Republicans are criticizing the Biden administration’s lukewarm response to the protests against strict zero-Covid policies in China–though there appear to be signs the country is easing those restrictions. The administration said it backed the right of the people to peacefully protest in China and around the world but stopped short of criticizing Beijing’s leadership.

Republicans believe President Biden, who met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping earlier this month, should be warning China of massive consequences if it cracks down on protestors. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called the White House response “pitiful,” adding in a tweet: “At a potentially historic inflection point, Dems shill for the CCP.”

Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten agrees, arguing that Biden has his own personal reasons for not wanting to rock the China boat.

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 Patriarch 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 U.S. 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.