As is typical with Biden, more may be getting touched than we originally knew. The Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman connects the dots:
The Biden Cancer Initiative, which had $2.1 million in total assets in 2018 before suspending its operations [in 2019], according to its tax records, declined to provide a list of donors. The Biden Institute at the University of Delaware has also declined to reveal its funders.
While the Penn Biden Center has not released information on its donors, foreign funding to the University of Pennsylvania has risen more than threefold since its soft opening, spiking to over $100 million last year from $31 million in 2016, according to Department of Education records. China has been the largest contributor during that time…
The donations included a $502,750 “monetary gift” in October 2017 from the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, a Chinese government agency that helps administer the regime’s “Thousand Talents Plan.” Federal prosecutors claim the program is linked to Chinese espionage operations at American universities and have prosecuted academics for hiding their involvement in it…
Penn received a total of 23 anonymous gifts from China between March 2017 and the end of 2019, totaling over $21 million. In the preceding four years, the university had disclosed just five anonymous donations from China, totaling less than $5 million.
There may be a perfectly good explanation for why the Biden Center’s affiliation with UPenn coincided with a tripling of Chinese cash to the school, much of it delivered anonymously. But there is no excuse for UPenn violating black letter transparency laws intended to protect us all. I’ve joined NLPC in calling for a review of these shady transactions. If in fact the Biden Center is yet another in a string of international money-laundering operations to facilitate political power, this could be the most damaging Biden scandal yet. It is just all too common.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, a former Democratic vice presidential candidate, once shared the slogan “Leadership for the New Millennium. Prosperity for America’s Families” with Al Gore. Today, Lieberman works for China’s ZTE, a company that routinely flouts U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea and paid a $1 billion fine. Sen. Lieberman called the 5G operator a national security threat, but lobbyist Lieberman is happy to work the phones and give them a “security” review—whatever that means.
If lobbyist Lieberman ever completes that “security” review, he should conclude that our national security comes from understanding that ours is a nation that values its rights and fights to maintain them. China doesn’t share our concerns about human rights, animal rights, copyrights, or really any kind of rights because they don’t understand the notion of rights. If the government can kick you out of your property without just compensation, you don’t own it. The absence of ownership isn’t progressive but regressive and brings about even more of the income inequality supposedly derided by the political Left.
So why is China favored by American liberals? New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wished America could be China for a day. “China’s one-party autocracy can impose the important policies needed to move a society forward in the twenty-first century,” Friedman wrote admiringly in 2009. Billionaire and Google investor Mike Moritz celebrated the slavish society he saw before him in a piece titled, “Silicon Valley Would Be Wise to Follow China’s Lead.”
In China…it is quite usual for the management of 10 and 15-year-old companies to have working dinners followed by two or three meetings. If a Chinese company schedules tasks for the weekend, nobody complains about missing a Little League game or skipping a basketball outing with friends. Little wonder it is a common sight at a Chinese company to see many people with their heads resting on their desks taking a nap in the early afternoon.
Our elites have seen the future and it works—for them. Chinese workers are as the American elite hoped we Americans might become: compliant, voiceless, interchangeable, and therefore expendable. Faced with the coronavirus outbreak, the American Left was only too happy to import the lockdowns that Communist China forced on its people indefinitely. But Americans resisted and disobeyed because we believe in liberty or death. There are things worth dying for, after all.
To the elites we are all interchangeable—just labor, a commodity even. We don’t have any specialness or any habits of free people that make us separate and unique. This idea of the substitutable nature of people means we can invade Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria and turn them into Jeffersonian Democrats. All you need are some institutions and some platitudes about human rights and free markets will work out.
But such a view undervalues what makes America great: her people and her habits. Our foreign policy elites don’t take seriously how different we are from the rest of the world and how precious the institutions that we’ve built up over centuries are.
We are not and never will be Chinese; they are not and never will be a free people.
The Chinese Communist Party has always been despotic. This is what the neoconservatives get wrong. The neocons separate the world into panda-cuddlers (the liberals) and dragon-slayers (them). I am neither a hawk nor a dove but an eagle, and I can see clearly and at a distance what we have to do. We should do all we can to help China’s neighbors avoid being turned into Chinese serfs economically. It is they we should trade with (on fair terms for our people). Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, and Vietnam all seek to avoid Chinese dominion. The enemy of my enemy can be my friend. Containment breeds alliances. Nations that share our priorities and our values are our friends; nations that share neither are our foes. The world’s largest consumer market, which is still the U.S., will find plenty of people willing to meet its needs. We don’t need China; China needs us. That’s why
