To many Americans, Hunter’s wheeling and dealing in China might look like another example of the powerful exploiting access — just like, well, Hunter in Ukraine. But this Xianchai is more sinister: It’s the apotheosis of the corrupt bond between US elites and China’s brutal regime.
Hunter is a winner in a globalist system that saw America hand to China its industrial base, good jobs, intellectual property and global standing in exchange for market access and flattery. China, Wall Street and the Bidens profited.
His son’s profiteering aside, Joe Biden defends this system — and has since meeting Deng Xiaoping in 1979, when he joined the first US congressional delegation to the People’s Republic.
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the early 2000s and then as veep, Biden helped along China’s geopolitical rise. Bernie Sanders is thus right to criticize Biden for supporting the grant of Permanent Normal Trade Relations status to China in 2000.
A decade later, Biden *said: “A rising China is a … positive *development not only for China, but for America.” Tell that to the 1 million Uighurs in Chinese concentration camps. Tell it to Asian democracies menaced by Beijing’s bullying. Tell it to the American factory workers who lost good jobs while Hunter got $80,000 a month for his princeling sinecure.
Oh, and what did Biden do about the growing Chinese-fueled fentanyl crisis while “overseeing the China portfolio,” as he says he did in the *Obama administration? Nada.
What Biden did do was to contribute mightily to Team *Obama’s record of appeasement and failure to counter Chinese aggression from cyber-hacking to island-building.