Biden’s Sellout to China
Softness on the CCP in the State of the Union Address.
President Joe Biden is selling out the United States of America to the Chinese Communist regime. During his long rambling State of the Union address, Biden wasted a rare opportunity before an audience of millions of Americans to stand up to America’s number one adversary and the enemy of freedom everywhere. He ignored China’s serial acts of aggression, while lashing out at Republicans and at American corporations.
President Biden is under the illusion that the United States is merely in “competition with China.” China is not just a competitor, a label that could also be used to describe our close allies in Western Europe and Asia who compete with the United States in global markets. First and foremost, China is our enemy.
China’s leaders have exploited President Biden’s weakness, which they observed when he recklessly withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 and left Americans, Afghan allies, and a trove of sophisticated military equipment behind. The Chinese are also reaping the benefits from the huge payments that Chinese individuals and businesses have made to the Biden family enterprise.
Most recently, President Biden allowed China’s Communist regime to maneuver a huge spy balloon over the United States for days without interference before the balloon was finally shot down off the South Carolina coast. The 200 feet tall balloon, equipped with surveillance cameras, had hovered over sensitive military sites before being taken down. China’s spymasters no doubt relished the opportunity to scoop up invaluable intelligence, thanks to the president’s dithering. President Biden glossed over this embarrassing incident in his State of the Union address.
The balloon fiasco was only the latest example of President Biden’s dereliction of duty as commander in chief in failing to stop China from transgressing U.S. sovereignty and harming the American people. Here are some examples of this disturbing pattern:
Fentanyl’s Deadly Toll – As if the coronavirus that originated in China, which killed more than a million Americans, was not bad enough, the Chinese regime has turned the synthetic fentanyl drug into a weapon of mass destruction against the United States.
President Biden’s open border policies have given the Chinese carte blanche, through their Mexican cartel associates, to spread the fentanyl poison throughout the United States. The Chinese regime is responsible for supplying the precursor chemicals the Mexican cartels use to produce U.S.-consumed fentanyl, which is now killing more Americans aged 18-49 than any other cause of death.
The amount of fentanyl entering the U.S., with materials sourced from China, has turned into a tsunami since President Biden took office. Since July 2022, according to a Washington Post report last month, U.S. authorities have seized more fentanyl per month than they did during the entire year of 2018. “Even so,” the report added, “the feds guess they’re netting just 5 to 10 percent of the fentanyl coming in from Mexico. Maybe less.”
There were approximately 71,000 fentanyl deaths in the U.S. in 2021. At least 75,000 Americans are estimated to have died from a fentanyl overdose in 2022.
Fentanyl, like the coronavirus epidemic, originated in China. Yet neither fentanyl nor the coronavirus origins were on the list of topics released by the White House that President Biden discussed with Chinese President Xi Jinping during their face-to-face meeting last November.
“Tens of thousands of Americans die from fentanyl poisoning every year, but @JoeBiden refused to press Xi Jinping on China’s role in this deadly crisis when they met face-to- face,” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody tweeted at the time. “Why won’t Biden fight to save American lives?”
The most likely answer is that President Biden does not want to do anything that would offend the Chinese regime to the point of potentially derailing his family enterprise’s gravy train from China.
China’s Trojan Horse on Campuses – China has deployed its Confucius Institutes on U.S. campuses as fronts for spreading propaganda, recruiting so-called “influence agents,” and engaging in cyber espionage and intellectual property theft.
“That the Confucius Institutes are instruments of propaganda was confirmed by Li Changchun, the head of propaganda for the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” according to a Heritage Foundation commentary, “who boasted that the Institutes were ‘an important part of China’s overseas propaganda setup.’”
Former President Donald Trump sought to clip their wings by proposing that American colleges and universities must disclose their financial ties with Confucius Institutes. The Biden administration did not think that such transparency was necessary. It withdrew the Trump administration’s financial disclosure proposal, which is no surprise considering that President Biden has a personal financial stake in shrouding the amount of funding channeled from China to U.S. colleges and universities.
Between the end of his service as vice president and the beginning of his presidential campaign, the University of Pennsylvania reportedly paid Joe Biden $900,000 in compensation for visiting the campus only about nine times as a “professor.” The university was already receiving millions of dollars from China, but Chinese donations and contracts spiked after the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement opened in 2018. The Penn Biden Center was one of the locations where classified documents from the days of the Obama-Biden administration were found.
