THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com.
Thomas McArdle
Biden Turning US Credit Agency Into Beijing Ally The Export-Import Bank’s explicit objective is to counter the PRC threat
W
hile it’s bad enough that President Joe Biden has nominated in Reta Jo Lewis a longtime, committed appeaser of the oppressive, genocidal, and expansionist People’s Republic of China to chair the Export-Import Bank of the United States, it’s probably worse that prominent U.S. business entities continue to gulp the Kool-Aid about the long widely accepted but now thoroughly discredited notion that capitalism is wooing China into democratic reform and lawfulness. Or, worse still, prominent businesses themselves actively taking part in Beijing’s bloody persecution of its own people. Placing Lewis at the helm of EXIM is comparable to Chamberlain taking over from Churchill against the Nazis, instead of the other way around. President Donald Trump’s EXIM chairman, Kimberly Reed, secured unprecedented broad bipartisan support within Congress for the export credit agency with a multi-pronged commitment to comprehensive reform of EXIM, including increased transparency, strengthened taxpayer protections, zero tolerance for “bad actor” corruption, and preventing the displacement of private investment for exports; plus, most importantly, the launching of a “Program on China and Transformational Exports,” a project unlike anything EXIM had done since its establishment during the New Deal. EXIM’s China Program, mandated by Congress, was intended to make EXIM’s private loan guarantees and other products for U.S. exporters “fully competitive with rates, terms, and other conditions established by the People’s Republic of China” for its export business interests, utilizing 20 percent of EXIM’s total financing authority–some $27 billion out of $135 billion–and to advance competition with China in “innovation, employment, and technological stan-
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dards” focused on 10 industries ranging from 5G to fintech to renewable energy to biotechnology. At variance to someone as serious in recognizing the China threat as Reed, Lewis has spent many years accommodating Beijing’s economic warfare against the United States. She is a strategic adviser to the United States Heartland China Association, an organization with links to communist China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Biden’s nominee is a strategic adviser to an organization with links to communist China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As Lewis’s USHCA biography boasts, she has traveled extensively throughout China, meeting with Party secretaries, mayors, governors, and city secretaries of trade and investment and education in more than 12 provincial localities. In the Obama administration, Lewis was the principal negotiator between the United States and China in establishing the first U.S. Governor’s Forums with China. That initiative in particular demonstrates the PRC’s proficiency in jumping over Washington heads and infiltrating American economic life–with little disguise. Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went so far as to appear before the National Governors Association in 2019 and devoted his entire speech to China’s insidious efforts to persuade state chief executives and regional business leaders that Beijing’s interests were also theirs. Pompeo told the governors that “a Chinese government-backed think tank in Beijing produced a report that assessed all 50 of America’s governors on their attitudes towards China. They labeled each of you ‘friendly,’ ‘hardline,’ or ‘ambiguous.’ ... and, in fact, whether you are viewed by the CCP as friendly or hardline,
know that it’s working you. Know that it’s working the team around you.” Pompeo’s speech has conveniently vanished from the State Department’s website. Fortunately, the public can still watch it on YouTube. A year ago, Lewis proposed that the State Department “reinstate the U.S.-China Governors Forum to Promote Sub-National Cooperation, for which U.S. participation was discontinued in 2020 ... strengthening bilateral trade, investment, and technology exchanges by locales on both sides.” Nothing could be more in line with Beijing’s economic strategy against the United States. Unfortunately, much of corporate America either can’t see the threat or only see dollar signs. “World peace through world trade,” declares Apple CEO Tim Cook, who argued that the company has a “responsibility” to do business in as many places in the world as it can, and, of course, make countless billions doing so. In May 2021, The Information revealed that “seven companies supplying device components, coatings and assembly services to Apple ... are linked to alleged forced labor involving Uyghurs and other oppressed minorities in China. At least five of those companies received thousands of Uyghur and other minority workers at specific factory sites or subsidiaries that did work for Apple.” Why settle for cheap labor when you can get slave labor? The notion that Lewis, who for so long has been blind to the destructive influence of the PRC upon the U.S. economy, and who fails to see Beijing’s underlying objectives of expansionism in sync with its economic warfare, can now pivot and oversee an agency whose explicit objective is to counter the PRC threat on a global economic playing field tilted against the United States, with at least 116 rival export credit agencies of other nations also opposing EXIM, is ludicrous.
