In Stinging Rebuke, China Tells U.S. Diplomat That Its Rise Can’t Be Stopped

A senior Chinese diplomat on Monday bluntly warned the visiting American deputy secretary of state, Wendy R. Sherman, that the Biden administration’s strategy of pursuing both confrontation and cooperation with Beijing was sure to fail.

China’s assistant foreign minister, Xie Feng, told Ms. Sherman that the United States’ “competitive, collaborative and adversarial rhetoric” was a “thinly veiled attempt to contain and suppress China,” according to a summary of Mr. Xie’s comments that the Chinese foreign ministry sent to reporters.

Ms. Sherman’s meetings offered the latest gauge of the Biden administration’s strategy of stepping up pressure against the Chinese government on several fronts, including human rights and internet hacking, while seeking to work together on global problems like climate change and international health threats. Mr. Xie’s remarks underscored the anger that has been building in China toward the United States, undermining the chances that the approach will work.

washingtonpost.com
By Glenn Kessler, The Fact Checker
February 19, 2021 at 3:00 a.m. EST

Biden’s repeated claim he’s ‘traveled 17,000 miles with’ Xi Jinping. Despite extensive meetings and multiple diplomatic, President Biden’s claim he “traveled 17,000 miles with” President Xi can’t be verified.

“My point was that when I came back from meeting with him and traveling 17,000 miles with him when I was vice president and he was the vice president — that’s how I got to know him so well.”

— President Biden, remarks during a town hall on CNN, Feb. 16, 2021

“I had 24-25 hours of private meetings with him when I was vice president, traveled 17,000 miles with him. I know him pretty well.”

— Biden, in an interview with Norah O’Donnell of CBS News, Feb. 7

“I’ve spent more time with Xi Jinping, at least before we got out, than any world leader has. I traveled 17,000 miles with him, the president of China. … we traveled around the world together, in the United States and China.”

— Biden, at a campaign rally in Sparks High School, Nevada, Jan. 10, 2020

During his recent town hall on CNN, President Biden made a number of mistaken claims and assertions. He suggested racehorse owners receive tax breaks worth $9 billion, almost enough to pay for free attendance at community college — a claim that left tax experts scratching their heads. He said that the $7.25 minimum wage set in 2009 would be worth $20 if indexed for inflation, a statement that only makes sense if you are measuring from 1968. He wrongly stated that “vast majority” of undocumented immigrants were not Hispanic.

We became interested in the claim that he had “traveled 17,000 miles” with Chinese President Xi Jinping. We had first noticed it when the president was interviewed by Norah O’Donnell but it seemed like a typical Biden malaprop. After, it did not make much sense because world leaders do not often travel together. But he then said it again. Researching the matter, we discovered he had also used the same phrase during the presidential election campaign — and the same number even earlier than that.

When a politician says the same thing at least three times, it cannot be shrugged off as a verbal stumble. What is Biden talking about?

The Facts
Biden is justifiably proud of his long relationships with many world leaders. He came into office with a list of overseas contacts unmatched by any predecessor since George H.W. Bush, also a former two-term vice president. Before being elected vice president, Biden was chair or ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for more than two decades.

During the Obama administration, it became clear that Xi, then the vice president, was in line to become the next leader of China. He was largely a mystery to U.S. officials, so Biden was assigned the task of getting to know him.

In 2011, Biden traveled to China and over the course of three days met with Xi in various settings. They had a bilateral meeting and formal dinner in Beijing on Aug. 18, co-hosted a business dialogue on Aug. 19 and then visited the city of Chengdu in Sichuan province, along with a high school about 50 miles away in an area where a 2008 earthquake had left 86,000 people dead or missing. They also had a lengthy dinner together in Chengdu. Afterward, Biden flew on to Mongolia.

In 2012, Xi visited the United States. On Feb. 14, Biden and Xi gathered at the White House for meetings, including with President Barack Obama, had lunch at the State Department, conducted a business roundtable and finally had dinner at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory. Xi then traveled elsewhere in the United States, including Iowa, before arriving in Los Angeles. Biden flew to Los Angeles to meet Xi there on Feb. 17; they had dinner, among other events.

