We Don't Have to Trade With China

And, yet, we do:

Canada’s Defence Minister Bill Blair says that two dangerous intercepts took place involving Chinese fighter jets and a Canadian Cyclone helicopter on Oct. 29, including flares deployed in the path of the helicopter.

The intercepts took place near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, “well outside of the territorial limits of both China or any other countries,” Blair said, and while the Canadian helicopter was conducting routine exercises in the region.

The CH-148 Cyclone helicopter had taken off from the HMCS Ottawa, which the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) says is deployed in the region as part of Canada’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

The CAF says that the first encounter with the jets was deemed safe, but two subsequent encounters were not.

In the first encounter, a J-11 Chinese fighter jet flew over the Canadian helicopter. One flyover took place with “little separation” and caused the helicopter to experience turbulence, the military said.

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Joe Biden’s collusion with China is back in the news becausethe House Oversight Committee has just released its latest report showing “thebig guy” actually did get at least one 10 percent payout from the Biden/Chinascheme, precisely matching his stake in the venture as it was sketched out in a notorious May 2017 email. But this is “news” only because the paper trail is now, inevitably, catching up with the outlines of the story.

Thanks to the extensive excavation of Biden financial records by Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), followed by the dogged reporting of the New York Post once Hunter’s abandoned laptop was exposed, the outlines of the story were publicly available before Election Day 2020. The Biden/China scheme may not have been sufficiently known, but it was eminently knowable — so much so that I presented it in detail in “A Collusion Tale: China and the Bidens,” which we published on October 31, 2020 — the weekend before the election.

The story has gotten more damning with the additional evidence unearthed by the Oversight Committee under the direction of Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.). But it hasn’t changed.

CEFC, the Shanghai-based energy conglomerate with which Joe Biden and his family joined forces, was China. To describe it as a “thinly veiled” arm of Xi Jinping’s monstrous regime would exaggerate the camouflage. It was run by Ye Jianming, whom the Bidens deemed a protégé of Xi — as the president’s brother, Jim Biden, conceded to federal investigators.

How could it be otherwise? As I recounted in October 2020, CEFC’s position as a privileged “private” company was established by the regime in 2006 (when Xi was the rising star of the CCP). CEFC was backed by a 30-billion-yuan line of credit by the regime-controlled China Development Bank (not coincidentally, a partner in a second Biden venture with Xi’s regime). Prior to the founding of CEFC, Ye had led the International Liaison Division of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). As is customary with big “private” firms in China, regime officials were threaded throughout CEFC’s ranks. The firm conducted joint activities with the PLA’s General Political Department — even funding a training center for applied psychological operations and propaganda against Taiwan.

Ye occasionally traveled with Xi and served as his emissary in foreign commercial dealings, particularly in Eastern Europe. Two other top CEFC executives — both of whom became Biden business partners — were tightly tied to Xi’s regime: Zhang Jianjun and Patrick Ho (Ho Chi-ping). Zhang was CEFC’s executive director and traveled with Xi to Moscow in 2017 for meetings with Vladimir Putin over CEFC’s prospective acquisition of a 14 percent stake in Rosneft, the Russian energy giant — a deal that fell through when CEFC suddenly succumbed amid a spying scandal in 2018. As we shall see, Ho — memorably dubbed the “f***ing spy chief of China” by Hunter Biden — was the central player in that scandal; he had been the regime’s home-affairs secretary for Hong Kong.

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The United States is fiercely competing with Communist Chinain many fields, not the least of which is medical research. China seeks to supplant the U.S. as the global leader in everything from developing vaccines to curing diseases. Remarkably, the U.S. National Institutes of Health has boosted China for years, as Americans learned during the Covid-19 pandemic when it came out that the NIH funded research in Wuhan’s virus lab. Now the NIH has given China another gift by downplaying research excellence in favor of racial equity.