Peter Schweizer’s new book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win includes the story of how donations from Communist China to the University of Pennsylvania almost tripled after the university established a “Biden Center” in 2017 and gave former Vice President Joe Biden a professorship.
As the book lays out in detail, the Biden family has a very extensive business relationship with Chinese Communist Party elites, and those elites were not shy about celebrating Joe Biden’s election in 2020 as a golden opportunity to further develop their influence over American government agencies and institutions. (One Chinese conference in November 2020 was so ebullient on this subject that Beijing prudently decided to nuke its video off the Internet just as it began to go viral.)
Three years before Joe Biden was elected president, the University of Pennsylvania made him a professor and established the “Biden Center” to promote his vision of “global leadership” — a vision, Schweizer notes, that viewed Russia as the great looming threat to world peace, but had absolutely nothing negative to say about China.
This should be especially amusing to those who remember the Obama-Biden ticket flinging adolescent taunts at rival candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 because he was supposedly stuck in the 1980s and obsessed with our good friends in Moscow as a Cold War boogeyman. It is, however, consistent with Biden’s stubborn refusal to see Communist China as either a threat to Western security or a competitor for American business interests.
The Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania was more than just a website that railed against Russia’s dictator while praising China’s as a treasured partner in globalism. The Center hired people, including Antony Blinken, who went on to become Biden’s Secretary of State — a role in which he was famously ambushed and curb-stomped by Chinese diplomats during his first bilateral conference with them in March.
Blinken’s work for the Biden Center appears to have left him completely unprepared for China’s emissaries shutting him down with a furious lecture on America’s alleged human rights violations. This should come as no surprise, for as Red-Handed outlines, the financing of the Biden Center was murky, but a great deal of documented Chinese money began flowing to the University of Pennsylvania after it was opened.
“In the three years before the announcement, the university received around $15 million. In the three years after, the total was close to $40 million. The latter number is $60 million from China if you include contracts,” Schweizer writes.
Some of those donors were anonymous, but declared donors included the state-owned China Merchants Bank, and a company called Cathay Fortune owned by “a secretive Chinese billionaire who appears to have strong links with the Communist Party” named Yu Yong.
Cathay Fortune is especially interesting because it has a controlling interest in China Molybdenum, a mineral producer with Chinese military contracts that teamed up with Hunter Biden’s investment fund to invest in an African copper mine.
As Red-Handed explains in great detail, the Chinese regime and Communist Party billionaires have spent a great deal of money developing influence over American higher education. At the very least, the return on these investments was a Biden administration staffed with people who expected China to play softball — and were absolutely stunned when the first diplomatic pitches they lobbed to Beijing were returned with smoking line drives right into their faces.
Red-Handed, published by Harper-Collins, will be released on January 25. Schweizer is the president of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute (GAI) and a senior contributor to Breitbart News.
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