For the past several years, talking tough on China has been a core message of Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again campaign for the White House. In 2011, in preparation for a potential 2012 presidential run, the real estate/hotel/casino mogul published Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, which included the following broadside against the communist regime in Beijing:
China is bilking us for hundreds of billions of dollars by manipulating and devaluing its currency. Despite all the happy talk in Washington, the Chinese leaders are not our friends. I’ve been criticized for calling them our enemy. But what else do you call the people who are destroying your children’s and grandchildren’s future? What name would you prefer me to use for the people who are hell bent on bankrupting our nation, stealing our jobs, who spy on us to steal our technology, who are undermining our currency, and who are ruining our way of life? To my mind, that’s an enemy. If we’re going to make America number one again, we’ve got to have a president who knows how to get tough with China, how to out-negotiate the Chinese, and how to keep them from screwing us at every turn.
Trump hasn’t softened his rhetoric on China since then. However, while Trump has been building a case against business-as-usual with Beijing, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (shown above in China in 1997), reportedly one of his top candidates for a running mate, has been building business relationships and mergers with the communist dictatorship.
Gingrich is a “senior adviser” to Dentons-Dechang, the world’s largest law firm and a major lobbying force and merger/acquisition operator for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). When he gave interviews in Chicago on May 12 regarding his potential VP selection, it was from the Dentons offices at Chicago’s Willis Tower.
Appearing there with him was Howard Dean, the former Vermont Democratic governor, former Democratic presidential candidate, and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Like Gingrich, Dean, the ultra-progressive Democrat, is a senior adviser to the globalist law firm. Another politician who has been recruited for the same elite stable is former Canadian Liberal Party prime minister Jean Chretien.
Chinese Lawyers Must Swear Allegiance to Communist Party
Dentons shot to the top of the list of worldwide legal behemoths when it merged last year with Beijing-based Dacheng, Communist China’s largest law firm. The combined Dentons-Dacheng entity now boasts nearly 7,000 attorneys and 125 offices in more than 50 countries. Dacheng has always been well-connected to China’s Communist Party power structure. Dacheng’s founder and current chairman is Peng Xuefeng, a former government attorney for the communist regime, who now professes to be a champion of the rule of law and human rights. We have not been able to find, however, any statement by Peng or Dentons-Dacheng concerning whether or not Peng and the firm’s other Chinese lawyers have taken the oath required for all attorneys in China.
The pledge all Chinese lawyers are required to take includes promising “to be faithful to the Motherland and the people, and to uphold the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and socialist system.” It’s a pretty safe assumption that Peng and the thousands of Chinese attorneys he has recruited have taken this pledge of submission to the Party dictators. Otherwise Peng and Denton-Dacheng would not be prospering now, with the blessings of the Party, while dissident attorneys and those defending human rights in China are being intimidated, jailed, tortured, and “disappeared,” under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s legal “reform” campaign (see here and here).
Dacheng’s chairman, Peng Xuefeng, is a member of the elite Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the front organization that provides the Communist Party of China (CPC) with the camouflage of “multi-party unity” among an assortment of fake “independent” parties. No honest analyst actually believes that the CPPCC is anything except a controlled asset of the CPC. The chairman of the CPPCC is Yu Zhengsheng, one of the Communist Party’s top leaders, and a member of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest ruling body. Yu Zhengsheng is the eighth Communist Party leader in succession to serve as chairman of the CPPCC, with mass-murderer/megalomaniac Mao Zedong being the first.
In 2014, the Dacheng law firm’s chairman Peng Xuefeng delivered a keynote speech at the CPPCC symposium, which was presided over by Yu Zhengsheng and other Communist Party officials. Peng would not have been accorded such an honor, nor would he be entrusted with negotiations and legal consultation on corporate and government megadeals for the Beijing regime, unless he and Dentons-Dacheng were considered loyal Party-line comrades.
Dentons-Dacheng is positioning itself to be the premier law firm to handle expansion of both outbound investment from China into the United States and inbound investment from the U.S. into China. That outbound investment will mean more and more Chinese buyouts of U.S. companies and assets, such as Smithfield Foods, the Chicago Stock Exchange, the AMC cinema chain, U.S. banking institutions, and more.
And increased inbound investment from the United States into China will only accelerate the destructive trend that has been stripping the U.S. of what little remains of our once-dominant competitive advantage vis-à-vis China. This clearly runs contrary to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” message. It also runs contrary to the claimed commitments of both Trump and Gingrich to the rule of law and fundamental human rights.
Lawyers “Dispatched to Oblivion”
Law firms such as Dentons — and their high-profile politicians-turned-advisers like Gingrich, Dean, and Chretien — provide a public relations velvet glove to cover the steel-fisted reality of China’s totalitarian system. “For all the semblance of a judicial system, with lawyers, judges and prosecutors, China’s courts remain a tool of a party-state that sees itself as above the law,” noted the Washington Post in an editorial this past January 18. “People can be detained for months — they simply disappear — and only later formally charged or tried. In China, detention means being sucked into the vortex of arbitrary rule.”
Even the globalist Post, hardly a bastion of conservatism or anti-communism, has noted what Gingrich, Dean, and company, apparently, refuse to see concerning the ruthless regime that is enriching them. Opined the Post editorial board:
In recent years, some lawyers and activists in China attempted, with extraordinary bravery, to navigate this system and work within it. Known as the rights defense movement, the lawyers demanded that authorities follow China’s own laws and rules. They worked in a sort of legal gray zone, tolerated — despite the party-state’s intolerance of dissent — because they handled individual cases and did not seem to threaten the regime.
“Now, these attorneys are being dispatched to oblivion,” the Post observed. “After rounding up or questioning 293 of them last summer, and detaining some for as long as six months, China has begun to issue formal charges of subverting state power, which can carry a sentence of life in prison. The charges are akin to saying the lawyers are trying to undermine the regime. Among those who have been accused in recent days are human rights lawyer Wang Yu and several others from the Fengrui law firm in Beijing who were part of the rights defense movement. Ms. Wang was detained in July and has not been heard from since, but lawyers said a notice from the police about the charges had been sent to her mother. Her husband, Bao Longjun, is also detained and facing charges.”
So, while truly heroic lawyers are dispatched to oblivion, Mr. Gingrich and his fellow globalists remain cheerfully, willfully oblivious to their plight, profiting from their oppressors, while continuing to dispense empty platitudes about human rights and liberty. Newt Gingrich’s hypocrisy on China and his fiendish flacking for Beijing’s communist thugocracy should make him thoroughly toxic to those vetting the VP candidates for Team Trump. Gingrich as running mate would signal either that Trump is dangerously ignorant and naïve concerning the ex-speaker’s positions and connections vis-à-vis China, or that Trump’s campaign rhetoric regarding China is just that, empty campaign bombast.
Photo of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich with second wife, Marianne Ginther Gingrich, in China in 1997: AP Images
(The New American never endorses candidates. Our purpose is to inform the electorate and enable them to draw their own conclusions.)
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