New Obama Ad Goes After Romney On China

IGOR BOBIC/TPM

President Obama's campaign on Monday released a new television ad entitled "Since When," which criticizes Mitt Romney for his connection to a factory that outsourced American jobs to China. After repeated requests, the Romney campaign has yet to deny that the candidate bought the factory. The ad is scheduled to air in New Hampshire, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada.

Is Mitt Romney Profiting Off Chinese Surveillance?

By Eli Clifton/Think Progress

In a Wall Street Journal oped last month, Mitt Romney laid out “how I’ll respond to a China’s rising power” and criticized the Obama administration’s handling of relations with Beijing. Romney warns of a China as a regional hegemon:

The character of the Chinese government —one that marries aspects of the free market with suppression of political and personal freedom — would become a widespread and disquieting norm.

In the op-ed, the former Massachusetts governor also criticized Obama for failing to press Beijing on human rights and intellectual property violations.

While Romney is quick to criticize Beijing and the White House’s management of U.S.-China relations, an examination of the GOP frontrunner’s investments with Bain Capital — a company he co-founded and once led — suggest he has profited from Chinese surveillance of its own citizenry and from companies that have engaged in intellectual property theft.

The New York Times revealed yesterday that a Bain-run fund in which a Romney family blind trust had holdings purchased Uniview Technologies in December, a Chinese company that claims to be the biggest supplier of surveillance cameras to the Chinese government. Uniview produces “infrared antiriot” cameras and software that allow police to share images in real time and provided technology for an emergency command center in Tibet that “provides a solid foundation for the maintenance of social stability and the protection of people’s peaceful life,” according to Uniview’s Web site.

Human rights advocates say that the rapidly growing number of surveillance cameras in Chinese cities are used to intimidate political and religious activists. “There are video cameras all over our monastery, and their only purpose is to make us feel fear,” Loksag, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Gansu Province told the Times. He said the cameras helped the authorities identify and detain nearly 200 monks who participated in a protest at his monastery in 2008.

Romney has said he has no role in Bain’s operations but a financial disclosure form filed last August showed that his wife, Ann Romney, held a $100,000 to $250,000 investment in the Bain Capital Asia Fund that purchased Uniview.

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Romney wrote, “In the economic arena, we must directly counter abusive Chinese practices in the areas of trade, intellectual property, and currency valuation.”

But Romney’s apparent hypocrisy between his hardline positions on China and his lucrative investment portfolio is on show once again with Bain Capital’s investment in Chinese YouTube competitor Youku. CBS Marketwatch co-founder Bill Bishop writes on his blog, Sinocism, that Romney’s talk of pressing Beijing to better enforce intellectual property rights is in direct contradiction with Bain Capital’s early investment in Youku, a “pirate’s den of copyright infringement” in the site’s early days. A Bain Capital VP now sits on the board of Youku and Youku has reportedly cracked down on copyright violating content. Its newly acquired partner, Tudou, still hosts a variety of pirated and copyright infringing videos.

But if Romney profited from Bain’s ties to Youku and Uniview Technologies, it’s worth examining how the GOP frontrunner’s tough-talk on China can happily coexist with Bain’s investments in companies that have constructed business models around Chinese human rights abuses and intellectual property theft.

Cain Indicates He’s Not Aware That China Has Nuclear Weapons

By Ben Armbruster/Think Progress

PBS’ Judy Woodruff interviewed GOP presidential frontrunner Herman Cain on Monday night and wanted to know how the former pizza CEO would handle China should he occupy the Oval Office. Boosting the “us vs. them” mentality the GOP usually promotes when talking about China, Cain said “they’re a military threat,” particularly because — seeming to keep up his image that he doesn’t know much about foreign policy — they’re trying to get nuclear weapons:

WOODRUFF: Do you view China as a potential military threat to the United States?

CAIN: I do view China as a potential military threat to the United States.

WOODRUFF: And what could you do as president to head that off?

CAIN: My China strategy is quite simply outgrow China. … [W]e already have superiority in terms of our military capability, and I plan to get away from making cutting our defense a priority and make investing in our military capability a priority, going back to my statement: peace through strength and clarity. So yes they’re a military threat. They’ve indicated that they’re trying to develop nuclear capability and they want to develop more aircraft carriers like we have. So yes, we have to consider them a military threat.

Watch the clip (starting at 10:47):

Far from “trying to develop a nuclear capability,” as Cain suggests, and at risk of insulting anyone’s intelligence, the Chinese conducted their first nuclear weapons test in 1964 and reportedly possess around 250 nuclear weapons, including thermonuclear warheads and around 150 tactical nukes. (HT: Huffington Post)