Beyond “Not Second Guessing”: Biden Wants Us To “Learn Together” From China’s One-Child Policy

“There are great orators that have come along in the world history who have been charlatans.” — Joe Biden, addressing students at China’s Sichuan University.

On Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden told a group of Chinese college students he was not “second-guessing” the regime’s vicious one-child policy of forced abortion. His crass and craven words to a group of educated people of child-bearing age made scant headlines back home. Biden could hardly object, since his administration’s Science Czar has written of his support for “compulsory abortion” for American women. However, the mainstream media have failed to report the rest of his speech, which had greater significance for American audiences. Joseph Biden said Americans were “inspired” by the Chinese, claimed Beijing had helped stop nuclear proliferation to North Korea and Iran, stated that Barack Obama hoped to export more dual-use technology to the nation, looked forward to more “cooperation” with the totalitarian state, and deemed China’s rise “a positive development…for the United States and the world as a whole.”

The vice president verbally bowed low before China during his address at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, on Sunday. He began by saying that the region he visited had suffered a terrible natural disaster, and Americans “were inspired by the way you all came together to help one another during that crisis.” Then began a string of lies and misdirection aimed at rewarding mythical good behavior with very real American military technology.

China: The Hippie Kingdom?

To the shock of those in the reality-based community, Biden claimed “China shares our concerns” about a nuclear North Korea and Iran. He boasted that the U.S. and China had worked “with international partners to counter the threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons, materials, and technology — so-called nonproliferation.”

This would come as news to Iran and North Korea. The United Nations — hardly a right-wing alarmist organization — issued a report in May confirming that North Korea trafficks nuclear weapons technology to Iran through China. Although the report only specified Pyongyang ships the illicit goods with the help of a “neighboring third country,” UN officials confirmed to multiple media outlets that country was China. Asia News reports China prevented the UN Security Council from adopting or releasing the report.

China has a long and ignoble history of selling the most dangerous weapons to the most murderous regimes. In 2002 alone, the Bush administration sanctioned five Chinese companies for exporting arms technology to Iran. China has long shipped steel, gyroscopes, accelerometers, and components for North Korea’s biological and chemical weapons. According to Korean expert Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu, Iran’s nuclear program is largely purchased from North Korea — and all experts realize North Korea’s program would be impossible without China.

Iran and Korea are not China’s only beneficiaries. “The North Koreans were Chinese proxies in proliferating ballistic designs, components and missiles to Pakistan,” said John Tkacik, a former head of China analysis at the State Department. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-FL, told The Washington Times, “China has been helping…rogue states avoid the sting of sanctions.”

Biden revealed Obama is committed to help the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) avoid the sting of Republican-enacted sanctions.

Change Yuan Can Believe In

The verbose veep bragged that:

[T]he president, once he took office, ordered for the first time in decades…a total reform of our export control system. Already, we have made thousands of new items available for export to China for exclusive civilian use that were not available before, some of which require a license, while others don’t. And tens of thousands of more items will become available very soon.

Biden rightly dubbed this “a significant change in our export policy and a rejection of those voices in America that say we should not export that kind of technology…for civilian use in China.”

True, in 2009 Obama transferred approval of dual use technology shipments bound for China from the White House to the Commerce Department. Bill Clinton had similarly loosened restrictions in the late 1990s, and Commerce so abused that authority that the Republican-controlled Congress passed the 1999 Defense Authorization Act.

Bill Clinton viewed China as a “strategic partner,” approving one special waiver after another to transfer technology with military applications to companies run or partially run by the Chinese military via the Commerce Department. Then-Commerce Secretary Ron Brown summed up the administration’s attitude by saying, “Once divided by ideology, we are now drawn together by shared economic interests.” From 1997-8, the Clinton administration allowed 191 supercomputers to be exported to Red China, checking exactly one to see if it was being used in a weapons program..

