When China’s President Xi Jinping came to San Francisco for a summit last week, power brokers from Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley scrambled to roll out the red carpet, giving Xi a standing ovation and even paying $40,000 each to have dinner with the Communist Chinese leader.
For his part, President Joe Biden did his best to throw cold water on talks of “decoupling” from America’s strongest adversary.
My new book, Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, Their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life, reveals that the powerful global elites and their preferred politicians like Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom not only don’t want to decouple from China, they actively work to make the U.S. more like its Communist foe.
President Joe Biden escorts Chinese Communist Party Leader Xi Jinping to his car to bid farewell after their talks in California on Nov. 15, 2023. (Li Xueren/Xinhua via Getty Images)
The book systematically shows that the elites in Washington, on Wall Street, and in Silicon Valley apparently do not view the elites in Beijing as dangerous adversaries or even as a rivals. Rather, the Communists are their business partners and friends.
Controligarchs such as BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman were among the attendees of the dinner honoring the Communist leader. The business titans gave Chairman Xi a standing ovation.
Chinese Communist Party Leader Xi Jinping (left) shakes hands with Apple CEO Tim Cook during a gathering of tech CEOs at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, on September 23, 2015. (Ted S. Warren/Getty Images)
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink speaks at the China Development Forum at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse on March 24, 2018, in Beijing, China. (Zhang Yu/China News Service/Visual China Group via Getty Images)
Blackstone founder Stephen A. Schwarzman speaks during the convocation ceremony of the Schwarzman Scholars at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, on September 10, 2016. (Emmanuel Wong/Getty Images)
And Fink, Cook, and Schwarzman, are not alone in their respect for Xi. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg reportedly “purchased several copies of Xi’s book,” and kept a copy on his desk, which he claimed was so that he and his Facebook could study up on “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Zuckerberg even offered to let Xi choose the Chinese name for his unborn child, though Xi declined. Years of fawning over Xi paid off earlier this month when Meta announced a new VR partnership with China’s Tencent.
Meta’s censorship practices exposed by the Twitter Files reporting (and reasserted just this week) are one of the many pages that the Controligarchs are cribbing from the CCP playbook. During the coronavirus pandemic, for example, self-anointed global health expert Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci seemed to have copy-pasted full chapters from the playbook.
Chinese Communist Party Leader Xi Jinping (left) talks with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a gathering of tech CEOs at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, on September 23, 2015. (Ted S. Warren/Getty Images)
In February 2020, Fauci dispatched his right-hand man to China to learn about the communists’ pandemic response strategies. Most objective observers agree that China’s pandemic response was decidedly brutal. But Fauci’s deputy found China’s tactics worthy of consideration and Fauci agreed. According to emails released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Fauci said:
[My deputy] was very impressed about how, from a clinical public health standpoint, the Chinese were handling the isolation, the contact tracing, the building of facilities to take care of people, and that’s what I believed he meant when he said [they] were managing this in a very structured, organized way.
A February 2020 email from Fauci’s deputy stated that “China has demonstrated this infection can be controlled, albeit at great cost.” When asked about the email and if he believed that all of society would need to undergo extreme social distancing (i.e., lockdowns) like in China, Fauci confirmed that lockdowns would, like China, need to “involve essentially the entire community.”
Gates agreed with Fauci and said “[the Chinese] did a lot of things right.” He stated that, in the US, pandemic “misinformation” fact-checking is needed but did not openly advocate for the “full Chinese solution” of propaganda and censorship. Gates has been notably instrumental in helping China censor the internet over the past twenty years. And, like Fauci, Gates praised the CCP’s pandemic response (on China’s state-run media network, no less).
Chinese Communist Party Leader Xi Jinping (right) shakes hands with Bill Gates in Beijing, China, on June 16, 2023. (Yin Bogu/Xinhua via Getty Images)
But, as it turns out, Fauci, his deputy, and Controligarchs like Bill Gates were wrong. More than three years after the world first learned about Covid, China’s brutal approach and its “Zero-COVID” policy—that literally locked residents in their homes even after the stated zero-covid objectives had been achieved—has proved to be an abject failure.
So, what did the COVID-19 experiment achieve? It showed that the pandemic was profitable and CCP-style lockdowns were lucrative for Big Tech Controligarchs like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Gates added $20 billion to his holdings, and Zuckerberg nearly doubled his net worth to $118.2 billion as of this writing.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’s net worth now tops $165 billion and it was at least partially built on importing cheap Chinese goods to sell to Americans who could not leave their homes or shop at their local small businesses. The pandemic was a blueprint for future success.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (right) and Tencent founder Pony Ma (left) talk with Chinese Communist Party Leader Xi Jinping (center) during a gathering of tech CEOs at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, on September 23, 2015. (Ted S. Warren/Getty Images)
Controligarchs also reveals on how climate change will bring a fresh wave of “disinformation” censorship, how the climate lockdowns will be equally profitable, and how the ultimate goal of the Controligarchs is a CCP-like social-credit-score system.
Seamus Bruner is the author of Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, Their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life and Peter Schweizer’s Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute. Follow him @SeamusBruner