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posted: December 29, 2024
tl;dr: A detailed look at how China spends some of the money we give them for their goods...
“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.”
-- Attributed to Vladimir Lenin
Most everyone knows that the United States runs a huge trade deficit with China, and has for decades. Americans buy inexpensive Chinese goods, which results in dollars flowing to China. Less well known is what China does with that surplus of dollars. The book Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, by Peter Schweizer, details how China spends some of that money back in the United States, by buying the influence of American elites.
China has multiple goals in doing so. China was a very poor, backwards country in the days of Chairman Mao, and needed to import American technology in order to modernize. The technology was needed to overhaul their industrial base, build up their military capabilities, and enshrine the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by constructing a surveillance state. The model they came up with, of running an export-oriented economy taking advantage of cheaper Chinese labor and laxer environmental, safety, and labor regulations, has worked remarkably well. To import the needed technology, and to gain the participation of American political and business leaders in this model (or at least acquiescence), a key component of the model is buying influence, as Schweizer documents.
American political leaders are the most prominent targets of China’s largesse, although it also spans leaders in the world of business as well as academia. The days of bribing politicians and others by sliding them a briefcase full of Benjamins ($100 bills) are long gone. It’s much more sophisticated now. The primary tool is to construct a profitable business deal and invite in the targeted individual, or better yet, family members of the targeted individual. This provides the appearance of an arms-length, dare I say “free market”, transaction. The politician can claim to be pure while family members cash in. Schweizer’s case studies include the Bidens, Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, and Mitch McConnell with his wife Elaine Chao. Hunter Biden’s recent pardon by his father, not just for the crimes he’s been convicted of but for everything he did over an eleven year period, preserves this business model.
Even more sadly, U.S. politicians see how state-directed capitalism is conducted in China and they then bring aspects of that system back to the United States. Close “partnerships” between the state and the private sector, with the state in ultimate control, are the way business is done in China, and it is becoming more prominent in the United States. Both countries are evolving towards the same system of state-directed capitalism.
The origin of COVID-19 does make an appearance in Red Handed. Schweizer claims that Nancy Pelosi made it into a political issue in 2020 by ordering Democrats not to cooperate with any investigation into the origin, to protect China. Certainly that political stance survived for years, although it (finally) appears to be breaking down somewhat.
Schwiezer’s style is reminiscent of the late Jack Anderson: hard core investigative journalism, lots of facts and names. It’s light on the narrative, which is fine by me: I can provide my own interpretation. I used to love reading Anderson’s “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column in my hometown newspaper when I was a schoolboy. He didn’t necessarily get everything right, but he was relentless in going after corruption wherever he thought it existed. I don’t read the news to receive the Party line; if I did, I’d subscribe to The New York Times or just read government press releases. I read the news to find out where the Party line may be wrong. That, to me, is true journalism, and Schweizer is truly a journalist.
Red Handed does traffic in some guilt by association. Not everyone who does business in China necessarily approves of how the CCP persecutes the Uyghurs. But at this point in time, after a pandemic that killed tens of millions worldwide, which originated in China and was covered up by the CCP, it is quite clear that China and the world would be a better place without the CCP. As would the United States without the politicians who prioritize Chinese interests over those of U.S. citizens.