by Newt Gingrich
Arizona US Senate candidate Mark Kelly’s activities with the Chinese Communist dictatorship have become an issue in that state’s senatorial election. Hunter Biden’s acceptance of money from allies in China, Russia, and Ukraine has become an issue in the presidential election.
Some Democrats apparently find it hard to understand how ruthless and dictatorial their Communist Chinese business partners are.
In Kelly’s case, riding around China with a Chinese flag on his motorcycle was probably good for selling products and putting money in his pocket, but it also helped legitimize the totalitarian police state Xi Jinping is building. After all, if an American astronaut is comfortable waving the Chinese flag, can the dictatorship really be that bad?
Similarly, selling the giant Chinese conglomerate Tencent a role in Kelly’s surveillance balloon company offers the Chinese dictatorship an opportunity to acquire surveillance technology which will help it further control the Chinese people. At a time when the dictatorship has more than a million Muslims in concentration camps, is systematically destroying the culture of Tibetan Buddhists, and is imposing a police state on Hong Kong, offering surveillance opportunities through Tencent to Xi Jinping is a profoundly bad idea.
Kelly’s business partner, Tencent, is also an investor in the remake of Top Gun and it is a sign of the dictatorship’s willingness to censor Americans that Tom Cruise’s pilot jacket no longer carries flags from Taiwan and Japan. No detail of Communist propaganda is too small for Kelly’s Chinese Communist friends.
Remember that all Chinese companies – by law – are subordinate to the communist dictatorship – and Kelly’s relationship with Tencent is really a relationship with the dictatorship.
Hunter Biden’s massively profitable ties with the communist Chinese have become a bigger and bigger national issue (see the 85-page Senate report on Biden’s enormous payments from players in Ukraine, Russia, and most aggressively China).
These two stories are part of a growing tide of examples of the Chinese Communist dictatorship’s efforts to infiltrate and influence America.
Consider these recent examples:
CNBC reported that 33-year-old, Tibetan-born New York Police Officer and US Army Reservist Baimadajie Angwang was arrested Monday for allegedly “spying on fellow ethnic Tibetans while acting as an illegal agent for China.” Charges allege that he reported the activities of other native Tibetans in the New York area to the Chinese consulate there.
Just the News reported “Between 2002 and 2016, Chinese state-owned or state-linked companies acquired more than $120 billion worth of assets in 40 states across the US. Just 15 Chinese entities (sovereign wealth funds, state-owned corporations, or state-linked private sector firms) accounted for 60% of this activity. In 2016 alone, more than 50 of these Chinese acquisitions exceeded $50 million. Several Chinese takeover deals exceeded $1 billion.”
Also, remember: The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the dictatorship’s Ministry of State Security spent years successfully recruiting California Sen. Diane Feinstein’s staff driver (she has served as both Chair and Ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee).
In US academia, there are nearly 75 Confucius Institutes in the United States and 500 Confucius classrooms in schools. They are part of the dictatorships propaganda system to influence American youth.
A 2019 US Senate Report found, “[N]early 70 percent of US. schools that received more than $250,000 from Hanban failed to properly report that amount to the Department of Education”
Hanban is the dictatorship’s propaganda agency.
Further, in from January 2012 to June 2018, there were 15 US schools that reported getting more than $15.4 million directly from Hanban. Overall, the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that Hanban had contributed more than $113.4 million to 100 American schools. This exceeded the schools’ official reported figure by seven-fold.
In February, The Department of Education that “[s]ince July, the Department has uncovered more than $6 billion in unreported foreign gifts from countries including Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.”
And you better believe that the Chinese Communist dictatorship is paying attention to its investments.
No act of anti-dictatorship behavior is too small to be punished. As the Voice of America reported: “Chinese student Yang Shuping, who addressed the 2017 graduation exercises at the University of Maryland about the ‘fresh air of free speech’ in America, was swiftly rebuked back home. The Communist Party’s official newspaper — China Daily — published her family’s address in China and the family was roundly harassed online. Shuping later apologized.”
Keep all this in mind when you also consider that “a Chinese state-owned securities conglomerate singled out Joe Biden for praise as a “rare candidate” who supports trade policies favorable to the country’s Communist government,” according to the Free Beacon.
Meanwhile, The New York Times apologizes for running an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a sitting US Senator, but happily runs op-eds penned by Beijing-ruled Hong Kong officials who are blatantly spreading Chinese Communist propaganda.
So, Kelly and Hunter Biden are just small (albeit important) examples of the massive effort by the Chinese Communist dictatorship to infiltrate, influence, and ultimately dominate the American economy and culture.
At a time when the Chinese Communist dictatorship is getting more aggressive and militant, we need leaders who are determined to stop it – not ones who want to be its friends and business partners.
This is the heart of the difference between Sen. Martha McSally and her opponent Kelly. It’s also the difference between President Donald Trump and former-Vice President Joe Biden.
