feinstein led the fight on a number of initiatives seen as
being favorable to China, including granting the country permanent
most-favored-nation trading status in 2000.
Despite Feinstein and her husband
having a close relationship with Jiang, the Chinese government targeted the senator
as part of its espionage operations. In the early 2000s, the Chinese Ministry
of State Security (MSS) recruited a longtime employee of the senator to gather
information about the inner workings of her congressional and district offices.
Feinstein only learned of the staffer’s duplicity in 2013, after he’d already
been on her payroll for more than 20 years.
“While this person, who was a
liaison to the local Chinese community, was fired, charges were never filed
against him,” Politico reported in 2018,
speculating that because “the staffer was providing political intelligence and
not classified information—making prosecution far more difficult.”
Apart from the convoluted history of
the senator’s ties to China, the political timing of Feinstein’s endorsement
also caught many off guard. The California Democrat, who hosted a
fundraiser on Biden’s behalf last week alongside House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) daughter, is only the most recent figure from the
Democrat establishment to openly pledge support for the former vice president.
Feinstein’s endorsement, however, was not totally expected, especially since
her seamate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), is mounting a bid of her own for the Democrat
nomination. In fact, earlier this year, Feinsten flirted with the notion of
remaining neutral in the 2020 contest out of respect for Harris.
Compounding the political picture is
that most polls show Biden no longer the favorite to win California, having fallen behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Feinstein, however, did not address
any of that when endorsing the former vice president on Tuesday. Instead, the
senator offered platitudes about Biden’s work to enhance gun control and how
his campaign was a “fight to restore the soul of the nation.”
China,
Not Russia, the Greater Threat
Ten weeks
of protests, some huge, a few violent, culminated Monday with a shutdown of the
Hong Kong airport.
Ominously,
Beijing described the violent weekend demonstrations as "deranged"
acts that are "the first signs of terrorism," and vowed a merciless
crackdown on the perpetrators.
China is
being pushed toward a decision it does not want to make: to use military force,
as in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago, to crush the uprising. For that would
reveal the character of President Xi Jinping's Communist dictatorship, as well
as Beijing's long-term plans for this semi-autonomous city of almost 7.5
million.
Yet this
is not the only internal or border concern of Xi's regime.
Millions
of Muslim Uighurs in China's west are in concentration camps undergoing
"re-education" to change their way of thinking on loyalty, secession
and the creation of a new East Turkestan.
In June,
a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Philippine fishing boat, leaving its 22
crewmen to drown. The fishermen were rescued by a Vietnamese boat.
President
Rodrigo Duterte's reluctance to resist China's fortification in the South China
Sea of the rocks and reefs Manila claims are within its own territorial waters
has turned Philippine nationalism anti-China.
China's
claim to Taiwan is being defied by Taipei, which just bought $2.2 billion in
U.S. military equipment including Abrams tanks and Stinger missiles.
Any
Taiwanese declaration of independence, China has warned, means war.
While
Taiwan's request to buy U.S. F-16s has not yet been approved, in a rare visit,
Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen stopped over in the U.S. recently, before
traveling on to Caribbean countries that retain diplomatic relations with
Taipei. Beijing has expressed its outrage at the U.S. arms sales and Tsai's
unofficial visit.
The
vaunted Chinese economy is growing, at best, at half the double-digit rate of a
decade ago, not enough to create the jobs needed for hundreds of millions in
the countryside seeking work.
And talks
have been suspended in the U.S.-China trade dispute, at the heart of which,
says White House aide Peter Navarro, are Beijing's "seven deadly
sins" in dealing with the United States:
China
steals our intellectual property via cybertheft, forces U.S. companies in China
to transfer technology, hacks our computers, dumps into our markets to put U.S.
companies out of business, subsidizes state-owned enterprises to compete with
U.S. firms, manipulates its currency, and, despite our protests, ships to the
USA the fentanyl drug that has become a major killer of Americans.
Such
practices have enabled China to run up annual trade surpluses of $300 billion
to $400 billion at our expense, and, says Navarro, have caused the loss of
70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
Moreover,
China has used the accumulated wealth of its huge trade surpluses to finance
its drive for hegemony in Asia and beyond.
With
President Donald Trump threatening 10% tariffs on $300 billion more in Chinese
exports to the U.S., Xi must decide if he is willing to end his trade-war
tactics against the U.S., which have gone on during the Clinton, Bush and Obama
administrations. If he refuses, will he accept the de-coupling of our two
economies?
