“Elite capture” can refer to different things, but to the Chinese Communist Party, China’s intelligence apparatus, or those involved in quasi-private business ventures, it’s a tool crucial to their success. The idea is simple enough: By tempting another country’s elite with money, access, and favors, you move them to see their interests and China’s interests as intertwined or even the same.
The Chinese are not subtle about this, and they barely try to hide it. They practice it around the world, most notably in Africa in pursuit of their Belt and Road Initiative. But elites in Western democracies have proven to be a soft touch, particularly among nongovernmental elites.
What separates this from ordinary diplomacy or even the time-honored business slogan that “the customer is always right” is the power wielded by those who succumb to the temptation. The book investigates the public activities and statements of some of the most powerful people in the United States. From the world of Silicon Valley, we explore Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Tim Cook of Apple, and Bill Gates of Microsoft. From the world of Wall Street, we look at Ray Dalio of Bridgewater, the largest hedge-fund investment company in the world, and Larry Fink of BlackRock. From academia, we explore the actions of Harvard and Yale universities. We survey the relationship histories of the Bush family, the Trudeau family of Canada, the Pelosi family, and of course, the Biden family.
Yet the news each day is full of still other examples. The way China has co-opted all these people and institutions—and others besides—is alarmingly similar, straightforward, and not hard to piece together. In 30 years of investigative reporting, I’m used to having to dig through endless layers of shell corporations, intermediaries, bank records, and tax filings to reveal these connections. Yet the connections between the Chinese regime and the people and institutions we reviewed fairly glowed on the page once we determined to look at the mechanics of corruption through the lens of Chinese capture of American elites. This is one reason I have said this is the scariest investigation I have ever done.
Pressed to the wall, each of the individuals we discuss would deny their role in helping China gain access to American capital markets, American military and surveillance technology, or American policymaking. Each would say they are merely pursuing business opportunities that the Chinese market has offered them, as any goods capitalist should. They may argue that the companies they run are truly international corporations and, as such, obligated to take as neutral a stance on American foreign policy as possible.
And they are not fully wrong about that.
Nor are they all as obsequious about it as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. At a 2015 state dinner at the White House for visiting Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the third-richest man in the world squired his ethnically Chinese, seven-months-pregnant wife over to be introduced to Xi and immediately made a strange request. Would Xi give their unborn child his Chinese name? The communist dictator was shocked by the request and politely declined, explaining it would be “too great a responsibility” to give to a total stranger.
Nor are they as star-struck about it as Ray Dalio, who wrote in his 2017 book, which bears the title “Principles,” of his “personal hero,” Wang Qishan. “Every time I speak with Wang,” Dalio swooned, “I feel like I get closer to cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the universe.” Wang is the second most powerful man in the Chinese Communist Party and is known as Xi’s enforcer. The Economist called him “the most feared man in China.” But not to Dalio. Readers learn, on the very next page of that book that at the same time, Dalio was trying to start a new hedge fund in China.
Of course, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, was present at an exclusive meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle, where tech titans met Xi even before that 2015 state dinner. When Xi entered the room, a thunderstruck Cook turned to a colleague and said, “Did you feel the room shake?”
Yet the Chinese communists are not absolutists about this. There is a common phrase in Mandarin that roughly translates: “A lot of help, with a little badmouth.” The phrase captures that the practical Chinese know their friends will have to criticize China’s actions from time to time. But so long as those friends are advancing China’s interests on the important things, they will deign to overlook that.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was a harsh critic of China’s human rights abuses. In her first term in Congress, she found herself in Tiananmen Square in 1991 and bravely unfurled a banner inscribed, “To those who died for Democracy in China.” Furious Chinese police seized the banner. “I started running,” Pelosi recalled. “And my colleagues, some of them, got a little roughed up. The press got treated worse because they had cameras, and they were detained.”
She too has recently evolved. And her husband, Paul, has since made millions of dollars in deals with China as a partner investor in Matthews International Capital Management, a pioneer in the Chinese investment market, and through his other ventures. She has, for two years now, blocked efforts by Congress to investigate the origins of the COVID virus. With much of the evidence pointing to the possibility of a lab leak of the virus in Wuhan, Pelosi ordered the Democrats in Congress not to cooperate with any efforts to investigate the matter.
The behavior, statements, and actions of these and many other people we discuss at length in the book, certainly suggest the intertwining of their interests with China’s interests. And those interests are thick enough to block out the humanitarian and national security concerns that China’s rise is built upon.
As the muckraker and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
