Biden Should Shun Xi at the G20

World leaders pose with Italian medical team members for a group photograph on day one of the G20 leaders summit in Rome, Italy, on Oct. 30, 2021. Ludovic Marin/Pool via Reuters

Commentary

China’s new “emperor for life,” Xi Jinping, is foisting a whirlwind tour on the world’s presidents and prime ministers, including at the upcoming G20 meeting in Bali. There, he will tell them to reject U.S. leadership and embrace China instead.

Xi will watch how countries address key issues that separate the China hawks from the China doves. Most importantly, he will want his international followers to reject all things Taiwan, ignore the Uyghur genocide, and oppose sanctions on China.

Those who follow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) line can expect Xi to dole out economic, diplomatic, and personal favors. The latter can be millions of dollars in cash bribes.

Diplomatic bennies will be significant for rogue states like Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Beijing uses its U.N. Security Council seat to veto any proposals that limit their human rights abuse and aggression toward neighbors.

The most shameless recent suitor to Xi was German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who bucked his own voters to visit Beijing and sell China 24.9 percent of a German port terminal. Olaf slid it in under the 25 percent that would have required cabinet approval.

Olaf is the first of the G7 leaders to visit China since the pandemic, so he may have hoped that his early obeisance and the port stake would yield a particularly lucrative outcome.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz speaks to the media on the last day of the three-day G7 summit at Schloss Elmau, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, on June 27, 2022. Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images

What he walked away with, however, made him look like a fool. Beijing approved Germany’s BioNTech vaccine for German expat use in China but not for Chinese citizens. This paltry return on the selling of his soul raises the question—is Olaf getting something else for his kowtow?

The Biden administration also wants a visit with Xi at this month’s G20 meeting in Bali. They’re using climate talks as an excuse. China is the world’s worst and most unrepentant polluter, and will likely break its 2016 Paris pledge, as it has doubled emissions since 2005.

Over that same period, the United States decreased emissions, which would be fine if China followed suit. But it has not, meaning the U.S. reductions are a drag on our economy when we should be maximizing it to beat Beijing.

Hunter Biden has already leveraged his dad’s political power with big money in China. He reportedly invested $420,000 for 10 percent of BHR, a Chinese state-backed private equity fund. He was a board member of the company until 2019, and one of his investment companies apparently still holds a 10 percent stake.

President Joe Biden’s corporate backers, like Apple, are doing even better “by pledging big investments and staying quiet on sensitive subjects,” according to the Financial Times this week. Apple “acquiesced to moving storage of Chinese user data to a data centre owned by the Guizhou provincial government, and it has removed thousands of apps from the local App Store at the request of Beijing’s censors.”

By operating in China, Apple is losing its soul, transforming into its host, and influencing Democrats to go soft on Beijing.

“Apple’s vision of a controlled, locked-down ecosystem for the customer experience maps into the same vision, the same control, that the Communist party wants to have in China,” according to an expert quoted in the Financial Times.

U.S. President Joe Biden meets with China’s leader Xi Jinping during a virtual summit from the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington on Nov. 15, 2021. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Just as the CCP threatens Apple to get the company to cancel its citizens’ privacy and freedom of speech, it can threaten climate destruction to lever Biden in its preferred direction on other matters.

Biden fell into that trap by seeking Xi’s cooperation on COVID-19, which he did not get. Now he is falling into the trap again by seeking cooperation on climate issues.

Instead of cooperation from the CCP, Biden will get environmental brinkmanship. Xi will have no qualms about risking global warming to get concessions on Taiwan, the Uyghurs, market access, and technology transfer.

It’s time for America and the world to stop their deference and homage to Xi, the world’s most dangerous dictator, and its biggest threat to peace and security.

To avoid the catastrophe of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, let’s all just say no.

No, we don’t need the president of the United States to meet with Xi. We need him to stand on principle and shun the totalitarian.

No, we don’t need more business and cooperation with China. We need decoupling.

No, we can’t convince Xi to be a nice guy or an environmentalist. He’s proven himself genocidal to his own population and willing to threaten war against peaceful democratic countries. To that end, he is polluting the Earth to the point of irreversible and catastrophic warming.

Xi is a disaster for all living beings and should be locked in the Forbidden City, forbidden to all with an ounce of ethics. He should be shunned until he abdicates to democracy.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.