Who Really is Vivek Ramaswampy?

From Marc Thiessen:

WASHINGTON — As a presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy has portrayed himself as tough on China, promising to bar American companies from doing business there. But just a few years ago, Ramaswamy was doing business with high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party, including the same CCP-linked family that paid millions to Hunter Biden.

Perhaps that explains why Ramaswamy is so willing to cede Taiwan to China.

In 2014, Ramaswamy founded the biotech company Roivant, serving as its chief executive until January 2021 and its chairman until February 2023. In 2017, Ramaswamy partnered with the private-equity arm of CITIC Group, a state-owned Chinese investment firm, to form a company called Sinovant, focused on “bringing innovative medicines to China and advancing Chinese biopharmaceutical innovation abroad.”

The news release announcing Ramaswamy’s deal boasted that CITIC’s private equity firm (CITIC PE) “knows China like no one else.” There’s a reason for that. The firm’s parent company, the New York Times reports, is “embedded in the Communist Party elite” and is “an important member of the government-controlled ‘national team’ that carries out the will of the state in financial markets.” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2010 that CITIC PE relies on “‘guanxi’ — official connections — in order to win business.” In 2020, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, called CITIC “one of China’s largest and most important Party-controlled financial conglomerates.”

CITIC PE is led by Liu Lefei, son of Liu Yunshan, who is the former head of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department. From 2012 to 2017, Liu Yunshan served as a member of the ruling seven-person Politburo Standing Committee — the top decision-making body of the CCP — and the country’s No. 5 official.

In other words, Ramaswamy went into business with one of the party’s top “princelings” — the son of the CCP’s propaganda chief and a one-time member of its senior-most leadership

In 2019, Ramaswamy and Liu Lefei’s CITIC PE deepened their partnership, announcing a $1 billion deal to launch a new company called Cytovant Sciences to develop treatments for diseases prevalent in Asian patients. (A Roivant spokesperson told the New Republic this year that “Sinovant and Cytovant never generated sales or profits and are no longer operating.”)

It gets worse. Liu Lefei is married to Jia Liqing. She is the daughter of China’s longest-serving minister of state security, Jia Chunwang, who ran the Chinese gulag and was in charge of China’s domestic and overseas espionage. In 2016, the New York Times reported, “Ms. Jia and her husband represent two of the most potent arms of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Jia Liqing is listed on the Yale School of Management website as a member of its Greater China Board of Advisors and “CEO, Harvest Capital International,” and “Managing Director, Harvest Alternative Investment Group.” She co-founded Harvest Global Investments with Zhao Xuejun (a.k.a., Henry Zhao), a company that went into business with Hunter Biden. Zhao paid $5 million to Biden’s firm Burnham Asset Management in 2016, which emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop confirm. Think of what that means: Ramaswamy was in business with the same family as the president’s son, whose Chinese business interests House Republicans are now investigating.

When asked for comment, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Ramaswamy campaign, said, “Vivek’s first business had a subsidiary in China, before the company eventually wound down its operations there as the risks of doing business in China became apparent.” She added, “We need leaders who understand complex issues deeply in order to address them, and Vivek believes in learning from experiences.”