When world leaders gathered in Glasgow last week to push ahead on the fight for climate change, Biden’s special climate envoy, John Kerry, drew more of the attention than he may have wanted.
On this week’s episode of The Drill Down, Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers examine John Kerry’s financial portfolio and how his investments may undermine not just Kerry’s credibility on climate change, but the President’s entire foreign policy agenda.
Kerry and his wife invested millions in Hillhouse China Value LP. Hillhouse pours tens of millions of dollars into surveillance firm Yitu Technology, manufacturers of facial recognition software for the Communist Party’s oppressive monitoring of the Uighurs in China’s far western province of Xinjiang.
Yitu Technology is also on the US government’s list of firms associated with human rights violations.
Human rights were at the forefront of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, alongside climate change and democracy. But when it comes to US-China relations in practice, these pillars are not on equal footing.
Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, has been pushing hard to hold China accountable for its egregious human rights record, but Kerry has countered Sullivan by emphasizing, in his view, the more urgent concern of climate change.
Kerry has even gone so far as to lobby against a bill in Congress that would ban the importation of goods made with forced Uighur labor.
President Biden has been silent on whether he would sign or veto such a bill, but its existence – and his climate czar’s opposition to it – is the perfect encapsulation of Biden’s China policy: tied up in a knot.
