“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
U.S. intelligence officials warn that China is considering “aggressive” interference in November’s election to support Joe Biden and oust Donald Trump from office – but Biden’s family has already reaped dividends from its decades-long relationship with Beijing.
Heading towards the November election, the Biden family history with China could become a big problem with swing voters concerned about corruption.
The former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, owns stock in a company that develops the software China uses to track and arrest protesters and ethnic minorities and send them to re-education camps.
Megvii Technology Ltd. developed its facial recognition software in 2011 for banking, but now the Chinese Communist Party uses it for what Beijing calls “anti-terrorism, anti-riot, and other security work.”
That means the CCP uses the company’s Face++ program to track Chinese dissidents and pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong through crowds and arrest them. Cameras installed on streetlights comb crowds, looking for anyone on the government’s watchlist.
The technology also allows Beijing’s Communist dictatorship to identify the facial characteristics of people who might belong to its Uighur Muslim minority, more than a million of whom are kept in a concentration camp.
The U.S. Department of Commerce has stated in a report that Megvii is directly “implicated in human-rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs” and others.
The CCP “really rely on facial recognition technology as a fundamental building block for tracking people,” according to Maya Wang, a senior research fellow at Human Rights Watch.
The constant, Big Brother-like surveillance lets Chinese Communists “control reality in ways that would make it capable to rule forever, she said.
Make no mistake: American companies are helping Beijing keep freedom-loving Chinese locked-up tight.
“Private equity firms and venture capitalists are aiding the government of China, which has a history of surveilling and curtailing behavior deemed inappropriate to the goals of the Communist Party,” an American technology investor told BuzzFeed News last year.
Joe Biden has said that he’ll crack down on Chinese oppression as president, but his son is literally invested in it.
The company Hunter Biden owned and helped found – Bohai Harvest RST – owns one-fiftieth of all Megvii’s stock.
Hunter stepped down from the company’s board just as his father ramped up his presidential campaign – but Hunter still owns 10 percent of all Bohai’s stock through his company, Skaneateles LLC.
Hunter Biden hammered out a $1.5 billion deal with China after a December 2013 meeting that took place while his father was on an official trip to the country as vice president of the United States.
Joe Biden has said Hunter’s shady businesses deals have “nothing” to do with him—but Hunter rode to China aboard Air Force Two at his dad’s side.
Financial investments in China’s persecution infrastructure shocked even Biden’s closest political allies.
“It is disturbing that American companies, researchers, and investors are helping facilitate grave human rights abuses,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who has endorsed Joe Biden for president in April.
It’s little wonder the People’s Republic of China would support Biden, even apart from his family’s personal support for CCP tyranny.
Joe Biden has been one of the most dependably pro-PRC votes in the Senate since he first traveled to China in 1979. Biden supported most favored nation status and trade deals that gave China access to U.S. markets while stealing intellectual property.
As millions of Americans lost their jobs, Biden said, “A rising China is a…positive development, not only for China, but for America.”
Biden already seeems to be preparing America for a soft-on-China policy if he’s elected.
The 2020 Democratic Party platform removed a plank condemning Chinese persecution of Tibet, which Freedom House ranks as the third-least free country in the world. To its credit, the Democrats’ 2016 platform promised to “promote greater respect for human rights, including the rights of Tibetans,” and the Republican Party platform accuses Beijing’s “cultural genocide” in Tibet.
Incredibly, Biden now claims in a campaign ad that Donald Trump has “rolled over for China.”
President Trump has been outspoken on China decades before he ever ran for office. As president he’s slapped tariffs against billions of dollars of Chinese imports and urged U.S. allies to follow his lead.
This summer, Trump sent two U.S Air Force B-1B bombers over the South China Sea to show the CCP America’s military strength, prosecuted American professors smuggling U.S. secrets to Beijing, and cracked down on Chinese diplomats peddling anti-American propaganda in the media.
Foreign policy experts across the board agree that Red China is the United States’ strongest competitor for global dominance.
But as one Silicon Valley venture capitalist told BuzzFeed, “As long as [limited partners] are making money, no one will care about human rights violations.”
Does the Biden family care?
That will be up to voters to decide.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”