A recent investigation by The National Pulse discovered that top officials in the new Biden administration once served as fellows at an organisation funded by the Chinese Communist Party.
Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Senior Adviser on China in Policy Planning Mira Rapp-Hooper had once worked as fellows at Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center, the organisation known for accepting millions of dollars as financial aid from Chinese Communist Party-linked sources, as per the report in National Pulse.
The Center was reestablished in 2016 after a staggering donation of $30,000,000 made by the son of the late Paul Tsai, Vice Chairman and co-founder of Alibaba Joseph Tsai. Alibaba, founded by Jack Ma, is believed to have close financial and personal ties to the senior Communist mandarins.
Besides accepting millions of dollars in grant, the Paul Tsai China Center has frequently hosted the Chinese government and military personnel as speakers and fellows and provided them with a platform to raise their opinions.
Joseph Tsai is also a ‘patron’ of the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), a Chinese Communist Party-backed group exposed by The National Pulse for sponsoring trips to China for journalists and politicians in exchange for ‘favourable coverage’ and part of the country’s United Front efforts ‘to co-opt and neutralise sources of opposition to the Chinese Communist Party and encourage ‘positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies,’” the National Pulse reports.
The Center also came under the scanner after a letter from the Department of Education sought financial records related to cash—estimated to be around $375 million—the organisation had received from foreign governments but failed to report The National Pulse said.
Visiting lecturers of the Yale Center include CCP leaders, PLA advisers and senior Chinese officials
Though the Center describes its purpose as “helping advance China’s legal reforms, improving U.S.–China relations, and increasing understanding of China in the United States”, but in reality, the Center partners extensively with the Chinese Communist Party and its American supporters.
According to the report, those invited to speak at the Center included professors at Chinese Communist-party run universities, CCP apparatchiks, and PLA advisers. One of the visiting fellows at the Paul Tsai China Center is Li Qiang, who is the Director of the Military Law Institute at the China University of Political Science and Law, and a former member on “expert panel on law-fare for the Chinese PLA Air Force” from 2015 to 2020.
One of the speakers invited at the Center was the Deputy Director-General of the Office of Senior Advisors to the state-run People’s Bank of China and Secretary-General of the Financial Research Center in the Office of the State Council. Another one served as a former official in the China Food and Drug Administration.
In addition to having senior Chinese officials, closely linked with the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese military establishment, the Center’s American counterparts have been fierce proponents of CCP in the western media outlets. Visiting Lecturer and Senior Fellow Jamie Horsley tried to deflect the blame of the COVID-19 from China in a Brookings Institute piece titled: “Let’s end the COVID-19 blame game: Reconsidering China’s role in the pandemic”.
Another senior fellow and visiting lecturer Susan Thornton were among one of the five academicians who had written a letter to the Trump administration, vigorously arguing that ‘China is not an enemy’.
Biden calls Uyghur genocide by CCP a different ‘cultural norm’
It is worth noting that the revelations about Biden’s top officials’ connection with the Chinese Communist Party came in the wake of the US President’s controversial remarks on China’s treatment of its Uyghur minorities. Biden, in a televised event on Wednesday last week, called the failure of Chinese Premier Xi Jinping to speak on the genocide of Uyghur Muslims as part of a “different norm”.
“Chinese leaders – and if you know anything about Chinese history – the time when China has been victimised by the outer world is when they haven’t been unified at home. The central principle of Xi Jinping is that there must be a United techno-controlled China and he uses his rationals for the things he does based on that.”
However, the remarks normalising the cultural genocide against Uyghur minorities did not sit well with the social media users, who were quick to slam the US President for being soft on China and rationalising the atrocities meted out by the Chinese Communist Party on the ethnic minorities.
