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Why China thinks it's got a future President Biden in its pocket
h/t Instapundit[NYPost] Six months ago, the Chinese walked away from the trade negotiations. The move caught nearly everyone by surprise. ...But I think the real reason that China backtracked is named "Joe Biden." The former vice president had just ended months of speculation over his political future by announcing he was running for president on April 25. ...They had decided to run out the clock on President Trump’s first term, convinced that they would get a much better deal from a future President Biden. Who can blame them? Biden has a long history of being a friendly voice for US-China relations. The Chinese side had every reason to expect that Biden, like Obama, would turn a blind eye to the theft of American jobs, factories, and intellectual property by an increasingly arrogant and rapacious PRC. ...But Beijing had another reason to bet on Biden: they had given sweetheart deals to his son, Hunter Biden. As Peter Schweizer has documented in his book, "Secret Empires," the vice president took his son along on Air Force Two when he flew to Beijing in December 2013. Not long after the father and son duo returned to the US, Hunter Biden’s small firm received a $1 billion private equity deal from the Chinese government. This was later increased to a cool one-and-a-half billion. ...At the time, the former vice president seemed like a sure bet ‐ not just to Beijing but to many on this side of the Pacific. The early polls suggested that he was a shoo-in for the Democrat nomination, and the odds-on favorite to beat Trump. Betting the farm on Biden, the Chinese likely stiffed Trump’s negotiators. Now they seem to be having second thoughts. Negotiators are crisscrossing the Pacific again, and the Chinese have placed a couple of big orders for farm products. ...Meanwhile, this being Trump, there is a price to pay for such perfidy. The tariffs are a little higher now and the terms of any future agreement will be even tougher. Vice President Mike Pence did not mince words on Thursday when he said that the US will continue to insist that China make significant reforms to its economic system, including abandoning trade barriers, forced technology transfers and predatory subsidies for "national champion" businesses. And Trump himself has made clear that, if no agreement is reached by the time of the 2020 election, Beijing will have an even steeper hill to climb during his second term. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2019-09-29 |
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