Dirty DiFi and her Chinese Pals

China Queen Dianne Feinstein Used Her Senate Power to Push Most-Favored-Nation Status for the CCP’s Corrupt Dictatorship. Why?

By Lee Smith, TabletMag.com
(Lee Smith is the distinguished & celebrated author of The Plot Against the President.)

NOTE: This is a monumentally significant, highly sophisticated article. It is extensive and substantive with many enlightening sections that reveal the self-serving activities of Diane Feinstein, her husband Richard Bloom and an ugly assortment of other government officials.  If you want to read the entire text, go to the link below.

‘The conviction that China was ripe to be remade in America’s image continued to form the thinking of the American policy establishment. Their optimism was not wholly misplaced. America’s use of economic development to drive political liberalization had shown repeated successes in the post-WWII period.

“It’s the strategy we used most consistently since the end of WWII,” says Matthew Turpin, who served as China director for Trump’s National Security Council staff in 2018-19, and held a similar position at the Pentagon under the Obama administration between 2013 and 2017.

“We used it with postwar Italy and Germany and Japan in the 1940s. In the ‘70s we used it with Spain, and in the ‘80s we used it with South Korea and Taiwan. And we used that approach after the fall of the Berlin Wall with the countries of Eastern Europe. The strategy has a logic to it. So, we thought the same with China. Building China’s economy and accustoming its leadership to the peace that is a natural consequence of prosperity would lead to political liberalization.”

The problem is that Chinese leadership saw through America’s strategy. You didn’t need to be steeped in Marxist doctrine to see that the capitalists understood China as an untapped resource just waiting to be exploited. China was a self-baiting trap and all Mao and his successors had to do was wait for the Americans to wander in.

If anyone should have understood the darker currents running through humanity, it was America’s 41st president, George H. W. Bush. A WWII Navy pilot who lost men in the Pacific, Bush had served as U.S. ambassador to China and also as director of the CIA before becoming vice president. In those roles, he came to know China well, while overseeing Cold War proxy fights and operations that cost many thousands of lives and decided the fate of hundreds of millions more.

But for whatever reasons—his WASP heritage, the primacy of Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, or the sense that the world was owed a respite after so much bloodshed and that it was his historical role to usher in a post-Cold War era of peace—Bush was determined to see China as a partner rather than a rival. “I see a world of open borders, open trade and, most importantly, open minds,” he told the U.N. According to Bush, the new order is “a world that celebrates the common heritage that belongs to all the world’s people, taking pride not just in hometown or homeland but in humanity itself.”

For their part, the Chinese knew Bush and liked him—and liked Republicans. They had evidence that the GOP meddled less than the Democrats in the affairs of foreigners. After all, Kissinger had “opened” Beijing during the murderous mass purges known as the Cultural Revolution without batting an eye.

In 2000, Feinstein achieved her longtime policy goal when Congress conferred permanent most-favored-nation status on China. The Senate voted in favor with 83 yeas, including Joe Biden. The Republican governor of Texas and presumptive GOP candidate for president praised the bill: “Passage of this legislation will mean a stronger American economy, as well as more opportunity for liberty and freedom in China,” said future President George W. Bush. And so, the deal was done.

In retrospect, some American politicians on the right now admit that their assumptions about the PRC were horribly mistaken. “We thought getting them into a rules-based system would gradually permeate their culture and that’d be a big step in the right direction,” said Newt Gingrich, author of the 2019 book Trump vs. China: America’s Greatest Challenge. “That was all wrong,” said the former speaker of the House.

With the coronavirus having put America on hold, it is worthwhile trying to figure out how and why we got it so wrong. The United States’ political and business elites told themselves that the new breed of Chinese communists were interested in money, just like capitalists. That fiction required American officials to ignore what they should have observed during the Cold War struggle against Soviet communism: Moscow apparatchiks and their Iron Curtain courtiers very much enjoyed the luxuries that money afforded them, like Western-made shoes and tailored suits, access to fresh vegetables and Swiss bank accounts, etc. The politburo confiscated private wealth not on behalf of the proletariat, but to enrich themselves.

The money pouring in from deals with Beijing lubricated America’s ruling classes, who wanted to be seduced—and so they ignored what was obvious about their new partners. What distinguished communists was not in fact their disdain for money or their trenchant critiques of consumer capitalism. Rather, it was their single-minded and paranoid pursuit of power.

By the time Xi Jinping began to consolidate his hold in 2012, it had become clear that Beijing wasn’t interested in joining the liberal international system. What China wanted was for its self-defined sphere of influence to be acknowledged by the United States and expanded throughout Asia. “When Xi came to power,” says Matthew Turpin, “the Chinese offered the U.S. a new form of international relations, which was actually a return to an older form: spheres of influence. The two powers would set norms in their own spheres of influence and show each other mutual respect. The Chinese said, ‘We get Asia, you get the West.’ The Obama administration rightly saw this as a complete rejection of the international system that had kept the peace for decades.”

Australian official John Garnaut, a respected former journalist who spent years reporting from China, explained the CCP’s paranoid worldview in an important speech he delivered in 2019: “The Western conspiracy to infiltrate, subvert and overthrow the People’s Party is not contingent on what any particular Western country thinks or does. It is an equation, a mathematical identity: The CCP exists and therefore it is under attack.”

In April 2013, the party’s Central Committee circulated a “Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere.” Document No. 9, as it came to be called, explained the confrontation with the Washington-led liberal international system in stark terms—China’s enemy, it argued, is the West. Party cadres were required to wage an “intense struggle” against “false trends,” including Western constitutional democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech—especially journalism—which the Communists defined as instruments used to weaken the party.

Xi and his top deputies were right of course. Starting with Mao, Communist Party officials knew what American officials were plotting with their strategy of “peaceful evolution.” What’s important about Document No. 9 is the insight it offers onto the party itself, a self-image drawn in the sharp hues of confrontation. Western liberalism is the party’s nemesis.

www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/lee-smith-china-coronavirus-1