Only
Trump has taken on the Middle Kingdom.
If the
American people and Congress are willing to play hardball and accept
sacrifices, we can win this face-off. The U.S. buys five times as much from
China as we sell to China. The big loser in this confrontation, if we stay the
course, will not be the USA.
For three
years, the U.S. establishment has not ceased to howl about Russia's theft of
emails of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.
Yet the
greatest cybercrime of the century was Beijing's theft in 2014 of the personnel
files of 22 million applicants and employees of the U.S. government, many of
them holding top-secret clearances.
Compromised
by this theft, said then FBI Director James Comey, was a "treasure trove
of information about everybody who has worked for, tried to work for, or works
for the United States government."
"A
very big deal from a national security ... and counterintelligence
perspective," said Comey. And Xi's China, not Putin's Russia, committed
the crime. Yet America's elites appear to have forgotten this far graver act of
cyberaggresion.
Undeniably,
Russia is a rival. But Putin's economy is the size of Italy's while China's
economy challenges our own. And China's population is 10 times that of Russia,
and four times that of the USA.
Manifestly,
China is the greater menace.
Are
Americans willing to make the necessary sacrifices to force China to abide by the
rules of reciprocal trade?
Or will
Trump be forced by political realities to accept the long-term and ruinous
relationship we have followed since granting China permanent MFN status in
2001?
This
issue is likely to decide the destiny of our relations and the future of Asia,
if not the world.
Patrick
J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That
Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever." To find out more
about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and
cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
Feinstein’s Ties to China Extend
Beyond Chinese Spy
August 6,
2018 Last Updated: August 7, 2018
Senate
Judiciary Committee Chairman Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein speaks during a
Committee hearing on Cambridge Analytica and data privacy in the Dirksen Senate
Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on May 16, 2018. (MANDEL
NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
News Analysis
Last week’s revelations that a Chinese spy served on the staff
of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for almost 20 years, should be shocking no
one.
The unidentified agent, who was in place as recently as five
years ago, was Feinstein’s driver. He also served as a “gofer” in her Bay Area
office and a “liaison to the Asian-American community.” He sometimes attended functions
at the Chinese consulate, as a stand-in for the senator.
At the time the spy was discovered by the FBI, Feinstein was
chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee. Feinstein says she forced the
agent into retirement, but no other staff were informed of the circumstances
behind his exit, and no charges were filed.
Feinstein had been warned two decades ago that she might be
targeted by Chinese intelligence.
The senator issued a statement on March 10, 1997, that the FBI
had warned her and five other senators that the Chinese government might try to
“funnel illegal contributions to her campaign and other Congressional
campaigns, but she said the information had not influenced her position or her
vote on any issue,” according to The New York Times.
“[Feinstein] said that while ‘the information was vague and
nonspecific,’ she had concluded that she should ‘be very cautious’ in dealing
with Asian-American contributors,” the NY Times report stated.
Feinstein would obviously be of interest to Chinese intelligence
for the classified information she might possess through her position on the
intelligence committee.
She might also be the target of “influence operations”—a subtler
approach, by which Chinese operatives would try to steer Feinstein into
promoting policies that might benefit the Chinese regime.
According to the article, “For many years, Ms. Feinstein has
tried to promote friendship and trade with China, and she has countered critics
of the Chinese human-rights record by emphasizing what she described in a
Senate speech last year as ‘major improvements in human rights’ there.”
Conciliatory to Communists
Feinstein’s conciliatory approach to communist governments began
in the mid-1950s, when she served in the Stanford University student government.
Before her senior year, Dianne Goldman, as she was then known,
traveled to Europe on a student trip led by Stanford political science
professor, James T. Watkins. The agenda included a possible meeting with
Yugoslav communist revolutionary Marshal Josip Broz Tito.
In January 1955, a vigorous debate erupted on the Stanford
student executive, over whether to support a proposed visit of seven Soviet
journalists to the United States.
According to Stanford Daily reports of the time, executive
member Sam Palmer asserted that “nothing can be lost in allowing them to come
over.”
He was supported by both Goldman and Don Peck, who claimed that
it was important to show “Russia that the United States is not an Iron Curtain
country—that we are willing to let Communists enter.”
The ayes won, and Goldman went on to personally host the
delegation from the Soviet Writers Union when they toured Stanford’s campus
later that year.
Thirty years later, while serving as mayor of San Francisco,
Feinstein issued an official city proclamation in support of that year’s World
Festival of Youth and Students, held in Moscow.
