The Biden administration's new direction on China

The new administration is nominating people who have a more positive view of Communist China.

In 2019, Anita Dunn was hired by the Biden campaign as a senior adviser on communications strategy.  In September 2020, Dunn was made co-chair of the Biden-Harris Presidential Transition Team.  She had been a top adviser in the Obama administration when she was forced to resign after comments she made about Mao Tse-tung.  In 2009, speaking to high school students in Maryland, she remarked that Mao was one of her two favorite political philosophers.  She commented, "In 1947, when Mao Tse-tung was being challenged within his own party, on his plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side, and people said, 'How can you win?  How can you do this?  How can you do this against all odds against you?'  And Mao Tse-tung said, 'You fight your war, and I'll fight mine.'  Think about that for a second.  You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you dont have to follow other people's choices in the past."

Biden nominated Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who served as the assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the United States Department of State's Bureau of African Affairs from 2013 to 2017, to be the next United States ambassador to the United Nations.  She has been criticized for praising Communist China during a 2019 speech at the CCP-funded Confucius Institute in Savannah, Georgia.  She praised China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for the "rollout of critical projects in Africa," including ports in Djibouti and major railways in Kenya, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.  She also criticized the Trump administration's approach to Chinese investment in Africa, which she described as a "battleground for great power competition rather than engagement with African leaders."  She believes that a "win-win situation" is possible if China and the U.S. can come together over "shared values of peace, prosperity, sustained economic growth and development, and a firm commitment to good governance, gender equity."  She added, "In fact, China is in a unique position to spread these ideals given its strong footprint on the continent."  Perhaps she had not heard what former president of Zambia Michael Sata said in a rare moment of honesty: "We want the Chinese to leave and the old colonial rulers to return.  They exploited our natural resources, too, but at least they took good care of us.  They built schools, taught us their language, and brought us the British civilization[.] ... [A]t least Western capitalism has a human face; the Chinese are only out to exploit us."

Thomas-Greenfield reportedly received a $1,500 honorarium from Savannah State University for her speech.  The following year, Savannah State closed its Confucius Institute chapter after the State Department labeled the organization a "foreign mission" operating on behalf of the Chinese government.  Congress had passed bipartisan legislation claiming that the CCP used Confucius Institutes for propaganda and espionage.  During her confirmation hearing, Thomas-Greenfield expressed regret over her speech and stated, "I am not at all naïve about what the Chinese are doing."

Anita Dunn and Linda Thomas-Greenfield are just two of the many Biden administration officials who have a sympathetic view of Communist China.  It is not an uncommon view.  It inspired the officials responsible for the Empire State Building to honor the Mao regime with a lighting ceremony.  To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China under Communist rule and Mao's 1949 revolution, the Empire State Building illumined its familiar spire with red and yellow lights.

The Western media and prominent Americans have done their best to promote the communist regime.  The Washington Post reported, "Mao the warrior, philosopher and ruler was the closest the modern world has been to the god-heroes of antiquity."  Senator Charles Percy asserted, "Mao is the George Washington of his country."  David Rockefeller wrote that "the social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history."

A review of "Art and China's Revolution" at the Asia Society Museum by Li Onesto reveals some of the reasoning behind the pro-communist stance.  He begins by describing the big banner with a drawing of Mao Tse-tung surrounded by images of workers, soldiers and youth on the outside of the building.  She claims that in the '60s, "millions of people around the world, including here in the United States, looked to socialist China as a truly liberating society."  She admits that she was "one of those youth in the United States who, inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution, carried a Red Book in my back pocket and put posters of Red Guards on my bedroom wall."  She states that "this art is a powerful chapter in the history of the Cultural Revolution.  It sheds real light on the overwhelmingly positive achievements of socialist China."  She claims, "I heard one woman declare, looking at a wall of art, 'this was all destroyed by Mao.'  On one level, this is just ridiculous."

