In an article in the Saturday, April 17 edition of National Pulse, Biden’s incoming ambassador to China, R. Nicholas Burns, has served as a senior adviser to a U.S. think tank that employs Chinese Communist Party officials; he is on the board of Harvard University’s cooperative program with the Communist Party’s military; and he has appeared on programs for the Communist Party’s state-run media.
National Pulse argues that while Burns is referred to in the mainstream media as a “career diplomat,” Burns is actually more of a career Communist Party retainer. Speaking at the Aspen Institute’s 2020 event, Burns said, “We can’t see China as the enemy because we need them.”
The Aspen Institute is an international nonprofit organization and think tank based in Washington, D.C.
The Cohen Group is the Chinese Communist Party’s consulting firm
Prior to joining Biden’s team, Burns was a senior advisor to the Cohen Group, founded by Clinton-era Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, whose goal in China was to “help Chinese companies go global and invest in the United States,” effectively serving as the CCP’s main avenue for intellectual property theft, espionage, and siphoning off U.S. jobs.
To that end, the Cohen Group opened two offices in Beijing and Tianjin more than a decade ago and hired former Communist Party officials. Wu Xiaorong, Cohen’s deputy chief representative in Beijing, is a former CCP Foreign Ministry official who “participated in the negotiations for the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong to China”; and Wang Yinghua, the chief representative in Tianjin, joined Cohen in 2007 after serving for many years in the Tianjin municipal government.
In 2011, Cohen Group founder Bill Cohen met with the president of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges (CCIEE), the CCP’s top government-funded think tank, at the CCP’s central headquarters in Beijing. In 2018, Bill Cohen visited China again and met with Shanghai Mayor Ying Yong.
The Cohen Group’s involvement in the Harvard Ashe Center project is related to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.
In 2014, the Cohen Group also participated in the Harvard Ash Center’s China Development Leaders Program, which bills itself as “one of the best overseas training programs for government officials widely recognized by the Chinese government. Over the years, members of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, identified by the Washington Post as a “tool of repression against the Uighurs” and now sanctioned by the Trump and Biden administrations for “serious human rights violations against minorities in Xinjiang,” have repeatedly joined the training program.
Harvard University’s Beaver Center and the Chinese Communist Party’s Military Working Group on Cybersecurity
Burns, who served in both the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations, also serves on the board of the Belfer Center at Harvard University. The Belfer Center has chaired cybersecurity working groups with Chinese Communist government and military officials, despite repeated poaching and hacking of U.S. technology by the Chinese (Communist).
The Belfer Center set up “fictional cyber scenarios” with Communist government and military officials to discuss how their respective governments and companies would respond in the face of third-party cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. Artificial intelligence, intellectual property theft, supply chain security and Huawei, arms control frameworks and controlling the spread of malware on the dark web were among the topics discussed by both sides.
Harvard’s Beaver Center felt comfortable enough to exchange cybersecurity tips with the Chinese Communist Party, and even invited General Hao Yeli, a senior advisor to the Chinese Communist Party, to give a talk entitled “Perspectives from the PLA: A Conversation with Major General Hao Yeli.
Screenshot from a report on the visit of Major General Hao Yeli of the Chinese Communist Party to the United States
Burns Featured in Key Chinese Communist Propaganda Media
A professor of practice in diplomacy and international relations, Burns appeared on the Communist Party’s global television network (CGTN) in 2015 in support of expanding the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
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