Keeping such technology in “civilian” hands, as Biden promised, will prove impossible. President Hu Jintao has pursued the overlapping policies of “rich nation, strong army” (fuguo qiangjun) and “melded development” (ronghe fazhan), which have forged the military and commercial sectors into a new, unified whole. Beijing has worked for decades to make all technology fungible, mutually benefiting industry and the People’s Liberation Army. Dean Cheng, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, wrote, “even as the U.S. is trading with the [People's Republic of China], it is also potentially benefiting the PLA and therefore may be weakening U.S. national security.” A 2005 RAND Corporation report found, “Imported equipment, R&D expertise, improved management skills, and modern design methods have raised the level of capabilities of many of China’s major shipyards.”

These realities made no dent on Biden. He stated he was “proud that more than 160 Fortune 500 companies are operating in Chengdu High-tech Zone.” He proceeded to praise the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (where the Brookings Institution reported the Obama administration has been “quite supportive of China’s increasingly ascendant role in international financial institutions”) and the Strategic Security Dialogue, which joins American and Chinese military leaders in dialogue. These initiatives, he hoped, would aid in “building cooperation” between America and China.

He made another ominous reference to cooperation when it came to China’s most inhuman policy.

Should We “Learn Together” About Forced Abortion?

Biden’s brief section on human rights was predictably muddled. While he mentioned “protecting human rights and freedoms,” he added Americans have “observed where we have failed, as well.” That he has. Obama has reported on alleged American misdeeds before the UN Human Rights Council and made criticizing this country a leitmotif of his. Biden humbly told the Chinese, “I do not pretend to have the answer.” Then, during the question and answer period, he proved he did not:

[A]s I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.

So, hopefully we can act in a way on a problem that’s much less severe than yours, and maybe we can learn together from how we can do that. (Emphasis added.)

Biden did not specify how he hoped the United States and China would “learn together” about curbing the U.S. entitlement program. However, this author was the first reporter to expose Science Czar John Holdren’s support for compulsory abortion in his 1977 book, Ecoscience, co-authored with “neo-Malthusian” hysterics Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Obama has proven himself the most pro-abortion president in history.

There is another component to the vice president’s remarks: Biden is a Catholic. Indeed, he once threatened, “The next Republican that tells me I’m not religious, I’m going to shove my rosary beads down their throat.” To date, this author has not read of any official in the Roman Catholic Church condemning Biden’s statement, although certainly the vast majority must be aghast.

If Catholics said nothing about Biden, the vice president returned the favor. Obama’s deputy said not a word about China’s persecution of the actual Catholic Church, its other Christian communities, the Falun Gong, or a single movement that acknowledges any power higher than the State.

China’s Success is Good for “The World as a Whole”

The vice president instead decided to end with a brief pep rally for Beijing. He concluded his exhortation to the Chinese people by encouraging them:

Believe in yourselves. Believe in yourselves. You have the capacity to do anything, anything anyone in the world has ever done. And the more you do, the better off my granddaughter and my great granddaughter’s generation are going to be.

Borrowing a phrase from his boss, he said, “let me be clear: I believed [during his first visit to Red China] in 1979 and said so, and I believe now, that a rising China is a positive development, not only for the people of China but for the United States and the world as a whole.”

Immediately after his statement that some of the world’s greatest orators have been “charlatans,” Biden told his audience “the most important thing to look to in a leader’s speech is not the elegance or the rhetorical flourish of his or her comments, but the judgment of whether or not you believe they are sincere in what they’re saying.” Unfortunately, it appears in Biden, the Chinese have found a man who is most sincere about longing for their success.

Update: The White House has moved to “clarify” Biden’s comments on the one-child policy. Biden’s spokeswoman, Kendra Barkoff, e-mailed The Daily Caller to say, in fact, Biden’s speech criticized China’s forced abortion policy:

The Obama Administration strongly opposes all aspects of China’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization. The Vice President believes such practices are repugnant. He also pointed out, in China, that the policy is, as a practical matter, unsustainable. He was arguing against the One Child Policy to a Chinese audience.

It is reassuring to know that Biden meant to say that, instead of what he actually said while he was in China, when he had the opportunity to criticize this “repugnant” policy to the Communists’ face.

Barkoff did not say if Biden retracted the rest of his speech: That China’s success was good for our children and grandchildren, and thus deserves to be rewarded with American technology that can be used to enhance Beijing’s military regime.