Vivek Ramaswamy's China connection

I will be traveling tonight and therefore probably won’t see the Republican candidates’ debate. I’m not sorry to be missing the spectacle. It’s not satisfying to see three or four candidates who, in my opinion, would make decent nominees and probably decent presidents, knowing that neither they nor anyone else on the stage has much chance of getting the nomination.

It’s also unpleasant to hear from the insufferable Vivek Ramaswamy, the snake oil salesman who claims that everyone else of the stage — from Asa Hutchinson (who apparently won’t be on it this time) and Doug Burgum to Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence — is “bought and paid for.”

On the other hand, the debate might be enjoyable if Ramaswamy is called on to explain his connection with China and its communist party. Marc Thiessen discusses that connection here.

According to Thiessen, “just a few years ago, Ramaswamy was doing business with high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party, including the same CCP-linked family that paid millions to Hunter Biden.”

Thiessen continues:

In 2017, Ramaswamy partnered with the private-equity arm of CITIC Group, a state-owned Chinese investment firm, to form a company called Sinovant, focused on “bringing innovative medicines to China and advancing Chinese biopharmaceutical innovation abroad.”. . . .

In 2019, Ramaswamy and Liu Lefei’s CITIC PE deepened their partnership, announcing a $1 billion deal to launch a company called Cytovant Sciences to develop treatments for diseases prevalent in Asian patients. . . . .

The news release announcing Ramaswamy’s [2017] deal boasted that CITIC’s private-equity firm (CITIC PE) “knows China like no one else.” There’s a reason for that. The firm’s parent company, the New York Times reports, is “embedded in the Communist Party elite” and is “an important member of the government-controlled ‘national team’ that carries out the will of the state in financial markets.” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2010 that CITIC PE relies on “‘guanxi’ — official connections — in order to win business.” In 2020, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, called CITIC “one of China’s largest and most important Party-controlled financial conglomerates.”

(Emphasis added)

How important?

CITIC PE is led by Liu Lefei, son of Liu Yunshan, who is the former head of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department. From 2012 to 2017, Liu Yunshan served as a member of the ruling seven-person Politburo Standing Committee — the top decision-making body of the CCP — and the country’s No. 5 official.

Liu Lefei is married to Jia Liqing. She is the daughter of China’s longest-serving minister of state security, Jia Chunwang, who ran the Chinese gulag and was in charge of China’s domestic and overseas espionage. The New York Times reported in 2016, “Ms. Jia and her husband represent two of the most potent arms of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Thus:

Ramaswamy went into business with one of the party’s top “princelings” — the son of the CCP’s propaganda chief and a onetime member of its senior-most leadership.

To add color to the story, Thiessen points out that Liu Lefei’s wife had dealings with Hunter Biden. A company she founded paid $5 million to Biden’s firm Burnham Asset Management in 2016.

Now, maybe Ramaswamy will stop accusing his rivals of being bought and paid for. Or maybe not.

Thiessen speculates that Ramaswamy’s connection with China may “explain why Ramaswamy is so willing to cede Taiwan to China.” But the candidate’s position on defending Taiwan — that the U.S. should defend it “only as far as 2028,” when, supposedly we will have achieved semiconductor independence — is half clever enough for him to have come up it absent any business dealings with China.

My problem with Ramaswamy’s China dealings doesn’t involve Taiwan, as strongly as I disagree with his position on the subject. My problem is that in 2017, when pretty much everyone understood the Chinese menace and Ramaswamy’s supposed hero Donald Trump was getting tough on the CCP, this candidate went into business with the Chinese regime. And he doubled down on these dealings in 2019.

GOP primary voters will likely see this as problematic, too. I suspect that Donald Trump, and Trump alone, could get away with it.