Biden returned to China in 2013, where he held another five hours of meetings with Xi. Biden also met Xi when he arrived in Washington on his first state visit as Chinese president in 2015.

That’s certainly an impressive amount of face time with Xi. But Biden’s mileage number has kept us puzzling till our puzzler was sore.

As far as we could tell, the only time Biden and Xi appear to have traveled together was when they visited Qingchengshan High School in Dujiangyan.

In theory, one could add in the trip from Beijing to Chengdu, a distance of about 1,000 miles. But when Xi came to the United States, Biden and Xi did not even follow a parallel route to Los Angeles.

We found a clue about what Biden was trying to say when we searched as many transcript archives as we could and found a statement Biden made at a Hillary Clinton campaign event on Nov. 4, 2016: “Because the former president of China and President Obama seven years ago thought we should get to know one another, I traveled 17,000 miles through his country and our country over nine days.”

A White House official conceded that Biden’s line of “traveling with” Xi is not accurate. “This was a reference to the total travel back and forth — both internally in the U.S. and China, and as well as internationally — for meetings they held together,” he said. “Some travel was in parallel, some was separately to joint destinations.”

Try as we could, however, we still could not get the travel to add up to 17,000 miles.

If you take Biden’s 2016 formulation of internal travel in China and the United States, here are the numbers.

The flight distance from Beijing to Chengdu: 950 miles
The round trip drive between Chengdu and Dujiangyan: 100 miles
The flight distance from Washington to Los Angeles: 2,300 miles
That’s only about 3,300 miles. It grows to 5,600 if you decide to add in Biden’s return flight from L.A. That’s still far short of 17,000 miles.

Meanwhile, the flight distance from Washington to Beijing is 6,900 miles, or about 14,000 miles round trip. So adding in Biden’s two trips to see Xi would add 28,000 miles to the total.

The White House did not offer an explanation for how Biden calculated 17,000 miles. But clearly it’s a number he deems important enough to repeat often.

We sought a comment from the Chinese embassy but did not get a response.

The Pinocchio Test
Some readers may object that this is inconsequential. Biden, one might argue, is using the phrase of “traveling together” in a more expansive sense of “flying to meet each other in various places.” Moreover, his broader point is undisputed — that he’s already spent an unusually large amount of time with Xi for someone who is just now taking office.

So Biden’s claim is not completely from whole cloth. He did meet Xi in various cities in China and United States, in some cases traveling substantial distances.

But numbers are numbers. Biden is using a figure that cannot be verified in a misleading way. He correctly notes he spent hours in private talks with Xi, including outside the capital cities, on different occasions. Those are substantial bragging rights — which makes his apparent need to gild the lily with an invented figure so puzzling.

The president earns Three Pinocchios.

ncbnews.com
By Bill Rivers

Joe Biden must clear the air on Hunter Biden and his China business dealings — win or lose
A public commitment from the Biden family to fully comply with any investigation is critical to restore confidence and take on Chinese attempts to undermine the U.S.

Americans endured years of federal investigations and media frenzy over allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia, a second-rate rival in open decline. Americans now deserve more than indignant dismissals from Joe Biden’s campaign about the Biden family’s business affairs in China — the country that poses the pre-eminent threat to U.S. national security today.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Trust the American people. Don’t try to frighten, lie to or bully them. They can handle the truth. And they deserve to hear it.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team spent two years and an estimated $32 million investigating allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia before failing to establish that this took place. No matter who wins Tuesday, Americans would be right to demand an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business in China and any allegations of connections to his father, Joe Biden. This is especially important in light of Beijing’s long-standing practice of targeting highly influential people at or near the top of governments.

THINKing about the 2020 election aftermath? Submit a letter to the editor for our special election newsletter.
On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show last week, Biden family business partner Tony Bobulinski made highly detailed allegations of meetings he had with Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and Joe’s brother Jim Biden in 2017, indicating that the former vice president had knowledge of Hunter’s dealings with a company close to China’s Communist Party. That company, CEFC China Energy, purportedly offered Hunter $10 million a year “for introductions alone.”

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Joe Biden has flatly denied involvement with any of his son’s overseas business, and there is to date no independently confirmed evidence of a link. So far, the allegations from Bobulinski appear to be the only ones claiming to tie Biden to his son’s international business activities.

