A report published Friday by The Intercept brought a surprising new angle to last week’s revelations about the extent of China’s electronic spying on the Muslims of Xinjiang province. The private equity firm of Hunter Biden, the son of former vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, invested in one of the Chinese companies that created the Xinjiang surveillance state nightmare.
The Intercept reported that Hunter Biden’s Chinese investment company Bohai Harvest RST, which obtains its financing from a subsidiary of the Communist government-owned Bank of China, is part of an investment pool that has made several rounds of large investments in a range of Chinese companies.
The group’s 2017 purchases included an interest in Face++, which provided the facial-recognition software integrated into the smartphone app used by Chinese security forces to monitor the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang province. The app plugs into a massive central database that collects an incredible amount of information about Xinjiang citizens, ranging from how much electricity they use to their DNA.
The Intercept found it curious that this week’s media coverage of the Chinese surveillance state and its condemnation by human-rights groups did not mention Hunter Biden’s firm’s investments, especially since questions are already swirling around the Biden family’s business ties to China, and eyebrows were raised by Joe Biden’s remarkable refusal to admit China poses a strategic threat to the United States.
The Intercept noted that Joe Biden has been comprehensively wrong about China for decades:
For his part, Joe Biden has long served as friendly voice for U.S.-China relations, even before his son’s investment ventures. The elder Biden helped lead Democratic support to passing permanent national trade relations with China.
In 2000 remarks in support of the vote, Biden argued that he did not “see the collapse of the American manufacturing economy” as a danger from opening up further trade with China, claiming that an economy “about the size of the Netherlands” could not become “our major economic competitor.” Opening China to further trade, Biden predicted, would create “a path toward ever greater political and economic freedom” for the country’s citizens.
Hunter Biden’s partner in many of his investment ventures is Christopher Heinz, stepson of former senator, secretary of state, and presidential candidate John Kerry, a longtime friend and political ally of Joe Biden.
The financial dealings of the Biden and Kerry families in China were detailed by Breitbart News Senior Contributor-at-Large Peter Schweizer in his book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.
Schweizer’s book exposed a $1.5 billion deal between Hunter Biden’s firm and the Bank of China signed shortly after then-Vice President Joe Biden flew to China with his son aboard Air Force Two. Some of the investments Hunter Biden made with this financing included companies whose products have “dual-use” military applications.