‘Big Help With a Little Badmouth’: How Politicians Use Tepid China Criticism as Cover to Do Beijing’s Bidding

Peter Schweizer’s new bestseller Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win blows the whistle on a little game played by pro-Beijing politicians in Washington, a tactic summed up as “big help With a little badmouth.” The idea is to throw out a little tepid public criticism of China to maintain deniability while collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its business interests behind the scenes.

“Beijing pragmatically accepts some level of public criticism from the elites with whom it is working,” Schweizer observes. “As long as these elites deliver on key policies and actions that benefit the regime, some criticism is acceptable.”

The modest toughening of President Joe Biden’s previously indulgent rhetoric toward China could be taken as an example of big help with a little badmouth, as Schweizer argues Biden’s introduction of a little tut-tutting on human rights does little to camouflage China policy that includes “no radical reduction in the transfer of technology or capital from America to Beijing” and “no fundamental challenges to the Chinese regime.”

Even Biden’s human-rights criticism of China is usually laced with qualifications and excuses, as when the president suggested in a CNN interview that dictator Xi Jinping understandably values national unity so much that he might be forgiven for cracking a few skulls in Hong Kong or Xinjiang to get it.

Biden’s notion of a “diplomatic boycott” of the Beijing Winter Olympics to protest the genocide in Xinjiang could be counted as another example of little badmouthing, although it happened too late to be included in Red-Handed. 

Unwilling to actually take a stand against allowing the monstrous Chinese government to host the Olympic Games, Biden came up with the idea of not sending any U.S. diplomats to attend the event as VIP guests — but then he ended up sending at least 46 officials to the Games anyway. This is a bit like declaring a “hunger strike” but then making exceptions for Twinkies and hamburgers.

China will get everything it wants out of the Genocide Games, and Biden’s “diplomatic boycott’ will not even be remembered as a footnote. Red-Handed offers many other examples of weak rhetorical objections to China for public consumption, while big money changes hands behind the scenes.

Plenty of the little badmouthing comes from Republicans, as seen in Schweizer’s detailed discussion of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) mixture of public objections to the actions of the Chinese government while his family maintains extensive private business ties with Chinese entities. Former House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is also criticized for taking “positions and actions that were highly beneficial to Beijing” while nominally criticizing the Chinese Communist Party.

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