"Collusion," anyone? Bill Gertz of the Free Beacon reports on the efforts, directed at the highest level of the Chinese government, to shape our politics:
China's Communist Party is intensifying covert influence operations in the United States that include funding Washington think tanks and coercing Chinese Americans, according to a congressional commission report.
The influence operations are conducted by the United Front Work Department, a Central Committee organ that employs tens of thousands of operatives who seek to use both overt and covert operations to promote Communist Party policies.
The Party's United Front strategy includes paying several Washington think tanks with the goal influencing their actions and adopting positions that support Beijing's policies.
If you expect conservative-leaning think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation, CATO, or the American Enterprise Institute to be taking money from the ChiComs, you are dreaming.
The report said the Johns Hopkins School of Advance[d] International Studies, a major foreign policy education and analysis institute, has received funding from Tung Chee-hwa, a vice chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the party group that directs the United Front Work Department and includes a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the collective dictatorship that rules China.
The money is laundered, of course:
The funding for Johns Hopkins came from Tung's non-profit group in Hong Kong, the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, which is a registered Chinese agent.
Among the other think-tanks receiving Chinese money – all of them progressive or left-leaning to one degree or another – one name leaps out: the Center for American Progress, founded and headed by John Podesta until he left to head Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign:
In addition to Johns Hopkins, other think tanks linked to China and influential in American policy circles include the Brookings Institution, Atlantic Council, Center for American Progress, EastWest Institute, Carter Center, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The Exchange Foundation is tied to Chinese government influence operations and uses the same public relations firm as the Chinese embassy.
The Center for American Progress denies receiving Chinese government money:
A spokesman for the Center for American Progress (CAP) said the center has received no money from China. CAP cooperated with the U.S.-China Exchange Foundation in producing a joint report in 2014 but received no financial contribution from CUSEF.
Imagine if the head of Trump's campaign had headed a nonprofit receiving money from, or simply cooperating with, an entity following Putin's orders. There would be headlines and endless talking heads on MSNBC and CNN flinging around charges of treason, I think it is fair to say.
Have you noticed any mainstream media attention to these disclosures? I haven't.
While the Democrats and their media buddies pretend Russia is our scariest rival for global leadership, China's size, growth rate, economic might, and actual presence in our institutions dwarf Russia's. China's GDP is close to eight times that of Russia and growing much faster. Chinese-manufactured exports flood the world's markets, while Russia has very, very few manufactured products outside weaponry that meet world standards.
Tucker Carlson, to his great credit, has taken the lead in top-tier media pointing to the open strategic threat China poses to the United States, including its extensive influence operations, its military buildup in the South China Seas, and its aggressive stance toward Taiwan. He correctly states that all the attention lavished on so far unsupported allegations of Russia's hand controlling our elections is serving as a smokescreen to obscure China's massive influence operations and serious and growing strategic threat.
Any sane person can see that Russia is in serious decline, its average lifespan low and declining; its population shrinking; and its economy unable to compete on world markets except for raw materials, principally gas and oil.
Is it pure coincidence that all of the alleged recipients of this Chinese money lie on the left side of the political spectrum and the Russia collusion narrative comes from that same part of the spectrum?