President Biden has excused China’s concentration camp confinement and torture of Turkic Uyghurs largely as a matter of having “different norms.”
He’s also enmeshed in a number of other China controversies, from his son’s business deals that promised a cut for the “big guy” to his decision to free schools from revealing financial sponsorships from China.
Now he’s “leaving America defenseless” to the Chinese Communist Party, charges Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China” and a Gatestone Institute senior fellow.
It’s because of Biden’s executive orders and other actions that are reversing President Trump’s agenda to protect the nation from China’s invasive technology.
“Although new White House occupants have always reviewed the policies of predecessors, Biden should have retained the Trump-era protections,” said Chang.
Trump cracked down on platforms such as TikTok and WeChat and banned the purchase of Chinese equipment for the U.S. electrical grid.
“China’s Communist Party has been using its companies – especially its tech businesses – to attack the United States. … Biden, in the interim, is leaving American defenseless,” Chang said.
Trump banned WeChat and TikTok after he “correctly contended” that they were collecting huge volumes of data and censoring Americans, said Chang.
Now the Biden administration is considering reversing the bans.
Chang explained, “TikTok’s threat to the U.S. goes well beyond the surreptitious collection of data and censorship, however. China has used the app’s algorithm to inflame American public opinion.”
Chinese engineers manage TikTok’s algorithms to determine when to show videos to users that “boost the signal” and “curate content to get people to act in certain ways,” Chang wrote.
For instance, TikTok “using big data to identify Americans likely to participate in Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests and then created and sent them ‘tailor-made’ TikTok videos on how to organize riots.”
The threat also includes Huawei Technologies, the world’s biggest maker of communications networking gear.
Chang said the Trump administration “moved hard against the company,” working to stop the use of the gear in American networks and encouraging allies to ban it too.”
“Trump added the company and dozens of its subsidiaries and affiliates to the Commerce Department’s Entity List beginning in May 2019,” he added. “The designations meant that no American business, without prior approval from the department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, was allowed to sell or license to Huawei or listed organizations products and technology covered by the U.S. Export Administration Regulations.”
But now, Biden’s Commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, has waffled on whether she believes Huawei is a danger.
And Huewei founder Ren Zhengfei wants to meet with Biden, saying, “We hope that the U.S. government can have a more open policy for the benefit of American companies and the development of the U.S. economy.”
Chang noted, however, that Huawei “poses a mortal threat to the U.S. economy.”
“Beijing has been using the company for malign purposes, such as stealing data. For instance, from 2012 to 2017 Beijing, through Huawei servers, surreptitiously downloaded information from the headquarters of the Beijing-donated and Chinese-built headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Huawei is Beijing’s ‘mechanism for spying, ‘ as Sen. Marsha Blackburn told Fox News in July 2019.”
China could, with its manipulation of 5G technology, “spy and remotely manipulate the world’s smartphones, cars, pacemakers, thermostats, and a multitude of other devices connected to what is referred to as the ‘Internet of Things,'” he said.
“In times of war, Beijing could paralyze critical infrastructure.”
“So, President Biden, what will you do to protect us?” Chang asked.
Other China issues for Biden: He’s under fire now for ending a requirement that schools reveal sponsorships from Chinese Communist Party-linked Confucius Institutes. His administration is being sued for refusing to provide information about Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and a Chinese spy. His CIA nominee was found to have close ties to China. He banned the term “China virus” in government documents. Messages from a laptop abandoned by his son, Hunter, indicated Joe Biden knew about his son’s influence-peddling deals and possibly profited from them.
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