China experts criticize Neil Bush for support of communist regime against Trump

Neil Bush, who has partnered with a former Chinese government official to form a consulting firm that touts relationships with multiple state-owned Chinese companies, attacked President Trump’s foreign policy while disputing that China is “a monolithic communist authoritarian system that has no regard for personal liberty or human rights.”

“Our system of government, our form of democracy, would not work for China, just like China’s system would not work for us,” he said at the event, which was organized by a man who is known as a friend of Beijing’s autocratic ruler and has a leading role on China’s top political advisory panel.

“The demonization of China is being fueled by a rising nationalism in the US that is manifested in anti-immigrant, anti-Chinese, pro-America-first rhetoric,” Bush, the 41st president’s third son, said in Hong Kong. “[China is inching] closer and closer to what we would refer to as the American dream, what President Xi Jinping has called the Chinese dream, and what one might call the American dream with Chinese characteristics.”

Those comments drew a blunt rebuke from Smith. “I’ve run out of plausible reasons why he would be in a position to be able to see what’s going on and represent such a pro-CCP narrative,” said the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation chief. “Those dreams are different. They’re different. And so, how else could you take it but as an endorsement, to say that they’re basically same?”

Chinese Communist officials have put “hundreds of thousands . . . possibly millions” of Uighur Muslims in detention camps, Smith’s organization and other U.S. analysts and officials have observed. That domestic repression gives Xi the internal security to pursue an expansionist foreign policy, according to some U.S. lawmakers, reinforced by corporate espionage and the use of telecommunications giants as potential platforms for Chinese intelligence services.

Two organizations with close ties to China’s ruling Communist Party sponsored the event, which featured an array of prominent former U.S. and Chinese officials and business elites. One is a Beijing-based “think tank with Chinese characteristics” that hopes “to improve China’s soft power.” The other is the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, which attempted to donate last year to the University of Texas but was spurned due to suspicions about the group’s involvement with Chinese Communist authorities.

Former Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa has a leadership role in both organizations, in addition to his responsibilities as vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference’s National Committee. This perch makes him a senior figure in the “patriotic united front” operations that the Chinese Communist Party uses to maintain domestic control and expand foreign influence, according to Western observers.

“I’d advise my American friends not to meddle in the internal affairs of China,” said Bush, who appeared in his capacity as chairman of the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations. “If the Chinese government gets carried away with denying basic rights, then there will be a pushback from within. Once people enjoy the taste of freedom, there is no turning back.”

In March, a senior State Department official described the crackdown on Uighur Muslims as the most ambitious abuse of human rights “since the 1930s.”

“The CPC has long sought to cultivate local influencers to carry their message both at home and abroad,” Joshua Eisenman, a China expert at the University of Notre Dame, told the Washington Examiner. “In this case, they got the son of a U.S. president to stand in Hong Kong and say their fascist country is free and to say the legitimate concerns of US officials are ‘half-truths.'”

Other U.S. attendees rebuked China for the deterioration of ties with the United States. “If China is the number two economy in the world, it is not unreasonable for America to ask that it will act like it and not try to game the world’s systems,” the Heritage Foundation’s founder and past president Ed Fuelner said in his prepared remarks.

Bush allowed that U.S. officials have legitimate grievances with China pertaining to economic, national security, and human rights issues, but stressed the two largest economies must collaborate on an array of issues. His glib posture on human rights and political issues, though, startled even fellow critics of Trump’s trade and economic policies.

“We’re against the trade war and everything else on the economic side, but that doesn’t mean we endorse putting people in concentration camps, or burning down churches, or organ harvesting,” Walter Lohman, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center, told the Washington Examiner. “So I think endorsing the regime so boldly, I think, that is a mistake.”

Bush also has business interests in China. He founded Asia & America Consultants in partnership with “a former senior government PRC official,” providing advice on “large-scale enterprises under the administration of the PRC central government, local state-owned enterprises, and private enterprises,” according to the company website. The firm brands itself as “the sole institution founded by direct member of [a] US presidential legacy in China.”

Those ties have proven controversial for his politically prominent brothers. Neil Bush raised $1.3 million in donations to a super PAC supporting Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign from a company owned by two Chinese citizens and whose board he sat on, leading to Federal Election Commission fines for both the company and the super PAC in March.

In 2003, in the run-up to George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, the younger Bush’s messy divorce from his first wife revealed he had a contract with a high-profile electronics company with ties to former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, and he admitted to having sex with various women who appeared unexpectedly at his hotel during business trips to Asia, testifying in a deposition that he did not pay them and did not know if they were prostitutes.

Multiple attempts by the Washington Examiner to contact Bush were unsuccessful.

David Firestein, a former Foreign Service officer who works with Bush as chief executive of the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations and was also listed as a speaker in the conference program, defended his colleague’s comments via email.

“[N]o one who knows Neil well would be surprised at the content of his speech,” he told the Washington Examiner. “I suspect some will agree with his views while others will take issue with them.”

He said Bush’s statements “reflect thinking on China inspired by his father’s well-documented views of the relationship” with the rising power.

“I don’t think I would have any particular comment on the perspective of either those who agree with Neil or those who disagree with him,” Firestein also wrote. “Everyone is entitled to his or her own viewpoint.”

Firestein was embroiled in a separate controversy involving Tung last year. As the director of UT-Austin’s China Public Policy Center, he reportedly backed the former Hong Kong official’s effort to donate to the school, only to be rebuffed when the university president cited conversations “with U.S. intelligence officials” and other members of the university faculty in refusing the funds.

Tung’s decision to give Bush a keynote slot is emblematic of Beijing’s efforts to identify and amplify convenient American voices, analysts say, but the significance of his particular performance is debatable.

While Smith worries that government officials in the Indo-Pacific region will take this speech as an affirmation of China’s authoritarian system and be more likely to “avoid direct criticism of Beijing” as a result, Eisenman thinks Bush is less influential.

“From an American perspective, I’d say that is concerning, but it’s also important not to overstate Neil Bush’s influence on U.S. policy,” he said.