Chubb’s Evan Greenberg: America can’t ‘put trade in competition with values.’
By | Apr 4, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags: Articles, Business News, Opinion
As Americans continue to be alarmed by the menacing national security implications of China’s growing footprint in the nation’s interior, US-based multinational corporations are scrambling to increase business ties with the Asian communist superpower. The fact that China is today considered America’s number one geopolitical rival or concern over the morality of engaging in commerce with a violently oppressive regime will not dissuade them in the least.
“China’s economy has not ‘peaked’ and its growth prospects remain ‘bright,’ [President] Xi Jinping told visiting US chief executives on [March 27] as Beijing sought to revive foreign investor confidence in the world’s second-largest country,” The Financial Times reports.
“Meeting the group of about 20 US business figures, who included
Chubb’s Evan Greenberg, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and Qualcomm’s
Cristiano Amon in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Xi insisted
that Beijing remained committed to reform.”
“The meeting was proposed by chief executive of US insurer Chubb, Evan Greenberg, said one of the sources who has direct knowledge of the matter,” Reuters reported beforehand. “Other attendees include Stephen Orlins, president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and Craig Allen, president of the U.S.-China Business Council.”
The friendly get-together was seen as a Beijing follow-up to the controversial swank dinner leading US-based corporations held for Xi when he visited San Francisco in November. “Business leaders are reportedly shelling out up to $40,000 for a table of eight at the banquet,” Fox Business reported at the time.
A closer look at Beijing meeting instigator Chubb CEO Greenberg tells you all you need to know about the steadfast commitment to China that still exists in elitist US business circles today.
Chubb China Chum
“Mr. Greenberg is engaged in international economic and foreign affairs through his service on the boards of several institutions, including the Board of Trustees of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Board of Directors of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and as Chairman of the National Committee on United States-China Relations,” the executive’s Chubb bio reads.
Evan Greenberg (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
All three of those organizations are known for their aggressively pro-China business stances. How aggressive? The Peterson Institute went viral in October 2022 when its president, Adam Posen, shockingly declared that “the fetish for [domestic] manufacturing is part of the general fetish for keeping white males with low education outside the cities in the powerful positions they are in in the US.”
It’s hard to find a more vile attack on white rural Americans than that.
Greenberg is a very active National Committee on United States-China Relations member. In July 2019, more than 30 members of this organization signed an open letter to then-President Donald Trump that appeared in a prominent Washington, DC, newspaper.
State-run Chinese media couldn’t have written the text any better:
“We do not believe that Beijing is an economic enemy or an existential national security threat that must be confronted in every sphere; nor is China a monolith, or the views of its leaders set in stone. Although its rapid economic and military growth has led Beijing toward a more assertive international role, many Chinese officials and other elites know that a moderate, pragmatic, and genuinely cooperative approach with the West serves China’s interests.
“Washington’s adversarial stance toward Beijing weakens the influence of those voices in favor of assertive nationalists. With the right balance of competition and cooperation, American actions can strengthen those Chinese leaders who want China to play a constructive role in world affairs.”
It gets far more disturbing than this.
‘Chinese Military University’
Greenberg’s Chubb bio also reveals that he serves on “the Advisory Board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in Beijing.”
Tsinghua is “considered by the Pentagon to be a Chinese military university,” the Washington Examiner reports.
Tsinghua University (Photo by Zhang Shu/VCG via Getty Images)
Tsinghua University “holds ‘secret-level security credentials’ for classified military research, trains students for China’s nuclear weapons program, and has allegedly carried out cyberattacks for the Chinese government, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute,” The Washington Free Beacon detailed. “It is also one of several Chinese universities under the supervision of the communist nation’s State Administration of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense, a CCP agency that works to deepen university involvement in the defense sector.”
The university also has reportedly been actively involved in the brutal suppression of China’s Uyghur minority.
“Tsinghua scientists led by Nurmemet Yolwas published a paper in 2018 outlining their research in how to train voice-recognition software to recognize the Uyghur language, as the ruling Chinese Communist Party began the mass incarceration of millions of Uyghurs in ‘re-education camps’ in its northwestern region of Xinjiang,” Radio Free Asia reported.
What is wealthy American businessman Greenberg doing tied up with all this? By his own admission, he isn’t losing too much sleep over the matter.
Human Rights Have Nothing to Do With Trade
In June 2022, Greenberg gave two speeches highlighted by the National Committee on US-China Relations (NCUSCR). “His speeches were hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, and by the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan,” a post on the NCUSCR website states.
Greenberg used the occasions to dismiss the notion of morality playing any role whatsoever in global business opportunities.
“China … is the top trading partner for more than 100 countries globally. Every one of America’s closest partners around the world has a deep economic relationship with China. None would be willing to end its economic relationship absent a dramatic Chinese action,” Greenberg asserted. “Given these realities, American interests are ill-served when policymakers put trade in competition with trust or values.
“America’s partners in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere do not welcome China’s assault on individual liberties, but they also do not see trade policy as the venue to adjudicate those differences. Rather, they seek to address differences over values in the political and diplomatic arena.”
Hey, business is business.
“China’s foreign minister Wang Yi met Greenberg and [NCUSCR President] Orlins on [March 26, one day before the meeting with Xi], and said bilateral tensions stemmed from the US ‘misperception’ of China as a strategic threat,” The Financial Times noted.
He needn’t have bothered.
There’s money to be made in China, a lot of it, and US-based multinational corporations are not going to allow less pressing matters such as American national security or a basic concern for human life stand in the way.
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