No candidate wants to run against his own record, but President Trump’s China policy is forcing Democratic challenger Joe Biden to do just that.
For eight years as vice president and decades longer while in the Senate, Biden and his team failed to confront China. Biden was more responsible than any other legislator of the post-Nixon era for enabling China’s rise as a revisionist superpower. But now that he’s running against Trump, Biden is trying to perform an unconvincing about-face on the foreign adversary in which he’s invested so much.
Biden’s support of the Chinese Communist Party is long and personal. In 2000-2001, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden led the Senate’s efforts to shepherd China into the World Trade Organization and to end annual congressional reviews of China’s status as a U.S. trading partner. At the time, Biden welcomed China’s emergence “as a great power, because great powers adhere to international norms in the areas of nonproliferation, human rights and trade.” As vice president in 2011, Biden said he believed “that a rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China but for America and the world writ large.”
The benefits of embracing China were not merely diplomatic. Biden’s son, Hunter, may have benefited financially from his father’s cultivation of Beijing.
The younger Biden found his way into acquiring a stake in a billion-dollar private equity fund partly owned by a Chinese state-owned enterprise and funded by Chinese state-owned venture capital. Among the firm’s investments was Face++, a Chinese surveillance firm. Hunter Biden began building investments and business deals in China based on his proximity to Chinese government and business figures in 2010, two years after his father was elected vice president. A new report from the Senate Finance and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees’ majority staffs further details Hunter Biden’s business ties with Chinese nationals linked to the Chinese government and military.
Even out of office — and as recently as last year — there was no indication Joe Biden thought any of this might be a problem for his presidential candidacy.
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