Trump told Xi he would keep shtum about Hong Kong
Trump is generous though. He doesn’t share his views on Biden with Ukraine only – no indeed! China gets to hear his opinions on the subject too.
When Donald Trump suggested today, at a press conference, that China should investigate Joe Biden he said he’d never actually pushed Chinese leader Xi Jinping to investigate his political rivals.
Now CNN reports that Trump discussed Biden and Elizabeth Warren with Xi during a whole call. He also reportedly told Xi he’d keep quiet about the protests in Hong Kong, so long as trade talks between China and the US progressed:
During a phone call with Xi on June 18, Trump raised Biden’s political prospects as well as those of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who by then had started rising in the polls, according to two people familiar with the discussion. In that call, Trump also told Xi he would remain quiet on Hong Kong protests as trade talks progressed.
The White House record of that call was later stored in the highly secured electronic system used to house a now-infamous phone call with Ukraine’s President and which helped spark a whistleblower complaint that’s led Democrats to open an impeachment inquiry into Trump. On Thursday, Trump told reporters at the White House he’d consider asking his counterpart in Beijing to investigate the Bidens, adding to a growing list of foreign leaders he’s tried to enlist in his attempts to bring down a potential Democratic challenger.
Though it’s unclear whether Trump actually asked Xi to investigate his rivals, it seems he was willing to trade favors — and look the other way while China violently quashes protests in Hong Kong, so long as Xi continued to negotiate on trade.
And by golly he has looked the other way.
Even amidst mounting violence in Hong Kong this week, Trump offered only a message of congratulations to Xi, tweeting: “Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!”
Earlier today senator Warren published an op-ed in Foreign Policy, urging Washington to stand up for the protesters.
Washington is too busy stand up for the Trumpers.
I must say that this abandoning of Hong Kong for a quid pro quo strikes me as almost worse than the Ukrainian business. The Chinese government is, as we know, not afraid of a good massacre to establish its point. Not, of course, that the British government seems to care about the matter, so far as I can see. We left Hong Kong, and as for those agreements, they are an old story, and things just move on, don’t they? Like the Good Friday agreement, they are best ignored, as are all those boring foreign entanglements that BREXIT will allow us to be free of.
I recommend, incidentally, Amelia Gentleman’s ‘The Windrush Betrayal’, in which people of West Indian extraction who were British citizens had their lives destroyed by the policies of Cameron, May & Amber Rudd, who went so far as to encourage good, upstanding citizens to inform on any neighbours whom they suspected of being ‘illegals’. If that sounds like the kind the kind of terror the Nazis and Communists unleashed, it is because it is.