A pair of biotech behemoths are shedding light on the aggressive courting of Chinese corporate money by local US elected officials despite clear-cut dire national security concerns. The China cash chase has thus far not had serious political ramifications, but all that may be about to change in the radioactively partisan atmosphere of Election Year 2024.
“For more than a decade, Chinese biotech pioneers WuXi AppTec and BGI Group have forged close scientific and financial relationships developed by US drugmakers, research scientists, and start-ups around Philadelphia and across the United States,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported April 16. “Now, Congress is threatening to cut off federal funding to companies that do business with WuXi and BGI, citing links to the Chinese military that some US officials say makes it hard for such companies to keep the data of their US customers private and therefore creates a national-security risk.”
The extent of the Chinese biotech footprint in America is alarming. And it’s not just Philadelphia.
‘Welcomed as Job and Revenue Generators’
“WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics have also received millions of dollars in tax incentives to build sprawling research and manufacturing sites in Massachusetts and Delaware that local government officials have welcomed as job and revenue generators,” The New York Times reported April 15.
(Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
“WuXi AppTec said it has about 1,900 US employees,” The Times added. “Officials in Delaware gave the company $19 million in tax funds in 2021 to build a research and drug manufacturing site that is expected to employ about 1,000 people when fully operational next year, public records and company reports show.”
State and municipal elected officials pining for China investment largesse heedless of the grave threat posed to the nation at large are a dirty secret of American politics that may finally fully come out in 2024. The Philadelphia Inquirer, a Democrat-aligned ruling progressive establishment media outlet, has discovered the beat at a very convenient time for its purposes. Dave McCormick, who has just captured the Republican nomination for a US Senate seat, has a track record on the issue that is astonishing, yet hardly unique.
Mitch McConnell’s Senate China Dolls
As Liberty Nation documented on April 8, outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “has cleared a path for GOP nomination for not one but two former top executives of Bridgewater Associates, a private equity behemoth so deeply invested in China that it manages state money for the Asian communist superpower.”
Along with McCormick, the former CEO of Bridgewater, the firm’s ex-chief financial officer Nella Domenici, daughter of longtime GOP Sen. Pete Domenici, is expected to claim the party’s Senate nod in New Mexico.
Dave McCormick (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Democrats and their big-box media allies are ready to pounce. The Inquirer launched a journalism nuclear strike against McCormick on April 12.
“Republican US Senate candidate Dave McCormick led a hedge fund that invested millions in Chinese companies that produced military equipment,” the paper related. “While McCormick was CEO or co-CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the hedge fund held more than $200 million in stock in at least 20 Chinese companies that were later sanctioned by the United States for being part of China’s military industrial complex, Bloomberg Government reported.”
Shockingly, active involvement with industrial branches of Chinese military expansionism has been par for the course in US politics for years. Democrats and Republicans are both involved. Perhaps the most outrageous examples in recent years involve prominent governors for each party.
Rocketry, Aerospace, Mining, and Ores
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who ran for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2020, gave an interview in 2015 with China state-run media outlet CGTN in which he begged Chinese companies to come to the Evergreen State and take advantage of its high-tech offerings, including rocketry.
“Because of our great growth in computer science, we now have biotechnology, bioinformatics, aerospace, rocketry, global health, video gaming. And what we’re finding [is] we’re reaching critical mass where those industries are giving you a portfolio of intellectual talent that’s really unsurpassed,” Inslee crowed in his sales pitch to the Asian communist superpower.
Not to be outdone, Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in 2017 sought to woo China by touting the Grand Canyon State’s vital military-grade natural resources.
“We just had a great meeting with the Chinese Chamber of Commerce just now,” Ducey told state-affiliated publication China Daily. “And, very exciting, lots of opportunities, including public-private partnerships. I’ve mentioned semiconductors, electronics, aerospace, our defense industry, mining and ores that we do … So I think from the franchise business to the aerospace and defense business, we would like to do more business with China, with Chinese business people.”
McCormick replied to the blistering Inquirer report on his China canoodling by saying it is up to US government officials to take the lead on shutting down this dangerous business activity.
“The private sector follows the government’s lead, and in the case of Bridgewater, once the government issued its executive orders, Bridgewater complied with all its terms,” McCormick told the paper. “I continue to fully oppose US investments in Chinese companies that the US government has determined are threats to US national security and I think we now need to decouple our economy from China’s in strategically sensitive industries.”
But what happens when the people running the government are also grabbing the Chinese money as fast as it is being doled out?