Onesto writes as though she were unaware of the "Four Olds," a term used during the Cultural Revolution by the student-led Red Guards in the People's Republic of China regarding the pre-communist elements of Chinese culture they attempted to destroy.  Examples of Chinese architecture were destroyed, classical literature and Chinese paintings were torn apart, and Chinese temples were desecrated.  The burial place of Confucius was attacked.  According to U.S. News and World Report, Mao Tse-tung was responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin combined.

How would people react to an art exhibit called "Art and the Nazi Revolution"?  We frequently see videos of the Nazi book-burning event.  How often do we see the comparable Chinese event?  This is all a consequence of media misinformation.

John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing).  He has a Master of Arts degree in international relations from St. Mary's University.  He is retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.  He is featured on the BBC's program "Things We Forgot to Remember": Morgenthau Plan and Post-War Germany.

Image: Frank Schulenburg via Wikimedia CommonsCC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped).About Us | Contact | Privacy Policy | RSS Syndication © American Thinker 2021



Cotton Calls on Biden to Recognize China as a ‘Dangerous Threat’

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Monday on FNC’s “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) urged President Joe Biden to recognize the “dangerous threat” posed by Asian superpower China.

Cotton, emphasizing the role the Chinese Communist Party “negligence” had in the spread of the coronavirus, said Biden needs a strong stance against Chinese leadership as it tries to “bend and corrupt” the rules to its own interests.

“The campaign has said the Chinese leadership weren’t bad folks and that they weren’t our competitors,” Cotton outlined. “Of course, they’re our most dangerous and long-term strategic competitor. But to simply rebuke President Trump for being the first president in two generations to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party and to say he’s going to do it differently but not specifying what he’s going to do differently is not a show of strengths.”

He continued, “Even his friends in liberal media are demanding that we have access to the labs in Wuhan, that China begins to come clean about what happened there a year ago. There are other things, of course, he can do, like continue the arms sales that we accelerated to Taiwan in the Trump administration, make it clear that we’re going to stand with our allies on China’s periphery as they continue to threaten places like Taiwan and India, and make clear that we recognize that China is a dangerous threat. And he says he wants to follow the international rules of the road, make it clear that we know that China uses those international rules and organizations and tries to bend and corrupt them to their own interests and that we’re not going to stand by and let them do that.”

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent


Obama’s Man in China Now Beijing’s Man in Washington

Former ambassador Baucus appears regularly on Chinese propaganda outlets

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Former U.S. ambassador to China Max Baucus / Getty Images

As the novel coronavirus wreaks havoc across the world, the Obama administration's ambassador to China has found a second lease on life as a pro-China talking head on regime propaganda outlets.

Former ambassador Max Baucus has given at least four different interviews to Chinese propaganda outlets in the last two weeks, repeatedly comparing the U.S. rhetoric about China to both the McCarthy era and Nazi Germany.

"Joe McCarthy [and] Adolf Hitler … rallied people up, making people believe things that were really not true," Baucus said during a May 12 interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN), a regime mouthpiece. "The White House and some in Congress are making statements against China that are so over the top and so hypercritical, they are based not on the fact, or if they are based on fact, sheer demagoguery, and that's what McCarthy did in the 1950s."

Since his retirement in 2017, Baucus has been a reliable critic of the Trump administration's increasingly confrontational China policy—chiefly the decision to wage a trade war with Beijing. He once warned that the White House's decision to impose additional tariffs was a "slap on the face" to China. But Baucus's recent comments in the pandemic era have been more sympathetic to China—and critical of the United States—than ever before.

His post-retirement public statements praising China have coincided with his burgeoning overseas investments. In 2017, he founded the Baucus Group, a consulting firm that advises both American and Chinese businesses, according to his U.S. Chamber of Commerce biography. He also sits on the board of directors for Ingram Micro, a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, as well as the board of advisers for Alibaba Group, one of China's largest tech companies.

Walter Lohman, director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, said that it was "inappropriate" for a former ambassador to speak ill about his own government on a foreign propaganda outlet.

"It's like going to China and … talking about your own government that way in meetings. I think that would be pretty inappropriate," Lohman said. "So it would be inappropriate speaking on state media."

