Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is warning that the U.S. has been underestimating China for decades.
Thiel, a longtime supporter of former President Donald Trump, was the co-founder of PayPal and an early Facebook investor. He made his comments Wednesday in an interview with Hugh Hewitt.
“So I think it’s been strangely underestimated,” he said. “ And you know, obviously, there are ways the Republican Party has underestimated it, that if you think of [Richard] Nixon or [Ronald] Reagan, they were anti-communist.
“But in the 70s and 80s, anti-communism meant anti-Soviet. And Communist China was both an evil country and a U.S. ally in trying to beat the Soviet Union. And so there’s a way that both Reagan and Nixon were good to be anti-communist, and then there’s a way they were not anti the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] at all. And so that’s somehow how we need to update from Nixon or Reagan.
“And I mean, you know, in 1972 when Nixon went to China, China had one-fifth of the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] of the Soviet Union. So they were sort of a way in which you know, Moscow, the Soviet Union was the thing that Nixon was right to focus on, and same with Reagan. And today, you know, China has five, six times the GDP of Russia. So you know, [Vladimir] Putin’s a bad guy, but Xi [Jinping] is a far bigger threat.”
Thiel went on to claim President Joe Biden is China’s “Manchurian Candidate.”
“So you know, it’s not a simply partisan thing where I think Biden was in some sense like as close to the Manchurian candidate as we could get in 2020,” he said. “If you looked at the people in the Democratic primary. It was Biden [who] was the Manchurian candidate.
“Then you know, if Biden wasn’t going to make it, [Michael] Bloomberg was sort of the default Manchurian Candidate. So they were the worst possible people for the U.S. getting tough on China. I mean, even Elizabeth Warren, I mean, all of these people, I think, you know, are in some ways terrible, was tougher on China than Biden.”
Thiel maintains Hollywood has been coopted by China.
“Hollywood gets to, you never have movies in which the Chinese Communists are villains,” he said. “I think the last year in which they were villains is 1997 — ‘Seven Years In Tibet.'”
In December, Thiel urged Republicans to make China more of a target as the party seeks a path forward following the results in November’s midterm elections, according to Yahoo News.
“There’s sort of no simply neutral way to work with China in any way,” Thiel said.
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