A leading official from the Biden State Department delivered a keynote address at a gala hosted by a pro-China group that has lobbied to soften U.S. action against Beijing over its human-rights abuses.
Jose Fernandez, the undersecretary for economic growth, energy, and the environment, spoke at the U.S.-China Business Council gala on Thursday, addressing the Biden administration’s bilateral approach to China.
Another speaker at the event, which was sponsored by the council’s corporate donors, was Chinese ambassador Qin Gang.
The council is one of Beijing’s biggest allies in Washington. The group represents hundreds of American companies that do business in China and it has lobbied Congress and the White House to tone down the language of bills that would sanction China over its treatment of Uyghur Muslims.
Officials with the council reportedly took part in a conference call with Chinese officials this week in which they urged American firms to continue supporting the Olympic Games in Beijing. This comes as calls to boycott the games have grown following the disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, who claimed to have been raped by a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official.
But the Biden White House and congressional Democrats have demonstrated a willingness to turn a blind eye to China’s human-rights record in order to win the communists’ cooperation on the issue of climate change.
The White House has, for instance, pressured lawmakers to kill a bill that would restrict the importation of goods made in Xinjiang, where Uyghurs are reportedly being subjected to abuses that include forced labor and forced sterilization. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats excluded the bill from consideration on Wednesday.
The gala was sponsored by some of the country’s biggest companies, such as JPMorgan Chase, Boeing, Ford, and GM.
The Washington Free Beacon notes:
The council has partnered with progressive and isolationist groups to thwart anti-China bills. According to Politico, the council collaborated with the antiwar group Justice is Global to urge Congress to oppose legislation that might undercut climate negotiations with China. In February, the council’s chief lobbyist, Anna Ashton, took part in a discussion with a Justice is Global cofounder and a then-senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an isolationist group funded by Charles Koch and George Soros.
In another federal government connection to China, Dr. Victor Dzau, president of the United States National Academy of Medicine and a National Institutes of Health (NIH) advisor, has frequently collaborated with Confucius Institutes — a CCP-funded propaganda organization.
Dzau serves on the World Bank Group and World Health Organization’s Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) and was on the Honorary Host Committee for a 2017 gala put on by the Confucius Institute U.S. Center (CIUSC) — the US headquarters of the Beijing operation.
Dzau also appeared in an hour-long interview for a series produced by CIUSC in 2018.
Confucius Institutes are hosted at American universities and not only push pro-China propaganda on students, but, per the FBI and DOJ, participate in intellectual property theft and espionage.
Dzau has praised China’s role in global health, saying “there’s every reason to be recognizing the importance of China in the global arena.”
Besides leading the National Academy of Medicine, Dzau served as a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Chair of the NIH Cardiovascular Disease Advisory Committee, and Vice-Chair of the US National Research Council.
Other well-known members of the National Academy are Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project; Jeffrey Sachs, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network; and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Biden’s time in the White House has been marked by pro-China policy.
On Day One, for example, Biden terminated an executive order from President Trump that had kept China out of America’s bulk power grid.
The Trump policy “prohibited any acquisition, importation, transfer, or installation of BPS electric equipment by any person or with respect to any property to which a foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that poses an undue risk to the BPS, the security or resiliency of U.S. critical infrastructure or the U.S. economy, or U.S. national security or the security and safety of U.S. persons.”
How many pro-China policies and officials can the Biden White House have before it’s fair to say it isn’t a coincidence?