Baucus's public statements have received considerable attention from Beijing's propaganda outlets. When the former ambassador compared President Donald Trump's criticism of China to rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler and Joe McCarthy during a May 6 interview with CNN, Chinese propaganda outlets quickly amplified Baucus's comments about how Trump was "a little bit like Hitler in the '30s" and that Americans were worried about "getting their heads chopped off" if they voice their disagreement with the U.S. government's China policy. Xinhua News Agency, a state-owned outlet, extensively cited Baucus's attacks in a May 8 article, using it as evidence that the Trump administration is attempting to "deflect criticisms about their blunders by blaming China." The article was syndicated in party-controlled mouthpieces such as Global Times and People's Dailyaccording to the Investigative Research Center.

Baucus then appeared on CGTN on May 12 to double down on his Hitler and McCarthy comparison, blaming the Trump administration for flaming "sheer demagoguery."

"[The current U.S. rhetoric] is somewhat reminiscent, nowhere close to that yet, somewhat reminiscent of the McCarthy era and somewhat reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s," he told CGTN.

The former ambassador also gave an exclusive interview to Global Times on May 14, where he said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's claim that the virus may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory "makes no sense" and accused both Democrats and Republicans of being tough on China to score political points in an election year.

Baucus again appeared on CGTN on May 15, where he claimed that America is "sliding toward a form of McCarthyism" because the Trump administration is pressuring policymakers to be tough on China. The former ambassador did another CGTN media hit on May 16, this time appearing alongside his wife Melodee Hanes, who blamed the presidential election for making dialogue "difficult."

"There are a lot of pretty smart people in the United States who are not speaking up. People in office, moderates, especially moderates on the Republican side," Baucus said on May 15. "They are afraid to speak up, they are intimidated, intimidated by President Trump. And it's kind of sliding toward a form of McCarthyism—how it is politically incorrect to speak the truth, speak the truth to power."

When the Washington Free Beacon called the phone number listed for Baucus's home address, no one answered. A lawyer representing Baucus Group, the ambassador's consulting firm, also did not respond to a request for comment.

While Baucus rarely enjoyed this much attention from Chinese state media outlets after his retirement, this is not the first time he has spoken to Chinese media outlets in recent years. Baucus also gave an exclusive interview to People's Daily in March 2018, criticizing U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods as the "wrong policy" and "too confrontational." He has also spoken at events backed by the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, a registered foreign agent of the Chinese government according to a 2018 congressional report.

Lohman, the Heritage Foundation expert, said that while Baucus has the right to appear on any domestic and foreign outlets, he should not have addressed a propaganda outlet with the same degree of candidness that he did with CNN.

"I think he must have gotten wrapped up in the media performances because when you shift from CNN to Global Times or CGTN, you've gone to an entirely new level," he said. "And there I think you just have to express yourself differently. It's not an appropriate place to air political differences."

U.C. Berkeley Advised Chinese Government on Economic Decisions

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Getty Images

U.C. Berkeley received millions of dollars from China to operate a big data research center that advised the Chinese government, as well as fund cutting-edge research into automated cars.

The Guizhou Berkeley Big Data Innovation Research Center (GBIC)—which was jointly operated by Berkeley, the Chinese province of Guizhou's local government, and the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology—helped "Guizhou’s government in making economic decisions and improving public services," according to a 2016 Chinese government press release. Meanwhile, the taxpayer-funded California school also enlisted help from Chinese tech companies Baidu and Huawei to bolster its Berkeley DeepDrive automated car program. 

Berkeley's overseas ties have allowed China to access U.S. expertise in two critical sectors: big data and automated cars. The Chinese government considers big data analytics—the use of computers to analyze large data sets—as essential to strengthen both its domestic surveillance apparatus and military capabilities, according to a RAND report. The regime has long viewed the automated car sector as a key growth area, and its spies have stolen trade secrets from Tesla and other car companies to boost its own development. 

