Opponents of the president have been trying for years to tie Joe Biden to China, including the think tank where classified documents were found. But a new report throws some cold water on that.
Joe Biden and China
Ever since he started running for president, opponents of President Joseph Biden have been trying to tie him to China.
Whether it’s conspiracy theories involving Hunter Biden or dissatisfaction with Biden’s response to the Chinese spy balloon, much of the case against Biden involves his supposed close ties to China.
One of those ties, supposedly, involves the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. That’s the think tank that Joe Biden set up, in association with the University of Pennsylvania, after the end of his vice presidency; Biden began a leave of absence from the Center that has continued since he began running for president in 2019.
That institution has most often been in the news after classified documents were found in its Washington office.
Ever since then, Republicans have sought to find a China connection to the Penn Biden Center. In January, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, wrote a letter calling for the University of Pennsylvania to “provide information about anonymous Chinese donations to UPenn and the Penn Biden Center.” Such donations, per the letter, “potentially influenced Biden Administration policies.”
“President Biden’s pattern of mishandling classified documents is alarming. The Committee is concerned about who had access to these documents given the Biden family’s financial connections to foreign actors and companies,” the letter from Comer said. “The American people deserve to know whether the Chinese Communist Party, through Chinese companies, influenced potential Biden Administration policies with large, anonymous donations to UPenn and the Penn Biden Center.”
Looks Like the GOP Got This One Wrong…
Donald Trump, not long after, claimed in a video tweeted by his son that the Biden Penn Center is itself “China-funded.”
Despite the insinuation, a Newsweek fact-check found that while Penn, the university itself, received large donations from people in China, none of those went directly to the Penn Biden Center.
And the donations from China form a small fraction of the total money received by the university.
“It is important to reiterate that the Penn Biden Center has never solicited or received any gifts from any Chinese or other foreign entity,” a university spokesperson told Newsweek. “In fact, the University has never solicited any gifts for the Center.”
On Monday, the Philadelphia Inquirer looked at the claims and quoted education funding experts as stating that the amount of money received from China by the university is not unusual for a university of its size or stature. Other elite universities, like Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia, all saw similar increases in donations from China in the relevant time frame.
More recently, with the onset of the pandemic, donations from China to major universities have fallen sharply.
If the conspiracy were true and China was seeking to launder money to the president through Penn, one would think those donations would have risen with Biden in office.
The majority of donations to Penn from China, in recent years, went to The Wharton School, Penn’s business school, which has a Beijing campus.
Trump is an alum of Wharton, although the university has worked to distance itself from Trump during his time in politics.
“There’s just many more people [in China] who can afford an American education, who can afford to send their children to go to school here, or to make more donations,” Karin Fischer, a reporter on international education for the Chronicle of Higher Education, told the Inquirer.
Experts also told the newspaper that such donation data is not always accurate, because standards have traditionally varied widely.
“The Department [of Education] has been unclear on definitions and has never carried out formal rule-making, so there is confusion about how to report,” Sarah Spreitzer, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, told the Inquirer.
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Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