TikTok Surveillance and Brainwashing – TikTok, the widely popular social media app that has many young people hooked, is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The Chinese Communist regime has the ultimate authority in ordering Chinese companies to hand over information that the government says it needs for security and intelligence purposes. There is nothing to stop the Chinese regime from seizing data shared by users in the United States with TikTok as part of the government’s surveillance program. And the app provides a readily available channel to brainwash impressionable teens and young adults with Chinese government propaganda.
As FBI Director Christopher Wray said at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing last November, TikTok poses “national security concerns.”
Nevertheless, President Biden signed an executive order revoking former President Trump’s order to ban the TikTok app in the United States unless TikTok’s Chinese parent found a U.S. buyer for TikTok, eliminating the ability of the Chinese to gather and store American users’ data to spy on them.
Instead, the Biden administration has been trying to negotiate unspecified governance and security safeguards while leaving the Chinese parent corporate ownership structure intact. The Biden administration is eager to require that the U.S. company Meta, Facebook’s parent company, sell its photo-sharing app Instagram and its messaging service WhatsApp. But it is perfectly willing to take a much laxer approach in dealing with the Chinese company ByteDance’s relationship with TikTok’s U.S. operations.
“Anything short of a complete separation” of TikTok from ByteDance “will likely leave significant national security issues regarding operations, data and algorithms unresolved,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the Ranking Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said.
Some state and local governments have banned government employees from using the TikTok app on their work devices. The app has also been banned on federal devices. However, this is a drop in the bucket.
There is increasing support in Congress for a ban on the provision of the TikTok app from all devices in the United States. An alternative would be to require that TikTok’s Chinese parent divest TikTok’s U.S. operations completely, including giving up all source code and other related tangible and intangible assets used for delivering services to users in the United States as well as for gathering and storing data from these users.
President Biden did not call out TikTok by name in his State of the Union address, let alone press for its ban in the United States or the immediate complete divestiture of TikTok’s U.S. operations from its Chinese parent. Instead, he engaged in generalities about the risks presented by social media and Big Tech. The president called for Congress to pass legislation that would “stop Big Tech from collecting personal data on kids and teenagers online, ban targeted advertising to children, and impose stricter limits on the personal data these companies collect on all of us.”
TikTok is the equivalent of a ticking time bomb, but President Biden would rather waste time playing around with heavily regulating U.S. technology companies.
Chinese Purchases of Land on U.S. Soil – China has been buying up American farmland, including near U.S. military bases. “Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland jumped more than 20-fold in a decade from $81 million in 2010 to nearly $1.9 billion in 2021,” Fox Business reported. Experts have warned about the national security implications of such purchases.
President Biden could have included a recommendation in his State of the Union address that Congress pass remedial legislation, which would have received broad bipartisan support. Such legislation would prohibit the purchase of land within a specified distance from any U.S. military or other U.S. government facility by any governmental or non-governmental entity designated as a “foreign adversary.” It would put into law and expand the executive order authority currently granted to the Secretary of Commerce to make such designations for certain purposes. The countries on the Secretary’s list of foreign adversaries are China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela’s Maduro regime.
Alas, President Biden remained silent in his State of the Union address on the alarming rise in Chinese purchases of land on U.S. soil that jeopardize national security.
Sale of Oil to China – During the height of the energy crisis last year, the Biden administration authorized the sale of nearly a million barrels of oil to the trading affiliate of the Chinese state-owned China Petrochemical Corporation, known as Sinopec. The oil that ended up in China was taken from the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). It just so happens that Sinopec had previous ties to a private equity firm co-owned by none other than Hunter Biden.
“With Biden supplying global oil markets with U.S. oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, he is depleting our oil reserves and hurting U.S. national security, while China is adding to its national reserves by buying SPR oil from Biden’s Department of Energy and by also buying cheap oil from Russia,” the Institute for Energy Research concluded.
Americans paying high gas prices at the pump were hurt by the Biden administration’s shenanigans, but at least Hunter Biden’s former partners at the Chinese state-owned energy company were happy.
President Biden is soft on China. He had very little to say in his State of the Union address about the Communist regime, which he thinks is just a competitor rather than the most dangerous enemy of the United States. His family has profited from business dealings with China, with the “big guy” getting his ten percent cut. And the American people are paying a steep price as a result.