"The Chinese Communist Party is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and big data analytics to build the most sophisticated system of state surveillance and repression in the world," said Ian Easton, a senior director at the Project 2049 Institute. "Any American university or research lab collaborating with the Chinese Communist regime or its agents on technology research is directly collaborating with a hostile foreign power. The moral, ethical, and legal risks of such behavior should be obvious to any educated American."

In a ceremony attended by Chinese Communist Party officials, the GBIC opened its doors in September 2016 with the lofty ambition of becoming a "big data research hub for world-class University of California and Chinese researchers." Since its opening, the GBIC has funneled nearly $1.9 million to the coffers of the state university, according to a Department of Education dataset of foreign donations to U.S. universities.

The government press release offered a vague description of GBIC's mandate, saying it will "provide data support for Guizhou’s government in making economic decisions and improving public services." A Berkeley website touts relatively benign work that GBIC did for the Chinese government, such as its big data analysis of elderly care. The university removed the page following Free Beacon inquiries.

Berkeley's work for the Chinese government is much more extensive than its website lets on. GBIC also helped Guizhou's local government set up its big data collection protocols and analyzed a database of more than one million individuals on behalf of the provincial government, according to one researcher. GBIC is also training Chinese researchers on how to handle big data, offering lessons to students at top Chinese universities such as Tianjin University. Cultivating big data expertise is a top priority for Chinese leader Xi Jinping and others, in part because the technology is a cornerstone of China's growing surveillance apparatus in Xinjiang and elsewhere.

A Berkeley spokesman said the GBIC program is "no longer functioning" on the Berkeley campus and hasn't been for the last year. He did not respond to inquiries into whether GBIC instituted any measures to ensure that Berkeley's big data expertise did not contribute to human rights abuses in China.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) said it was high time for universities such as Berkeley to review their ties to China.

"Every U.S. academic institution needs to review its relationships with China," McCarthy told the Washington Free Beacon. "The handling of big data should be specifically scrutinized given China's surveillance state collects more data on its own citizens than any other country in the world and is responsible for some of the biggest data hacks of the U.S. government, collecting troves of information on American citizens."

Berkeley's automated car program also has extensive ties to Chinese tech companies, including those that the U.S. government considers a national security threat. Berkeley DeepDrive, a consortium that formed in 2016 to advance automated car development, counted Huawei, Baidu, Didi, and other Chinese tech companies as research partners, according to a research slide from 2018 and an archived corporate website. Chinese tech giants collectively funneled millions of dollars into the California university, according to the Department of Education. Huawei and its U.S. subsidiary donated $6.8 million to Berkeley, while Baidu gave $1.5 million. Berkeley also received $450,000 from China Automated Battery Research, a group linked to the Chinese government.

The research partnership has proved beneficial for Baidu's ApolloScape program, which has a much smaller dataset than Berkeley's DeepDrive. "This collaboration between Baidu and [Berkeley DeepDrive] would incorporate Apollo’s industrial resources and Berkeley’s top academic team to ramp up the innovation of theoretical research, applied technology, and commercial applications," a press release read.

After U.S. authorities indicted Huawei in 2019, Berkeley said it would no longer take funding from the Chinese tech company. Berkeley DeepDrive, however, still lists Futurewei, Huawei's U.S. subsidiary, as a corporate sponsor. A Berkeley spokesman said that all Berkeley DeepDrive corporate sponsors—including American entities—have equal access to commercial IP rights that non-sponsors do not enjoy. "Our sponsors are all treated equally and their funding is pooled," the spokesman said.

Berkeley's relationship with China goes beyond the big data center and automated car program. Chinese students represent more than half of Berkeley's international student population. The college also operates a joint institute with Tsinghua University, a premier Chinese university that conducts extensive defense research and is linked to Chinese espionage, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

The California university's close relationship with the Chinese government and corporate elite is not unique. Huawei also donated millions of dollars to other top universities such as MIT, where the Chinese company exerted enough clout to ghostwrite a pro-Huawei op-ed in the name of a prominent MIT scholar. More than 100 U.S. universities also operated Chinese government-controlled Confucius Institutes. Dozens have cut ties with that program following bipartisan scrutiny from Congress.