Billionaire left-wing philanthropist George Soros told the New York Times in an interview published Friday that China is a “mortal enemy.”
Though Soros has often pushed for free trade, he told the Times that China had not played by the rules and that its values were at odds with those of the “open society” to which he had devoted his political life:
“I consider Xi Jinping’s China the worst threat to an open society,” he said of China’s president, repeating a declaration he made this year in Davos, Switzerland, that prompted China to retort, “We hope the relevant American can correct his attitude.”
Mr. Soros, who has long encouraged free trade as a strategy to open up otherwise closed countries, said that the strategy had not worked in China the way he had expected and that more intervention was needed.
Mr. Soros, pointing a finger in the air, called China “a mortal enemy” and said the West gave it too much of the benefit of the doubt.
“We should recognize it: It’s a different system. It’s totally opposed to ours, diametrically opposed to ours,” he said. Perhaps to qualify his words, he added: “I’m not anti-Chinese at all. I’m just anti Xi Jinping.”
Soros’s words echo an op-ed he published in the Wall Street Journal last month in which he praised President Donald Trump’s policy of confronting China as a “great achievement.”
Though Soros told the Times that he expected the political pendulum to swing back to “globalists” (his word), and said he expected Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to be the Democratic Party nominee (without endorsing her), his feelings on China are firmly in line with those of the Trump administration.
Read the full Soros interview here.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.