But on the eve of a presidential election, with a majority of likely voters believing it’s likely that Joe Biden was consulted about his son’s dealings abroad, a public commitment from the Biden family to fully comply with any such investigation is critical to restore trust and confidence should Biden win the White House.

This is also essential because the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, is orchestrating the greatest external challenge to American global leadership since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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OCT. 22, 202001:13
The Cold War taught generations of Americans to regard Russia as their chief international rival, but with its entire gross domestic product just slightly more than that of Texas, Russia no longer deserves that status. To be clear, Moscow remains a threat, especially for America’s allies and friends in Europe and the Middle East. But as the left-leaning Center for American Progress assesses it, Russia today “is not a peer competitor — or even a near-peer competitor — with the United States.”

Not so with Beijing. Having surpassed the United States as the country with the world’s largest economy this year, China now has far greater reach and resources to pursue its long-standing plan to displace America globally and destabilize Americans at home through cyberattacks and espionage, intellectual property theft and other malign activity.

OPINION

In its 2018 National Defense Strategy, the Defense Department had identified great-power competition from China and Russia as the main threats to U.S. security, but this summer, Secretary Mark Esper explicitly labeled China as America’s most dangerous military rival, directing the National Defense University “to refocus its curriculum by dedicating 50 percent of the coursework” to China.

China poses a danger to millions of regular Americans at home, too. Speaking at Washington’s Hudson Institute this year, FBI Director Christopher Wray put it simply: “If you are an American adult, it is more likely than not that China has stolen your personal data.”

Referring to the 2017 Equifax hack, in which China’s military purloined personal information from more than 140 million Americans, Wray added that nearly half the FBI’s 5,000 active counterintelligence cases are related to China and that the FBI opens a new China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours.

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As the analysts at the Center for American Progress write, China’s long-term strategic approach includes “building relationships with — and often leverage over — governments, institutions, businesses, and prominent individuals around the world as a way to project power.” Hacking millions of people’s personal information is one way to do that.

But the center’s writers make another interesting observation: “Given China’s global ambitions and desire to be seen in a positive light on the global stage, the CCP seems to value having actual plausible deniability.”

This brings us back to the Biden family’s business dealings in China.

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In his Fox News interview, Bobulinski related what he said was a personal conversation at another meeting with Jim Biden in May 2017. Bobulinski asked whether the Biden family worried that its engagement with CEFC China Energy might jeopardize Joe Biden’s career. According to CNN, CEFC China Energy “aligned itself so closely with the Chinese government that it was often hard to distinguish between the two.” According to Bobulinski, Jim Biden responded with the phrase “plausible deniability.” When asked by reporters last week, Jim Biden offered no comment.

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As The Wall Street Journal has editorialized, there’s no evidence that the former vice president benefited from his son’s business activities in China. But The Journal also noted that — when it came to the alleged encounters in which Bobulinksi and Joe Biden discussed Hunter Biden’s possible venture with the Chinese energy company — Joe Biden “hasn’t denied that the meetings took place, and the Bobulinski documents make clear that Mr. Biden hasn’t been honest about his knowledge of his son’s business affairs.”

This is unsettling for Americans about to walk into the polling booth. They know the Chinese government is a nefarious actor, from state-sponsored theft of intellectual property to international campaigns targeting fleeing political dissidents to funding pro-Communist Party research projects on U.S. college campuses while disincentivizing research deemed harmful to Beijing.

The Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, is orchestrating the greatest external challenge to American global leadership since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

They also know that Joe Biden’s campaign has not denied that the May 2017 meeting described by Bobulinski took place. How much there is to the rest of Bobulinski’s story is a question best answered by impartial federal authorities. It is entirely reasonable to want them to investigate, especially if they were willing to go to such lengths to investigate actions related to a second-tier competitor like Russia in 2016. Why would they do anything less when the son of a presidential nominee is working with companies tied to such masterly manipulators as the Chinese Communist Party?

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Trust the American people. Don’t try to frighten, lie to or bully them. They can handle the truth. And they deserve to hear it.

Win or lose, the business dealings of Joe Biden’s family with China need to be investigated — but most especially if he wins.

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