This international propaganda event was organized by the
Soviet-controlled World Federation of Democratic Youth and was supported in the
United States by the Communist Party USA and similar groups.
Feinstein traveled to Moscow in December of that year as part of
a trade delegation of 450 U.S. businessmen and public officials.
A little over a year later, on Jan. 27, 1987, Soviet Consul
General Valentin Kamenev presented Feinstein with a Soviet streetcar: “A
streetcar named desire.” Also present at the ceremony was Viktor Zhelezny,
deputy chief of public transport for the Russian Republic.
Bridges to Communist China
Building bridges to the People’s Republic of China, however,
seems to have been an even higher priority for Feinstein.
One of Feinstein’s first acts on becoming mayor of San Francisco
in January 1979, was to visit Shanghai to establish sister-city relations.
The next apparent priority was re-establishing passenger airline
service between China and the United States. Service was restored on Jan. 8,
1981, after a “32-year hiatus when a Boeing 747 with 139 Chinese passengers
arrived exactly on time at San Francisco International Airport,” according to
The New York Times.
Feinstein and Chinese Consul General Hu Ding-yi held a
ribbon-cutting ceremony, “which included a cake, decorated with ‘CAAC [Civil
Aviation Administration of China] Welcome to San Francisco,’ and two bottles of
champagne.” Feinstein described the landing as “an historic and exciting
occasion.”
Feinstein went on to visit Shanghai several times in her
official capacity and built a close personal relationship with then-Mayor Jiang
Zemin.
According to the San Jose Mercury: “He [Jiang] once invited her
and her husband to see Mao Tse-tung’s bedroom in his old residence, the first
foreigners to do so. Feinstein had entertained Jiang in San Francisco, dancing
with him as he sang ‘When We Were Young.'”
This relationship proved fruitful in 1999, when President Bill
Clinton was pushing to bring China into the World Trade Organization.
A visit to Washington that year by Chinese Prime Minister Zhu
Rongji, which many had hoped would seal the deal, produced nothing. Relations
got even worse after U.S. bombers accidentally destroyed the Chinese Embassy in
Belgrade that May.
Feinstein, stepped in to offer assistance to the administration.
She volunteered to use her personal relationship with now-Chinese regime leader
Jiang, to get negotiations back on track.
In August 1999, the White House dispatched Feinstein to China,
with a hand-written note to Jiang from President Clinton, urging a resumption
of talks.
“Senator Feinstein played a critical role in paving the way for
this critical trade agreement,” White House press officer Elizabeth Newman
said.
Feinstein and Jiang met Aug. 16 in the Chinese coastal city of
Dalian, where the senator handed over President Clinton’s letter.
In an interview with the San Jose Mercury in November 1999,
Feinstein said, that she felt the only way China would enter into WTO
negotiations again was with the backing of Jiang.
Feinstein said, in offering her services as an intermediary to
Clinton and national security adviser Sandy Berger, “I said I’d be prepared to
do it if they felt it would be helpful, and they said they did think it would
be helpful and please do it.”
Jiang was “receptive and particularly pleased that Clinton had
taken the time to personally write a note to him,’’ Feinstein said.
“I think he listened, and we had substantial discussions on the
subject. … I was successful in getting the Chinese interested in beginning to
resume negotiations on the subject,” Feinstein said in the November 1999
interview.
Human Rights
Significantly, Feinstein said she expected approval of the new
trade status, which would remove the “annual congressional review that many
believe continues to put pressure on China to reform its economy and
human-rights record.”
In other words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would get the
trade status it coveted, without having to do anything of significance to
improve its abysmal human-rights record.
China was admitted to the World Trade Organization and has used
that trade access to build the world’s second-strongest economy, and a
world-class military.
If anything, the CCP’s human-rights record is worse today.
Certainly, their repressive technologies are far more powerful.
At the time, Feinstein’s colleague, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
expressed grave concerns about the deal.
“Once they get permanent (normal trade relations status), all
leverage from the US on behalf of business is over because they have what they
want permanently,” Pelosi said, in the San Jose Mercury article. “They have
violated their agreements in terms of proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, they have violated their agreements in terms of trade, they have
violated their agreements on international covenants on human rights. Why is
that we think they are then going to honor their commitments they make for
WTO?”
All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese
government.
Feinstein has done more for the CCP than other any serving U.S.
politician.
Correction: A previous version
of this article misstated who led Dianne Feinstein’s student trip to Europe.
The trip was led by Stanford political science professor, James T. Watkins. The
Epoch Times regrets the error.
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