If we’re about to witness a replay of Tiananmen Square amid the white paper revolution, what does the Biden administration plan to do about it? In October, the President and his national security strategy said that, quote, Americans will support universal human rights and stand in solidarity with those beyond our shores who seek freedom and dignity. Unquote. It’s not at all clear that this pledge to stand with the oppressed extends to China, judging by the administration’s muted, to say the least, response as Chinese citizens have taken to the streets amid widespread protests of Beijing’s draconian zero COVID policy and the tyrannical Chinese Communist Party behind it. 

The White House delivered a passive and unsentimental message on China after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, reiterated since, focusing more on the efficacy of Chinese Coronavirus policies than the hardships faced by those suffering under them and the right of the affected to dissent. 

Not that anyone asked, but the administration emphasized that quote, zero COVID is not a policy we are pursuing, that it might not prove effective for China and that America’s favored public health tools are superior. As for the Chinese protesters, the administration simply affirmed that, quote, everyone has the right to peacefully protest including in the PRC. Wow, that’s bold. And another dispassionate statement by an NSC Spokesman John Kirby had the following exchange with Real Clear Politics is Phillip Wegmann. 

The question is why the support for protesting but not for these protesters, protesters who as tanks rolled down the streets are undoubtedly putting their lives on the line and standing up against Xi. What causes the Biden administration to curl in a ball as the Chinese people chide a communist biomedical security state, under which their countrymen were left to perish to be burnt alive, allegedly behind doors the CCP sealed shut in a room.  

It can’t be that Biden has a blanket policy of strict non-interference in others’ business. His White House has waded into the internal affairs of all from the Canadians to the Brazilians and the Hungarians to the Israelis. It hasn’t been bashful when it comes to, with public displays of affection, for some people facing down adversarial regimes like the Ukrainians. 

It doesn’t seem the Biden administration fears that it will be accused of hypocrisy if it challenges totalitarian Chinese lockdown policies that merely represent the logical extreme ends of the very ones long embraced by its own officials. The administration made that clear when it focused in its initial statements on drawing a line between its favorite policies and China’s and could it be that Biden’s stated devotion to human rights is conditional?

Perhaps. It might weigh what it considers national security interests or economics, overtaking a moral stance in defense of liberty-minded protesters against tyrants who threaten to massacre them. Or it could be acting out of fear, fear that China will retaliate should Biden give voice to critics of the Gulag-operating CCP regime that is America’s most formidable adversary. But there’s still another factor looming in the background which ought to be front and center. That factor is the Biden family’s dubious dealings with our greatest adversaries led by Communist China, in which at minimum, his son and brother monetized Patriach Joe’s public office for private gain. 

We don’t know the full scope of the dealings and the extent to which the big guy might have profited from them. But it’s well documented that during and after Joe Biden’s time as Vice President, when he managed a China portfolio that proved very favorable to Beijing, that his family exploited relationships with CCP-tied individuals and entities that generated an estimated more than $30 million for the Biden’s. 

This after a career spent at the highest levels of the US government as Senator and then as Vice President, in which Biden gleefully, cheerfully helped facilitate China’s rise to our greatest adversary. 

The Biden’s influence peddling creates conflicts for Joe that compromise him and us. Yet he has never been formally investigated, let alone held to account. And the big guy has also surrounded himself, by the way, with like-minded soft on China officials who themselves have demonstrated dubious ties to the CCP. We don’t know what will become of the white paper revolution, how organized the protesters are, who may be driving them, what their ultimate aims are, how the CCP will respond and who and what will prevail. We can and must debate what our national interest requires with respect to China and the brave dissidents that are challenging that regime, including how and to what extent we ought to engage in information fear and what we can realistically hope to achieve by public and private efforts in service of America’s national interests. But the buck stops with the President. He has more power than anyone. And given his family’s dealings and his obfuscation about them, we are left to question whether his private interest impacts his approach to the national interest with respect to China, and is therefore causing the administration to pull punches. One simply can’t sever the Biden family’s China ties from the Biden administration’s China policies. Those courageously taking on Xi Jinping in the streets today may well bear the brunt of them.