What’s been good for China has also been good for Kissinger. The architects of America’s Chinese policy have had their policies “Made in China” too.
Kissinger headed up China Ventures, a company that partnered with China’s state bank but only in projects that “enjoy the unquestioned support of the People’s Republic of China.” Kissinger has received millions from China and from American businesses hoping to move to China since 1988. Wall Street Journal reporter John Fialka wrote an article called “Mr. Kissinger Has Opinions on China—and Business Ties” that detailed some of the cozy relationships Kissinger has enjoyed.
Kissinger even supported the Chinese crackdown in Tiananmen Square and argued against economic sanctions, which would have hurt his bottom line: “China remains too important for America’s national security to risk the relationship on the emotions of the moment…. No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators,” argued Kissinger in a Washington Post op-ed in August 1989, just two months after the Chinese government massacred protestors in Tiananmen Square.
Should we really be so surprised? Frauds gravitate toward frauds. And there’s little punishment for sellouts. Kissinger’s conflicts of interest did not preclude him from having an honored spot among our foreign policy elite.
“The relationship between China and the United States has become a central element in the quest for world peace and global well-being,” he wrote in On China. To build world peace, he got a piece of every deal.
But has the deal been good for us? And whose peace is it? Globalization is too often sinification, making non-Chinese things more Chinese. We’ve seen that with the growing number of multinational organizations and companies that depend upon being in China’s good graces, from the NBA to NBC. The status quo is China gets richer and we get poorer. This is by design. We let them launder their polluted profits through our real estate markets—and push Americans further and further out into the countryside, where nature is paved and commutes lengthened. Our cities become Chinese playgrounds, our universities their training grounds.
We let the Chinese take seats in institutions meant for Americans, ones supported with tax dollars, because the Chinese pay top dollar to get in. Sometimes they pay more than a little extra. College counselor Rick Singer accepted bribes to get undeserving kids into colleges across the country, but his best customers were Chinese party bosses. One family paid $1.2 million to get their daughter into Yale. Another paid $6.5 million to get their daughter into Stanford. Xi Jinping sent his daughter to Harvard, though how he can afford the $70,000 tuition on an official salary of $13,000 I leave to you to figure out. The FBI accuses our top schools of accepting hundreds of millions in fishy donations—and yet tuition keeps going up year after year for Americans.
President Trump recognized the risk of Chinese infiltration of higher education when he announced from the Rose Garden that student visas from China would be vetted more rigorously. I wonder if they should be here at all. Our professoriat has also been bought off, and some of them have found themselves the witting or unwitting tools of Chinese espionage, a topic we will examine in further detail in the chapter “Big Tech Hates America.”
The bipartisan consensus on China has been created by bipartisan payoffs. Whereas the Russians cause chaos, the Chinese open their checkbooks—and find out how cheaply our retired senators can be rented or bought.
In addition to Kissinger, there’s former Sen. David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, who survived a prostitution scandal but lost a gubernatorial campaign, then managed to prostitute himself as a lobbyist for China-based Hikvision. Vitter was secretly recorded promising to do all he could to stop Hikvision from being barred by the Commerce Department. Sen. Vitter co-sponsored a resolution in 2015 that made trade deals contingent on a country’s religious freedom record. But lobbyist Vitter has seemingly no problem selling the technology used in China’s concentration camps to surveil its Muslim minority. The word “Orwellian” gets thrown around often these days, but helping the Chinese state drum up money from American taxpayers to spy on American citizens is pretty jarring. It turns out David Vitter is far more dangerous as the trick than as the John.
Not to be outdone is former Sen. Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, who is actually on the board of advisors of Alibaba, a Chinese company that traffics in counterfeit goods. Last year Alibaba settled a $250 million lawsuit for failing to disclose its counterfeit problem to investors. That wasn’t all it failed to disclose. Alibaba’s CEO Jack Ma promised for years that he wasn’t a Communist Party official. Turns out he was a Communist Party official. Most recently, Baucus got in a spot of trouble for comparing Trump to Hitler on Chinese state TV. One wonders how he justified working for Chinese companies that make the equipment necessary for real modern-day concentration camps. Vice President Biden personally advocated for Baucus to serve as U.S. ambassador to China during the Obama/Biden administration. One wonders what position Biden would offer Baucus if he had the chance again.
Joe Biden is the classic China First American politician. The Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania may have China connections that would make even the Clinton Foundation blush!
According to a much-cited National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) complaint, UPenn has systemically failed to report China gifts and contracts, despite a pesky provision of the Higher Education Act that requires disclosure of foreign gifts exceeding $250,000. Converting Chinese money into Chinese influence on American policy is big business for some of our nation’s most ivy-draped universities. For Biden, this was perfect. He set up
