AMERICAN AND THE RED CHINA MENACE - HOW HARD IS WAR PROFITEER DIANNE FEINSTEIN WORKING FOR HER PAYMASTERS IN CHINA?

"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?

By K.S. Guardiola

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.

China, Not Russia, the Greater Threat

Pat Buchanan

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

https://www.theepochtimes.com/feinsteins-ties-to-china-extend-beyond-chinese-spy_2616284.html

 

By Trevor Loudon

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.