“So today, I applaud China for stepping out,” said Joe Biden on Friday before the Canadian Parliament. The members immediately burst out in laughter. “Excuse me,” Biden said, “I applaud Canada.” The Delaware Democrat might have been right the first time.
Under Justin Trudeau, it’s becoming ever harder to distinguish Canada from China, and Trudeau is a big fan of the Middle Kingdom. He made that clear back in 2013, when asked which nation he admired the most.
“There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China,” Trudeau said. “Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.” Actually, a basic dictatorship allows no such thing.
As Friedrich Hayek showed in The Road to Serfdom, economic knowledge is highly dispersed and dictators cannot possibly command it. That is why basic dictatorships have been economic basket cases, one of the many hardships, injustices and atrocities dictatorships inflict on the people.
Trudeau’s admiration of China’s dictatorship was a matter of inheritance. Long before he became prime minister in 1968, Justin’s father Pierre was an admirer of several basic dictatorships.
Fondness for the Soviet Union prompted a visit in the early 1950s, when Stalin tightened his grip on eastern Europe, ramped up persecution of writers and artists, and revived Russia’s traditional antisemitism. This had all been documented but Canada’s intelligence service managed to wipe out the records of Trudeau’s service for Stalin, which he later shifted to Mao Zedong, in any event.
In 1960, Trudeau visited Communist China in the midst of Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” that claimed millions of lives, many through a state-imposed famine. In 1970, during the murderous Cultural Revolution, Prime Minister Trudeau recognized the People’s Republic.
Two years later, when Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate, Mao still headed the Communist dictatorship. His rule claimed millions of lives but could not kill off the Chinese people’s desire for freedom. The chairman passed away in 1976, about 80 years too late, and in 1985 and 1986 Chinese students mounted pro-democracy protests in Beijing and Shanghai.
By the end of May 1989, more than 1 million pro-democracy protesters had gathered in Tiananmen Square. On June 4, Chinese soldiers stormed the square, gunning down thousands of protesters and arresting 10,000. Senator Joe Biden voted against strong sanctions on Communist China as a response to the massacre. In 1998, the United States again proposed sanctions on the PRC, including visa restrictions. Biden was among the group of 10 senators opposed to the measures.
In 2001, Biden, then head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, supported China’s entry to the World Trade Organization. As he explained, “the United States welcomes the emergence of a prosperous, integrated China on the global stage, because we expect this is going to be a China that plays by the rules.”
China admitted to performing more than 330 million abortions and 196 million sterilizations as part of the regime’s one-child policy. Biden is a Roman Catholic but has kept rather quiet about China’s forced abortions. In 2011, he told a group at Sichuan University “Your policy has been one which I fully understand—I’m not second-guessing—of one child per family.”
In May 2011, Reuters ran a story headlined “Biden, Clinton bluntly press China on rights.” Biden said “President Obama and I believe strongly, as does the secretary, that protecting fundamental rights and freedoms such as those enshrined in China’s international commitments as well as in China’s own constitution is the best way to promote long term stability and prosperity—of any society.”
Biden did not specify the “fundamental rights and freedoms” enshrined in China’s constitution, and his “blunt” statement included no criticism of the Communist regime. By 2010 the regime’s genocidal record, with more than 60 million murdered, had been thoroughly documented in The Black Book of Communism. Unfortunately, as Mark Bowden explained in his 2010 Atlantic profile, Biden shows little familiarity with influential books and works of scholarship.
In 2012, Biden “got China” through the efforts of Democrat insider Tom Donilon, who would go on to serve as national security advisor. Donilon is an advocate of “a deeper U.S.-China military-to-military dialogue” and sees only “potential competition” between the two nations. By the end of Biden’s term as vice president, it was apparent that China “got Biden.”
Biden in 2019 famously said the Chinese are “not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” His substitution of China for Canada was revealing, and so was Trudeau’s acknowledgement of China’s competitive edge. That now goes far beyond issues of trade.
As Col. Grant Newsham recently explained, China has ways to influence what Americans think. Thousands of Chinese students in American universities are positioned to gather intel and rip off intellectual property. China even operates police stations in the United States, a troubling prospect for the FBI.
China has its way in Canada’s National Microbiology Lab and the Galveston National Lab, both collaborators with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The WIV, funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci to conduct gain-of-function research, is the most likely source of the COVID virus that caused so much death and destruction around the world.
Joe Biden also looks the other way at Chinese espionage, and allows China to float a surveillance balloon over nearly the entire country, including military bases, before taking any action.
China’s growing influence is not likely to be rolled back under Justin Trudeau, who admires China’s “basic dictatorship.” The same goes for Joe Biden, who believes that the ruling Chinese Communists are “not bad folks,” and not even competition for the United States.